14. Conclusion¶
Core Argument¶
The concluding chapter of Engels’s polemic delivers a devastating summation of Dühring’s entire philosophical project, pronouncing it a complete failure. The core argument is that Dühring’s grand promises—a “strictly scientific conception of the world,” “system-creating ideas,” and a philosophy “directed to the reality of nature and of life”—have been exposed as pure charlatanism. Engels systematically recapitulates the specific failures of each domain of Dühring’s system. The world schematism, allegedly establishing the “basic forms of being” without detracting from profundity, is dismissed as an infinitely vulgarised copy of Hegelian logic, sharing the idealist superstition that logical categories exist prior to and outside the material world. The philosophy of nature produced a cosmogony based on a “self-equal state of matter” that is conceptually incoherent, requiring an extramundane personal God to set it in motion. In organic nature, Dühring first rejected Darwinian natural selection as brutal, only to smuggle it back in as a secondary factor, while simultaneously displaying biological ignorance so profound it would embarrass even the “daughters of the ‘educated classes’.” In morality and law, Dühring’s vulgarisation of Rousseau and his shallow version of Hegel are matched by a legal knowledge so deficient it barely exceeds that of the most ordinary Prussian jurist, his supposedly horizon-free philosophy being in practice confined to the jurisdiction of Prussian law.
Engels’s polemic is relentless and personal. He contrasts Dühring’s self-praise—his “really critical standpoint,” his exclusion of “subjectively limited conception of the world”—with his actual performance: defective knowledge, a narrowly metaphysical mode of thought, grotesque conceit, and childish personal crotchets. The philosopher who claims to transcend subjective limitations cannot produce his system without imposing his repugnance to tobacco, cats, and Jews as universal law. His “critical standpoint” consists of imputing to others things they never said. His verbose philistine reflections on the value of life explain his anger at Goethe for making Faust, not the serious Wagner, his hero. Engels concludes by inverting Dühring’s own accusation: Dühring called Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel charlatans, but the label fits Dühring himself, a market quack whose “great words” contain “nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever.” The chapter thus serves as a final verdict: Dühring’s philosophy is the “weakest residue of the German would-be Enlightenment,” a thin and transparent commonplace dressed up in oracular rhetoric, offering not a single line from which anything could be learned.