The aristocracy – and nowadays that also includes the middle classes – has
exhausted itself; such ideas as it had, have been worked out and utilised
to their ultimate logical limit, and its rule is approaching its end with
giant strides. The Constitution is its work, and the immediate consequence
of this work was that it entangled its creators in a mesh of institutions
in which any free intellectual movement has been made impossible. The rule
of public prejudice is everywhere the first consequence of so-called free
political institutions, and in England, the politically freest country in
Europe, this rule is stronger than anywhere else – except for North
America, where public prejudice is legally acknowledged as a power in the
state by Iynch law. The Englishman crawls before public prejudice, he
immolates himself to it daily – and the more liberal he is, the more humbly
does he grovel in the dust before his idol. Public prejudice in “educated
society” is however either of Tory or of Whig persuasion, or at best
radical – and even that no longer has quite the odour of propriety. If you
should go amongst educated Englishmen and say that you are Chartists or
democrats – the balance of your mind will be doubted and your company fled.
Or declare you do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and you are done
for; if moreover you confess that you are atheists, the next day people
will pretend not to know you. And when the independent Englishman for once
– and this happens rarely enough – really begins to think and shakes off
the fetters of prejudice he has absorbed with his mother’s milk, even then
he has not the courage to speak out his convictions openly, even then he
feigns an opinion before society that is at least tolerated, and is quite
content if occasionally he can discuss his views with some like-minded
person in private.
* * *
As I have said, we too are concerned with combating the lack of principle,
the inner emptiness, the spiritual deadness, the untruthfulness of the age;
we are waging a war to the death against all these things, just as Carlyle
is, and there is a much greater probability that we shall succeed than that
he will, because we know what we want. We want to put an end to atheism, as
Carlyle portrays it, by giving back to man the substance he has lost
through religion; not as divine but as human substance, and this whole
process of giving back is no more than simply the awakening of
selfconsciousness. We want to sweep away everything that claims to be
supernatural and superhuman, and thereby get rid of untruthfulness, for the
root of all untruth and Lying is the pretension of the human and the
natural to be superhuman and supernatural. For that reason we have once and
for all declared war on religion and religious ideas and care little
whether we are called atheists or anything else. If however Carlyle’s
pantheistic definition of atheism were correct, it is not we but our
Christian opponents who would be the true atheists. We have no intention of
attacking the “eternal inner Facts of the universe", on the contrary, we
have for the first time truly substantiated them by proving their
perpetuity and rescuing them from the omnipotent arbitrariness of an
inherently selfcontradictory God. We have no intention of pronouncing “the
world, man and his life a lie"; on the contrary, our Christian opponents
are guilty of this act of immorality when they make the world and man
dependent on the grace of a God who in reality was only created from the
reflected image of man in the crude hyle of his own undeveloped
consciousness. We have no intention whatever of doubting or despising the
“revelation of history", for history is all and everything to us and we
hold it more highly than any other previous philosophical trend, more
highly than Hegel even, who after all used it only as a case against which
to test his logical problem.
It is the other side that scorns history and disregards the development of
mankind; it is the Christians again who, by putting forward a separate
“History of the Kingdom of God” deny that real history has any inner
substantiality and claim that this substantiality belongs exclusively to
their otherworldly, abstract and, what is more, fictitious history; who, by
asserting that the culmination of the human species is their Christ, make
history attain an imaginary goal, interrupt it in midcourse and are now
obliged, if only for the sake of consistency, to declare the following
eighteen hundred years to be totally nonsensical and utterly meaningless.
We lay claim to the meaning of history; but we see in history not the
revelation of “God” but of man and only of man. We have no need, in order
to see the splendour of the human character, in order to recognise the
development of the human species through history, its irresistible
progress, its evercertain victory over the unreason of the individual, its
overcoming of all that is apparently supernatural, its hard but successful
struggle against nature until the final achievement of free, human
self-consciousness, the discernment of the unity of man and nature, and the
independent creation – voluntarily and by its own effort – of a new world
based on purely human and moral social relationships – in order to
recognise all that in its greatness, we have no need first to summon up the
abstraction of a “God” and to attribute to it everything beautiful, great,
sublime and truly human; we do not need to follow this roundabout path, we
do not need first to imprint the stamp of the “divine” on what is truly
human, in order to be sure of its greatness and splendour. On the contrary,
the “more divine", in other words, the more inhuman, something is, the less
we shall be able to admire it. Only the human origin of the content of all
religions still preserves for them here and there some claim to respect;
only the consciousness that even the wildest superstition nevertheless has
within it at bottom the eternal determinants of human nature, in however
dislocated and distorted a form, only this awareness saves the history of
religion, and particularly of the Middle Ages, from total rejection and
eternal oblivion, which would otherwise certainly be the fate of these
“godly” histories. The more “godly” they are, the more inhuman, the more
bestial, and the “godly” Middle Ages did indeed produce the culmination of
human bestiality, serfdom, jus primae noctis, etc. The godlessness of our
age, of which Carlyle so much complains, is precisely its saturation with
God. From this it also becomes clear why, above, I gave man as the solution
to the riddle of the Sphinx. The question has previously always been: what
is God? and German philosophy has answered the question in this sense: God
is man. Man has only to understand himself, to take himself as the measure
of all aspects of life, to judge according to his being, to organise the
world in a truly human manner according to the demands of his own nature,
and he will have solved the riddle of our time. Not in otherworldly,
nonexistent regions, not beyond time and space, not with a “God” immanent
in or opposed to the world, is the truth to be found, but much nearer, in
man’s own breast. Man’s own substance is far more splendid and sublime than
the imaginary substance of any conceivable “God,” who is after all only the
more or less indistinct and distorted image of man himself. So when Carlyle
follows Ben Jonson in saying, man has lost his soul and is only now
beginning to notice the want of it, the right formulation would be: in
religion man has lost his own substance, has alienated his humanity, and
now that religion, through the progress of history, has begun to totter, he
notices his emptiness and instability. But there is no other salvation for
him, he cannot regain his humanity, his substance, other than by thoroughly
overcoming all religious ideas and returning firmly and honestly, not to
“God", but to himself.
* * *
So much for the inward, religious aspect of Carlyle’s standpoint. It serves
as a point of departure for the assessment of the outward, politicosocial
aspect; Carlyle has still enough religion to remain in a state of
unfreedom; pantheism still recognises something higher than man himself.
Hence his longing for a “true aristocracy,” for “heroes”; as if these
heroes could at best be more than men. If he had understood man as man in
all his infinite complexity, he would not have conceived the idea of once
more dividing mankind into two lots, sheep and goats, rulers and ruled,
aristocrats and the rabble, lords and dolts, he would have seen the proper
social function of talent not in ruling by force but in acting as a
stimulant and taking the lead. The role of talent is to convince the masses
of the truth of its ideas, and it will then have no need further to worry
about their application, which will follow entirely of its own accord.
Mankind is surely not passing through democracy to arrive back eventually
at the point of departure. ” What Carlyle says about democracy,
incidentally, leaves little to be desired, if we discount what we have just
been referring to, his lack of clarity about the goal, the purpose of
modern democracy. Democracy, true enough, is only a transitional stage,
though not towards a new, improved aristocracy, but towards real human
freedom; just as the irreligiousness of the age will eventually lead to
complete emancipation from everything that is religious, superhuman and
supernatural, and not to its restoration.
-- A review of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle, London, 1843 by
Frederick Engels. Written in January 1844, Published in the
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/carlyle.htm
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