Atnti Duhring- negation of negation

Anti Duhring DIALECTICS. NEGATION OF THE NEGATION

"This historical sketch" (of the genesis of the so called original accumulation of capital in England) "is relatively the best part of Marx's book, and would be even better if it had not supported itself with the dialectical crutch in addition to the scholarly crutch. In default of anything better and clearer, the Hegelian negation of the negation has in fact to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past. The abolition of individual property, which has been effected in the way indicated above since the sixteenth century, is the first negation. It will be followed by a second, which bears the character of a negation of the negation and hence of a restoration of 'individual property', but in a higher form, based on the common ownership of land and of the instruments of labour. Herr Marx calls this new 'individual property' also 'social property', and in this there appears the Hegelian higher unity, in which the contradiction is supposed to be sublated, that is to say, in the Hegelian verbal jugglery, both overcome and preserved. . . . Consequently, the expropriation of the expropriators is, as it were, the automatic result of historical reality in its materially external relations. . . . It would be difficult to convince a sensible man of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital on the basis of credence in Hegelian dodges such as the negation of the negation. . . . However, the nebulous hybrids of Marx's conceptions will not appear strange to anyone who realizes what nonsense can be concocted with Hegelian dialectics as its scientific basis, or rather what nonsense must necessarily spring from it. For the benefit of the reader who is not familiar with these tricks, it must be expressly pointed out that Hegel's first negation is the catechismal idea of the fall from grace, and his second is that of a higher unity leading to redemption. The logic of facts can hardly be based on this farcical analogy borrowed from the religious sphere. . . . Herr Marx cheerfully remains in the nebulous world of his property which is at once both individual and social, and leaves it to his adepts to solve for themselves this profound dialectical enigma." Thus far Herr Dühring.

So Marx has no other way of proving the necessity of the social revolution and of establishing the common ownership of land and of the means of production produced by labour than by appealing to the Hegelian negation of the negation; and because he bases his socialist theory on these farcical analogies borrowed from religion, he arrives at the result that an ownership at once both individual and social will prevail in the society of the future as a Hegelian higher unity of the sublated contradiction.

Let the negation of the negation rest for the moment, and let us have a look at the ownership which is "at once both individual and social". Herr Dühring characterizes this as a "nebulous world", and curiously enough he is actually right on this point. Unfortunately, however, it is not Marx but again Herr Dühring himself who is to be found in this nebulous world. Just as his dexterity with the Hegelian method of "delirious raving" enabled him to determine without any difficulty what the still unfinished volumes of Capital are sure to contain, so here, too, without any great effort he can, following Hegel, put Marx right by foisting on him the higher unity of a property, of which there is not a word in Marx.

Marx says: "It is the negation of negation. This re-establishes individual property for the producer, but based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, on the co-operation of free workers and on their common property in land and in the means of production produced by labour itself. The transformation of the scattered private property of individuals, arising from their own labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalist private property, already actually resting on socialized production, into socialized property."[*] That is all. The state of things brought about by the expropriation of the expropriators is therefore characterized as the re-establishment of individual property, but on the basis of the social ownership of the land and of the means of production produced by labour itself. To anyone who understands plain language, this means that social ownership extends to land and the other means of production and individual ownership to the products, that is, to articles of consumption. In order to make the matter comprehensible even to children of six, Marx assumes on page 56 "a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community", that is, a society organized on a socialist basis; and he continues: "The total product of the community is a social product. One portion of this product serves as means of production again. It remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members of the community as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion among them is consequently necessary."** Surely that is clear enough even for Herr Dühring's Hegelianized brain.

The property which is at once both individual and social, this confusing hybrid, this nonsense which necessarily springs <"fnp166">

* Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 763-64. The English translation of Capital, Vol. I, follows the text of the third German edition (1883), whereas Engels cites the second German edition (1872), which is slightly different in this passage and which is accordingly followed here. --Ed.
** Ibid., p. 78, translation revised, Engels' italics. --Ed.

from Hegelian dialectics, this nebulous world, this profound dialectical enigma which Marx leaves his adepts to solve for themselves -- is yet another free creation and imagination of Herr Dühring's. As an alleged Hegelian, Marx is obliged to produce a true higher unity as the outcome of the negation of the negation, and as Marx does not do this to Herr Dühring's taste, the latter has again to slip back into his loftier and nobler style and to foist on Marx in the interests of the whole truth things of Herr Dühring's very own manufacture. A man who is so totally incapable of quoting correctly, even by way of exception, may well lapse into moral indignation at the "Chinese erudition" of other people who always quote correctly, but who precisely by doing so "poorly conceal their lack of insight into the totality of ideas of every writer they quote". Herr Dühring is right. Long live historical treatment in the grand manner!

So far we have proceeded from the assumption that Herr Dühring at least showed good faith in his inflexible practice of quoting falsely and that it was due either to his total incapacity to understand things or to a habit of quoting from memory, a habit which seems to be peculiar to historical treatment in the grand manner but which is usually described as slovenly. But we seem to have reached the point at which quantity is transformed into quality even with Herr Dühring. For we must take the following facts into consideration. Firstly, the passage in Marx is perfectly clear by itself and is moreover amplified in the same book by a further passage leaving absolutely no room for misunderstanding. Secondly, Herr Dühring had discovered the monstrosity of "property which is at once both individual and social" neither in the critique of Capital appearing in the Supplementary Sheets, which was referred to above, nor yet in the critique in the first edition of his Critical History, but only in the second edition -- that is, on his third reading of Capital. Further, in this second edition, which was rewritten in a socialist sense, it was deemed necessary by Herr Dühring to make Marx talk the worst possible nonsense about the future organization of society, in order to enable him, by way of contrast, to trot out all the more triumphantly -- as he in fact does -- "the economic commune which I outlined economically and juridically in my Course ". When we take all this into consideration, we are almost forced to the conclusion that Herr Dühring has here deliberately made an "advantageous extension" of Marx's idea -- to his own advantage.

Now what role does the negation of the negation play in Marx? On page 791 and the following pages* he sets out the final conclusions which he draws from the preceding fifty pages of economic and historical investigation into the so-called original accumulation of capital. Before the capitalist era, petty industry existed, at least in England, on the basis of the private property of the worker in his means of production. The so-called original accumulation of capital here consisted in the expropriation of these immediate producers, that is, in the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. This became possible because the petty industry referred to above is compatible only with narrow and crude bounds of production and society, and at a certain stage brings forth the material agencies for its own annihilation. This annihilation, the transformation of the individual and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, forms the prehistory of capital. As soon as the workers <"fnp">

* Ibid., pp. 761-64. --Ed.

page 169are turned into proletarians and their conditions of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialization of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production, and therefore the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. "That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the worker working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many workers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the concentration of capital. One capitalist kills many. Hand in hand with this concentration, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, there develop, on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the work-process, the conscious technological application of science, the methodical collective cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the collective means of production of combined socialized labour. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation; but with this too there grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Concentration of the means of production and socialization of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."[*]

Now I ask the reader: Where are the dialectical frills and mazes and arabesques of ideas, where the hybrid and hobbled ideas as a result of which everything is all the same in the end, where the dialectical miracles for his faithful followers, where the mysterious dialectical rubbish and the contortions in accordance with the Hegelian doctrine of the Logos, without which Marx, according to Herr Dühring, is unable to put his exposition into shape? Giving a brief summary here, Marx shows in a simple historical way that, just as formerly petty industry by its very development necessarily created the conditions for its own annihilation, i.e., for the expropriation of the small proprietors, so now the capitalist mode of production has itself created the material conditions which will necessarily make it perish. The process is a historical one, and if it is at the same time a dialectical one, this is not Marx's fault, however annoying it may be to Herr Dühring.

It is only at this point, after Marx has completed his historico-economic proof, that he proceeds: "The capitalist mode of production and appropriation, and consequently capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private property based on one's own labour. The negation of capitalist production is begotten by itself with the inexorability of a natural process. It is the negation of the negation" -- and so on (as quoted above).*

Thus, by characterizing the process as the negation of the negation, Marx does not intend to prove that the process <"fnp170">

* Ibid., pp. 763-64; see first footnote on p. 166 above. --Ed.

was historically necessary. On the contrary. After he has proved from history that in fact the process has in part already occurred, and in part must occur in the future, he also characterizes it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law. That is all. It is therefore once again a pure distortion of Herr Dühring's when he declares that the negation of the negation has to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past, or that Marx wants anyone to be convinced of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital (which is itself a Dühringian contradiction in corporeal form) on the basis of credence in the negation of the negation.

Herr Dühring's total lack of understanding of the nature of dialectics is shown by the very fact that he holds it to be an instrument of mere proof, as in a more limited way perhaps formal logic or elementary mathematics can be regarded. Even formal logic is primarily a method of discovering new results, of advancing from the known to the unknown, and the same holds, only much more eminently so, for dialectics, which, by breaking through the narrow horizon of formal logic, also contains the germ of a more comprehensive world outlook. The same relation exists in mathematics. Elementary mathematics, the mathematics of constant quantities, moves, by and large at least, within the confines of formal logic; the mathematics of variables, the most important part of which is the infinitesimal calculus, is essentially nothing but the application of dialectics to mathematical relations. Here mere proof is decidedly pushed into the background, as compared with the manifold applications of the method to new spheres of research. But almost all the proofs of higher mathematics, from the first proofs of the differential calculus on, are strictly speaking wrong from the standpoint of elementary mathematics. This is necessarily so, when, as in this case, an attempt is made to prove by formal logic results obtained in the field of dialectics. To attempt to prove anything by dialectics alone to a crass metaphysician like Herr Dühring would be as much a waste of time as was the attempt made by Leibnitz and his pupils to prove the principles of the infinitesimal calculus to the mathematicians of their time. The differential gave them the same convulsions as Herr Dühring gets from the negation of the negation, in which the differential also plays a certain role, as we shall see. Finally these gentlemen -- or such as had not died in the interval -- grudgingly gave way, not because they were convinced, but because it always came out right. As he himself tells us, Herr Dühring is only in his forties, and if he attains old age, as we hope he will, perhaps his experience will be the same.

But what then is this terrible negation of the negation which makes life so bitter for Herr Dühring and is the same unpardonable crime for him as the sin against the Holy Ghost is for Christianity?

A very simple process that is taking place everywhere and every day, that any child can understand as soon as it is stripped of the veil of mystery behind which it was hidden by the old idealist philosophy, and behind which it is to the advantage of helpless metaphysicians of Herr Dühring's calibre to keep it hidden. Let us take a grain of barley. Billions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which are normal for it, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture a specific change occurs in it, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place there appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilized and finally once more produces grains of barley, and as soon as these have ripened, the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have the original grain of barley once again, but not as a single unit, but ten-, twenty- or thirty-fold. Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener's art, as a result of this negation of the negation we get not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved ones, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this improvement.

With most insects, this process follows the same lines as in the case of the grain of barley. Butterflies, for example, spring from the egg by a negation of the egg, pass through certain transformations until they reach sexual maturity, pair and are in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs. We are not concerned at the moment with the fact that the process does not take such a simple form with other plants and animals, that before they die they produce seeds, eggs or offspring not once but many times; our purpose here is only to show that the negation of the negation really does take place in both kingdoms of the organic world.

Furthermore, the whole of geology is a series of negated negations, a series in which old rock formations are successively shattered and new ones deposited. First the original earth crust formed by the cooling of the liquid mass was broken up by oceanic, meteorological and atmospherico-chemical action, and these fragmented masses were stratified on the ocean bed. Local elevations of the ocean bed above the surface of the sea subjected portions of these first strata once more to the action of rain, the changing temperature of the seasons and the oxygen and carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. These same influences acted on the molten masses of rock which issued from the interior of the earth, broke through the strata and subsequently cooled off. In this way, in the course of millions of centuries, ever new strata were formed and in turn were for the most part destroyed, ever anew serving as material for the formation of new strata. But the result of this process has been a very positive one: the production of a soil out of a mixture of the most varied chemical elements and in a state of mechanical pulverization, which makes possible the most abundant and diversified vegetation.

It is the same in mathematics. Let us take any algebraic quantity we like: for example, a. If it is negated, we get -a (minus a). If we negate that negation by multiplying -a by -a, we get + a ², i.e., the original positive quantity, but at a higher degree, raised to its second power. It makes no difference in this case that we can obtain the same a ² by multiplying the positive a by itself, thus likewise getting a ². For the negated negation is so securely entrenched in a ² that the latter always has two square roots, namely a and -a. The fact that it is impossible to get rid of the negated negation, the negative root of the square, acquires very obvious significance as soon as we come to quadratic equations.

The negation of the negation appears even more strikingly in higher analysis, in those "summations of infinitely small magnitudes" which Herr Dühring himself declares are the highest operations of mathematics and which in ordinary parlance are known as the differential and integral calculus. How are these forms of calculus used? In a given problem, for example, I have two variables, x and y, neither of which can vary without the other also varying in a ratio determined by the facts of the case. I differentiate x and y, i.e., I take x and y as so infinitely small that in comparison with any real quantity, however small, they disappear, that nothing is left of x and y but their reciprocal relation without any, so to speak, material basis, a quantitative ratio in which there is no quantity. Therefore, dy/dx, the ratio between the differentials of x and y, is equal to 0/0, but 0/0 taken as the expression of x/y. I only mention in passing that this ratio between two vanished quantities, caught at the moment of their vanishing, is a contradiction; however, it cannot disturb us any more than it has disturbed the whole of mathematics for almost two hundred years. Now what have I done but negate x and y, though not in such a way that I need not bother about them any more, which is the way metaphysics negates, but in the way that corresponds with the facts of the case? In place of x and y, therefore, I have their negation, dx and dy, in the formulas or equations before me. Now I continue to operate with these formulas, treating dx and dy as quantities which are real, though subject to certain exceptional laws, and at a certain point I negate the negation, i.e., I integrate the differential formula, and in place of dx and dy again get the real quantities x and y, and then am not back where I was at the beginning, but on the contrary have in this way solved the problem on which ordinary geometry and algebra might perhaps have broken their jaws in vain.

It is the same in history. All civilized peoples begin with the common ownership of the land. With all peoples who have passed a certain primitive stage, this common ownership becomes a fetter on production in the course of the development of agriculture. It is abolished, negated, and after a longer or shorter series of intermediate stages is transformed into private property. But at a higher stage of agricultural development brought about by precisely this private property in land, private property becomes contrariwise a fetter on production, as is the case today with small as well as with large landownership. The demand necessarily arises that it, too, should be negated, that it should once again be transformed into common property. But this demand does not mean the restoration of the old primitive common ownership, but the institution of a much higher and more developed form of possession in common which, far from being a hindrance to production, will on the contrary free production for the first time from all fetters and enable it to make full use of modern chemical discoveries and mechanical inventions.

Or let us take another example. The philosophy of antiquity was primitive, natural materialism. As such, it was in capable of clearing up the relation between thought and matter. But the need to get clarity on this question led to the doctrine of a soul separable from the body, then to the assertion of the immortality of this soul, and finally to monotheism. The old materialism was therefore negated by idealism. But in the course of the further development of philosophy, idealism, too, became untenable and was negated by modern materialism. This modern materialism, the negation of the negation, is not the mere re-establishment of the old, but adds to the lasting foundations of this old material- ism the whole intellectual content of two thousand years of progress in philosophy and natural science, as well as in these two thousand years of history itself. Generally speaking, it is no longer philosophy at all, but a simple world outlook which has to be verified and implemented, not in a science of sciences standing apart, but in the positive sciences. Philosophy is therefore "sublated" here, that is, "both overcome and preserved"; overcome in its form, and preserved in its real content. Thus, where Herr Dühring sees only "verbal jugglery", closer inspection reveals an actual content.

Finally, even Rousseau's doctrine of equality, of which Dühring's is only a feeble and spurious imitation, could not have seen the light but for the midwife's services rendered by the Hegelian negation of the negation -- rendered, what is more, well-nigh twenty years before Hegel was born. So far from being ashamed of this, in its first presentation the doctrine bears almost ostentatiously the imprint of its dialectical origin. In the state of nature and savagery men were equal; and as Rousseau regards even language as a perversion of the state of nature, he is fully justified in extending the equality of animals within the limits of a single species also to the animal-men recently classified by Haeckel hypothetically as Alali, speechless. But these equal animal-men had one quality which gave them an advantage over the other animals, perfectibility, the capacity to develop further; and this became the cause of inequality. So Rousseau sees progress in the birth of inequality. But this progress contained an antagonism, it was at the same time retrogression.

"All subsequent advances" (beyond the original state of nature) "meant so many steps seemingly towards the perfection of the individual, but in reality towards the decay of the species. . . . Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts the discovery of which produced this great revolution" (the transformation of the primeval forest into cultivated land, but also the introduction of poverty and slavery through property). "For the poet<"p178"> it is gold and silver, but for the philosopher it is iron and corn, which have civilized men and ruined the human race. "[56]

Each new advance in civilization is at the same time a new advance in inequality. All institutions set up by the society which has arisen with civilization turn into the opposite of their original purpose.

"It is an incontestable fact, and the basic maxim of all constitutional law, that the peoples gave themselves chiefs to safeguard their liberty and not to enslave them."

Nevertheless, the chiefs necessarily become the oppressors of the peoples and intensify their oppression to the point at which inequality, carried to the utmost extreme, is again turned into its opposite and becomes the cause of equality: before the despot all are equal -- equally ciphers.

"Here we have the final measure of inequality, the last point which completes the circle and meets the point from which we set out : here all private individuals become equal once more, just because they are nothing, and the subjects have no other law than their master's will." But the despot is only master so long as he possesses force, and therefore he cannot "complain of the use of force as soon as he is driven out. . . . Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him, and thus everything takes its natural course."

So inequality once more turns into equality, though not into the former natural equality of speechless primitive men, but into the higher equality of the social contract. The oppressors are oppressed. It is the negation of the negation.

Already in Rousseau, therefore, we find not only a line of thought which corresponds exactly to the one developed in Marx's Capital, but in detail, too, a whole series of the same dialectical turns of speech as Marx used: processes which in their nature are antagonistic, contain an internal contradiction; transformation of one extreme into its opposite; and finally, as the kernel of the whole thing, the negation of the negation. Although Rousseau was not yet able to speak the Hegelian jargon in 1754, he was nevertheless deeply bitten by the Hegelian pestilence, the dialectics of contradiction, the doctrine of the Logos, theologizing, etc., sixteen years before Hegel was born. And when Herr Dühring begins to operate with his victorious twosome in his vulgarization of Rousseau's theory of equality, he is himself already perched on the inclined plane down which he must slide helplessly into the arms of the negation of the negation. The state of affairs in which the equality of the two men flourished, which was also described as an ideal state, is characterized on 71 of his Philosophy as the "original state". However, according to 79, this original state was necessarily sublated by the "robber system" -- the first negation. But now, thanks to the philosophy of reality, we have gone so far as to abolish the robber system and establish in its stead the economic commune based on equality which has been discovered by Herr Dühring -- the negation of the negation, equality on a higher plane. What a delightful spectacle, and how advantageously it extends our range of vision to witness his eminence Herr Dühring in person committing the capital crime of negating the negation!

So what is the negation of the negation? An extremely general, and for this very reason extremely far-reaching and important, law of development of nature, history, and thought; a law which, as we have seen, holds good in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history and in philosophy, and which even Herr Dühring has to follow unwittingly and in his own way, in spite of all his huffing and puffing. It is self-evident that I am not saying anything concerning the particular process of development of, for example, a grain of barley from germination to the death of the fruit-bearing plant, if I say it is a negation of the negation. For, as the integral calculus is also a negation of the negation, if I said anything of the sort I should only be making the nonsensical statement that the life-process of a barley plant was integral calculus or for that matter even socialism. That, however, is precisely what the metaphysicians are constantly accusing dialectics of. When I say that all these processes are a negation of the negation, I am bringing them altogether under this one law of motion, and for this very reason I am leaving out of account the specific peculiarities of each individual process. In fact, dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought.

But someone may object: the negation that has taken place here is not a real negation at all: I also negate a grain of barley when I grind it, an insect when I crush it underfoot, or the positive quantity a when I cancel it, and so on. Or I negate the sentence, the rose is a rose, when I say, the rose is not a rose; and what do I get if I again negate this negation and say, but after all the rose is a rose?

These objections are in fact the chief arguments of the metaphysicians against dialectics, and they are wholly worthy of the narrow-mindedness of this mode of thought. Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes. Long ago Spinoza<"p180"> said: Omnis determinatio est negatio -- every limitation or determination is at the same time a negation.[57] Further, the kind of negation is here deter- mined, firstly, by the general, and, secondly, by the particular, nature of the process. I should not only negate, but also in turn sublate the negation. I must therefore set up the first negation in such a way that the second remains or becomes possible. In what way? According to the particular nature of each individual case. If I grind a grain of barley, if I crush an insect, it is true I have carried out the first act, but have made the second act impossible. Therefore, every kind of thing has its characteristic kind of way of being negated, of being negated in such a way that it gives rise to a development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea. In the infinitesimal calculus negating is done differently from negating in the establishment of positive powers from negative roots. This has to be learnt, like everything else. I can no more grow barley successfully or differentiate and integrate with the bare knowledge that the barley stalk and the infinitesimal calculus both come under the negation of the negation than I can play the violin right off by the bare laws of the determination of sound by the dimensions of the strings.

But it is clear that nothing but the silliness of the person adopting such tedious procedures emerges from a negation of the negation which consists in the childish pastime of alternately writing and cancelling a, or in alternately asserting of a rose that it is a rose and that it is not a rose. Yet the metaphysicians would have us believe that if ever we wanted to accomplish the negation of the negation, this would be the right way.

Once again, therefore, it is no one but Herr Dühring who is mystifying us when he asserts that the negation of the negation is a stupid analogy invented by Hegel, borrowed from the sphere of religion and based on the story of the fall of man and his redemption. Men thought dialectically long before they knew what dialectics was, just as they spoke prose long before the term prose existed. The law of the negation of the negation, which is unconsciously operative in nature and history and in our heads as well until it has been recognized, was first clearly formulated by Hegel. If Herr Dühring wants to operate with it himself on the quiet and it is only that he cannot stand the name, then let him find a better name. But if his aim is to banish the process itself from thought, we must ask him to be so good as first to banish it from nature and history and to invent a mathematical system in which -a X -a is not + a ² and in which differentiation and integration are prohibited under severe penalties.

XIV

CONCLUSION

We have now finished with philosophy; such other fantasies of the future as the Course contains will be dealt with when we come to Herr Dühring's revolution in socialism. What did Herr Dühring promise us? Everything. And what promises has he kept? Not one. "The elements of a philosophy which is real and accordingly directed to the reality of nature and of life", the "strictly scientific conception of the world", the "system-creating ideas", and all Herr Dühring's other achievements trumpeted forth to the world by Herr Dühring in high-sounding phrases, turned out to be a pure swindle, wherever we laid hold of them. The world schematism which "without the slightest detraction from the profundity of thought, securely established the basic forms of being", proved to be an infinitely vulgarized copy of Hegelian logic and with the latter shares the superstition that these "basic forms" or logical categories have led a mysterious existence somewhere prior to and outside the world to which they are "to be applied". The philosophy of nature offered us a cosmogony whose starting point is a "self-identical state of matter", a state which can only be conceived by means of the most hopeless confusion over the relation between matter and motion, and which, moreover, can only be conceived on the assumption of an extramundane personal God who alone can get it into motion. In its treatment of organic nature, the philosophy of reality first rejected the Darwinian struggle for existence and natural selection as "a piece of brutality directed against humanity", and then had to readmit both by the backdoor as factors operative in nature, though of the second rank. In addition, the philosophy of reality found occasion to exhibit ignorance in the biological domain such as must be sought out with a magnifying glass even among the daughters of the educated classes, now that popular science lectures are no longer to be escaped. In the domain of morals and law, the philosophy of reality was no more successful in its superficial version of Rousseau than it had been in its previous vulgarization of Hegel; and as for jurisprudence, in spite of all its assurances to the contrary, it displayed a lack of knowledge such as is rarely found even among the most commonplace jurists of old Prussia. The philosophy "which cannot allow the validity of any merely apparent horizon" is content with a real horizon in legal matters which is coextensive with the territory in which the Prussian Landrecht holds sway. We are still waiting for the "earths and heavens of outer and inner nature" which this philosophy promised to reveal to us in its mighty revolutionizing sweep, just as we are for the "final and ultimate truths" and the "absolutely fundamental". The philosopher whose mode of thought "excludes" any tendency to a "subjectively limited conception of the world" proves to be subjectively limited not only by what has been shown to be his extremely defective knowledge, his narrow metaphysical mode of thought and his grotesque conceit, but even by his childish personal crotchets. He cannot produce his philosophy of reality without dragging in his repugnance to tobacco, cats and Jews as a general law valid for all the rest of humanity, including the Jews. His "really critical standpoint" in relation to other people is shown by his persistently foisting on them things which they never said and which are of Herr Dühring's very own manufacture. His long-winded inanities on petty-bourgeois themes, such as the value of life and the best way to enjoy it, are so steeped in philistinism that they explain his anger at Goethe's Faust. It was really unpardonable of Goethe to make the immoral Faust his hero and not that serious philosopher of reality, Wagner.

In short, taking it all in all the philosophy of reality proves to be what Hegel would call "the diluted dregs of the diluted German Enlightenment", dregs the thinness and transparent banality of which are thickened and muddied only by the admixture of crumbs of cryptic rhetoric. Now that we have finished the book, we are just as wise as we were at the start, and we are forced to confess that although the "new mode of thought", the "fundamentally original conclusions and views" and the "system-creating ideas" have certainly shown us a great variety of original nonsense, they have not provided us with a single line from which we might have been able to learn something. And this man, who praises his talents and his wares to the blare of cymbals and trumpets as loudly as any mountebank and behind whose big words there is nothing, absolutely nothing -- this man has the temerity to say of people like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the least of whom is a giant compared to him, that they are charlatans. Charlatan, indeed! But who?