Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"

He is therefore engaged with principles, formal conceptions, which are subjective and not derived from the knowledge of external phenomena, but which are applied to Nature and Humanity, as the principles according to which Nature and Humanity must regulate themselves. But how are these subjective principles derived? From thought itself? No, for Herr Duehring himself says: the purely ideal realm is limited to logical arrangements and mathematical conceptions (which latter as we shall later see is false). Logical arrangements can only be referred to forms of thought, but we are engaged here only with forms of existence, the external world, and these forms can never be created by thought nor derived from it but only from the external world. Hereupon the entire matter undergoes a change. We see that principles are not the starting point of investigation but the conclusion of it, they are not to be applied to nature and history but are derived from them. Nature and Humanity are not steered by principles, but principles are, on the other hand, only correct so far as they correspond with nature and history. That is just the materialistic conception of the matter, and the opposite, that of Herr Duehring is the idealistic conception, it turns things upside down and constructs a real world out of the world of thought, arrangements, plans and categories existing from everlasting before the world, just like Hegelianism.

As a matter of fact, we prefer Hegel's "Encyclopedia," with all its fever phantoms, to the "final truths of the last instance" of Herr Duehring. In the first place, according to Herr Duehring we have the general scheme of the universe which by Hegel is called "logic." Then according to both of them we have the application of this scheme to nature by means of the logical categories, the philosophy of nature, and finally their application to Humanity, by what Hegel calls "the Philosophy of the Spirit." "The inner logical arrangement" of Duehring's scheme brings us therefore logically back to Hegel's "Encyclopedia" from which it is taken with a fidelity which would move that Wandering Jew of the Hegelian school, Professor Michelet of Berlin, to tears.

Such a result follows if one takes it for granted that "consciousness," "thought," is something which has existed from the beginning in contradistinction to nature. It would then be of the greatest importance to bring consciousness and Nature, thought and existence, into harmony, to harmonise the laws of thought and the laws of Nature. But one enquires further what are thought and consciousness and whence do they originate. It is consequently discovered that they are products of the brain of man, and that Humanity is itself a product of nature which has developed in and along with its environment; wherefore it becomes self-apparent that the products of the brain of man being themselves, in the last instance, natural products, do not contradict all the rest of Nature but correspond with it.

But Herr Duehring cannot allow so simple a treatment of the subject. He thinks not only in the name of Humanity which would be quite a large affair, but in the name of the conscious and thinking beings of the whole universe. Indeed, it would be "a degradation of the foundation concepts of knowledge and consciousness if one should wish to exclude or even to throw suspicion upon their sovereign value and undoubted claims to truth by means of the epithet 'human.'" In order that there may be no suspicion that upon some heavenly body or other twice two may make five, Herr Duehring does not venture to call thought a human attribute, and therefore he is obliged to separate it from the only true foundation on which it rests, as far as we are concerned, namely, from man and nature, and thereby falls, without any possibility of getting out, into an "ideology" which causes him to play baby to Hegel. It is self-evident that one cannot build materialistic doctrines on foundations so ideological. We shall see later that Herr Duehring is compelled to push nature to the front as a conscious agent and, therefore, as that, which people in plain English call God.

Indeed, our philosopher had other motives in shifting the foundation of reality from the material world to that of thought. The knowledge of this general scheme of the universe, of these formal principles of being is just the foundation of Herr Duehring's philosophy. If we derive the scheme of the universe not from our own brain, but merely by means of our own brain, from the material world, we need no philosophy, but simply knowledge of the world and what occurs in it, and the results of this knowledge likewise do not constitute a philosophy, but positive science. In such a case, however, Herr Duehring's entire book would have been love's labor lost.

Further, if no philosophy, as such, is longer required there is no longer the necessity of any philosophy of nature even. The view that all the phenomena of nature stand in systematic mutual relations compels science to prove this systematic interconnection in all respects, in single cases as well as in the entirety. But an appropriate creative, scientific representation of this mutual connection in such a way as to show the composition of an exact thought-picture of the system of the universe in which we live remains not only for us but for all time an impossibility. Should such a final conclusive system of the interconnection of the various activities of the universe, physical, as well as intellectual and historical, ever be brought to completion at any point of time in the history of the human race, human knowledge would forthwith come to an end and future historical progress would be cut off from the very moment in which society was directed in accordance with the system, which would be an absurdity, mere nonsense.

Man is therefore confronted by a contradiction, on the one hand he is obliged to study the interconnections of the world-system exhaustively, and, on the other hand, he is unable to fully accomplish the task either as regards himself or as regards the system of nature. This contradiction, however, does not consist solely in the nature of the two factors World and Man; it is the main lever also of universal intellectual progress and is solved every day and for ever in an endless progressive development of humanity, just as mathematical problems find their solution in an endless progression of a recurring decimal. As a matter of fact also every concept of the universe is subject to objective limitations owing to the conditions of historical knowledge, and subjectively in addition owing to the physical and mental make up of the author of the concept. But Herr Duehring exhibits a mode of thought which is confined in its application to a limited and subjective idea of the universe. We saw earlier that he was omnipresent, in all possible forms of the universe, now we see that he is omniscient. He has solved the final problems of science and has nailed up tight all future knowledge.

Herr Duehring considers that he can, as with the fundamental forms of existence, produce aprioristically by means of his own cogitations the whole of pure mathematics without making any use of the experience which is afforded us in the objective world. In pure mathematics the understanding is engaged "in its own free creations and imaginations"; the concepts of number and form are "self-sufficient objects proceeding from themselves" and so have "a value independent of individual experience and actual objective reality."

That pure mathematics has a significance independent of particular individual experience is quite true as are also the established facts of all the sciences and indeed of all facts. The magnetic poles, the formation of water from oxygen and hydrogen, the fact that Hegel is dead and that Herr Duehring is alive, are facts independent of my experience or that of any other single individual, and will be independent of that of Herr Duehring himself, as soon as he shall sleep the sleep of the just. But in pure mathematics the mind is not by any means engaged with its own creations and imaginings. The concepts of number and form have only come to us by the way of the real world. The ten fingers on which men count and thereby performed the first arithmetical calculations are anything but a free creation of the mind. To count not only requires objects capable of being counted but the ability, when these objects are regarded, of subtracting all qualities from them except number and this ability is the product of long historical development of actual experience. The concept form is, like that of number, derived exclusively from the external world and is not a purely mental product. To it things possessed of shape were necessary and these shapes men compared until the concept form was arrived at. Pure mathematics considers the shapes and quantities of things in the actual world, very real objects. The fact that these objects appear in a very abstract form only superficially conceals their origin in the world of external nature. In order to understand these forms and qualities in their purity it is necessary to separate them from their content and thus one gets the point, without dimensions, the line, without breadth and thickness, a and b, x and y, constants and variables, and we finally first arrive at independent creations of the imagination and intellect, imaginary magnitudes. Also the apparent derivation of mathematical magnitudes from each other does not prove their aprioristic origin, but only their rational interconnection. Before one attained the concept that the form of a cylinder was derived from the revolution of a rectangle round one of its sides, he must have examined a number of rectangles and cylinders even if of imperfect form. Like all sciences, mathematics has sprung from the necessities of men, from the measurement of land and the content of vessels, from the calculation of time and mechanics. But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development, laws are abstracted from the actual phenomena, are separated from them and set over against them, as something independent of them, as laws, which apparently come from the outside, in accordance with which the material world must necessarily conduct itself. So, it has happened in society and the state, so, and not otherwise, pure mathematics though borrowed from the world is applied to the world, and though it only shows a portion of its component factors is all the better applicable on that account.

But as Herr Duehring imagines that the whole of pure mathematics can be derived from the mathematical axioms, "which according to purely logical concepts are neither capable of proof nor in need of any, and without empirical ingredients anywhere and that these can be applied to the universe, he likewise imagines, in the first place, the foundation forms of being, the single ingredients of all knowledge, the axioms of philosophy, to be produced by the intellect of man; he imagines also that he can derive the whole of philosophy or plan of the universe from these, and that his sublime genius can compel us to accept this, his conception of nature and humanity." Unfortunately nature and humanity are not constituted like the Prussians of the Manteuffel regime of 1850.

The axioms of mathematics are expressions of the most elementary ideas which mathematics must borrow from logic. They may be reduced to two.

(1) The whole is greater than its part; this statement is mere tautology, since the quantitatively limited concept, "part," necessarily refers to the concept, "whole," – in that "part" signifies no more than that the quantitative "whole" is made up of quantitative "parts." Since the so-called axiom merely asserts this much we are not a step further. This can be shown to be a tautology if we say "The whole is that which consists of several parts – a part is that several of which make up a whole, therefore the part is less than the whole." Where the barrenness of the repetition shows the lack of content all the more strongly.

(2) If two magnitudes are equal to a third they are equal to one another; this statement is, as Hegel has shown, a conclusion, upon the correctness of which all logic depends, and which is demonstrated therefore outside of pure mathematics. The remaining axioms with regard to equality and inequality are merely logical extensions of this conclusion. Such barren statements are not enticing either in mathematics or anywhere else. To proceed we must have realities, conditions and forms taken from real material things; representations of lines, planes, angles, polygons, spheres, etc., are all borrowed from reality, and it is just naive ideology to believe the mathematicians, who assert that the first line was made by causing a point to progress through space, the first plane by means of the movement of a line, and the first solid by revolving a plane, etc. Even speech rebels against this idea. A mathematical figure of three dimensions is called a solid – corpus solidum – and hence, according to the Latin, a body capable of being handled. It has a name derived, therefore, by no means from the independent play of imagination but from solid reality.

But to what purpose is all this prolixity? After Herr Duehring has enthusiastically proclaimed the independence of pure mathematics of the world of experience, their apriorism, their connection with free creation and imagination, he says "it will be readily seen that these mathematical elements (number, magnitude, time, space, geometric progression), are therefore ideal forms with relation to absolute magnitudes and therefore something quite empiric, no matter to what species they belong." But "mathematical general notions are, apart from experience, nevertheless capable of sufficient characterization," which latter proceeds, more or less, from each abstraction, but does not by any means prove that it is not deprived from the actual. In the scheme of the universe of our author pure mathematics originated in pure thought, in his philosophy of nature it is derived from the external world and then set apart from it. What are we then to believe?

The Scheme of the Universe

"All-comprehending existence is sole. It is sufficient to itself and has nothing above or below it. To associate a second existence with it would be to make it just what it is not, a part of a constituent or all-embracing whole. When we conceive of our idea of soleness as a frame there is nothing which can enter into this, nothing which retains twofoldness can enter into this concept of unity. But nothing can alienate itself from this concept of unity. The essence of all thought consists in uniting the elements of consciousness in a unity. The indivisible concept of the universe has arisen by comprehending everything, and the universe, as the word signifies, is recognised as something in which everything is united into one unity."

So far Herr Duehring is quoted. The mathematical method, "Everything must be decided on simple axiomatic foundation principles, just as if it were concerned with the simple principles of mathematics," this method is for the first time here applied.

"The all-embracing existence is sole." If tautology, simple repetition in the predicate of what has been stated in the subject, if this constitutes an axiom, then we have a splendid specimen. In the subject Herr Duehring tells us that existence comprehends everything, in the predicate he explains intrepidly that there is nothing outside it. What a system-shaping thought. It is indeed system-shaping until we find six lines further down that Herr Duehring has transformed the soleness of being by means of our idea of unity into its one-ness. As the work of all thought consists in the bringing together of all thought into a unity so is existence, as soon as it is conceived, thought of as a unity, an indivisible concept of the universe, and because existence so conceived is the sole universal concept, so is real existence, the real universe, just as much an indivisible unity, and consequently "the beings in the beyond have no further place as soon as the mind has learned to comprehend existence in the homogeneous universality."

That is a campaign with which in comparison Austerlitz and Jena, Koeniggratz and Sedan sink in insignificance. In a couple of expressions after we have set the first axiom moving we have abolished, put away, and destroyed all the inhabitants of the spirit-world, God, the heavenly hierarchies, heaven, hell and purgatory as well as the immortality of the soul.

How do we arrive at the idea of the unity of existence from that of its soleness? As a matter of fact, we generally conceive it. As we spread out our idea of unity as a frame around it the concept of existence becomes the concept of unity, for the existence of all thought consists in the bringing of elements of consciousness into unity.

This last statement is simply false. In the first place thought consists in the decomposition of objects of consciousness into their elements as well as in the uniting of mutually connected elements into a unity. There can be no synthesis without analysis. In the second place, thought can, without error, only bring those elements of consciousness into a unity in which or in the actual prototypes of which this unity already existed beforehand. If I comprehend a shoebrush under the class mammal, it does not thereupon become a milk-giver. The unity of existence is therefore just the thing which had to be proved in order to justify his concept of thought as a unity, and if Herr Duehring assures us that he regards existence as a unity and not as twofold he tells us nothing more than that he himself personally thinks so.

To give a clear explanation of his method of reasoning, it is as follows, "I begin with existence. Therefore I think of existence. The idea of existence is an idea of unity. Thought and existence must therefore belong together, they answer one another, they mutually cover each other. Therefore existence is in reality a unity and there are no beings beyond." But if Herr Duehring had spoken thus plainly instead of entertaining us with oracular statements, the ideology of his argument would have been completely exposed. To attempt to undertake to prove from the identity of thought and existence the reality of the result of thought, that indeed were one of the fever-phantoms of a Hegel.

If his entire method of proof were really correct Herr Duehring would not have gained a single point over the spiritists. The spiritists would curtly reply, "The universe is simple from our standpoint also. The division into the hither and the beyond only exists from our special earthly original sin standpoint. In its essence, that is God, the entire universe is a unity." And they will take Herr Duehring with them to his beloved heavenly bodies, and will show him one or more where no original sin can be found, and where there is therefore no antagonism between the hither and the beyond, and the oneness of the universe is a demand of faith.

The most comical thing about the matter is that Herr Duehring in order to prove the non-existence of God from his concept of existence, furnishes the ontological proof of God's existence. This runs as follows – If we think of God we think of Him as the concept of complete perfection. To the idea of perfection existence is a first essential, since a non-existent being is of necessity imperfect. We must therefore add existence to the perfections of God. Therefore God must exist. Thus Herr Duehring reasons exactly. If we think of existence we think of it as a concept. What is united into a concept is a unity, therefore existence would not correspond with its concept if it were not a unity. Therefore it must be a unity, therefore there is no God, etc.

If we speak of existence and merely of existence, the unity can only consist in this that all objects with which it is concerned are – exist. They are comprised under the unity of this common existence, and no other, and the general dictum that they all exist cannot give them any further qualities, common or not common, but excludes all such from consideration in advance. For as soon as we take a step beyond the simple fact that existence is common to all things, the distinctions between these separate things engage our attention, and if these differences consist in this that some are black, some white, some alive, others not alive, some hither and some beyond, we cannot conclude therefrom that mere existence can be imputed to all of them alike.

The unity of the universe does not consist in its existence, although its existence is a presumption of its unity, since it must first exist before it can be a unit. Existence beyond the boundary line of our horizon is an open question. The real unity of the universe consists in its materiality, and this is established, not by a pair of juggling phrases but by means of a long and difficult development of philosophy and natural science.

With respect to the subject in hand; the existence which Herr Duehring presents to us is "not that pure existence which is self sufficient and without any other qualities, in fact, only representing the antithesis of no-idea or absence-of-idea." Now we shall very soon see that the universe of Herr Duehring has its origin simultaneously with an existence which is without essential differentiation, progress or change, and is therefore merely in fact a contradiction of absence of thought, therefore really nothing. From this non-existence is developed the present differentiated, changeable universe which represents progressive growth; and when we grasp this idea, only by virtue of this eternal change do we arrive at "the concept of the self sufficing, universal existence." We have therefore now the concept of existence on a higher plane where it comprises within itself stability as well as change, being as well as development. Arrived at this point we find that "species and genera in fact the special and the general, are the simplest forms of differentiation, without which the constitution of things cannot be grasped."

But this is a means of distinguishing quality and after a discussion of this part of the subject we proceed "Over against the idea of species stands the idea of the whole, a homogeneity, as it were, in which no differentiation of species can longer be found," so we pass from quality to quantity and this is always "capable of measurement."

Let us compare this "clear analysis of the actual, universal scheme of things" and its "real, critical standpoint" with the fever-phantasies of a Hegel. We find that Hegel's "Logic" begins with existence as does that of Herr Duehring; that existence displays itself as nothing, as with Herr Duehring; that out of this not-being, a leap is made into being, and that existence is the result of this, that is a more complete and higher form of being, as with Herr Duehring. Being leads to quality, quality to quantity, just as with Herr Duehring. And in order that no essential shall be lacking Herr Duehring tells us elsewhere "from the realm of absence of sensation man leaps to that of sensation in spite of all the quantitative steps with but one qualitative leap … from which we can show that he is entirely differentiated from the mere gradation of one and the same quality." This is just the Hegelian standard of measurement according to which mere quantitative expansion or contraction causes a sudden qualitative change at a given point, as for example with heated or cooled water, there are points where the spring into a new set of conditions is fulfilled under normal circumstances, and where therefore quantity suddenly changes into quality.

Our investigation has likewise sought to penetrate to the deepest roots, and discovers the rooted Duehring foundations to be the "fever-phantasies" of a Hegel, the categories of the Hegelian logic, in the first place, teachings in regard to existence after the antique Hegelian method, and an ineffective cloak of plagiarism.

And not content with purloining the whole scheme of existence from his despised predecessors, Herr Duehring after giving the above example of a change of quantity into quality has the coolness to say of Marx, "Is it not comical, this appeal (of Marx) to Hegelian confusion and mistiness, that quantity changes into quality." Confused mixture, who changes his ground, who is a comical fellow Herr Duehring?

All these pretty little statements are not only not "axiomatic utterances" according to label, but are simply taken from foreign sources, that is, from Hegel's "Logic." Of a truth there is not revealed in the whole chapter the shadow of any "inner connection," except so far as it is borrowed from Hegel, and the whole talk about stability and change finally runs out into mere garrulity on the subject of time and space.

From existence Hegel comes to substance, to the dialectic. Here he treats of reflex-movements, antagonisms and contradictions, positive and negative for example, and thence proceeds to causality, or the conditions of cause and effect and closes with necessity. Herr Duehring does not vary this method. What Hegel calls the "doctrines of existence" Herr Duehring has translated into "logical properties of existence." These exist, above all else in the antagonism of forces, in antithesis, Herr Duehring denies the antithesis in toto, but we shall return to this matter later. Then he proceeds to causality and thence to necessity. If Herr Duehring says of himself, "I do not philosophise from a cage," he must mean that he philosophises in a cage, the cage of the Hegelian arrangement of categories.