Critique's Quarrel with Church and State

By Edgar Bauer

From the translator's introduction:
"While much of this book is Edgar's attempt to defend his older brother Bruno, the founder and primary exponent of Young Hegelian critique, against attacks from conservative Christian authorities and apologists, the greater part - and the main message - is straightforward political philosophy, written in a brash, accessible, sarcastic, no-holds-barred style - not at all ponderous, as we might have expected from a German author. His overarching theme is that faith is justified if and only if it is faith in reason and in the power of the human intellect, but never if it is faith which defies or denies reason, logic, history, nature, the human spirit, or especially science. Unreflective conformity with the faith of others or with the dictates of the ecclesiastical or sociopolitical order is even worse."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gegensatz Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781621307242

Book preview

Critique's Quarrel with Church and State

translated and with an introduction by

Eric v.d. Luft

from

Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat

(second edition, 1844)

by

Edgar Bauer (1820-1886)

with the German text, modernized for spelling and syntax

and

a Foreword by

Widukind De Ridder

~~~~~

Published by Gegensatz Press at Smashwords

ISBN 978-1-62130-724-2

Copyright © 2019 by Gegensatz Press

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North Syracuse, New York

2019

~~~~~

Quotable Thoughts From Within

"The human is a free being. Human and free, freedom and humanity, are for us one and the same. The human is a rational being. Human and rational, reason and humanity, are for us one and the same. But freedom is a condition in which I am not obstructed in my self-activity by any external barrier or any extrinsic law and in which I have within myself the law of my action - and this law is my reason. If I am the slave of the prejudices which keep my reason captive, or if I am the slave of an arbitrary power which dominates both mind and body - then I am no human, because I am not free."

"Truth itself is the one and only judge!"

The rock upon which the church is built is nothing other than the fact that humans are too lazy to think, and thus fall into religious anxiety and parochial stupidity. If humans are freely, cheerfully, actively on the move - then that rock crumbles - thought undermines it.

Irrationality has the right to be annihilated.

For vassals, it is a gratification, a joy to the depths of their souls, to be permitted to bow in humility before the prince, since this humility is the only act in which vassals feel that they are political creatures. To be beloved of their prince is their supreme blessedness; to flatter him is their duty.

... it is a crime to be called 'king' in a free state.

How did great humans become great? Not through that which they did for themselves, no, but through that which they did for humanity. If I acquired hundreds of millions for myself, would I thereby become a great personality? No; I must exist for others in order to be a person. I am only a human among humans, and indeed, among equal humans. Even if I had a thousand slaves, I couldn't feel like a human among them, since it would be pernicious to my authority to attribute the same spiritual or cultural investments and abilities, i.e., the same rights, to them as to myself.

... I am not free if I impair the freedom of others through whatever I have.

How can the need for higher spiritual and cultural benefits awaken if satisfying our physical needs requires all our thought and action? The earth provides nothing to those without property; they are at the mercy of the rich who offer them work, who let them scrape out a living, and who decide whether they should starve. The state provides nothing to them; educational and cultural events pass them by without effect; and at best they dumbly gawk at the works of spirit.

"Philosophy isn't supposed to give; it is only supposed to liberate."

~~~~~

Contents

Foreword by Widukind De Ridder

Translator's Introduction

Introduction

Einleitung

I. Critique

I. Die Kritik

II. The Religious and Conforming Bourgeois Consciousness

II. Das Religiöse und spießbürgerliche Bewußtsein

III. Peace

III. Der Friede

Appendix: French Text of Quotation from Mirabeau's Commentary on the Prussian Monarchy

~~~~~

Foreword

Widukind De Ridder

One of the most fascinating and enduring traits of Young Hegelian thought is its ability to captivate and stimulate an arguably wide and diverse readership. It is therefore a great privilege to be part of this laudable initiative to make one of its most overlooked texts finally available in the English language. Edgar Bauer indeed ranks amongst the lesser of the Young Hegelians, forever standing in the shadow of his brother Bruno Bauer.

Never a mere epigone, Edgar developed a more accessible and crude strand of Young Hegelian thought, sometimes echoing the highly idiosyncratic influence of French and English socialism. What ties everything together, though, is a rallying cry for an all-out war against the established order. In 1842, with his brash and sarcastic style, Edgar went down in history as the first author to extend pro-terrorist arguments to a general theoretical basis, as our translator, Eric Luft, reports in The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, edited by Douglas Moggach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 140. A remarkable feat for a 22-year-old college dropout!

Engulfed in what was both an exciting and a troublesome time, Edgar set himself the task of ferociously defending his brother, whose license to teach had just been revoked by the Prussian authorities. To the Bauer brothers this amounted to nothing less than a world-historical turning point. In muzzling Bruno from speaking, the old order had proven itself irredeemably sclerotic and historically bankrupt. What had thus already been demonstrated theoretically had now finally manifested itself for all the world to see. Bruno probably stated the matter most eloquently in one of his letters to Karl Marx: … everything must come down. The catastrophe will be tremendous, will have far-reaching consequences and I am almost inclined to say that it will become greater and more horrific than the crisis which accompanied the entry of Christianity into the world (5 April 1840). Upon his return to Berlin from Bonn in 1842, Bruno became the undisputed ringleader of the (Berlin) Young Hegelians. At least to some, it must have seemed as though his arrival signaled the coming of a new age.

Looked at that way, one can begin to understand the sense of urgency and the level of exhilaration exhibited here on every single page. In a similar vein, it seems no coincidence that Edgar decided to have his nuclear assault published under his own name, rather than anonymously or under a pseudonym. Moreover, not submitting the book to the royal censor could but end with an indictment by the Prussian supreme court. Luring the authorities out into the open was at all times crucial to both Bruno's and Edgar's endeavors. By ruthlessly cracking down on the book's author, the established order would simply once again expose itself as irrational and ultimately doomed. In the eyes of Edgar this would surely hasten an already epochal crisis. This world-historical crisis, of course, never materialized. Even before Edgar found himself confined at the fortress of Magdeburg in 1845, critique - and Young Hegelianism in general - had lost its luster. Those among the Young Hegelians, who took an active part in the revolutionary events of 1848, would be left disheartened by its outcome. Yet their highly polemical debates still resonate with us today.

In many ways, our own time is eerily reminiscent of the decade that gave way to the revolutions of 1848. It is an age marked by a broad range of attempts to develop a distinctly political language to grapple with numerous fast-paced societal changes. It uses a language of emancipation from traditional relationships, stressing the quest for common interests and their extension into the realms of the state. Our own time, however, has also seen the elaboration of quite a different rhetoric:

The incursion of neoliberalism into all spheres of life has arguably given way to a new vocabulary that is often dismissively referred to as identity politics. Unfortunately, merely disparaging any given discourse doesn't necessarily render it intelligible. In the absence of an emancipatory project that can bind the atoms of society together, politicized identities are quite likely to take over. The claims which they make for themselves at once dramatize and firmly entrench an - often justified - anguish in politics without staking out possible ways of alleviating it. Neoliberalism has thus spawned the politics of ressentiment, relentlessly reinforcing what it promises to overcome.

With its focus on exclusion rather than emancipation, this politics not only is wholly reliant on an oppressive other, but also risks clouding the issue of its societal and political underpinnings in its entirety. The shrinking of the public sphere has thus led to the privatization of exclusion, while at the same time leaving neoliberalism's secularized promise of prosperity intact.

Similarly, Edgar's lambasting of the collusion between church and state got me wondering about the nature of spiritual power (as opposed to temporal power) at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The alleged separation between church and state has in reality led to the transfer of spiritual power from the church to either the state (Europe) or the market (USA). Given the eroding monopoly of the state on education and health care, in Europe, it is more than likely that spiritual power will eventually be wielded by the market as well. If so, a critique of state and market might well be in order. I can only hope that such a text will be as sardonic and amusing as the nineteenth-century counterpart that helped to inspire it.

Brussels, 25 August 2018

~~~~~

Translator's Introduction

As a sort of culmination and resolution of my three previously published works on Edgar Bauer, I offer the first complete English translation of his magnum opus, this unjustifiably obscure book which has so influenced my political thinking since it was introduced to me in graduate school in the early 1980s. Of course I disclaim terrorism and violent anarchism, but there is much more to his political thought than that. He envisions - albeit imperfectly and provisionally - a world in which the poor are not expected to live vicariously through the rich, but may have reasonable and realizable aspirations of their own.

Irreverent books of political philosophy such as this can tell us as much about our own time and culture as about the respective times and cultures in which they were written. If read with a view toward the contemporary and near subsequent history of their respective sociopolitical environments, developments, triumphs, and tragedies, they can show us how our own near future history is likely to go. Edgar understands class warfare very well. He knows, for instance, that when the poor and humble strongly avow their fundamentalist religion, the rich and powerful rub their hands with glee. Such class warfare persists into our own time as rich tricksters use religion to control and manipulate the masses, creating ever new shapes of populism to subvert democracy, restrict freedom, curtail human rights, and further consolidate the power of money in the hands of the few. He also agrees with Karl Marx that the task of philosophy is not only to interpret the world, but also - and primarily - to change it. To express this point, he twists Hegel's well-known image of the owl of Minerva taking flight only as dusk begins to fall, writing that such night birds sleep during the day, i.e., when events are actually happening, because they cannot see anything in the light, i.e., they do not recognize events or their significance until long after such recognition has become meaningless.

While much of this book is Edgar's attempt to defend his older brother Bruno, the founder and primary exponent of Young Hegelian critique, against attacks from conservative Christian authorities and apologists, the greater part - and the main message - is straightforward political philosophy, written in a brash, accessible, sarcastic, no-holds-barred style - not at all ponderous, as we might have expected from a German author. His prose is lively, polemical, and figurative, steeped in irony, and sometimes jarring. His metaphors are often mixed and his analogies sometimes cannot withstand logical scrutiny, yet even when his particular meanings or small concatenations of argument are obscure, even when his phrases seem like non sequiturs, his overall meaning is clear enough. Among his favorite rhetorical devices is an extended acyron, i.e., saying just the opposite of what he really means, as when he asserts that the state is not to blame for poetry having become doggerel, when in fact it is obvious that he believes that the state is indeed responsible for the degeneration of poetry.

Subtle is not the first word which might pop into readers' heads to describe Edgar's prose, but some of his passages contain allusions which are indeed quite subtle. For example, the opening sentence of his Chapter II. 4., The Christian State, is a clear but insidious reference to the opening sentence of Novalis's 1799 pro-Catholic polemic, Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom or Europe). Hereby, without even mentioning Novalis explicitly, he lets the readers who know Novalis know that he disagrees with every word that Novalis wrote in that essay.

Although there is much anger in his presentation, and although much of this anger is excusable, his style remains humorous throughout. For example, in claiming that philosophy and religion cannot be reconciled, he writes that someone who recognizes both philosophical religion and religious philosophy, allows them to coexist, and believes them to be compatible, is like a man with two wives, Helena and Marie, whom he calls his Helenian Marie and his Marianish Helena - which puts us in mind of Heidegger's quip (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Introduction, § 5) that the idea of a Catholic phenomenology is as crazy as the idea of a Protestant mathematics.

Also, like Hegel himself and like many subsequent German philosophers, Edgar was quite fond of puns, not necessarily for their own sake, but primarily to help him to express systematic meaning. A case in point is in Chapter II. 4. I. 5., The School and the Church, where he writes that the state regards the church as a Seelenhort, i.e., a refuge for souls, shelter for souls, stronghold of souls, or nest of souls, an unusual expression which would instantly put readers in mind of the more common Seelenhirt, literally herder of souls, which in the nineteenth century was a figurative and somewhat derogatory designation for pastor, as if souls were sheep - Hirt being the everyday German word for shepherd.

Edgar's overarching theme is that faith is justified if and only if it is faith in reason and in the power of the human intellect, but never if it is faith which defies or denies reason, logic, history, nature, the human spirit, or especially science. Unreflective conformity with the faith of others or with the dictates of the ecclesiastical or sociopolitical order is even worse.

In the immediate wake of David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno was among the major founders of what came to be known as the higher criticism of the Bible. It is indeed a mark of social, political, cultural, and academic progress that objective scholars of the Bible are no longer persecuted or thrown in jail as they were in Germany in the 1840s. We may today rightly honor the Bauer brothers - despite their occasional misreadings, chronological errors, and mistaken hypotheses - for starting us on the road toward learning that if we understand the Bible, then we cannot believe it, and if we believe it, then we do not understand it.

Among Edgar's major complaints about biblical narratives is that they lack verisimilitude, and therefore are questionable as history. This line of biblical criticism was begun in earnest no later than Voltaire, and probably earlier. Edgar pursues it with zeal and is explicitly not interested in rehabilitating biblical narrative or reconciling it with known or verifiable historical facts. Hence, even though he lived before significant advances in ancient Near Eastern archaeology, he likely would not have been impressed or swayed by either subsequent archaeological discoveries which corroborate some of the statements in the Bible or conclusions such as we read in, for example, The Bible as History: A Confirmation of the Book of Books, by Werner Keller, translated by William Neil (New York: Morrow, 1956).

Edgar rails against much, but mostly against the mindless positivism which is perhaps best expressed in Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 294: Whatever is, is right. Blind loyalty to the state or devout fealty to the church are only two instantiations of this positivism. Other instantiations might include ethnic pride, family traditions, or the old school tie. On the grounds that it is one-sided and positivistic, Edgar attacks Hegel's famous assertation that the rational is actual and the actual is rational. But perhaps Edgar did not know that Hegel wrote it this way (in 1820) only to please the censors, who were rampant in Germany after the 1819 Carlsbad Decrees. According to Dieter Henrich in his edition of Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts: Die Vorlesung von 1819/20 in einer Nachschrift (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 50-51, and Shlomo Avineri in his feature review of Henrich's book in the journal of the Hegel Society of America, The Owl of Minerva, 16, 2 (Spring 1985): 202-204, Hegel in his lectures at the University of Berlin really said, according to his own manuscript lecture notes, that the rational becomes actual and the actual becomes rational (Was vernünftig ist, wird wirklich, und das Wirkliche wird vernünftig), which Edgar may have found a bit more palatable. In other words, for Hegel, the relationship between actuality and rationality is one of process and development, not one of being and stasis. Edgar surely shared this idea with Hegel, since in Chapter I. 2. 2. III., Religious Historiography, he plainly asserts that "the majesty and dignity of humans lies more in that they become something than in that they are something."

Like many radical political thinkers, Edgar wants to throw the baby out with the bath water. That is, while nearly all his complaints about the church and the state are legitimate, his proposed remedies are too extreme, too broad, too angry, too convulsive, since, surely, to tear everything down and then start over in a blanket revolution would be ultimately unworkable, shortsighted, and counterproductive. For example, it is true that poverty (1) is an evil which is mostly caused by the policies and priorities of the upper classes and (2) could be eliminated through a general act of will, which seems lacking. But the remedy is not, as Edgar proposes, to eliminate all private property. Nor is it the mere palliative of voluntary charity, as the upper classes prefer. Rather, the remedy, which Edgar does not and would not mention, is a system of checks and balances - not unlike that envisioned in a liberal interpretation of the American Constitution - grounded in popular sovereignty and a strong central government, accountable only to the people, so that it would rein in the inordinate and essentially anti-human power of corporations, special interests, religious institutions, and even itself, the state. But Edgar sees no good in either the church or the state, and thus wants to annihilate both. Nevertheless, the actual fact is that, like Anakin Skywalker buried deep inside Darth Vader, there is still a shred of good in both the church and the state that needs to be identified, rescued, redeemed, and uplifted after the evil in them has been purged away.

Regarding Edgar's contempt for private property and his recommendation that it be eliminated, it is well to recall that he was writing in the context of the Prussian feudal monarchy, in which a property owner typically had hundreds or thousands of subjugated tenants, vassals, servants, peasants, and other underlings living on his land, in order to enrich himself and his family while maintaining for the working inhabitants only subsistence or some condition only slightly above subsistence. In advocating the abolition of private property, Edgar was referring mainly to land reform, cooperative ownership of farms and factories, and so on. He hated the very idea of anyone owning anyone else's home. He saw the landlord / tenant relationship as demeaning, uncivilized, and essentially a false representation of humanity. He would likely not have objected to modest and responsible home ownership for single families or individuals with neither any sort of landlord / tenant relationship nor any ostentation, excess, or wastefulness. He certainly did not demand the shared ownership of personal items such as clothes, vehicles, or the tools of one's trade.

The influence of the French Revolution, especially the Jacobin movement, on Edgar is obvious throughout. Perhaps less obvious is the influence of the American Revolution. Yet when Edgar writes, We will claim that the state must perish if the law should come into conflict with any free self-consciousness (Es wird behaupten, der Staat müsse zu Grunde gehen, wenn es von jedem freien Selbstbewußtsein angetastet werden dürfe), it seems obvious that he has this line from the American Declaration of Independence in mind: ... when a long train of abuses and usurpations ... evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Among the Young Hegelians, Edgar - mainly because of his favorable treatment of the human species over against the human individual - is probably closer to Feuerbach than to any other, even Marx or Engels. Feuerbach expounded his theory of Gattungswesen (species-being or essence of the species) in Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity] (Leipzig: Wigand, 1841), so Edgar would surely have been familiar with it, especially since Otto Wigand was the usual publisher of Young Hegelian books. Indeed, Edgar, Bruno, and Feuerbach were often lumped together in the Vormärz, e.g., by the will-o'-the-wisp Georg Friedrich Daumer in Der Anthropologismus und Kriticismus der Gegenwart in der Reife seiner Selbstoffenbarung nebst Ideen zur Begründung einer neuen Entwicklung in Religion und Theologie [Today's Anthropologism and Criticism in the Fullness of Their Self-Revelation, along with Ideas toward the Foundation of a New Development in Religion and Theology] (Nürnberg: Bauer und Raspe, 1844). Nevertheless, despite his apparently virulent anti-egoism and his affinity with Feuerbach's brand of atheistic humanism, some of Edgar's anarchist pronouncements seem tolerably close to those of Max Stirner, despite the latter's radical individualism.

Insofar as his topic was hereditary monarchy, sycophantic nobility, and their religious underpinnings, we could well wonder whether his reaction would have been so extreme and violent if he had lived in, say, the United States under Tyler and Polk in the 1840s. Indeed, many 48er refugees from Germany found agreeable new homes in America.

Edgar's ideas remain relevant for thinking Americans in the early twenty-first century, as Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets strive to rekindle the grovelling spirit toward the rich and powerful - which Edgar describes so well in Chapter II. 4. I. 1., The Geniality and Humility of the Conforming Bourgeois - which typified ordinary people before the republican revolutions of 1776, 1789, 1830, 1848, etc., either toppled monarchies, decreased their influence, or got the people out from under their thumbs - and which should have ended once and for all with the defeat of crowned heads in 1918.

Many passages in this book could have been written today, mutatis mutandis, about current sociopolitical events. Such passages will leap out at astute readers. Also, many current sociopolitical events recall, verify, or corroborate points that Edgar makes. For example, Edgar's main point about the cozy and anti-human relationship between church and state is clearly illustrated in the decree of Bavarian Premier Markus Söder on 24 April 2018 that, as of 1 June 2018, all public buildings in Bavaria must display the Christian crucifix, as well as in the hypocrisy of subsequent official statements that the separation of church and state exists in Bavaria and that Söder's decree concerns culture, not religion. Nevertheless, we must remember that Edgar lived in a monarchy, and that therefore much of what he says against the state in general is relevant only to monarchies, oligarchies, plutocracies, and other autocracies or aristocracies, but not to all states in particular; e.g., his railings against the theological personification of a Christian state in its ruler and against the systematic flattering of this ruler would not be applicable to a secular democratic socialist republic.

This book is a product of Edgar's early twenties. His stance herein is inconsistent and difficult to pin down, but it could be variously described as sometimes anarchist, sometimes social democratic, sometimes democratic socialist, sometimes communist, sometimes libertarian, and thoroughly revolutionary. A street veteran of the 1848 revolutions, he did not stick with his views after the defeat of these insurrections and the subsequent re-establishment of firm, central governments throughout Europe. As early as his late thirties and surely by his early forties, he had become quite conservative, even reactionary, and publicly repudiated the views which he had promulgated in the Vormärz. We may well ask why and how he became conservative, just as we may ask the same question about Eldridge Cleaver, whose Soul on Ice (1968) is a sociopolitical classic, but whose Soul on Fire (1978), which explains his turning to conservative Christianity and his recanting of Black Panther ideology, is a dud.

For background, I refer readers to my earlier works on Edgar, especially the chapter in the Moggach volume. They are:

Eric v.d. Luft, Edgar Bauer and the Origins of the Theory of Terrorism, in: The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, edited by Douglas Moggach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 136-165.

Eric v.d. Luft, Edgar Bauer Promotes Anarchy / Edgar Bauer, 1843, in: Terrorism: Essential Primary Sources, edited by K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2006), pp. 4-7.

Edgar Bauer, The Political Revolution, from Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat (Critique's Quarrel with Church and State), translated and annotated by Eric von der Luft, in: The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence S. Stepelevich (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983; reprint: Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997; reprint: Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity [i.e., Prometheus] Books, 1999), pp. 265-274.

The 1844 edition was published without a table of contents. Occasionally interpolating, I have constructed it here from Bauer's arrangement, numbering, and chapter titles in the text:

Introduction

I. Critique

I. 1. Critique

I. 1. 1. Our Time. The People

I. 1. 2. Critique and the Religious Consciousness

I. 1. 3. Christian and Protestant

I. 1. 4. The Theological Consciousness

I. 2. Presentation of Bruno Bauer's Critique

I. 2. 1. The Inner Development of this Critique

I. 2. 2. Results of Bruno Bauer's Critique

I. 2. 2. I. Religious Facts

I. 2. 2. II. The Religious Consciousness

I. 2. 2. III. Religious Historiography

I. 2. 2. IV. The Four Evangelists

I. 2. 2. V. The True Concept of Christianity

I. 2. 3. Christianity

I. 2. 4. The Importance of Critique

I. 3. How Have They Thus Proceeded Against Critique?

I. 3. 1. The State

I. 3. 1. I. Truth

I. 3. 1. II. Law

I. 3. 1. III. The Institution

I. 3. 1. IV. Christianness

I. 3. 2. The Universities

I. 3. 2. I. Mitigation

I. 3. 2. II. The Theological Faculty

I. 3. 2. III. Non-Science

I. 3. 2. IV. Academic Freedom

I. 3. 3. Public Opinion

II. The Religious and Conforming Bourgeois Consciousness

II. 1. Theological Public Opinion

II. 1. 1. Attempts at Mediation

II. 1. 1. Annotation: Dr. Julius Rupp

II. 1. 2. Christian Herrmann Weisse

II. 1. 3. Herr Dr. Otto Friedrich Gruppe

II. 1. 3. Addendum I: Herr Ferdinand Hitzig

II. 1. 3. Addendum II: Dr. Julius Ferdinand Räbiger

II. 2. The Theological Faculties and the Universities

II. 2. 1. The Bishopric of the Faculties

II. 2. 2. The Faculty's Assessment

II. 2. 3. The Universities

II. 2. 3. Addendum: A Curiosity

II. 3. The Christian Church

II. 4. The Christian State

II. 4. I. The Christian State and the Vassal

II. 4. I. 1. The Geniality and Humility of the Conforming Bourgeois

II. 4. I. 2. Law and Right

II. 4. I. 3. Bureaucracy and Secrecy

II. 4. I. 4. Censorship, Academic Freedom

II. 4. I. 5. The School and the Church

II. 4. II. The Theological Regime

II. 4. III. The Christian State and the Free Human

II. 4. III. 1. Public Opinion

II. 4. III. 2. Propertylessness and the Mastery of Circumstances

II. 4. III. 3. The Political Revolution

II. 4. III. 4. The Free Community

III. Peace

Each unit of the translation, as demarcated in the table of contents, is followed by the corresponding German unit, with original page numbers in [square brackets] and with Edgar's footnotes incorporated into the text. Where Edgar has used only allusions, elliptical or incomplete references, or mere surnames, I have fleshed it out in situ. Wherever possible, I have consulted the original text of quoted passages and have followed the original, rather than Edgar's transcription, in setting this present version, with the exception that, in such passages, I have added Edgar's emphasis, even when it does not correspond to the original. In this English translation, but not in the German text, I have updated citations and references to the most useful, reliable, or readily available editions. I have transcribed Edgar's lengthy quotation of Mirabeau from the translation that he likely used, but I have translated that passage here from the original French, which is included as an appendix. Also, since this was the second German edition, published in 1844; since the first German edition was published on 7 August 1843; and therefore since sometimes when Edgar refers to last year, he means 1842, not 1843, or when he refers to this year or the new year, he means 1843, not 1844; I have corrected these instances in the translation, but not in the German text.

Sometimes technical philosophical terms, e.g., Heidegger's Dasein, Aristotle's phronêsis, or Plato's sôphrosynê, are better left in their original languages, since they are essentially untranslatable. Hegel's aufheben / Aufhebung is in that category. Nevertheless, because the dialectical concept behind aufheben / Aufhebung is so complex, I have chosen to use the threefold circumlocution which I learned from my dissertation director at Bryn Mawr College, George L. Kline: preserve, cancel, and raise to the higher level / preservation, cancellation, and raising to a higher level. This may be unwieldy or ugly, but it is more accurate than what has become the standard English rendering: sublate / sublation.

I am grateful to Katharina Dulckeit and Sören Paul for their help with the translation, to Widukind De Ridder for providing such an astute foreword, and to my wife, Diane Davis Luft, for her usual eagle-eyed proofreading. Of course, all remaining mistakes are my own, not theirs.

~~~~~

Introduction

Your mental images of the human spirit are just too fantastic! Because you esteem yourselves so highly, because you are indeed so exalted, at least in your own eyes, world history, the progressiveness of time, has slipped quite softly away from you under your feet, and despite your exalted position you now cannot even find today's humanity in your thoughts and activities any longer. All your means of shackling time will be in vain.

You always intend to be able to rule things according to your fancy ideas, since you see in the entire course of world history nothing but contingencies and the outcomes of fancy ideas. You maintain that your own existence is the only necessity among all these trifles.

Thus you also believe that today's critical movements of free spirit are nothing but a merely arbitrary fancy idea, i.e., that spirit woke up once on a beautiful summer morning, bored, listless, not knowing what to do, but then the fancy idea of critique occurred to it, and in this way it straight out began to criticize. Just put this insolent foolishness aside - so you say for your own sake - put it aside; we will always thunder against you at the right time with our I'll get you!

That is your view of spirit. Are you too smug to concern yourselves with truth? Or does your position actually force you, do your circumstances force you, to have contempt for time and to misunderstand your striving? I don't know. But I know this much: You are totally in the dark about the time in which you live and about spirit and what it wants.

Indeed it will be useless for me to say this to you, but we must always repeat this to you again and again: Modern critical efforts are historically necessary and a consequence of historical development. Whatever spirit wants, it wants not from any whim, but rather because spirit's own essence, spirit's own determining, drives it in that direction.

Spirit, already conscious of its majesty, authority, and complete power, has freely looked around.

On one side it saw a cross; on the other side, a throne: powers which, against all reason, have usurped what is right in order to tyrannize it and to throw it into bondage. The cross said to spirit: You are weak, and everything that you, by your own means, want to bring before yourself is vain lies and sin. Therefore bow down before me, throw yourself at my feet, bend to my commands, chastise yourself, and when you have fully suppressed the evil craving to be self-reliant - i.e., when you have become properly stupid and spiritless - then you may expect to be purged of the wicked scum of sin. However, opined the cross further, I don't want to be quite so gruesome; I will allow you any kind of movement, any little promenade within the due limits of undeniability and of trust, but in no case are you permitted to go out of my sight! I must keep you under constant supervision, so that, if you take any slaphappy leaps or try any crazy tricks, I can reprimand you and let you feel my rod.

The throne made similar claims. My existence, it said, is the highest truth, the highest right, and truly you shouldn't dare to infringe upon this right. I indeed want to allow you to have freedom, but naturally only within the appropriate limits of submissiveness. You can exercise your reason to any extent you want, only just don't presume upon my holiness. By all means indulge, I beg you, in the 'civilized' promenades of a loyal opposition, amuse yourself with the 'well-meaning' bombastic phraseology of a most devoutly subservient mental imagery; in that way you can get a healthy enough movement for yourself, a movement which promotes a rightly respectable sleep.

These are thus the demands which the two prevailing powers are so bold to make upon spirit. And they take all possible pains to keep spirit dependent, now by force, now by sycophantic cajolery. I want to make you blessed, they say here. I want to provide a calm and civilized happiness for you, they say there. And if you don't want to be blessed, they say further, see, here are burnings at the stake and excommunications and interdicts! And if you don't submit calmly, see, there are jail and starvation and censorship and police!

Sophists, shy of thought about the status quo, have an easy way of being done with freedom; they downright deny that humans are invested in or capable of freedom. Oh, if we only could, by a similar dictum, deny the sad experience that there resides in humans a certain investment in laziness and servility. With a powerful force of inertia, an uneducated or selfish herd can cherish the status quo, just because it is what now exists. If they are allowed to work only for their own lousy welfare, then they leave loftier matters alone in order to provide for themselves. They at some point settle into the existing relationships which give us our daily bread, and thus, at most, they achieve a certain disgust at those who want to shake up those relationships.

In this condition of sentiment, inertia, and philistinic selfishness, the church and the regime find their support, indeed, their origin and ascendancy. The rock upon which the church is built is nothing other than the fact that humans are too lazy to think, and thus fall into religious anxiety and parochial stupidity. If humans are freely, cheerfully, actively on the move - then that rock crumbles - thought undermines it. Yes, keep this in mind, this church is nothing but a building, a monument to your own religious weakness. Throw aside the stone of humility which depresses your spirit; throw it away from you, and that stony monument will collapse into itself.

It is just the same with governmental relationships. You yourselves are still disposed toward the police, therefore you don't behave like free humans. You yourselves don't let your thoughts become words, therefore the rulers feel entitled to suppress the expression of free thought. You yourselves are so fittingly cozy, so preoccupied with your personalized and conforming bourgeois affairs, that you know nothing of the lofty and human questions of freedom; therefore the regime treats you as individuals to be supervised, as those with whom it fondly associates a police guard, as those who pay, and as those toward whom it believes it has no spiritual obligation. Tyranny, the physical and moral pressure which you suffer, has its seat and emergence only in your own weak sentiments. Be free yourselves and you will certainly be able to win the fight for freedom. Throw the conforming bourgeois sense away, become human, and you will know and gain your rights as humans.

Critique is the means to make us free. It drives weakness and faith and conforming bourgeois humility away. It shows that humans have to create and dominate relationships, not be created and dominated by them.

Yet in humans resides not merely that force of inertia, not merely that irrational instinct which calls them to cling to the status quo! Humans are neither created to be eternally hopeful of heaven nor born to be conforming bourgeois. No! It is just as certain that in humans there abides an infinite pull toward freedom and rational dignity.

This freedom of the spirit is the weapon of critique, and it appeals to the indestructible human attitude. But are church and state going to allow critique to exist in peace? Good gracious no! Their existence is endangered and they must seek to secure themselves. Both rely on the status quo; both survive by the force of inertia and the sentimental conforming bourgeois disposition of the herd. They cannot admit that critique stands before the paradise of subservience and prejudice, or that critique wants to compel humans to obtain freedom with the help of thought and by the sweat of their brows.

The police state: Is this how the state survives over against a progressive culture? The state which, in the interest of the prevailing irrationality, presumes to suppress the free, searching spirit, is certainly still very far from being a free commonwealth which embraces all its citizens and all their interests with the same love, the same consideration. The enthusiasm for this state, for its majesty and worth, thus cannot be that which binds vassals to it. The police regime, which believes that it has a privilege of the regime, speculates rather on its fear of the vassals, because it itself is afraid. It relies on clandestine powers among humans, since it cannot require the higher facilities of freedom. Humility, indifference to everything which proceeds beyond the limited horizon of its own four walls, dull contentment - these are the properties which a police state has to cultivate above all. - The science which it allows to be taught won't be genuine science, because such science is always under watch and is forced to be official science. The educational and academic institutions which this state establishes will be good schools to develop literate vassals, but not even kindergartens for a rough and strenuous life. And it is certainly not the fault of any such state if poetry degenerates into vapid, sycophantic odes and sing-songs, and painting into official portraiture or presentations of parades, guards, and military tableaux. Any concern that the police state has for science, education, and art will always be only illusion and unedifying Jesuitism.

A commonwealth of free and equal humans gives humans the consciousness of their strength and self-reliance, gives their lives a worthy content, gives their energies a worthy sphere of activity. Such a commonwealth needs no church. But the police state cannot and may not, for its own sake, place itself at this standpoint of a free commonwealth; it cannot and may not accomplish making a socially responsible human out of a religious and chastened human. For the police state it is never possible to inspire and fulfill the whole human; hence there will always persist, beside the state and in the state, a church which asserts itself to be higher than the state, because it is concerned with the health of the eternal human soul.

Here isn't the place to discuss any conflict that the church may thereby ever have with the police state. Here it would be just too much to reiterate how every preceding state and church, in their persecutions of critique, concluded an intimately trustworthy and most refreshing alliance of well-meaning souls.

Critique until now has concerned itself mainly with religion and theology. It began with the main point. Since the theory of human weakness and dependence is contained, as it were, in religion, the religious consciousness conceives in general all human enterprises to be humble, anxious vassalage. If religion is therefore established as a power which is unworthy of humans and which must be thrown down; if the human religious consciousness is shattered, then the main point has been won. Critique, which annihilates the sanctity of articles of faith, has an easy play if it wants also to prove that the sanctity of political institutions is invalid. The sanctity of religion is overthrown and sinks into nothing together with the sanctity of the police state.

Thus, when we speak about critique, then we mean, first of all, something antitheological, because heretofore this was where it proved itself - and had to prove itself - most actively.

Yet critique cannot and may not remain merely antireligious.

Great questions have recently been asked, and critique will need to answer still greater ones. Now we strive for everything! We strive for ethnicity, for nationality; and whoever is moderate wishes for a constitution, guarantees of freedom. But those who see further find in a so-called state constitution no guarantee against stagnation or oppression. We want to know that everything which is called human is absorbed as equally justified into a society which is remote from any exclusivity or aristocracy or paternalism whatsoever. Now we may either be inconsistent, like nationalists, constitutionalists, or republicans, and remain stuck at a certain point, or we may be consistent, like communists, and attach ourselves to universal freedom and reason. Never will we be able to manage without critique, because the moderate friend of progress must also turn against the status quo.

Then is it possible for a people to arise if spirit, which is always the spirit of a people, is neglected? If anyone wants to prevent free spirit from asking questions, then whose answer is inevitably necessary for self-conscious progress? Is it possible to obtain guarantees of freedom as long as the old obstacles to freedom, aristocratic privileges, egoistic paternalism, still exist and as long as they are preserved as holy shrines? Is it possible to achieve a free state when differences of property, status, and rank are still expected to be given as a privilege for one person over another? Every state will want so-called superiors supervising, patronizing, controlling so-called inferiors; even a so-called republican regime, since indeed it is still a regime, won't be able to keep away from the lust to oppress. Thus critique will henceforth be on the job specifically to expose inconsistent strivings for freedom in their half measures. Henceforth critique will develop itself with ever livelier force, so that it may finally grasp the full concept of freedom and prepare us to achieve it.

The strength of critique lies in that it is critique. Already its mere appearance, with its clear pronouncement of its results, is half the battle. To help it to victory, nothing further is necessary than that, on one side, we characterize critique itself as what it wants to be, and on the other side, we seek to uncover the opinions and rebuttal attempts of its enemies in their complete nakedness.

This book should consist of such a contribution to the knowledge of critique and its enemies. In my 1842 book, Bruno Bauer and his Enemies, I aimed at the same goal. Since here I just want to make my small contribution, I thus consider what follows as only an attempt, on the basis of that book, to discuss somewhat more precisely and extensively the various questions to which critique and its opponents give occasion.

I have taken