VIII

Rome, June 20, 1897.

I must write a sort of postscript, which shall supplement my letter preceding the last one, so full of difficult questions.

Very naturally, I class among the products of our emotions, by which the scientific mind is obscured, also those complex sensations, which we ordinarily call optimism and pessimism respectively, and which represent certain inclinations, tendencies, evaluations and prejudices.

No one can find in those modes of expression, which oscillate between poetry and passion and always strike that uncertain note which cannot be reduced to precise terms, either a tendency to, or a promise of, a rational interpretation of things. Taken in their entirety, these emotions are combinations and expressions of infinite individual feelings, which may have their seat, as is plainly the case with pessimism, either in the specific temperament of some individual personality (such as Leopardi), or in the common conditions of large multitudes (for instance, the origin of Buddhism). In short, optimism and pessimism are essentially generalisations of emotions resulting from some particular experience or social condition, which are projected so far outside of our immediate environment as to make of them, as it were, the axis, the fulcrum, or the finality of the universe. By this means the categories of good and bad, which have really but a modest relation to our practical needs, finally become standards by which the whole world is judged, reducing it to such small dimensions as to make of it a simple basis and condition of our happiness or unhappiness. From either point of view, the world seems to have no other meaning than that of good or bad, and the final outcome seems to depend on the prevalence or triumph of one over the other.

At the bottom if this mode of looking at things is always the primitive poetry which is never separated from myth. And such modes of conception form always the practical pith and suggestive power of religious systems, from the crude optimism of Mohammedanism to the refined pessimism of Buddhism. And that is very natural. Religion is a need precisely for the reason, and only for the reason, that it represents the transfiguration of so many fears, hopes, pains, bitter experiences of daily life into pre-ordained faiths and judgments. In this way the struggles of this world, so-called, are transformed into transcendental antagonisms of the universe, such as God and Devil, sin and redemption, creation and re-birth, the scale of atonements and Nirvana. This optimism, and this pessimism, which assume the shape of thought and surround themselves with a certain philosophy, are nothing but more or less conscious survivals of religion in another form, or of that anti-religion, which in a transport of passionate unbelief resembles faith. The optimism of Leibniz, for instance, is certainly not a philosophical function of his study of the differential calculus, nor of his critique of action at a distance, nor of his metaphysical theory of monads, nor of his discovery of internal determinism. His optimism is his religion. It is that religion which appears to him as the perpetual and lasting one. It is for him that Christianity which reconciles all Christian creeds, a providence justified by the view that this world is the best which can ever be and continue. This theological poetry has its humoristic, and therefore dialectic, counterpart in Voltaire's Candide. Similarly the pessimism of Schopenhauer is not a necessary result of his critique of the Kantian critique, nor a direct function of his exquisite researches in logic. It is rather the expression of his petty bourgeois soul, unhappy, disgruntled, peevish, seeking satisfaction in the metaphysical contemplation of the blind forces of the unknowable (or the blind effort to exist). In other words, he seeks satisfaction in a form of religion to which little attention is paid, the religion of atheism.

If we rise from the secondary and derived configurations and complications of religion or theological philosophy, to which optimism and pessimism belong, to the origin of these mental creations themselves, we find ourselves in the presence of a fact which is as obvious as it is simple. It is that every human being, on account of his or her physical condition and social environment, is led to make a sort of hedonistic calculation, in other words, to measure his or her needs and the means of satisfying them. The result is a more or less colored appreciation of the conditions of existence, and of life itself in its interrelations. Now, when intelligence has progressed so far as to overcome the incantations of imagination and ignorance, which link the prosaic poverty of ordinary life with fantastic transcendental forces, then the creative suggestions of optimism and pessimism can no longer exert themselves. The mind turns to the prosaic study of the means by which to attain, not to that fabulous entity called happiness, but to the normal development of human faculties. Under favorable, natural and social conditions, these faculties find in life itself the reasons for its existence and an explanation for its causes. This is the beginning of that wisdom, which alone entitles man to the name of homo sapiens.

Historical materialism, being a philosophy of life, instead of its mere intellectual phenomena, overcomes the antithesis between optimism and pessimism, because it passes beyond their limits and understands them.

History is indeed an interminable succession of painful struggles. Labor, which is the distinguishing mark of human life, has been the means of oppressing the vast majority. Labor, which is the prerequisite of all progress, has pressed the sufferings, the privations, the travail, and the ills of the multitude into the service of the comfort of the few. History is like an inferno. It might be presented as a somber drama, entitled The Tragedy of Labor.

But this same somber history has produced out of this very condition of things, almost without the conscious knowledge of men, and certainly not through the providence of any one, the means required for the relative perfection, first of very few, then of a few, and then of more than a few. And now it seems to be at work for all. The great tragedy was unavoidable. It was not due to any one's fault or sin, not to any one's aberration or degeneration, not to any one's capricious and sinful straying from the straight path. It was due to an immanent necessity of the mechanism of social life, and to its rhythmic process. This mechanism operates on the means of subsistence, which are the product of hunan labor and co-operation under more or less favorable natural conditions. Nowadays, when the prospect opens up before our eyes of organizing society in such a way as to give to every one the means of self-perfection, we see clearly the reasonableness of this view, because the growing productivity of labor supplies all the requirements for a higher culture of all. It is this fact on which scientific socialism bases its right to existence, instead of trusting in the triumph of a universal goodness, which the utopian and sentimental socialists have discovered in the hearts of all and proclaimed as eternal justice. Scientific socialism trusts in the development of the material means which shall promote conditions, under which all human beings shall have leisure to develop in freedom. In other words, the causes of injustice (to use this term of ideologists) will be removed, such as class rule, bossism, the oppression of man by man. The injustices resulting from these causes are precisely the indispensable conditions for that miserable material fact, the economic exploitation of the working class.

Only in a communistic society will labor be no longer exploited, but rather rationally measured. Only in a communistic society will a hedonistic calculation become practicable, unimpaired by the private exploitation of social forces. Once that the obstacles to the free development of all are removed, those obstacles which now divide classes and individuals until they are separated past all recognition, every one will find at hand the means by which the faculties and needs of each can be measured by the requirements of society. To adapt ourselves to the practicable, and do it without any external compulsion, this is the standard of liberty, which is the same as wisdom. For there can be no true morality, unless there is a consciousness of determinism. In a communistic society the apparent antagonism between optimism and pessimism falls to the ground. For in that society there is no longer any contradiction between the necessity to work in the service of the collectivity and the self-development of the personality. That necessity and this personal freedom will be understood as one. The ethics of that society will abolish the contradiction between rights and duties, for this contradiction is essentially the theoretical elaboration of the present antagonistic social conditions, in which some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey. In a society, in which goodness does not mean charity, it will not seem utopian to demand that each give according to his faculties and each take according to his needs. In such a society, preventive education will largely eliminate the sources of crime, and the practical education of co-operative life and labor will reduce the necessity of repression to a minimum. In short, punishment will appear as a simple safeguard of a certain order and will lose all character of a supernatural justice, which must be vindicated or established. In such a society, there will no longer be any need to look for any transcendental explanation of the practical fate of man.

This critique of the motive causes of history, of the reasons for the existence of present society, and of a rationally measurable and measured outlook upon the society of the future, shows why optimism, pessimism, and so many other fabrics of imagination had to serve, and must continue to serve, as expressions of emotions that stir minds under the influence of the struggles of social life. If this is what the transcendental thinkers, to whom you allude, mean, and if they intend to be the posthumous collectors of the sighs and tears of humanity in the course of the centuries, so be it. Poetical license is not forbidden, even to socialists. However, they will not succeed in putting the myth of eternal justice on its legs and sending it to fight against the reign of darkness. That grand and beneficent lady will never move a single stone of the capitalist structure. That which the metaphysical thinkers among the socialists call the evil, against which the good is straggling, is not an abstract negation, but a hard and strong system of practical facts. It is poverty organized to produce wealth. Now, the historical materialists have so little tenderness of heart as to claim that this evil is actually the cradle of the future good. Freedom will come through the revolution of the oppressed, not through the goodness of the oppressors.

An easy relapse into metaphysics of the offensive kind is often the fate of even those studies which, according to their writers, represent the quintessence of positive and scientific procedure. This is the case, for instance, with many of the expounders of the much discussed and disputable criminal anthropology.

In its aims and tendencies, this science represents a notable factor in that salutary critique of criminal law, which gradually succeeded in overturning the foundations of the philosophical, and especially ethical, ideas concerning so simple a fact as the experience that there must be punishment so long as there is a society. In its method, however, it passes rarely beyond the field of statistical compilation, or beyond that mass of probabilities which constitute the various shades of study embraced by the general term anthropology. Hardly ever does it reach the degree of precision, which has enabled such analogous studies as psychic research, thanks to the marvelous progress in the anatomy of the central nerve system and in all departments of medicine, to contribute in a few years more to the development of psychology than was contributed by twenty centuries of controversy over the text of Aristotle, or the hypothesis of spiritualism, or that of purely rational materialism.

But this is not what I want to emphasize.

This doctrine carries with it a tendency to consider the recurrence of crime as a result of an innate predisposition of individuals who show certain characteristic marks. However, these marks are not in all cases objectively studied or well fixed. Still, there is nothing wrong about this.

The theory which lies at the bottom of the criminal law of those countries to which the effects of the bourgeois revolution have extended shares the merits and defects of that equalitarian principle of all so-called liberalism which can be only formal and abstract, considering the natural and social inequalities of men. Of course, this theory was an advance over the corporeal justice, and over the privileges of the clergy and aristocracy. And for this reason, a historical victory is proclaimed in the words: The law is equal for all. However, this theory reduces the function of punishment to a mere defense of the present system by means of established laws. It is content to punish only violations of this order, without penetrating to the problem of consciousness. It has been shorn of all religious character and no longer deals with the mind or soul. It is no longer the instrument of a church, of a creed, of a superstition. This criminal law is prosaic, just as prosaic as all of capitalist society. And this is another triumph of free thought, leaving out of consideration a few slight inconsistencies. In short, it is the act which is punished, not the man. It is the disturber of this order who is punished by the law that defends it. The punishment is not aimed at a man's conscience, be it irreligious, heretical, atheistic, or what not. In order to accomplish this result, this theory had to construct a typical equality of responsibility for all human beings, on the basis of a free will, excluding only extreme cases of lack of mental control and liberty of action. It is by this very means that vaunted and celebrated justice, through the irony of fate, transforms the principle of equality before the law into the grossest injustice. For human beings are in reality socially and naturally unequal before the law.

This dialectic has of late been discussed by sociologists, socialists, and critics of all sorts. They have built up a longs line of argument against the existing law ranging from the mystical colored paradox that society punishes the crimes which it breeds to the humanitarian demand that equal education should vindicate the principle of equality before the law by creating the actual conditions for its practicability. The salient point of all this criticism is brought out by the consistent socialists, who realize that class struggles are an essential part of present society, and who do not expect to get equal justice for all either by the right to punish or by any other existing law. For to act otherwise would be like looking for an improbable society, in which divisions would be the causes of concord and union. This law of a mediocre justice, which is in constant conflict with itself, is the product of a society, in which the demand for equality is ever at war with itself. The lie becomes very plain in that fine discovery of the apologists of capitalism that after all the wage workers are free citizens, who accept servitude voluntarily by making contracts on equal terms with their equals, the capitalists. Still, we socialists don't wish to abandon this self-contradictory principle merely to throw ourselves into the arms of reactionaries, who are combatting it for other reasons and would abolish it in some other way. We rather look upon it as one of the negative factors inherent in bourgeois society, as one of the historical means by which it is undermining itself.

Criminal anthropology came in good time to support with its special studies the critical claim that the law is not equal for all. To this extent it is a progressive science. To the social differences, which render the demand for an equal responsibility of all absurd, in proportion as the typical form of free will in sane minds varies, this science has added the study of presocial differences, which are the limits drawn around our will by our animal nature and which oppose an invincible resistance to all attempts to adapt ourselves to the demands of education. This is not the place to investigate, whether this science has exaggerated the extent of this animal nature, whether it has imperfectly interpreted the cases it wanted to study, and whether it has fantastically generalized the results of partial and not very accurate observations. The main point is that some of its methods throw it unconsciously back into the metaphysics it detests. In its legitimate efforts to combat the conception of justice and responsibility as entities, it makes the mistake of attributing too much to such natural facts as the disposition to commit crime, and denotes and defines them in such a way as to detract from those categories of social protection, which arise out of conditions of existence to which men have become accustomed after their birth. To be more explicit, excessive and unbridled license should be attributed to animal nature, but certainly not adultery, which is very clearly a social product. Rapacity should be classed as animal nature, but not theft in its economic aspects, including the forging of checks. A bloodthirsty temperament belongs in the animal category, but not the murder of kings, etc. It must not be said that these are merely verbal distinctions. They touch the bottom of things. They concern the clear grasp of methodical limits. They show how important it is to remember that metaphysics is an atavistic evil, from which even those do not escape who are continually shouting: Down with metaphysics! The same has for a long time taken place in other sciences, for instance in general psychology, or in the special study of diseased minds. Many have attempted to localize psychic phenomena in the brain, instead of adhering to the most elementary facts, which, it is true, were but recently ascertained. They tried to locate the faculty of the soul, for instance the renowned physiologist Ludwig. In other words, they tried to determine the local seat of rationalist concepts, of things which did not exist in reality. Criminal anthropology still has to separate its categories and determine them critically. It must overcome the mistake of regarding as innate and natural facts the simple categories, which criminal law fixed and defined for practical reasons in order to apply them to the experience of mere social conditions.