II. The Absolute Truth and Its Natural Manifestations

Was it Goethe or Heine? It is one or the other who said: only the know- and have-nots are modest. I repudiate, accordingly, all such modesty because I believe myself in a position to make a small contribution to the great work of science. I am strengthened in this belief by the May number of the Neue Zeit (1886), where my efforts are honorably mentioned by our highly meritorious Frederic Engels in an article on Ludwig Feuerbach. In such cases the personal and objective elements are so closely bound up with one another that an exaggerated modesty can only hinder the progress of the objective inquiry.

The things which I am going to discuss here were already set forth by me some seventeen years ago in an opuscle which then appeared. Yet what I said at that time is so scanty that in view of the progress since made on the subject I feel justified in returning to it once more. Already Hegel said in his preface to the Phenomenology of Mind quite aptly: “The easiest thing is to judge what has substance and solidity; more difficult is to conceive it; and most difficult of all, because it must contain both judgment and conception, is to reproduce it by description.” In fully endorsing these words I forbear to give an adequate presentation of the case now before me; all I should attempt here is to sketch the essence of the cherished epistemological question, which I have in my mind, in all brevity and with as much precision as I can command. I hope that the task thus defined may justify me in explaining in a few words – by way of elucidating the subject – how I came across it.

The year 1848 with its reactionaries, constitutionalists, democrats and socialists called forth in my then youthful mind an irresistible desire to acquire a critically firm, undoubted standpoint, a positive opinion as to what in all that I had heard and read for and against was absolutely and unmistakably true, good and right. As I had my just doubts about God in heavens, and the church did not inspire me with any confidence at all, I found myself amidst the greatest perplexity, not knowing how to escape from the situation. While on search I came across Ludwig Feuerbach, and the diligent study of his writings gave me a good push forward. Of still greater help in my thirst for knowledge was the Communist Manifesto, which I got to know through the newspapers on the occasion of the trial of the Communists at Cologne (1849). Most of all, however, I owe, after a number of old philosophical volumes had in the meanwhile appeared in my rural life, to the work of Marx which appeared in 1859 under the title: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. There it is stated in the preface that the way – so approximately runs the sentence – in which man earns his daily bread, that the level of civilisation on which a generation physically works, determines the mental standpoint or the way in which it conceives and must conceive the True, the Good and Right, God, Freedom and Immortality, Philosophy, Politics and Law.

Everything that I have studied and read all my life referred to one point which I desired and made mental efforts to grasp, viz.: how to attain a positive, undoubted knowledge, that is, to a criterion of what is true and right. The above passage leads us to the true path which shows how it altogether stands with human knowledge and with the absolute and relative truth.

What I have just related as a personal experience is the experience which mankind, too, has made in the course of centuries. If I had been the first to moot these questions and to exhibit the thirst for the absolute truth, I would have been the fool to wait for an answer in all eternity. The fact, however, that I was not left such a fool, but received a sufficient answer, is due to the historical development of things which made me put the questions at a time when after a long series of preceding generations the best minds had occupied themselves with their solution and could already supply me with such elucidation as I obtained, in point of fact, from Feuerbach and Marx. What I mean to say by this is, the light which those men gave me was not merely the product of these individuals, but it was the common product of culture older than the historical times.

At first sight it seems as if there was little agreement among the predecessors, – who, begining with the Greek Thales and ending with the Prussian J�rgen Bona Meyer at Bonn, have enquired after the absolute truth. A closer examination, however, will reveal the red line which, running from generation to generation, becomes ever more distinct and patent. It is the lack of appreciation of the importance of the historical which even now misleads some people to look in the innermost of their heads for that enlightenment which with a little more historical sense they would have found in the products matured in the gradual development of science through the long period of centuries.

But to the point. By way of reply to the question, what is truth, absolute truth, Pilate shrugged his shoulders as if to say, that is too high for me, – go and ask the High-Priest Caiaphas. The latter then said the same which priests say to this day: God is truth, – it is supernatural, super-earthly. It is not worth while at the close of the nineteenth century to trouble myself with the refutation of such an answer. On the other hand, Pilates are still too numerously represented even among the leaders of science to hinder a rational enlightenment on that point.

To understand more clearly the nature of the absolute truth it is first of all necessary to do away with the old-rooted prejudice which regards it as of a purely mental nature. No, no! Absolute truth can be seen, heard, smelt, touched and, of course, also known; but it cannot be resolved into pure knowledge, – it is not pure mind. Its nature is not either corporeal, or mental, not one or the other, but all embracing, as much corporeal as spiritual. Absolute truth has no nature of its own, but, on the contrary, it has the nature of the general. In other words, to speak without mystification, the general natural nature and general truth are identical. There are no two Natures, one corporeal and another a mental. There is only one Nature which contains all bodies and all minds.

The Universe is identical with Nature, with the world and the absolute truth. Natural science divides Nature into parts, domains, branches of study, but it knows and feels that all such divisions are formal only, that Nature or Universe is in spite of all divisions undivided, – in spite of all variety and manifold natures only one indivisible, general and universal Nature, World and Truth. There is only one Existence, and all forms are modi, varieties or relative truths of one general truth which is absolute, eternal and endless at all times, in all places. Human knowledge is, like anything else, a limited portion of the unlimited, a modus, a variety of Existence or General Truth.

Since the nature of truth has hitherto been regarded as purely mental, and accordingly, truth was looked upon as a thing which is only to be found in knowledge, the inquiry into human knowledge comes within the province of our subject, of our search after the absolute and relative truth and their relation.

The mental world of man, that is, all we know, believe and think, forms a portion of the universal world which only in its absolute inter-relation, in its complete whole possesses an unlimited, perfect, absolute existence, a true one in the highest sense of the word. At the same time it possesses through its component parts, modi, varieties, products or phenomena an infinite number of existences of which every particular one is also true, but is as against the whole a mere relative truth.

Human knowledge, itself a relative truth, is the medium between us and the other phenomena or relativities of the absolute Existence. Still the faculty of cognition, the knowing subject, must be distinguished from the object, the distinction being, however, a limited and relative one, since both the subject and the object are not only distinct, but at the same time alike in that they are parts or phenomena of the same generality called the Universe. We distinguish between Nature and parts, departments or phenomena, though these are inseparably connected with the All-Existence, emerge from it and submerge in it. There is no Nature without phenomena, her manifestations, nor phenomena without Nature, as the Absolute. It is only our knowledge which provides the separation, the mental analysis in order to form an image of the phenomena. Knowledge, conscious of its doings dealings, must know that the mentally separated, differentiated objects are indivisibly bound up with the reality of Nature.

What we learn to know are truths, relative truths or natural phenomena. Nature itself, the absolute truth, cannot be known, – not directly, but only through her manifestations, the phenomena. How then do we know that there is behind the phenomenon an absolute Truth, a general Nature? Is this not a new mysticism?

Well, let us see. As human knowledge is not the absolute truth, but only an artist making pictures of the truth, true, genuine, correct and exact pictures, it is self-evident that the picture does not exhaust the object and that the artist cannot reach the comprehensiveness of the model. Nothing more insipid has ever been said of truth and knowledge than what has been repeated for thousands of years by the commonly accepted logic, namely, that truth is the conformity of our knowledge with its object. How can a picture “conform” with its model? Approximately it can. What picture worth the name does not agree approximately with its object? Every portrait is more or less of a likeness. But to be altogether alike, quite the same as the original – what an abnormal idea!

Thus we can only know Nature and her parts relatively, since even a part, though only a relation of Nature, possesses again the characteristics of the Absolute, the nature of the All-Existence which cannot be exhausted by knowledge.

How, then, do we know that behind the phenomena of Nature, behind the relative truths, there is a universal, unlimited, absolute Nature which does not reveal itself completely to man? Our vision is limited, so are also our hearing, touch, etc., and our knowledge; yet we know of all these things that they are limited parts of the Unlimited. Whence that knowledge?

It is innate; it is given to us with consciousness. The consciousness of man is the knowledge of his personality as part of the human species, of mankind and of the Universe. To know is to form pictures in the conscious ness that they are pictures of things which all, both the pictures and the things, possess a general mother from which they have issued and to which they will return. This mother is the absolute truth; she is perfectly true and yet mystical in a natural way, that is, she is the inexhaustible source of knowledge and consequently never entirely to be comprehended.

All that is known in and of the world is, however true and exact, only a known truth, therefore a modified truth, a modus or part of truth. When I say that the consciousness of the endless, absolute truth is innate in us, is one and the only knowledge a priori, I am confirmed in my statement also by the experience of this innate consciousness. We learn that every beginning and end are only a relative beginning and end, at the bottom of which lies the Inexhaustible by all experience, the Absolute. We learn by experience that each experience is only a part of that which, in the words of Kant, surpasses all experience.

The mystic of a fantastical character will, perhaps, say: then, there is something after all which surpasses the limits of physical experience. We reply, yes and no at the same time. In the sense of the old exaggerating metaphysician, there is nothing of this kind. In the sense of the cognition conscious of its nature, each particle, be it of dust or of stone or of wood, is incomprehensible as to its whole extent, each particle being an inexhaustible material for the human faculty of cognition, consequently something which surpasses all experience.

When I say that the consciousness of the absence of a beginning and end of the physical world is an innate consciousness which is not acquired by experience, – in other words, that it is a consciousness which is given a priori and precedes all experience, I must still add, that originally it is only given as a germ and that it has developed to what it is now through experience in the struggle for existence and through sexual selection.

In so far the knowledge of the Universe as the absolute truth is, too, an empirical knowledge which, just like every other knowledge and like every other thing, is given a priori as a germ and originates in the Endlessness. Hence it follows that the human mind, which has clearly conceived the relation between the universal truth and the natural phenomena, will no longer separate in an exaggerated way the knowledge gained by experience from the innate faculty of knowledge, cognition, etc.

Mysticism of this kind is not of the nebulous, morbid sort such as the one which teaches us that the human faculty of cognition is too narrow to know the absolute truth. The human intellect is too small to exhaust by study the smallest particle as well as the whole of Nature. But since such inexhaustibility or endlessness is a predicate which applies to all things without exception, and consequently, to our faculty of cognition also, it is sheer humbug to make much capital out of it as was the custom until now.

Morbid mysticism separates unscientifically the absolute truth from the relative truth. It makes of the phenomenal thing and of the “thing in itself,” that is, of the phenomenon and truth, two categories which differ completely from each other and are not contained in one united category. This nebulous mysticism turns our knowledge and faculty of cognition into mere substitutes which have to suggest to us a superhuman monstrous mind somewhere in the transcendental heavens.

Humility is always becoming to man. Yet the statement of the inability of man to know the truth has a double sense, – one that is worthy and one that is unworthy of man. Everything which we know, all scientific results, all phenomena are parts of the genuine, the right, the absolute truth. Though the latter is inexhaustible and cannot with full perfection be portrayed in knowledge or pictured in the mind, yet the pictures, which science is able to show of it, are exact pictures in the humanly relative sense of the word. Just so the sentences which I am now writing down here have an exact, rational sense and yet have not, if one likes to pervert or misunderstand them.

Granted that truth cannot be exhausted by knowledge. Still it is not so far removed from our cognition as the fantastical mystics assume who are not satisfied with the human mind, because they carry about in their head the fantasy of a superhuman monstrous mind.

Scientific cognition must not long after absolute truth because that truth is given to us by means of our senses as well as of our mind without further search. It is in reality the phenomena, the special manifestations of the given general truth, which we want to know. Such truth readily yields itself to us in its particular phenomenon. It is exact pictures, genuine knowledge which our cognition has to provide. And the question here deals only with relative exactness or completeness. More must not be wished for by human reason. This is no resignation as the monks recommend. We are able to know the truth – it yields to us readily. But it is quite natural that we cannot jump out of our skin. It may also be natural that there should be metaphysical and religious dreamers who still go about with such an intention. Their quest after another absolute truth is a dream which the history of human knowledge has left far behind it, whilst the modesty which is satisfied with the knowledge of relative truth is called rational enlightenment.

Spinoza says, there is only one substance, – it is universal, endless or absolute. All other finite so-called substances originate in it, emerge from it and submerge in it; they only have a relative, transient, accidental existence. All finite things are to Spinoza, and justly so, mere modi of the endless substance, as confirmed by our modern natural science in its doctrine of the eternity of matter and conservation of force. Only in one thing, and that a very essential one, Spinoza had to be corrected by the subsequent philosophy.

According to Spinoza, the endless, absolute substance possesses two attributes: it is infinitely extended and it thinks infinitely. Thought and extension are the two Spinozist attributes of the absolute substance. This is wrong, especially as there is nothing which could support the proposition of the absolute thinking. And the absolute extension, too, explains very little. The world, or the absolute, or Nature, or the Universe, or whatever else the thing of things, the One and Infinite is called, extend infinitely both in time and space; yet every little space of the Space, and every particle of Time as well as every other thing which is contained in it, is an individual, changeable, transient, limited thing, and thinking forms no exception to this limitation and finity.

Our present knowledge of the nature of thought and thinking far surpasses that of Spinoza in clearness and definiteness. We now know that thinking or conscious ness is no mysterious depository of truth, but rather in its true nature possesses no other nature than the natural one of which all other things participate. It is as much trivial as mysterious, and, though an unlimited object of study, yet no more unlimited than any other particular matter or force.

What is called by Spinoza the endless substance, and what we call the Universe or the absolute truth, is as identical with its finite phenomena, with the relative truths which we meet in the Universe, as the forest is identical with its trees, or in general, as the species with its varieties. The relative and the absolute do not lie so far apart as it is painted to man by that uncultivated sense of infinity which is called Religion. And the branch of study, too, which is called speculative Philosophy was permeated by religion and proceeded from that ignorance which did not perceive the relative position of the human mind to the absolute truth. The branch of study which strove after a clear idea of the mind was from its beginning to the very last classical philosophers biased by inconsistent extravagance. It fails to perceive that everything which is relative, and the faculty of cognition, too, is contained in the Absolute precisely in the same way – I repeat the analogy – as trees are contained in the for est. It misses the essence of all logic, viz., that all specialties without any exception are contained in one species and all species in one general species, the Universe, which is the absolute truth.

Philosophy, like Religion, lived in the belief in a supernatural absolute truth. The solution of the problem lies in the conception that the absolute truth is nothing but the generalized truth, that the latter dwells not in the mind – at least, not more than anywhere else – but in the object contemplated by the mind, which we designate by the general term, the Universe.

The transcendental absolute truth which Religion and Philosophy used to call God, was a mystification of the human mind which in its turn mystified itself with this fantastical picture. The philosopher Kant, who dealt with the critique of the faculty of cognition, found out that man cannot know the transcendental absolute truth. We may add: man cannot know the prosaic, everyday things, either, in a transcendental absolute manner. When, however, he uses his faculty in a sober and relative way as one has to consider all circumstances relatively, as soon as he rids himself of his supernatural bias, then everything is to him open and nothing closed, and he can also grasp and know the general truth.

Just as our eye, be it with the assistance of glasses, can see everything and yet not everything, since it can neither see sounds nor smells, nor, in general, anything invisible, so our faculty of cognition can know everything and yet not everything. It cannot know the unknowable. But this is plainly enough only a fantastical or a transcendental desire.

When we recognize that the absolute truth which was sought by Religion and Philosophy in the region of the transcendental, is close at hand in its full reality as the bodily Universe, and that the human mind is a real, or actual and active part of the general truth, having the mission to form true pictures of the parts of the general truth, then we have the problem of the limited and unlimited completely solved. The Absolute and the Relative are not separated transcendentally, they are connected with each other so that the Unlimited is made up of an infinite number of finite limitations and each limited phenomenon possesses the nature of the Infinite.

How and in what way the things said here bear upon the passage from Marx quoted at the beginning, that is, upon the true, good and right in political and social life, I must leave meanwhile to the reader to find out for himself, as a detailed elucidation of it would take up too much space here. Perhaps, I may yet find the opportunity to return to that reference at another time.