VI.

The philosophic apologies of J�rgen Bona Meyer, quoted in the last chapter, are the last make-shifts of religion. And it isn’t he alone who plays this tune. He has with him in the literature of the day a whole company of musicians who are in the same boat. All of them repeat the same reactionary refrain: “Back to Kant.” The question has therefore an importance which goes beyond the little person of General J�rgen. They do not want to go back to Kant because this great thinker has made short work of the story of the immortal soul that he has undoubtedly done; but they would like to return to him, because he, on the other hand, has left in his system a narrow entrance through which a little meta physics can be smuggled back into it – that he has undoubtedly done, too.

Idolatry, Religion and Philosophy are three slightly different kinds of the same thing, which is called metaphysics or cracked Truth. I apologize for the use of the latter adjective, but an unequivocal characterization demands a strong terminology. The cracked Truth has played a great part in the history of the world. Idolatry, Religion and Philosophy have been evolved from one another in the course of time; and now, in the time of Social-Democracy, we have arrived at the point when Philosophy, the “last Mohican” of the metaphysical tribe, must be transformed into rational Physics.

It is clear: all perverted wisdom rests on the perverted use of our intellect. And nobody has been more successfully and courageously engaged in the inquiry of the intellect and in the foundation of the theory of cognition than Immanuel Kant. Still, there is an essential difference between him and his successors of to-day. In the great historic struggle against superstition he stood on the side of progress; he put his genius into the service of the revolutionary development of science, while our Prussian philosophers serve reactionary politics.

As long as the philosophers were sometimes in danger of being sentenced to take poison, like Socrates, or of ending their life on the stake, like Giordano Bruno, of being expelled by the Prussians and threatened with the gallows, like Wolf, or of being placed under Police supervision, like Kant and Fichte – in short, as long as Philosophy was a dangerous occupation, it was also an honest endeavor to struggle through the mists of metaphysics to Reason, to rational thinking. Now, however, when philosophers have given up the struggle and are sounding retreat, it is time for Social-Democracy to learn with what kind of “science” and with what sort of “liberal” fellows they have to deal.

The push with which Kant has thrown metaphysics out of the Temple, and the narrow back door which he left open are clearly indicated in a few sentences in the preface of the second edition to his Critique of Pure Reason. Not having the volume at hand, I quote from memory. They are as follows: Our knowledge is limited to the experienced things, to the phenomena; what they are in themselves we are not able to know. Yet, the things must be something in themselves, else we would arrive at the inconsistent proposition, that appearance exists without the something which appears.

The great thinker argued seemingly quite logically, and yet his argument is altogether faulty. On his fallacy rests the metaphysical remains which Philosophy still drags along.

It cannot be denied that where there are appearances there is also something which appears. But how would it be if that something were the appearance itself, when appearances simply appear? There would be nothing illogical or irrational in that, if subject and predicate were everywhere in Nature of the same kind. Why should the something which appears be of a quality totally different from the appearance? Why can the things “for us” and the things “in themselves” – why can appearance and truth not be of the same empirical material, of the same Nature?

Reply: Because the superstition about the metaphysical world – because the belief in the dirty clay, which is evident, and the belief in an imperceptible exaggerated or divine truth, which must somewhere dwell in it, has not been cleared completely out of Kant’s mind. The syllogism: Where there are appearances which we see, hear and feel, there must also be concealed in them something quite different, a so-called higher or divine Truth which cannot be seen, heard or felt – this syllogism is a fallacy despite Kant.

The scholastic squabble about God, Freedom and Immortality was repulsive to that thinker. Therefore he put the intellect to the test and asked, whether something cracked, or metaphysics, could be possible as a science. No, was his reply after a wonderfully clear and thorough inquiry. No, our instrument of cognition depends on experience as well as our experience on that instrument. In other words, our mind cannot produce science but with the help of perceptible material, and science must and can have nothing to do with the “other world.” Only in its conscious connection with the materialist experience may the intellect become operative, and all questioning into hazy generalities can lead only to confusion and failure.

But the K�nigsberg Professor had, as Heine relates, a valet, a common fellow of the people, by the name of Lampe, to whom, it is said, air castles were an emotional necessity. The Professor took pity on him and argued: whereas the world of experience is closely connected with the intellect, we have really nothing else but mental experiences, that is, mental appearances or flashes. Empirical material things are no real truths, but apparitions in the transcendental sense of the word, cobwebs of the mind or something like it. The real things “in themselves,” the metaphysical truths, are beyond our experience, and must therefore be believed, in consequence of the well-known argument: Where there is appearance there must be something (metaphysical) which appears.

Thus was the belief, thus was the cracked truth snatched from the fire of rational inquiry, which was very welcome, not only to the valet Lampe, but also to the German Professors in the “Kulturkampf,” for “popular enlightenment” and against the hated and radically unbelieving Social-Democrats. Immanuel Kant was henceforth the proper man; he helped them to attain the requisite, though not scientific, balance of mental attitude.

The theologians are now no more in need of telling us how the old Lord Zebaoth looks, in how many choirs the angels are divided, and in how many regiments the devils, or whether the commanders are called Gabriel, Michael or Lucifer – for Kant’s philosophy has proved once for all that nothing can be known about them, and that, therefore, the parson must shut up.

But when the Social-Democrats appear on the scene and rejoice over the good news that superstition has disappeared and that the cracked hopes have ceased troubling, and that the earthly salvation has begun, then – of course, things look different, then they will prove to you by the same Kant that, though we cannot see, hear or perceive the metaphysical truth which dwells behind the natural phenomena, we must believe in it. Thus we can not get rid of belief, if not in Rome, and if not in the Bible, then in the “Back to Kant,” J�rgen Bona Meyer and his ilk.

The Social-Democrats are convinced that the clerical Jesuits are less dangerous than the “Liberal” ones. Of all parties the party of the middle-readers is the most wretched. It uses the terms Enlightenment and Democracy as a false label in order to offer to the people adulterated goods and to discredit the genuine ones. They, of course, offer their goods on their best knowledge and conscience. And we do believe that they know little; but the worst of it is that they don’t want to know and don’t want to learn. The superstition is with them not as much a matter of brains as of instinct. They are alarmed at ghost-freed thought, for they feel instinctively that it is dangerous to their interests. And it is that instinctive fear which paralyzes them and renders them unfit for courageous and consistent research.

Under such circumstances it would be a mistake to treat them as equals, to meet them in a friendly spirit and to try to bring them back on the right path. They are by no means stray lambs, but bitter foes. Since Kant a century has gone; Hegel and Feuerbach have come and gone, and before all, the capitalist system has fully developed which exploits the people and, finally, when no profits can be made out of them, throws them pitilessly on the street and leaves them to starvation. Then the people open their innocent eyes. All ideology is driven out of them, and thus we need no tender pedagogues, nor Moses and the Prophets to educate the masses. Our pupils, the wage-earners, possess all qualifications necessary to gain an insight into the Social-Democratic Philosophy, which regards the natural phenomena as the material for theoretical or scientific truth, the empirical and materialist, or, if you like, also subjective truth, which, however, must be clearly distinguished from the extravagant or cracked truth of metaphysics.

Just as in politics we see the nation dividing itself into two camps, on one side the wage-earners and on the other the capitalists, corresponding with the economic development which is thinning the ranks of the middle classes and leaving only two classes: the Have and the Have-not, so is science divided in two general divisions: into metaphysicians there and into physicists or materialists here. The intermediate members and conciliating quacks with their different appellations: Spiritualists, Sensualists, Realists, etc., etc., fall underway into the current. We are steering full steam ahead to a definite and clear outline of things. Pure Idealists are those who sound the retreat, and dialectic Materialists must be the appellation of all those who strive for the liberation of the human mind from all metaphysical magics. In order that names and definitions may not confuse us we must steadily keep in mind that the general want of clearness has not allowed yet of establishing a distinct terminology in this field.

In comparing the two parties with solid and liquid matter we find pulpiness as the intermediate stage. Such indistinctness is the general nature of all things in the world. It is only the faculty of cognition, or science, which clears them and puts them asunder, just as it has distinguished heat from cold by inventing a thermometer and agreed to regard the freezing point as the fixed limit where the indistinct temperature is divided into two different classes. The interest of Social-Democracy demands that we should apply the same process to Philosophy, that we divide the general species of thought into two classes: into purely idealistic, religious, emotional twaddle and into a sober, inductive or materialist method of thinking.