The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (14 page)

For Germany the
criticism of religion
is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.

The
profane
existence of error is discredited after its
heavenly oratio pro aris et focis
has been rejected. Man, who looked for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the
reflexion
of himself, will no longer be disposed to find but the
semblance
of himself, the non-human [
Unmensch
] where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The basis of irreligious criticism is:
Man makes religion,
religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But
man
is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is
the world of man,
the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion,
a reversed world-consciousness,
because they are
a reversed world.
Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic
point d’honneur,
its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and justification. It is
the fantastic realization
of the human essence because the
human essence
has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore mediately the fight against
the other world,
of which religion is the spiritual
aroma
.

Religious
distress is at the same time the
expression
of real distress and the
protest
against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the
opium
of the people.

The abolition of religion as the
illusory
happiness of the people is required for their
real
happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the
demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.
The criticism of religion is therefore
in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe,
the
halo
of which is religion.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.

The task of history,
therefore, once the
world beyond the truth
has disappeared, is to establish the
truth of this world.
The immediate
task of philosophy,
which is at the service of history, once the
saintly form
of human self-alienation has been unmasked, is to unmask self-alienation in its
unholy forms.
Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the
criticism of religion
into the
criticism of right
and the
criticism of theology
into the
criticism of politics.

The following exposition—a contribution to that work—bears immediately not on the original, but on a copy, the German
philosophy
of state and of right, for the single reason that it is written in
Germany
.

If one wanted to proceed from the
status quo
itself in Germany, even in the only appropriate way, i.e., negatively, the result would still be an
anachronism.
Even the negation of our political present is already covered with dust in the historical lumber-room of modern nations. If I negate the powdered pigtail, I still have an unpowdered pigtail. If I negate the German state of affairs in 1843, then, according to the French computation of time, I am hardly in the year 1789, and still less in the focus of the present.

Yes, German history flatters itself with a movement which no people in the heaven of history went through before it or will go through after it. For we shared the restorations of the modern nations although we had not shared their revolutions. We were restored, first because other nations dared to carry out a revolution and second because other nations suffered a counter-revolution, the first time because our rulers were afraid, and the second because our rulers were not afraid. Led by our shepherds, we never found ourselves in the company of freedom except once—on the
day of its burial.

A school which legalizes the baseness of today by the baseness of yesterday, a school that declares rebellious every cry of the serf against the knout once that knout is a time-honoured, ancestral, historical one, a school to which history only shows its
a posteriori
as the God of Israel did to his servant Moses—the
historical school of right—
would hence have discovered German history had it not been a discovery of German history itself. Shylock, but Shylock the servant, it swears on its bond, its historical bond, its Christian-Germanic bond, to have every pound of flesh cut from the heart of the people.

Good-natured enthusiasts, Germanomaniacs by extraction and free-thinkers by reflexion, on the contrary, seek our history of freedom beyond our history in the ancient Teutonic forests. But what difference is there between the history of our freedom and the history of the boar’s freedom if it can be found only in the forests? Besides, it is common knowledge that the forest echoes back what you shout into it. So peace to the ancient Teutonic forests!

War
on the German state of affairs! By all means! They are
below the level of history,
they are
beneath any criticism,
but they are still an object of criticism like the criminal who is below the level of humanity but still an object for the
executioner.
In the struggle against that state of affairs criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its
enemy,
which it wants not to refute but to
exterminate.
For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself it is no object
worthy of thought,
it is an
existence
which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an
end in itself,
but only of a
means.
Its essential pathos is
indignation
, its essential work is
denunciation
.

It is a case of describing the dull reciprocal pressure of all social spheres one on another, a general inactive ill humour, a limitedness which recognizes itself as much as it mistakes itself, within the frame of a government system which, living on the preservation of all wretchedness, is itself nothing but
wretchedness in office.

What a sight! This infinitely proceeding division of society into the most manifold races opposed to one another by petty antipathies, uneasy consciences and brutal mediocrity, and which, precisely because of their reciprocal ambiguous and distrustful attitude, are all, without exception although with various formalities, treated by their
rulers
as
conceded existences.
And they must recognize and acknowledge as a
concession of heaven
the very fact that they are
mastered, ruled, possessed
! And on the other side are the rulers themselves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number!

Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in a
hand-to-hand fight,
and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal,
interesting
opponent, the point is to
strike
him. The point is not to let the Germans have a minute for self-deception and resignation. The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing it. Every sphere of German society must be shown as the
partie honteuse
of German society; these petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing their own tune to them! The people must be taught to be
terrified
at itself in order to give it
courage
. This will be fulfilling an imperative need of the German nation, and the needs of the nations are in themselves the ultimate reason for their satisfaction.

This struggle against the limited content of the German
status quo
cannot be without interest even for the
modern
nations, for the German
status quo
is the
open completion of the ancien régime,
and the
ancien régime
is the
concealed deficiency of the modern state.
Th struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of the modern nations, and they are still burdened with reminders of that past. It is instructive for them to see the
ancien régime,
which has been through its
tragedy
with them, playing its
comedy
as a German
revenant. Tragic
indeed was the history of the
ancien régime
so long as it was the pre-existing power of the world, and freedom, on the other hand, was a personal notion; in short, as long as it believed and had to believe in its own justification. As long as the
ancien régime
, as an existing world order, struggled against a world that was only coming into being, there was on its side a historical error, not a personal one. That is why its downfall was tragic.

On the other hand, the present German régime, an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of generally recognized axioms, the nothingness of the
ancien régime
exhibited to the world, only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing. If it believed in its own
essence
, would it try to hide that essence under the
semblance
of an alien essence and seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern
ancien régime
is rather only the
comedian
of a world order whose
true heroes
are dead. History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its
comedy
. The gods of Greece, already tragically wounded to death in Aeschylus’s
Prometheus Bound,
had to re-die a comic death in Lucian’s
Dialogues
. Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past
cheerfully.
This
cheerful
historical destiny is what we vindicate for the political authorities of Germany.

Meanwhile, once
modern
politico-social reality itself is subjected to criticism, once criticism rises to truly human problems, it finds itself outside the German
status quo
or else it would reach out for its object
below
its object. An example. The relation of industry, of the world of wealth generally, to the political world is one of the major problems of modern times. In what form is this problem beginning to engage the attention of the Germans? In the form of
protective duties,
of the
prohibitive system,
of
national economy.
Germanomania has passed out of man into matter, and thus one morning our cotton barons and iron heroes saw themselves turned into patriots. People are therefore beginning in Germany to acknowledge the sovereignty of monopoly on the inside through lending it
sovereignty on the outside.
People are therefore now about to begin in Germany with what people in France and England are about to end. The old corrupt condition against which these countries are revolting in theory and which they only bear as one bears chains is greeted in Germany as the dawn of a beautiful future which still hardly dares to pass from
crafty
theory to the most ruthless practice. Whereas the problem in France and England is:
Political economy
or
the rule of society over wealth,
in Germany it is:
National economy
or
the mastery of private property over nationality.
In France and England, then, it is a case of abolish ng monopoly that has proceeded to its last consequences; in Germany it is a case of proceeding to the last consequences of monopoly. There it is a case of solution, here as yet a case of collision. This is an adequate example of the
German
form of modern problems, an example of how our history, like a clumsy recruit, still has to do extra drill on things that are old and hackneyed in history.