1. "CAMPAIGN" AGAINST FEUERBACH

1. “CAMPAIGN” AGAINST FEUERBACH 

Before turning to the solemn discussion which Bauer’s self- 
consciousness has with itself and the world, we should reveal one 
secret. Saint Bruno uttered the battle-cry and kindled the war only 
because he had to “safeguard” himself and his stale, soured criticism 
against the ungrateful forgetfulness of the public, only because he 
had to show that, in the changed conditions of 1845, criticism always 
remained itself and unchanged. He wrote the second volume of the 
“good cause and his own cause’”*: he stands his ground, he fights pro 
aris et focis. In the true theological manner, however, he conceals 
this aim of his by an appearance of wishing to “characterise” Feuer- 
bach. Poor Bruno was quite forgotten, as was best proved by the 
polemic between Feuerbach and Stirner,‘ in which no notice at all 
was taken of him. For just this reason he seized on this polemic in 
order to be able to proclaim himself, as the antithesis of the antago- 
nists, their higher unity, the Holy Spirit. 

Saint Bruno opens his “campaign” with a burst of artillery fire 
against Feuerbach, that is to say, with a revised and enlarged reprint 
of an article which had already appeared in the Norddeutsche Blatter‘ 
Feuerbach is made into a knight of “substance” in order that Bauer’s 
‘‘self-consciousness” shall stand out in stronger relief. In this tran- 

 Bruno Bauer’s article “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” is here ironically 
called the second volume of Bauer’s book Die gute.Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene 
Angelegenheit (The Good Cause of Freedom and My Own Cause).— Ed. 

? Literally: for altars and hearths, used in the sense of: for house and home—that 
is, pleading his own cause.— Ed. 

“ Feuerbach, “Ueber das ‘Wesen des Christenthums’ in Beziehung auf den 
‘Einzigen und sein Eigenthum’” .—Ed. 

aa e., Bruno Bauer’s article “Ludwig Feuerbach” — Ed. 

substantiation of Feuerbach, which is supposed to be proved by 
all the writings of the latter, our holy man jumps at once from 
Feuerbach’s writings on Leibniz and Bayle* to the Wesen des 
Christenthums, leaving out the article against the “positive phi- 
losophers”*! in the Hallische Jahrbiicher.” This “oversight” is “in 
place”. For there Feuerbach revealed the whole wisdom of “self- 
consciousness” as against the positive representatives of “sub- 
stance”, at a time when Saint Bruno was still indulging in specula- 
tion on the immaculate conception. 

It is hardly necessary to mention that Saint Bruno still continues to 
prance about on his old-Hegelian war horse. Listen to the first 
passage in his latest revelations from the Kingdom of God: 

“Hegel combined into one Spinoza’s substance and Fichte’s ego; the unity of 
both, the combination of these opposing spheres, etc., constitutes the peculiar interest 
but, at the same time, the weakness of Hegel’s philosophy. [...]} This contradiction in 
which Hegel’s system was entangled had to be resolved and destroyed. But he could 
only do this by making it impossible for all time to put the question: what is the 
relation of self-consciousness to the absolute spirit.... This was possible in two ways. Either 
self-consciousness had to be burned again in the flames of substance, i.e., the pure 
substantiality relation had to be firmly established and maintained, or it had to be 
shown that personality is the creator of its own attributes and essence, that it belongs to 
the concept of personality in general to posit itself” (the “concept” or the 
‘“‘personality”?) “as limited, and again to abolish this limitation which it posits by its 
universal essence, for precisely this essence is only the result of its inner self-distinction, of its 
activity” (Wigand, pp. 86, 87, 88).° 

In Die heilige Familie (p. 220)’ Hegelian philosophy was 
represented as a union of Spinoza and Fichte and at the same time the 
contradiction involved in this was emphasised. The specific 
peculiarity of Saint Bruno is that, unlike the authors of Die heilige 
Familie, he does not regard the question of the relation of self- 
consciousness to substance as “a point of controversy within 
Hegelian speculation”, but as a world-historic, even an absolute 
question. This is the sole form in which he is capable of expressing the 
conflicts of the present day. He really believes that the triumph of self- 
consciousness over substance has a most essential influence not only 
on European equilibrium but also on the whole future development 
of the Oregon problem. As to the extent to which the abolition of the 
Corn Laws in England depends on it, very little has so far transpired.” 

“ The reference is to the following works of Feuerbach: Geschichte der neuern 
Philosophie. Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Philosophie and Pierre 
Bayle.—Fd. 

p Ludwig Feuerbach, “Zur Kritik der ‘positiven Philosophie’” —Ed. 

© Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” — Ed. 

See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 139.—Ed. 

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno 99 

The abstract and nebulous expression into which a real collision is 
distorted by Hegel is held by this “critical” mind to be the real 
collision itself. Bruno accepts the speculative contradiction and 
upholds one part of it against the other. A philosophical phrase about 
a real question is for him the real question itself. Consequently, on 
the one hand, instead of real people and their real consciousness of 
their social relations, which apparently confront them as something 
independent, he has the mere abstract expression: self-consciousness, 
just as, instead of real production, he has the activity of this 
self-consciousness, which has become independent. On the other hand, 
instead of real nature and the actually existing social relations, he has 
the philosophical summing-up of all the philosophical categories or 
names of these relations in the expression: substance; for Bruno, 
along with all philosophers and ideologists, erroneously regards 
thoughts and ideas—the independent intellectual expression of the 
existing world—as the basis of this existing world. It is obvious that 
with these two abstractions, which have become senseless and empty, 
he can perform all kinds of tricks without knowing anything at all 
about real people and their relations. (See, in addition, what is 
said about substance !n connection with Feuerbach and concerning 
“humane liberalism’ and the “holy” in connection with Saint Max.) 
Hence, he does not forsake the speculative basis in order to solve the 
contradictions of speculation; he manoeuvres while remaining on 
that basis, and he /imseif still stands so much on the specifically 
Hegelian basis that the relation of “self-consciousness” to the 
“absolute spirit” still gives him no peace. In short, we are confronted 
with the philosophy of self-consciousness that was announced in the Krittk 
der Synoptiker, carried out in Das entdeckte Christenthum and which, 
unfortunately, was long ago anticipated in Hegel’s Phanomenologie. 
This new philosophy of Bauer’s was completely disposed of in Die 
heilige Familie on page 220 et seq. and on pages 304- 07.” Here, 
however, Saint Bruno even contrives to caricature himself by 
smuggling in “personality”, in order to be able, with Stirner, to 
portray the single individual as “his own product”, and Stirner as 
Bruno’s product. This step forward deserves a brief notice. 

First of all, let the reader compare this caricature with the original, 
the explanation given of self-conscicusness in Das entdeckte Christen- 
thum, page 113, and then let him compare this explanation with its 
prototype, with Hegel’s Phadnomenologie, pages 575, 583 and so on. 
(Both these passages are reproduced in Die heilige Familie, pages 

* See this volume, pp. 40, 54, 232-39, 282-301.—Ea. 
See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 139 et seq. and 191-93.—Ed. 

221, 223, 224.*) But now let us turn to the caricature! “Personality in 
general”! “Concept”! “Universal essence”! “To posit itself as limited 
and again to abolish the limitation”! “Inner self-distinction”! What 
tremendous “results”! “Personality in general” is either nonsense 
“in general” or the abstract concept of personality. Therefore, it is 
part of the “concept” of the concept of personality to “posit itself as 
limited”. This limitation, which belongs to the “concept” of its 
concept, personality directly afterwards posits “by its universal 
essence’’. And after it has again abolished this limitation, it turns out 
that “precisely this essence” is “the result of its inner self-distinction”’. 
The entire grandiose result of this intricate tautology amounts, 
therefore, to Hegel’s familiar trick of the self-distinction of man in 
thought, a self-distinction which the unfortunate Bruno stubbornly 
proclaims to be the sole activity of “personality in general”. A fairly 
long time ago it was pointed out to Saint Bruno that there is nothing 
to be got from a “personality” whose activity is restricted to these, by 
now trivial, logical leaps. At the same time the passage quoted 
contains the naive admission that the essence of Bauer’s “personali- 
ty” is the concept of a concept, the abstraction of an abstraction. 

Bruno’s criticism of Feuerbach, insofar as it is new, is restricted to 
hypocritically representing Stirner’s reproaches against Feuerbach 
and Bauer as Bauer’s reproaches against Feuerbach. Thus, for 
example, the assertions that the “essence of man is essence in general 
and something holy”, that “man is the God of man”, that the 
human species is “the Absolute”, that Feuerbach splits man “into an 
essential and an inessential ego” (although Bruno always declares 
that the abstract is the essential and, in his antithesis of criticism and 
the mass, conceives this split as far more monstrous than Feuerbach 
does), that a struggle must be waged against the “predicates of 
God”, etc. On the question of selfish and selfless love, Bruno, 
polemising with Feuerbach, copies Stirner almost word for word for 
three pages (pp. 133-35) just as he very clumsily copies Stirner’s 
phrases: “every man is lis own creation”, “truth is a ghost”, and so 
on. In addition, in Bruno the “creation” is transformed into a 
“product”. We shall return to this exploitation of Stirner by Saint 
Bruno. 

Thus, the first thing that we discovered in Saint Bruno was his 
continual dependence on Hegel. We shall not, of course, dwell 
further on the remarks he has copied from Hegel, but shall only put 
together a few more passages which show how firmly he believes in 
the power of the philosophers and how he shares their illusion that a 

“ See present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 139-41.—Ed. 

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno 101 

modified consciousness, a new turn given to the interpretation of 
existing relations, could overturn the whole hitherto existing world. 
Imbued with this faith, Saint Bruno also has one of his pupils 
certify—in issue IV of Wigand’s quarterly, p. 327—that his phrases 
on personality given above, which were proclaimed by him in 
issue III, were “world-shattering ideas”’.’ 

Saint Bruno says ( Wigand, p. 95)?: 

“Philosophy has never been anything but theology reduced to its most general 
form and given its most rational expression.” 

This passage, aimed against Feuerbach, is copied almost word for 
word from Feuerbach’s Philosophie der Zukunft (p. 2): 

“Speculative philosophy is true, consistent, rational theology.” 

Bruno continues: 

“Philosophy, in alliance with religion, has always striven for the absolute 
dependence of the individual and has actually achieved this by demanding and causing 
the absorption of the individual life in universal life, of the accident in substance, of 
man in the absolute spirit.” 

As if Bruno’s “philosophy”, “in alliance with” Hegel’s, and his still 
continuing forbidden association with theology, did not “demand”, 
if not ‘“‘cause”, the “absorption of man” in the idea of one of his 
“accidents”, that of self-consciousness, as “substance”! Moreover, 
one sees from this whole passage with what joy the church father 
with his “pulpit eloquence” continues to proclaim his “world- 
shattering” faith in the mysterious power of the holy theologians 
and philosophers. Of course, in the interests of the “good cause of 
freedom and his own cause”’“ 

On page 105 our godfearing man has the insolence to reproach 
Feuerbach: 

“Feuerbach made of the individual, of the depersonalised man of Christianity, not 
a man, not a true” (!) “real” (!!) “personal” (!!!) “man” (these predicates owe their 
origin to Die heilige Familie and Stirner), “but an emasculated man, a slave” — 

and thereby utters, inter alia, the nonsense that he, Saint Bruno, can 
make people by means of the mind. 
Further on in the same passage he says: 

“According to Feuerbach the individual has to subordinate himself to the species, 
serve it. The species of which Feuerbach speaks is Hegel’s Absolute, and it, too, exists 
nowhere.” 

* “Ueber das Recht des Freigesprochenen...”.— Ed. 

> Bruno Bauer, “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” .— Ed. 

© An ironical allusion to Bauer’s book Die gute Sache der Fretheit und meine eigene 
Angelegenheit.—Ed. 

Here, as in all the other passages, Saint Bruno does not deprive 
himself of the glory of making the actual relations of individuals 
dependent on the philosophical interpretation of these relations. He 
has not the slightest inkling of the correlation which exists between 
the concepts of Hegel’s “absolute spirit” and Feuerbach’s “species” 
on the one hand and the existing world on the other. 

On page 104 the holy father is mightily shocked by the heresy with 
which Feuerbach transforms the holy trinity of reason, love and will 
into something that “is in individuals and over individuals”, as 
though, in our day, every inclination, every impulse, every need did 
not assert itself as a force “in the individual and over the individual”, 
whenever circumstances hinder their satisfaction. If the holy father 
Bruno experiences hunger, for example, without the means of 
appeasing it, then even his stomach will become a force “in him and 
over him”. Feuerbach’s mistake is not that he stated this fact but that 
in idealistic fashion he endowed it with independence instead of 
regarding it as the product of a definite and surmountable stage of 
historical development. 

Page 111: “Feuerbach is a slave and his servile nature does not allow him to fulfil 
the work of a man, to recognise the essence of religion” (what a fine “work of a 

man”!).... “He does not perceive the essence of religion because he does not know the 
bridge over which he can make his way to the source of religion.” 

Saint Bruno still seriously believes that religion has its own “es- 
sence”. As for the “bridge’’, “over which” one makes one’s way to the 
“source of religion”, this asses’ bridge* must certainly be an aqueduct. 
At the same time Saint Bruno establishes himself as a curiously 
modernised Charon who has been retired owing to the building of 
the bridge, becoming a tollkeeper? who demands a halfpenny” from 
every person crossing the bridge to the spectral realm of religion. 

On page 120 the saint remarks: 

“How could Feuerbach exist if there were no truth and truth were onlv a spectre” 
(Stirner, help!°) “of which hitherto man has been afraid?” 

The “man” who fears the “spectre” of “truth” is no other than the 
worthy Bruno himself. Ten pages earlier, on p. 110, he had already 
let out the following world-shattering cry of terror at the sight of the 
“spectre” of truth: 

* A pun in the original: Eselsbriicke (asses’ bridge)—an expedient used by dull 
or lazy people to understand a difficult problem.—Ed. 
This word is in English in the manuscript.—Ed. 
“ A paraphrase of the expression “Samuel, hilf!” (Samuel, help!) from Carl Maria 
von Weber’s opera Der Freischiitz (libretto by Friedrich Kind), Act I, Scene 6.—-Ed. 

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno 103 

“Truth which is never of itself encountered as a ready-made object and which 
develops itselfand reaches unity only in the unfolding of personality.” 

Thus, we have here not only truth, this spectre, transformed into a 
person which develops itself and reaches unity, but in addition this 
trick is accomplished in a third personality outside it, after the 
manner of the tapeworm. Concerning the holy man’s former love 
affair with truth, when he was still young and the lusts of the flesh 
sull strong in him—see Die heilige Familie, p. 115 et seq.* 

How purified of all fleshly lusts and earthly desires our holy man 
now appears is shown by his vehement polemic against Feuerbach’s 
sensuousness. Bruno by no means attacks the highly restricted way in 
which Feuerbach recognises sensuousness. He regards Feuerbach’s 
unsuccessful attempt, since it is an attempt to escape ideology, as—a 
sin. Of course! Sensuousness is lust of the eye, lust of the flesh and 
arrogance’—horror and abomination‘ in the eyes of the Lord! Do 
you not know that to be fleshly minded is death, but to be spiritually 
minded is life and peace; for to be fleshly minded is hostility to 
criticism, and everything of the flesh is of this world. And do you 
not know that it is written: the works of the flesh are manifest, they 
are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, obscenity, idolatry, witch- 
craft, enmity, strife, envy, anger, quarrelsomeness, discord, sinful 
gangs, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony and the like. I pro- 
phesy to you, as I prophesied before, that those who do such works 
will not inherit the kingdom of criticism; but woe to them for in their 
thirst for delights they are following the path of Cain and are falling 
into the error of Balaam, and will perish in a rebellion, like that of 
Korah. These lewd ones feast shamelessly on your alms, and fatten 
themselves. They are clouds without water driven by the wind; bare, 
barren trees, twice dead and uprooted; wild ocean waves frothing 
their own shame; errant stars condemned to the gloom of darkness 
for ever.* For we have read that in the last days there will be terrible 
times, people will appear who think much of themselves, lewd vilifiers 
who love voluptuousness‘ more than criticism, makers of sinful 
gangs, in short, slaves of the flesh. Such people are shunned by Saint 
Bruno, who is spiritually minded and loathes the stained covering of 
the flesh § and for this reason he condemns Feuerbach, whom he re- 

* See present edition, Vol. 4, p. 79 et seq.— Ed. 
> Cf. 1 John 2 : 16.— Ed. 

© Cf. Ezekiel 11 : 18.— Ea. 

“ Cf. Galatians 5:19-21.— Ed. 

© Cf. Jude 11-13.—Ed. 

' Cf. 2 Timothy 3 : 1-4.— Ed. 

§ Cf. Jude 23.— Ed. 

gards as the Korah of the gang, to remain outside together with the 
dogs, the magicians, the debauched and the assassins.* “Sensuous- 
ness”—ugh! Not only does it throw the saintly church father into the 
most violent convulsions, but it even makes him sing, and on page 
121 he chants the “song of the end and the end of the song”. Sensu- 
ousness—do you know, unfortunate one, what sensuousness is? Sen- 
suousness is—a “stick” (p. 130). Seized with convulsions, Saint Bruno 
even wrestles on one occasion with one of his own theses, just as Jacob 
of blessed memory wrestled with God, with the one difference that 
God twisted Jacob’s thigh, while our saintly epileptic twists all the 
limbs and ties of his own thesis, and so, by a number of striking 
examples, makes clear the identity of subject and object: 
“Feuerbach may say what he likes ... all the same he destroys” (!) “man... for he trans- 
forms the word man into a mere phrase... for he does not wholly make” (!) “and create” (!) 
‘““man, but raises the whole of mankind to the Absolute, for in addition he declares not 
mankind, but rather the senses to be the organ of the Absolute, and stamps the sensu- 
ous—the object of the senses, of perception, of sensation—as the Absolute, the indu- 
bitable and the immediately certain. Whereby Feuerbach—such is Saint Bruno’s 
opinion—“can undoubtedly shake layers of the air, but he cannot smash the phenomena 
of human essence, because his innermost’ (!) “essence and his vitalising spirit [...] 
already destroys the external” (!) “sound and makes it empty and jarring” (p. 121). 

Saint Bruno himself gives us mysterious but decisive disclosures 
about the causes of his nonsensical attitude: 

“As though my ego does not also possess just this particular sex, unique, compared 
with all others, and these particular, unique sex organs.” (Besides his “unique sex or- 
gans’’, this noble-minded man also possesses a special ‘‘unique sex’’!) 

This unique sex is explained on page 121 in the sense that: 

‘“‘sensuousness, like a vampire, sucks all the marrow and blood from the life of man; it 
is the insurmountable barrier against which man has to deal himself a mortal blow”. 

But even the saintliest man is not pure! They are all sinners and 
lack the glory that they should have before “self-consciousness”’. 
Saint Bruno, who in. his lonely cell at midright: struggles with 
“substance”, has his attention drawn by the frivolous writings of the 
heretic Feuerbach to women and female beauty. Suddenly his sight 
becomes less keen; his pure self-consciousness is besmirched, and a 
reprehensible, sensuous fantasy plays about the frightened critic 
with lascivious images. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” 
Bruno stumbles, he falls, he forgets that he is the power that “with its 
strength binds, frees and dominates the world”, he forgets that 
these products of his imagination are “spirit of his spirit”, he loses all 

* Cf. Revelation 22:15.—Ed. 
> Cf. Matthew 26:41.—Ed. 
© Cf. ibid. 16:19.—Fd. 

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno 105 

“self-control” and, intoxicated, stammers a dithyramb to female 
beauty, to its “tenderness, softness, womanliness”’, to the “full and 
rounded limbs” and the “surging, undulating, seething, rushing and 
hissing, wave-like structure of the body’’* of woman. Innocence, 
however, always reveals itself—even where it sins. Who does not 
know that a “surging, undulating, wave-like structure of the body” 
is something that no eye has ever seen, or ear heard? There- 
fore—hush, sweet soul, the spirit will soon prevail over the rebellious 
flesh and set an insurmountable “barrier” to the overflowing, 
seething lusts, “against which” they will soon deal themselves a 
“mortal blow’. 

“Feuerbach”—the saint finally arrives at this through a critical understanding of 
Die heilige Familie—“‘is a materialist tempered with and corrupted by humanism, i.e., a 
materialist who is unable to endure the earth and its being” (Saint Bruno knows the 
being of the earth as distinct from the earth itself, and knows how one should behave 
in order to “endure the being of the earth”!) “but wants to spiritualise himself and rise 

into heaven; and at the same time he is a humanist who cannot think and build a 
spiritual world, but one who is impregnated with materialism”, and so on (p. 123). 

Just as for Saint Bruno humanism, according to this, consists in 
“thinking” and in “building a spiritual world”, so materialism 
consists in the following: 

“The materialist recognises only the existing, actual being, matter” (as though man 

with all his attributes, including thought, were not an “existing, actual being’’), “and 
recognises it as actively extending and realising itself in multiplicity, nature” (p. 123). 

First, matter is an existing, actual being, but only in itself, 
concealed; only when it “actively extends and realises itself in mul- 
tiplicity” (an “existing, actual being” “realises itself”’!!), only then does 
it become nature. First there exists the concept of matter, an abstrac- 
tion, an idea, and this latter realises itself in actual nature. Word 
for word the Hegelian theory of the pre-existence of the creative 
categories. From this point of view it is understandable that Saint 
Bruno mistakes the philosophical phrases of the materialists con- 
cerning matter for the actual kernel and content of their world out- 

l ;

2. SAINT BRUNO'S VIEWS ON THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN FEUERBACH AND STIRNER

Having thus admonished Feuerbach with a few weighty words, 
Saint Bruno takes a look at the struggle between Feuerbach and the 
unique. The first evidence of his interest in this struggle is a 
methodical, triple smile. 

“ Marx and Engels have inserted the words “seething, rushing and hissing”— 
which occur in Schiller’s poem Der Taucher (“The Diver’’)—into the passage they 
quote from Bruno Bauer’s article “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” — Ed. 

“The critic pursues his path irresistibly, confident of victory, and victorious. He is 
slandered—he smiles. He is called a heretic—he smiles. The old world starts a crusade 
against him—he smiles.” 

Saint Bruno—this is thus established—pursues his path but he 
does not pursue it like other people, he follows a critical course, he 
accomplishes this important action with a smile. 

“He does smile his face into more lines than are in the new map, with the 

augmentation of the Indies. I know my lady will strike him: if she do, he'll smile and 
take’t for a great art’”*—like Shakespeare’s Malvolio. 

Saint Bruno himself does not lift a finger to refute his two 
opponents, he knows a better way of ridding himself of them, he 
leaves them—divide et impera—to their own quarrel. He confronts 
Stirner with Feuerbach’s man (p. 124), and Feuerbach with Stirner’s 
unique (p. 126 et seq.); he knows that they are as incensed against 
each other as the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland, which so completely 
devoured each other that finally only their tails remained.* And 
Saint Bruno passes sentence on these tails, declaring that they are 
‘substance’ and, consequently, condemned to eternal damnation. 

In confronting Feuerbach with Surner he repeats what Hegel said 
of Spinoza and Fichte, where, as we know. the punctiform ego is 
represented as one, and moreover the most stable, aspect of 
substance. However much Bruno formerly raged against egoism, 
which he even considered the odor specificus of the masses, on page 
129 he accepts egoism from Stirner—only this should be “not that of 
Max Stirner’, but, of course, that of Bruno Bauer. He brands 
Surner’s egcism as having the moral defect “that his ego for the 
support of its egoism requires hypocrisy, deception, external 
violence”. For the rest, he believes (see p. 124) in the critical miracles 
of Saint Max and sees in the latter’s struggle (p. 126) ‘“‘a real effort to 
radically destroy substance”. Instead of dealing with Stirner’s 
criticism of Bauer’s “pure criticism’, he asserts on p. 124 that - 
Stirner’s criticisin could affect him just as little as any other, “beca- 
use he himself is the critic’. 

Finally Saint Bruno refutes both of them, Saint Max and 
Feuerbach, applying almost literally to Feuerbach and Stirner the 
antithesis drawn by Stirner between the critic Bruno Bauer and the 
dogmatist. 

Wigand, p. 138: “Feuerbach puts himself in opposition to, and thereby” (!) “stands in 
opposition to, the unique. He is a communist and wants to be one. The unique is an egoist 

* Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 2. Marx and Engels quote these lines 
from the German translation by August Wilhelm von Schlegel. But they have 
substituted the word Kunst (art) for the word Gunst (favour).— Ed. 

The German Ideology. The Leipzig Council. II. Saint Bruno 107 

and has to be one; he is the holy one, the other the profane one, he is the good one, the 
other the evil one, he is God, the other is man. Both are dogmatists.” 

The point is, therefore, that he accuses both of dogmatism. 

Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, p. 194: “The critic is afraid of becoming dogmatic 
or of putting forward dogmas. Obviously, he would then become the opposite of a 
critic, a dogmatist; he who as a critic was good, would now become evil, or from being 
unselfish” (a Communist) “would become an egoist, etc. Not a single dogma!—that is his 
dogma.” 

3. SAINT BRUNO VERSUS THE AUTHORS

3. SAINT BRUNO VERSUS THE AUTHORS OF DIE HEILIGE FAMILIE

3. SAINT BRUNO VERSUS THE AUTHORS 
OF DIE HEILIGE FAMILIE 

Saint Bruno, who has disposed of Feuerbach and Stirner in the 
manner indicated and who has “cut the unique off from all 
progress”, now turns against the apparent “consequences of 
Feuerbach”, the German Communists and, especially, the authors of 
Die heilige Familie. The expression “real humanism”, which he 
found in the preface to this polemic treatise, provides the main basis 
of his hypothesis. He will recall a passage from the Bible: 

“And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal” 
(in our case it was just the opposite), “even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with 
milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it” (1 Corinthians, 

3: 1-2). 

The first impression that Die heilige Familie made on the worthy 
church father was one of profound distress and serious, respectable 
sorrow. The one good side of the book is that it 

“showed what Feuerbach had to become, and the position his philosophy can adopt, if 
it desires to fight against criticism” (p. 138), 

that, consequently, it combined in an easy-going way “desiring” with 
“what can be” and “what must be’, but this good side does not out- 
weigh its many distressing sides. Feuerbach’s philosophy, which 
strangely enough is presupposed here, 

“dare not and cannot understand the critic, dare not and cannot know and perceive criti- 
cism in its development, dare not and cannot know that, in relation to all that is 
transcendental, criticism is a constant struggle and victory, a continual destruction and 
creation, the sole” (!) “creative and productive principle. It dare not and cannot know 
how the critic has worked, and still works, to posit and to make” (!) “the transcendental 
forces, which up to now have suppressed mankind and not allowed it to breathe and 
live, into what they really are, the spirit of the spirit, the innermost of the innermost, a 
native thing” (!) “out of and in the native soil, products and creations of 
self-consciousness. It dare not and cannot know that the critic and only the critic has 
smashed religion in its entirety, and the state in its various manifestations, etc.” 

(pp. 138, 139). 

Is this not an exact copy of the ancient Jehovah, who runs after his 
errant people who found greater delight in the cheerful pagan gods, 
and cries out: 

‘Hear me, Israel, and close not your ear, Judah! Am I not the Lord your God, who 
led you out of the land of Egypt into the land flowing with milk and honey, and 
behold, from your earliest youth you have done evil in my sight and angered me with 
the work of my hands and turned your back unto me and not your face towards me, 
though I invariably tutored you; and you have brought abominations into my house 
to defile it, and built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Himmon, which 
I did not command, and it never entered my head that you should do such 
abominations; and I have sent to you my servant Jeremiah, to whom J did address my 
word, beginning with the thirteenth year of the reign of King Josiah, son of Amon, 
unto this day—and for twenty-three years now he has been zealously preaching to 
you, but ye have not harkened. Therefore says the Lord God: Who has ever 
heard the like of the virgin of Israel doing such an abomination. For rain water does 

not disappear so quickly as my people forgets me. O earth, earth, earth, hear the word 
of the Lord!” 

Thus, in a lengthy speech on “to dare” and “to be able”, Saint 
Bruno asserts that his communist opponents have misunderstood 
him. The way in which he describes criticism in this recent speech, 
the way in which he transforms the former forces that suppressed 
“the life of mankind” into ‘transcendental forces’, and these 
transcendental forces into the “spirit of the spirit”, and the way in 
which he presents “criticism” as the sole branch of production ~ 
proves that the apparent misconception is nothing but a disagreeable 
conception. We proved that Bauer’s criticism is beneath all criticism, 
owing to which we have inevitably become dogmatists. He even in all 
seriousness reproaches us for our insolent disbelief in his ancient 
phrases. The whole mythology of independent concepts, with Zeus 
the Thunderer—self-consciousness—at the head, is paraded here 
once again to the “jingling of hackneyed phrases of a whole janissary 
band of current categories”’. (Literatur-Zeitung, cf. Die heilige Familie, 
p. 234°). First of all, of course, the myth of the creation of the world, 
i.e., of the hard “labour” of the critic, which is “the sole creative and 
productive principle, a constant struggle and victory, a continual de- 
struction and creation”, “working” and “having worked”. Indeed, 
the reverend father even reproaches Die heilige Familie for under- 
standing “criticism” in the same way as he understands it himself in 
the present rejoinder. After taking back “substance” “into the land 
of its birth, self-consciousness, the criticising and” (since Die heilige 

Familie also) “the criticised man, and discarding it” (self-conscious- 
ness here seems to take the place of an ideological lumber-room), 
he continues: 

“Tt” (the alleged philosophy of Feuerbach) “dare not know that criticism and the 
critics, as long as they have existed” (!)““have guided and made history, that even their 
opponents and all the movements and agitations of the present time are their creation, 
that it is they alone who hold power in their hands, because strength is in their consciousness, 
and because they derive power from themselves, from their deeds, from criticism, from 
their opponents, from their creations; that only by the act of criticism is man freed, 
and thereby men also, and man is created” (!) “and thereby mankind as well”. 

Thus, criticism and the critics are first of all two wholly different 
subjects, existing ayd operating apart from each other. The critic is a 
subject different from criticism, and criticism is a subject different 
from the critic. This personified criticism, criticism as a subject, is 
precisely that “critical criticism” against which Die heilige Familie was 
directed. “Criticism and the critics, as long as they have existed, have 
guided and made history.” It is clear that they could not do so “as 
long as they” did not “exist”, and it 1s equally clear that “‘as long as 
they have existed” they “made history” in their own fashion. Finally, 
Saint Bruno goes so far as to “dare and be able” to give us one of the 
most profound explanations about the state-shattering power of 
criticism, namely, that “criticism and the critics hold power in their 
hands, because”’ (a fine ‘“‘because”’!) “strength is in their consciousness’ , 
and, secondly, that these great manufacturers of history “hold power 
in their hands”, because they “derive power from themselves and 
from criticism” (i.e., again from themselves)—whereby it is still, 
unfortunately, not proven that it is possible to “derive” anything at 
all from there, from ‘“‘themselves’’, from ‘‘criticism’’. On the basis of 
criticism’s own words, one should at least believe that it must be 
difficult to “derive” from there anything more than the category of 
“substance” “discarded” there. Finally, criticism also “derives” “from 
criticism” “power” for a highly monstrous oracular dictum. For it 
reveals to us a secret that was hidden* from our fathers and unknown 
to our grandfathers, the secret that “only by the act of criticism is 
man created, and thereby mankind as well’—whereas, up to now, 
criticism was erroneously regarded as an act of people who existed 
prior to it owing to quite different acts. Hence it seems that Saint 
Bruno himself came “into the world, from the world, and to the 
world” through “criticism”, i.e., by generatio aequivoca.’ All this is, 
perhaps, merely another interpretation of the following passage 

from the Book of Genesis: And Adam knew, i.e., criticised, Eve his 
wife: and she conceived,’ etc. 

Thus we see here the whole familiar critical criticism, which was 
already sufficiently characterised in Die heilige Familie, confronting 
us again with all its trickery as though nothing had happened. There 
is no need to be surprised at this, for the saint himself complains, on 
page 140, that Die heilige Familie “cuts criticism off from all 
progress”. With the greatest indignation Saint Bruno reproaches the 
authors of Die heilige Familie because, by means of a chemical 
process, they evaporated Bauer’s criticism from its “fluid” state into a 
“crystalline” state. 

It follows that “institutions of mendicancy”, the “baptismal 
certificate of adulthood”, the “regions of pathos and thunder-like 
aspects”, the * ‘Mussulman conceptual affliction” (Die heilige Familie, 
pp. 2, 3, 4° according to the critical Literatur-Zeitung)—all this is 
nonsense only if it is understood in the “crystalline” manner. And 
the twenty-eight historical howlers of which criticism was proved 
guilty in its excursion on “Englische Tagesfragen” “—are they not 
errors when looked at from the “fluid” point of view? Does criticism 
insist that, from the fluid point of view, it prophesied a priori the 
Nauwerck conflict “—long after this had taken place before its 
eyes—and did not construct it post festum?* Does it still insist that the 
word maréchal could mean “farrier” from the “crystalline” point of 
view, but from the “fluid” point of view at any rate must mean 
“marshal”? Or that although in the “crystalline” conception “un fait 
physique’ may mean “a physical fact”, the true “fluid” translation 
should be “a fact of physics”? Or that “la malveillance de nos bourgeois 
juste-milieux” “in the “fluid” state still means “the carefreeness of our 
good burghers”? Does it insist that, from the “fluid” point of view, 
‘a child that does not, in its turn, become a father or mother is 
essentially a daughter’? That someone can have the task “of 
representing, as it were, the last tear of grief shed by the past”? That 
the various concierges, lions, grisettes, marquises, scoundrels and 
wooden doors in Paris in their “fluid” form are nothing but phases 

of the mystery “in whose concept in general it belongs to posit itself 
as limited and again to abolish this limitation which is posited. by its 
universal essence, for precisely this essence is only the result of its 
inner self-distinction, its activity” *? That critical criticism in the 
“fluid” sense “pursues its path irresistibly, victorious and confident 
of victory”, when in dealing with a question it first asserts that it has 
revealed its “true and general significance” and then admits that it 
“had neither the will nor the right to go beyond criticism”, and 
finally admits that “it had still to take one step but that step was 
impossible because—it was impossible” (Die heilige Familie, p. 184°)? 
That from the “fluid” point of view “the future is still the work” of 
criticism, although “fate may decide as it will” “? That from the fluid 
point of view criticism achieved nothing superhuman when it “came 
into contradiction with its true elements—a contradiction which had 
already found its solution in these same elements’? 

The authors of Die heilige Familie have indeed committed the 
frivolity of conceiving these and hundreds of other statements as 
statements expressing firm, “crystalline” nonsense—but the synoptic 
gospels should be read in a “fluid” way, 1.e., according to the sense of 
their authors, and on no account in a “crystalline” way, i.e., accord- 
ing to their actual nonsense, in order to arrive at true faith and to 
admire the harmony of the critical household. 

“Engels and Marx, therefore, know only the criticism of the Literatur-Zeitung” © 

——a deliberate lie, proving how “fluidly” our saint has read a book 
in which his latest works are depicted merely as the culmination of all 
the “work he has done’. But the church father lacked the calm to 
read in a crystalline way, for he fears his opponents as rivals who 
contest his canonisation and “want to deprive him of his sanctity, in 
order to make themselves sanctified”’. 

Let us, incidentally, note the fact that, according to Saint Bruno’s 
present statement, his Literatur-Zeitung by no means aimed at 
founding “social society” or at “representing, as it were, the last tear 
of grief” shed by German ideology, nor did it aim at putting mind in 
the sharpest opposition to the mass and developing critical criticism 
in all its purity, but only—at “depicting the liberalism and radicalism 
of 1842 and their echoes in their half-heartedness and phrase-mon- 
gering’’, hence at combating the “echoes” of what has long disap- 

peared. Tant de bruit pour une omelette!* Incidentally, it is just here 
that the conception of history peculiar to German theory is again 
shown in its “purest” light. The year 1842 is held to be the period of 
the greatest brilliance of German liberalism, because at that time 
philosophy took part in politics. Liberalism vanishes for the critic 
with the cessation of the Deutsche Jahrbiicher and the Rheinische Zer- 
tung, the organs of liberal and radical theory. After that, apparently, 
there remain only the “echoes’”—whereas in actual fact only now, 
when the German bourgeoisie feels a real need for political power, 
a need produced by economic relations, and is striving to satisfy it, 
has liberalism in Germany an actual existence and thereby the 
chance of some success. 

Saint Bruno’s profound distress over Die heilige Familie did not 
allow him to criticise this work “out of himself, through himself and 
with himself”. To be able to master his pain he had first to obtain the 
work in a “fluid” form. He found this fluid form in a confused 
review, teeming with misunderstandings, in the Westphalische 
Dampfboot, May issue, pp. 206-14.” All his quotations are taken from 
passages quoted in the Westphdlische Dampfboot and he quotes 
nothing that is not quoted there. 

The language of the saintly critic is likewise determined by the 
language of the Westphalian critic. In the first place, all the 
statements from the Foreword which are quoted by the Westphalian 
(Dampfboot, p. 206) are transferred to the Wigand’sche Viertel- 
jahrsschrift (pp. 140, 141). This transference forms the chief part of 
Bauer’s criticism, according to the old principle already recom- 
mended by Hegel: 

“To trust common sense and, moreover, in order to keep up with the times and 
advance with philosophy, to read reviews of philosophical works, perhaps even their 
prefaces and introductory paragraphs; for the latter give the general principles on 
which everything turns, while the former give, along with the historical information, 
also an appraisal which, because it is an appraisal, even goes beyond that which is 
appraised. This beaten track can be followed in one’s dressing-gown; but the elevated 
feeling of the eternal, the sacred, the infinite, pursues its path in the vestments of a 
high priest, a path” which, as we have seen, Saint Bruno also knows how to “pursue” 
while “striking down” (Hegel, Phadnomenologie, p. 54). 

The Westphalian critic, after giving a few quotations from the 
- preface, continues: 

“Thus the preface itself leads to the battlefield of the book”, etc. (p. 206). 

The saintly critic, having transferred these quotations into the 
Wigand’sche Vierteljahrsschrift, makes a more subtle distinction and 
Says: 

“Such is the terrain and the enemy which Engels and Marx have created for battle.” 

From the discussion of the critical proposition: “the worker 
creates nothing”, the Westphalian critic gives only the summarising 
conclusion. 

The saintly critic actually believes that this is all that was said about 
the proposition, copies out the Westphalian quotation on page 141 
and rejoices at the discovery that only “assertions” have been put 
forward in opposition to criticism. 

Of the examination of the critical outpourings about love, the 
Westphalian critic on page 209 first writes out the corpus delictiin part 
and then a few disconnected sentences from the refutation, which he 
desires to use as an authority for his nebulous, sickly-sweet 
sentimentality. 

On pages 141-42 the saintly critic copies him out word for word, 
sentence by sentence, in the same order as his predecessor quotes. 

The Westphalian critic exclaims over the corpse of Herr Julius 
Faucher: ‘Such is the fate of the beautiful on earth!” * 

The saintly critic cannot finish his “hard work” without ap- 
propriating this exclamation to use irreievantly on page 142. 

The Westphalian critic on page 212 gives a would-be summary of 
the arguments which are aimed against Saint Bruno himself in Die 
heilige Familie. 

The saintly critic cheerfully and literally copies out all this stuff 
together with all the Westphalian exclamations. He has not the 
slightest idea that nowhere in the whole of this polemic discourse does 
anyone reproach him for “transforming the problem of political 
emancipation into that of human emancipation”, for “wanting to kill 
the Jews’, for “transforming the Jews into theologians”, for 
“transforming Hegel into Herr Hinrichs”, etc. Credulously, the 
saintly critic repeats the Westphalian critic’s allegation that in Die 
heilige Familie Marx volunteers to provide some sort of little schola- 
stic treatise “in reply to Bauer’s silly self-apotheosis”. Yet the words 
“silly self-apotheosis”, which Saint Bruno gives as a quotation, are 
nowhere to be found in the whole of Die heilige Familie, but they do 
occur with the Westphalian critic. Nor is the little treatise offered asa 
reply to the “self-apology’ of criticism on pages 150-63 of Die heilige 

Familie, but only in the following section on page 165,” in 

connection with the world-historic question: “Why did Herr Bauer 
have to engage in politics?” 

Finally on page 143 Saint Bruno presents Marx as an “amusing 
comedian”, here again following his Westphalian model, who 
resolved the “world-historic drama of critical criticism”, on page 
213, into a “most amusing comedy’. 

Thus one sees how the opponents of critical criticism “dare and 
can” “know how the critic has worked, and still works’! 

4. OBITUARY FOR “M. HESS” 

“What Engels and Marx could not yet do, M. Hess has accomplished.” 

Such is the great, divine transition which—owing to the relative 
“can” and “cannot” be done of the evangelists—has taken so firm a 
hold of the holy man’s fingers that it has to find a place, relevantly or 
irrelevantly, in every article of the church father. 

“What Engels and Marx could not yet do, M. Hess has 
accomplished.” But what is this “what” that “Engels and Marx could 
not yet do”? Nothing more nor less, indeed, than—to criticise 
Stirner. And why was it that Engels and Marx “could not yet” criticise 
Stirner? For the sufficient reason that—Stirner’s book had not yet 
appeared when they wrote Die heilige Familie. 

This speculative trick—of joining together everything and bring- 
ing the most diverse things into an apparent causal relation—has 
truly taken possession not only of the head of our saint but also of his 
fingers. With him it has become devoid of any contents and 
degenerates into a burlesque manner of uttering tautologies with an 
important mien. For example, already in the Allgemeine Literatur- 
Zeitung (1, 5) we read: 

“The difference between my work and the pages which, for example, a Philippson 

covers with writing” (that is, the empty pages on which, “for example, a Philippson” 
writes) “must, therefore, be so constituted as in fact it is”!!! : 

“M. Hess”, for whose writings Engels and Marx take absolutely no 
responsibility, seems such a strange phenomenon to the saintly critic 
that he is only capable of copying long excerpts from Die letzten 
Philosophen and passing the judgment that “on some points this 
criticism has not understood Feuerbach or also” (O theology!) “the 
vessel wishes to rebel against the potter’. Cf. Epistle to the Romans, 
9: 20-21. Having once more performed the “hard work” of quoting, 
our saintly critic finally arrives at the conclusion that Hess copies 

from Hegel, since he uses the two words “united” and “develop- 
ment”. Saint Bruno, of course, had in a round-about way to try to 
turn against Feuerbach the proof given in Die heilige Familie of his 
own complete dependence on Hegel. 

“See, that is how Bauer had to end! He fought as best he could 
against all the Hegelian categories”, with the exception of seif- 
consciousness — particularly in the glorious struggle of the Literatur- 
Zeitung against Herr Hinrichs. How he fought and conquered them 
we have already seen. For good measure, let us quote Wigand, 
page 110, where he asserts that 
the “true” (1) “solution” (2) “of contradictions” (3) ‘in nature and history” (4), the 
“true unity” (5) “of separate relations” (6), the “genuine” (7) “basis” (8) “and abyss” 
(9) “of religion, the truly infinite” (10), “irresistible, self-creative” (11) “personality” 
(12) “has not yet been found”. 

These three lines contain not two doubtful Hegelian categories, 
as in the case of Hess, but a round dozen of “true, infinite, 
irresistible” Hegelian categories which reveal themselves as such by 
“the true unity of separate relations” —‘‘see, that is how Bauer had to 
end”! And if the holy man thinks that in Hess he has discovered a 
Christian believer, not because Hess “hopes”— as Bruno says— but 
because he does not hope and because he talks of the “resurrection”, 
then our great church father enables us, on the basis of this same 
page 110, to demonstrate his very pronounced Judaism. He declares 
there 
“that the true, living man in the flesh has not yet been born”!!! (a new elucidation about 
the determination of the “unique sex’’) “and the mongrel produced” (Bruno Bauer?! ?) 
‘Is not yet able io master ail cogmatic formulas’, etc. 

That is to say, the Mess:ah is not yet born, the son of man has 
first to come into the world and this world, being the world of the 
Olid Testament, is stil under the rod of the law, of “dogmatic 
formulas’’. 

Just as Saint Bruno, as shown above, made use of “Engels and 
Marx” for a transition to Hess, so now the latter serves him to bring 
Feuerbach finally into causal connection with his excursions on 
Stirner, Die heilige Familie and Die letzten Philosophen. 

“See, that is how Feuerbach had to end!” “Philosophy had to end picusly’, etc. 
(Wigand, p. 145.) 

The true causal connection, however, is that this exclamation is 
an imitation of a passage from Hess’ Die letzten Philosophen aimed 
against Bauer, among others (Preface, p. 4): 

“Thus [...] and in no other way had the last offspring of the Christian ascetics |...] 
to take farewell of the world.” 

Saint Bruno ends his speech for the prosecution against Feuerbach 
and his alleged accomplices with the reproach to Feuerbach that all 
he can do is to “trumpet”, to “blow blasts on a trumpet’, whereas 
Monsieur B. Bauer or Madame la critique, the “mongrel produced”, 
to say nothing of the continual “destruction”, “drives forth in his 
triumphal chariot and gathers new triumphs” (p. 125), “hurls down from 
the throne” (p. 119), “slays” (p. 111), “strikes down like thunder” 
(p. 115), “destroys once and for all’ (p. 120), “shatters” (p. 121), 
allows nature merely to “vegetate” (p. 120), builds “stricter’’ (!) 
“prisons” (p. 104) and, finally, with “crushing” pulpit eloquence 
expatiates, on p. 105, in a brisk, pious, cheerful and free* fashion on 
the ‘“‘stably-strongly-firmly-existing”, hurling “rock-like matter and 
rocks” at Feuerbach’s head (p. 110) and, in conclusion, by a side 
thrust vanquishes Saint Max as well, by adding “the most abstract 
abstractness” and “the hardest hardness” (on p. 124) to “critical 
criticism”, “social society” and “rock-like matter and rocks’. 

All this Saint Bruno accomplished “through himself, in himself 
and with himself’’, because he is ‘‘He himself’; indeed, he is “him- 
self always the greatest and can always be the greatest”’ (1s and can 
be!) “through himself, in himself and with himself” (p. 136). That’s 
that. 

Saint Bruno would undoubtedly be dangerous to the female sex, 
for he is an “irresistible personality”, if “in the same measure on 
the other hand” he did not fear “sensuousness as the barrier 
against which man has to deal himself a mortal blow’. Therefore, 
“through himself, in himself and with himself” he will hardly pluck 
any flowers but rather allow them to wither in infinite longing and 
hysterical yearning for the “irresistible personality”, who “‘possesses 
this unique sex and these unique, particular sex organs”’.* 

5. Saint Bruno in His “Triumphal Chariot” 

Before leaving our church father “victorious and confident of victory”, let us fora 
moment mingle with the gaping crowd that comes up running just as eagerly when he 
“drives forth in his triumphal chariot and gathers new triumphs” as when General 
Tom Thumb with his four ponies provides a diversion. It is not surprising that we 
hear the humming of street-songs, for to be welcomed with street-songs “belongs after 
all to the concept” of triumph “in general”.