Struggle and Non-Violence; Poetry and Morals (1942/44).

Parts (I)—with an editorial note on the ‘Encore’—and (II):

The revolutionary idea attacks the injustice of existing society. Its ideal is less abundance than justice. No one should through no fault of their own have it worse off than others. Human beings should rule their own lives through common decision and determine for themselves whether they want to have more leisure or greater prosperity. Decisions should not lie in the hands of ruling cliques but actually in the hands of those who will be ruled by them. The position of those who carry out these decisions should not be one iota better than that of the ordinary citizen, but just one service among others. There may be no class strata in society upon whom all its burdens—its miseries, worries, the worst of its labors—are foisted. The arrangement that dishonored all societies to date—that hard and horrible labor is tied to bad life—should disappear. To the extent that difficult and dangerous labor is not taken up by all through rotation or does not disappear as a consequence of better conditions, it should be balanced by advantages those who perform more pleasant functions do not have. No one should be left out or down. Even if the most fantastical material conditions of existence where realized for the majority but some individuals, however few, would be forced to live on in senseless misery, then membership in this society would be just another privilege, the whole thing just another racket, and fear, lies, and wrongs would reign.

The revolutionary idea levels at class society itself. It wants to realize in humanity what nature in its indifference cannot on its own: life and happiness for all. Consciousness is the organ of this realization: today as longing, imagination, and goal; tomorrow as the embodiment of the agreements according to which human beings organize their lives. Consciousness is the freedom of human beings to determine right lives for themselves. Whenever this goal is denied, consciousness falls into unsublatable [unaufhebbaren] contradiction with itself. Whenever power, greatness, Übermenschlichkeit are held to be values in themselves instead of moments of a freer humanity, they betray that endless fury humans harbor for themselves. Thinking and domination are incompatible. The negation of domination sets human beings into revolutionary opposition to the existing order and implicates them in the class struggle for the same power they seek to abolish. The man of power and conformist wins peace and respect, he leads a productive existence; the revolutionary struggles through the swamp of opposition parties and sects. Participation in oppression and wickedness leads to harmony, the will to harmony to squalor and hostility.

The teachings of the Gospels, like those of the other Urreligionen, sought to overcome this contradiction through non-resistance. They refused to join in injustice without however fighting it in practice. They preached that justice, worldly or otherworldly, cannot ever be realized through violence. They bore the burdens of suffering but not of the struggle for power. The ecclesiastical hierarchy warped the passivity of this original spirit into the affirmation of violence. With God-given authority, its theologians made a pact with the rulers of the world, a covenant with power against the powerless. They falsified, compromised, mutilated the clear spirit of the Word. To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to free the prisoners; not to murder, not to curse, not to bear arms even in defense. All this, they claimed, was not meant to be taken literally. It was instead to be interpreted, deepened, qualified—and, when nothing else would do, declared to be purely symbolic. In the Gospel where, in the first few pages alone, a program of peace, justice, and non-conformity with evil is announced as only in anarchist pamphlets since—in the Sermon of the Mount, which today would be enough to brand its author a fool or a criminal in the eyes of one and all—the holy fathers of the church discovered just the words they needed, specific words which when taken literally would redirect Christianity for the sake of generals and prison wardens, for their closest friends: the whip and the sword. Where the scripture teaches violence is not to be answered in kind, the priests did not, indeed, oppose it with another. Instead, they grounded it, derived it, justified it, reinforced it. They consecrated the violence of the existing order insofar as they received from it their bread and honors. It was their world-historical function to prepare the otherwise so unpalatable Christianity for domination, to remodel the Gospel into its instrument. Despite it all the Word retains the revolutionary idea as non-violence, however great the woodpiles for gallows and witch-pyres scribes and scholars heaped upon it: the idea of the abolition of injustice.

The contradiction in this idea between the struggle for human conditions and non-violence has at present hardened into what seems an insuperable antinomy. Non-violence serves the world up on a platter for the most power-hungry states and cliques. It leads to the triumph of the worst of all without the slightest hope for anything else. Participation in opposition parties and movements, enlisting into the ranks on one side of the international or national front, means promoting domination however modified in form. Power-politics recoils on its practitioners. The states and parties that seem the better today will become the worse tomorrow. Practical struggle demands a disciplined, hierarchical organization, the deferral of humanity, alliances with villains, suppression of moral reservations. It leads to the fellowship of Churchill and Stalin, Philip Murray and Lord Mountbatten. There seems no escape between the passive or the active aid that each must now lend heartless fate.

And yet this antinomy is misleading. The antinomy itself belongs to the wrong reality. The logic that tries to ground praxis directly in the idea is less ironclad than it may appear to members of the party. There is not so great a distinction between the earnest Bible student in the concentration camp who is martyred as a shining testimony to non-violence and the member of the party in the conquest of power who must look thousandfold death in the eye every day—provided both of them call reality by its right name. They bear witness for the other to truth. Because the way each justifies their own individual existence is necessarily confused and fragile, because a moment of subjectivity belongs even to the most evident insight, they are close to one another. They express the revolutionary idea. There is no set path to profess truth but in the form of concrete resistance against injustice according to honest insight. As little as the necessity of these forms can be derived from the idea, only by fulfilling one concretely does someone give expression to truth. The tension between truth and praxis is caught in constant flux, and the poles themselves are transformed in the process. There are periods in which subordination to the praxis of the party is the presupposition of theory, while in others this would spell its death. The expression of resistance, in both linguistic and extra-linguistic forms, is subject to history. Today the religious sectarian and political militant are bearers of humanity in itself insofar as they refuse to sacrifice the idea to any powers of this world, not even to their own leaders, but guard its light against the world and for the world. Nothing should be left to arbitrariness, and yet there is no recipe. Not even the demand to speak the truth can be derived from the idea with greater certainty than any other sacrifice. What the idea demands of them in unequivocal form is only that the lie not be proclaimed, and even this is enough to hand them over to misery and persecution. The idea gleams in the eyes of peacemakers and militants alike—in the eyes of everyone the existing order cannot bribe. That they bear unswerving trust in the possibility of the good, that they neither reconcile their spirits to injustice nor pray to what is false for any price, is the sole promise that someday humanity will no longer just preserve the truth but realize it.

There is, however, one degeneration [Entartung] of the revolutionary idea: the susceptibility to the subordination of one’s own person. The idea negates the ruling order, the socially imposed separation of happiness and misery. The idea negates power. However the susceptibility to self-subordination contains the same instinct for power that even now drives humanity headlong towards the slaughter-bench.1 The idea stems from the love of life. That life is cut short for others gives rise to the idea and to resistance in general. The organ for recognizing how others are defrauded out of happiness develops only where the blessings of existence have been perceived. And mere existence, when not rent by hunger and cold, humiliation and hard labor—bare existence is a blessing to the heart that cannot be satisfied by anything less than paradise for humanity. Whoever is concerned with only their own rights, who is impossible to get along with, who, whether on principle or on account of resentment, is first and foremost defensive about their own worth—they are an enemy of the idea, no matter how zealously they might propagate it. The loyal handmaiden of the bygone world who never watched the clock had in her stupidity more than does the organized wage-laborer who shrewdly counts the minutes of that humility towards life without which socialism is only one new form of madness. Her naïve willingness to work, her easiness to please, her foolish sense of justice are elements that point towards a better future. She is free of resentment. The revolutionary idea is ignited not by excesses above, which it would preserve, but by miseries below, which it would overcome. In the face of the suffering that runs throughout nature as a whole and will in the end outlast even socialism, the bearer of the revolutionary idea sets their sights not on abundance—which only ever grants a hollow happiness amidst the horror anyway—but on the disappearance of the terror tied to abundance today. Non-violence resides in this idea no less than struggle.

In bourgeois literature the outspoken tendency of the author, his respective thema probandum, was mostly an external matter. Often enough his reactionary or progressive mentality, his conscious conviction, contradicted the spirit of presentation. One need only think of Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes,2 where the bigoted morality of the restoration appears more as a sensation that seasons the adventure than it does as a belief—as wistful as the Ave Maria for Winnetou.3 The positivism of Salammbô4—it’s impossible to say whether its Carthaginian horrors served more to delight or disgust the European reader—is already prefigured in the style of Candide,5 whose thema probandum was indeed humane.

All of them have their prototype in the “divine Marquis.” Leonore and Castellina’s adventures in Aline et Valcour6 are no less piquant than those of Justine and Juliette.7 And yet the moral is reversed. The hymn to vice outlines the same plan for the same evolution of individual and social trends as the vindication of virtue, and it makes little difference in matters of presentation whether the author hands the laurel to the monster Noirceuil as in Juliette or to Rompa-Testa, spiritual twin of Karl Mohr, as in Aline. Such externality of morals manifests itself outside the œuvre of any one author. The analysis of vice, the psychology of perversion, the proof of the connection between atheism and crime are just as passionately pursued in the works of the Marquis as in the works of his antipode De Maistre. The bloodthirsty suggestions of Saint-Fond, that terrible minister from Juliette, correspond to such a great extent with the social ideas cultivated in De Maistre’s circle that the speeches delivered on the banks of the River Neva that first evening in St. Petersburg could have been made over supper in the minister’s palace. The hymn to public order and criminal justice where one meets here the Parliamentary President, Prince, and Minister, and there the Knight, Count, and Senator—that is, the very same characters—is the same down to the last word, except for that in the discourses of the counterrevolutionary De Maistre the bloody intent finds no release in the ensuing orgy as aphrodisiac to fantasy, as it does with the funeral orator of Marat, but is instead reserved for some darker praxis to come. In both cases the opposite morality covers the same exact content as the veneer of thin rationalization, and it seems as if the ethical and pedagogical intention of the literature served merely as a protective shield for the presentation of the extraordinary and the gruesome, as consciousness does for the unconscious.

Because externality, lack of connection, is aesthetically untenable, the renunciation of the thesis was a concern of great literature long before the arrival of the novel without action and point, long before the symbolism and objectivity of Flaubert. Literature wanted to emulate bourgeois science and politics, sticking strictly to the given, much as Machiavelli once had—according to the order of the day, dedicating his treatises diplomatically to representatives of democracy and its sworn enemies alike, without thereby detracting from their value whatsoever. Of course this has never been as easy for literature. The novellas of Kleist aspire to that neutral positivity as their highest aim, and yet every single word breathes insurrection against the collective. Only today at the end of this process in the mass literature of the best-seller has the last vestige of this sentiment that distinguishes the artwork given way—to considerations about which version would make the best film. A new sentiment creeps in: the spirit of the public. Just as the philosophy of the enlightenment recoiled into positivism, the aesthetic objectivity born out of resistance to the pressure from official public powers has been brought into complete and perfect harmony with the same. The task of the artist is simply to present life. Like the specialist-scholar of today, he relegates the task of reflection on it to harmless debate clubs, vague speculation, and idle chatter. The distinction between the genius and the successful man, between Joyce and Werfel, lies in the fact that the former consciously erases all traces of tendency from his work. In so doing, he bars the force of the existing order from breaking into the artwork even by way of opposition to it. The latter hands himself over to the powers that be and incorporates morality into his routine.

This development mirrors the path taken in bourgeois commerce in general. The moral represents a goal, the meaning and the purpose of the whole. At first this was determined via anonymous market, later by conscious monopoly. The individual however still has to work to receive their meaning and their purpose from without. The individual is supposed to stay in their lane, operate their machine, build bridges, fill fuel tanks, be a specialist. The path and the destiny of society as a whole cannot be allocated to any one sphere—except, that is, among the estates of the uppermost rackets, the secret boards of industrial lobbies, and the golf courses upon which the course of the world is decided. Artists should stick to painting and poeticizing. They may even be permitted to portray the highest circles of society in a respectful or progressive tone so long as it is in the service of one racket or another, and if the portrayal cannot be done without some measure of malice it should at least be tempered by considerations for what would be most useful for a given party or trade union in its struggle against the others. The only thing intolerable is theory. Art must merge completely into theory if it wants to rescue the minimum of morality for whose sake it exists.

What has since the eighteenth century appeared in poetry as morality and tendency and, in the end, discarded from it was originally one with the essence of poetry itself. The artwork illuminated reality with a light not borrowed from it. It disclosed its secret. It judged the judge. Only in its decline did the vocation of the artwork to tell reality what it is, the verdict, become independent and external to the artwork as morality and tendency. The efforts of the great authors not to worry about such things and remain true to the thing itself stems from the intuition that presentation and verdict were originally one and the same. They renounced morality as inartistic and therefore as untrue in an effort to bring the decline to a halt. But the divisions initiated by enlightenment and progress can be revoked as little in art as in other areas. They cannot be stopped. They demand recognition. Wedekind, Sternheim, and Brecht attempted to do justice to the split by intentionally detaching the moral from the nexus of action and cynically announcing it as such. The coherence of the artwork was supposed to be rescued through its rupture.8 They did deliberately what happened half-unconsciously for the Marquis and Balzac. But when the moral of the piece is announced like this, it gains in lucidity, not depth. Depth still only comes from the now-lost unity to which the pseudo-realistic substance of modern poetry bears truer witness than the tendency out of step with its content. Reality is better illuminated and denounced by the events a work portrays than the moral it tries to impart. In the detachment of reflection from the substance of the artwork, however, it does not merely become more ideological. It also becomes sharper. The conscious, reflected morality, which in the given division of labor falls inside the remit of philosophy rather than art, seems at least to have shed its ambiguity. Any attempt to return to ‘the concrete,’ to ‘the whole,’ is romantic and reactionary. The latter path ends in the artificial resurrection of dead mythologies and leads to the clearance sale of culture itself, precisely what romantics and reactionaries sought to avoid. The ethics of Aristotle is both more limited and more universal than the tragedy of Aeschylus. The practical philosophy of Kant is both more pedantic and more liberal than the poetry of Goethe. Today it comes down to disclosing the secret affinity of the artwork to nature through which the spell might be lifted via the philosophical concept, which, as abstract, remains in the service of the spell even now.