The German Ideology - Saint Max

The German Ideology by Marx and Engels

III

Saint Max

“Was jehen mir die jrinen Beeme an?"

["What are the green trees to me?” — a paraphrase (in the Berlin dialect) from Heine’s work Reisebilder, Dritter Teil “Die Bäder von Lucca”, Kapitel IV]

Saint Max exploits, “employs” or “uses” the Council to deliver a long apologetic commentary on “the book”, which is none other than “the book”, the book as such, the book pure and simple, i.e., the perfect book, the Holy Book, the book as something holy, the book as the holy of holies, the book in heaven, viz., Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. “The book”, as we know, fell from the heavens towards the end of 1844 and took on the shape of a servant with O. Wigand in Leipzig [46]. It was, therefore, at the mercy of the vicissitudes of terrestrial life and was attacked by three “unique ones”, viz., the mysterious personality of Szeliga, the gnostic Feuerbach and Hess. [Szeliga, “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum”; Feuerbach, “Über das ‘Wesen des Christenthums’ in Beziehung auf den ‘Einzigen und sein Eigenthum'”; Hess, Die letzten Philosophen] However much at every moment Saint Max as creator towers over himself as a creation, as he does over his other creations, he nevertheless took pity on his weakly offspring and, in order to defend it and ensure its safety, let out a loud “critical hurrah”. In order to fathom in all their significance both this “critical hurrah” and Szeliga’smysterious personality, we must here, to some extent, deal with church history and look more closely at “the book”. Or, to use the language of Saint Max: we “shall episodically put” “into this passage” a church-historical “meditation” on Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum “simply because” “it seems to us that it could contribute to the elucidation of the rest”.

“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in.

"Who is this King of Glory? The War-Lord strong and mighty, the War-Lord mighty in battle.

"Lift up your heads, 0 ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory, shall come in.

"Who is this King of Glory? The Lord Unique, he is the King of Glory,” (Psalms, 24:7-10).

1. The Unique and His Property

The man who “has based his cause on nothing’ [here and below Marx and Engels paraphrase the first lines of Goethe’s poem Vanitas! Vanitatum Lanitas!] begins his lengthy “critical hurrah” like a good German, straightway with a Jeremiad: “Is there anything that is not to be my cause?” (p. 5 of the “book”). And he continues lamenting heart-rendingly that “everything is to be his cause”, that “God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth and freedom, and in addition the cause of his people, of his lord”, and thousands of other good causes, are imposed on him. Poor fellow! The French and English bourgeois complain about lack of markets, trade crises, panic on the stock exchange, the political situation prevailing at the moment, etc.; the German petty bourgeois, whose active participation in the bourgeois movement has been merely an ideal one, and who for the rest exposed only himself to risk, sees his own cause simply as the “good cause”, the “cause of freedom, truth, mankind”, etc.

Our German school-teacher simply believes this illusion of the German petty bourgeois and on three pages he provisionally discusses all these good causes.

He investigates “God’s cause”, “the cause of mankind” (pp. 6 and 7) and finds these are “purely egoistical causes”, that both “God” and “mankind” worry only about what is theirs, that “truth, freedom, humanity, justice” are “only interested in themselves and not in us, only in their own well-being and not in ours” — from which he concludes that all these persons “are thereby exceptionally well-off”. He goes so far as to transform these idealistic phrases — God, truth, etc. — into prosperous burghers who “are exceptionally well-off” and enjoy a “profitable egoism”. But this vexes the holy egoist: “And I?” he exclaims.

“I, for my part, draw the lesson from this and, instead of continuing to serve these great egoists, I should rather be an egoist myself!” (p. 7)

Thus we see what holy motives guide Saint Max in his transition to egoism. It is not the good things of this world, not treasures which moth and rust corrupt, not the capital belonging to his fellow unique ones, but heavenly treasure, the capital which belongs to God, truth, freedom, mankind, etc., that gives him no peace.

If it had not been expected of him that he should serve numerous good causes, he would never have made the discovery that he also has his “own” cause, and therefore he would never have based this cause of his “on nothing” (i.e., the “book”).

If Saint Max had looked a little more closely at these various causes” and the “owners” of these causes, e.g., God, mankind, truth, he would have arrived at the opposite conclusion: that egoism based on the egoistic mode of action of these persons must be just as imaginary as these persons themselves.

Instead of this, our saint decides to enter into competition with “God” and “truth” and to base his cause on himself —

“on myself, on the I that is, just as much as God, the nothing of everything else, the I that is everything for me, the I that is the unique.... I am nothing in the sense of void, but the creative nothing, the nothing from which I myself, as creator, create everything.”

The holy church father could also have expressed this last proposition as follows: I am everything in the void of nonsense, “but” I am the nugatory creator, the all, from which I myself, as creator, create nothing.

Which of these two readings is the correct one will become evident later. So much for the preface.

The “book” itself is divided like the book “of old”, into the Old and New Testament — namely, into the unique history of man (the Law and the Prophets) and the inhuman history of the unique (the Gospel of the Kingdom of God). The former is history in the framework of logic, the logos confined in the past; the latter is logic in history, the emancipated logos, which struggles against the present and triumphantly overcomes it.