In the summer of 1839 he thought he might have found an acceptable compromise to his spiritual crisis in the teachings of Friedrich Schleiermacher whose redemptive theology, with its stress on an intuitive religion of the heart compatible with the modern demands of reason, seemed a very different faith from the hellfire and damnation of ‘our valley of hypocrites’. For Engels, Schleiermacher was said to ‘teach the word of Christ in the sense of “Young Germany” ’. But even that paled after Engels came across the theological bombshell of early nineteenth-century Europe. David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus critically examined had appeared in 1835–6 and, to many young men, proved a terrifying, secular revelation. ‘The spell that this book exercised over one was indescribable,’ was how the liberal philosopher Rudolf Haym put it. ‘I never read any book with so much pleasure and thoroughness… It was as though scales fell from my eyes and a great light was shed on my path.’64
Strauss's book directly questioned the literal truth of the Bible: he regarded the Gospels not as infallible holy scripture but rather as the historically and culturally contingent product of their time. It was preferable, he averred, to approach the Gospels as Jewish myths or imaginative representations expressive of a specific stage of human development – and, consequently, not applicable to the current age. In turn, the figure of Christ was best substituted for the idea of ‘humanity’. The effect of The Life of Jesus was to open up the Bible to a more rigorous process of intellectual and scriptural enquiry, and Engels rushed to be in the vanguard. ‘I am very busy at present with philosophy and critical theology. When you get to be eighteen years of age and become acquainted with Strauss… then you must either read everything without thinking or begin to doubt your Wuppertal faith,’ he priggishly informed the Graebers. Over the next few months Engels returned again and again to biblical contradictions, the impact of new geological findings on Christian timelines and the question of original sin. But, as he recounted in a letter to Friedrich Graeber, shedding a lifetime's indoctrination was not an easy or comfortable process.
I pray daily, indeed nearly the whole day, for truth, I have done so ever since I began to have doubts, but I still cannot return to your faith… My eyes fill with tears as I write this… To be sure, you lie comfortably in your faith as in a warm bed, and you know nothing of the fight we have to put up when we human beings have to decide whether God is God or not. You do not know the weight of the burden one feels with the first doubt, the burden of the old belief, when one must decide for or against, whether to go on carrying it or shake it off.65
By October 1839 the doubts had passed. There was no autumnal, ‘Dover Beach’ tidal melancholy for Engels – once the decision was made, he embraced his new spiritual status with relish. ‘I am now a Straussian,’ he told William Graeber matter of factly. ‘I, a poor, miserable poet, have crept under the wing of the genius David Friedrich Strauss… Adios faith! It is as full of holes as a sponge.’66 Engels was, as he later put it, ‘utterly and wholly lost’ from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity. And, true to form, he now supported his newly adopted stance with total conviction, teasing Friedrich Graeber as the ‘great hunter of Straussians’.67
Behind the banter Engels seemed relieved that his spiritual journey had come to a conclusion. Having lost one faith, he moved swiftly to assume another: the psychological vacuum left by the demise of his Christian convictions was filled by an equally compelling ideology. Strauss was just a stepping stone. ‘I am on the point of becoming a Hegelian. Whether I shall become one I don't, of course, know yet, but Strauss has lit up lights on Hegel for me which makes the thing quite plausible to me.’68 The purpose of Strauss's criticisms had never been to show that Christianity was false per se; rather, he had hoped to show that the doctrine was no longer adequate for the new scientific age. Strauss's ambition was to take his readers to the next stage of spiritual development after Christianity – which was Hegelian philosophy.69 ‘Now I'll study Hegel over a glass of punch’ was how Engels wisely approached the work of Europe's most abstruse, arcane and brilliant philosopher. But it would prove worth the struggle: the writings of Hegel eventually shunted Engels along the path towards socialism. In the coming decades Marx's reinterpretation of Hegel's dialectics would loom large over communist ideology, but at this stage of Engels's self-tutelage it was Hegel's pure philosophy which was of such great interest.
At the core of the Hegelian system was an interpretation of history which consists of the realization or unfolding of ‘Mind’ or ‘Spirit’ (the notoriously untranslatable Geist). Spirit, or self-conscious reason, was perpetually in motion and constituted the only true reality in the world; its unfolding was the chronicle of human history. Engels was instantly attracted to this new sense of a rational, ordered development of the past as laid out in Hegel's Philosophy of History, a transcription of his lectures to the University of Berlin in 1822–3. ‘What distinguished Hegel's mode of thinking from that of all other philosophers was the exceptional historical sense underlying it,’ as he later put it.70
What dictated the history of Spirit was the concrete actualization of the Idea of freedom in human affairs, and the achievement of that freedom constituted Spirit's absolute and final goal. Yet true freedom could be the product only of reason and rationality – as evidenced in language, culture and the ‘spirit of the people’. Only once humans had the capacity of judgement could they really be free. Therefore the passage of history consisted of the organic growth of freedom and reason in civilization in a teleological manner which ultimately culminated in the fulfilment of the Spirit. ‘The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom,’ in Hegel's words. At every stage, history was advancing in that direction even when it seemed most wayward and hopeless. For beneath the chaos and anarchy of human affairs the sly cunning of reason remained steadily at work. Thus Hegel's analysis of the past fully begins only with the emergence of the Greek city-states in which he sees the emergence of freedom and reason.
Christianity was a part of this story of all-encompassing progress – it, too, fitted within the framework of rational development. In obvious historical terms, events such as the Protestant Reformation had markedly accelerated freedom and individuality. It was through the faculty of reason, which man shared with God, that man came to self-consciousness and was reconciled with God. Hegel rejected the old dualism of man and God, the immanent and the transcendent, embodied in the traditional teachings of orthodox Christianity, and instead proffered a reconciliation of the individual self with the absolute as the fulfilment of human experience in the world.71 In the modern age this would take place through the supersession of religious faith by knowledge and cultivation; universities and schools were to subsume the work of the Church. In that sense, religion would become part of the everyday world, its values incarnate in the family, the state and culture. What Engels took from this was an idea of modern Pantheism (or, rather, Pandeism) which dissolved the pietist ethos of religious alienation and, instead, merged divinity and humanity together. God and reason became one in the unfolding of freedom and progress. ‘Through Strauss I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism… The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the “modern pantheists”,’ Engels wrote in one of his final letters to the soon to be discarded Graebers.72
After the doubts and confusions of the previous few months, Engels embraced his new Hegelian faith with characteristic enthusiasm. In a classic feuilleton for Gutzkow's Telegraph entitled ‘Landscapes’ (1840), Engels compared the refreshing spray and glistening sun enjoyed on a voyage across the North Sea to ‘the first time the divine Idea of the last of the philosophers [Hegel], this most colossal creation of the thought of the nineteenth century, dawned upon me, I experienced the same blissful thrill, it was like a breath of fresh sea air blowing down upon me from the purest sky’. Engels had found temporary solace in a new, animating, naturalistic God. As Gareth Stedman Jones puts i
t, Hegel offered ‘a secure resting place to replace the awesome contours of his Wuppertal faith’.73
However, those other elements of Engels's intellectual make-up didn't simply fade away. Alongside the Hegelianism, there was still the passion for German Romanticism, the allure of Young Germany's liberal-constitutionalism and the republican impulses of Shelley and July 1830. These strands came together in one of his last Bremen articles. A review of the German author Karl Immerman's Memorabilien provided Engels with the occasion for a cri de coeur which wove together the ‘new philosophy’ with his favourite trope of Siegfried-like heroism. ‘He who is afraid of the dense wood in which stands the palace of the Idea, he who does not hack through it with the sword and wake the king's sleeping daughter with a kiss, is not worthy of her and her kingdom; he may go and become a country pastor, merchant, assessor, or whatever he likes, take a wife and beget children in all piety and respectability, but the century will not recognize him as its son.’74
By early 1841 Engels had reached the conclusion that his own recognition as one of the century's sons was far from assured if he remained deskbound in Bremen. ‘There is nothing to do but fence, eat, drink, sleep and drudge, voilá tout,’ he wrote to Marie. He returned to Barmen, but his lofty romantic soul found the parental home and office work in the family firm even more tedious. So, in September 1841, he agreed to the Prussian state's demand that he fulfil his military duties and he ‘volunteered’ for one year's service with the Royal Prussian Guards Artillery, 12th Company. Berlin, the Prussian capital, would offer this bourgeois son of a provincial textile merchant just the stage he needed in support of the Idea. Here, at last, he could reveal himself as a latter-day Siegfried in the service of the modern age.
2
The Dragon's Seed
‘Ask anybody in Berlin today on what field the battle for dominion over German public opinion is being fought,’ Engels wrote in 1841, ‘and if he has any idea of the power of the mind over the world he will reply that this battlefield is the University, in particular Lecture-hall No. 6, where Schelling is giving his lectures in the philosophy of revelation…’1
Even for such a bullish philosopher as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, it must have been a daunting class to teach. It was, said another observer, ‘an extraordinary audience… select, numerous and diverse’. Arrayed around the lecture hall sat some of the most gifted young minds of the nineteenth century: earnestly taking notes at the front was the autodidact Engels – happy, at this point, to describe himself simply as ‘young and self-taught in philosophy’; alongside him perched Jacob Burckhardt, the nascent art historian and Renaissance scholar; Michael Bakunin, the future anarchist (who dismissed the lectures as ‘interesting but rather insignificant’); and the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who thought Schelling talked ‘quite insufferable nonsense’. But, far worse, the revered philosopher committed the cardinal academic crime of ending his lectures over the hour. ‘That isn't tolerated in Berlin, and there was scraping and hissing.’2
Engels, however, was mesmerized by the grey-haired, blue-eyed Schelling and his relentless critique of his hero, Hegel. In a philosophical battle royal, week by week Schelling attempted to unpick Hegel's pantheism by insisting on the direct power of the divine in history. It was revelation versus reason. ‘Two old friends of younger days, room mates at Tübingen theological seminary, are after forty years meeting each other again face to face as opponents; one of them ten years dead but more alive than ever in his pupils; the other, as the latter say, intellectually dead for three decades, but now suddenly claiming for himself the full power and authority of life.’ And Engels had no doubts as to where his sympathies lay: he was in the lecture hall, he said, to ‘shield the great man's grave from abuse’.3
Though his official remit in Berlin was military training in support of the Prussian monarchy, Engels spent his time garnering the ideological tools to undermine it. As often as possible he left behind the parade ground for the university campus to immerse himself in theorems that would prove far more deadly than a six-pounder cannon. And he did so in deeply hostile terrain.
The Berlin which Engels entered in 1841 was fast turning into a civic monument to the Hohenzollern dynasty. Its residents, numbering some 400,000 by the mid-1840s, had witnessed much over the previous half-century: the flight of their king, Frederick William III, and Emperor Napoleon's 1806 victory march through the Brandenburg Gate; liberation by the Russians in 1813 and, with it, a steady churn of reform, Romanticism and then reaction. The forces of reaction had triumphed in the 1820s and 1830s as Frederick William marked the restoration of royal authority with a neo-classical building boom. Under architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the modern Berlin of bombastic public spaces and royal grandeur was carved out: the Doric Schauspielhaus (now the Konzerthaus Berlin), his ornately sculptured Schlossbrücke and then, along Unter den Linden, the imperial Roman Neue Wache guardhouse and, finally, his masterpiece, the Pantheon-inspired Altes Museum. This was the innately anti-intellectual Berlin of the court, the army and the Junker aristocracy of the east Prussian plains. In later years Engels remembered how utterly ghastly it all was, ‘with its scarcely formed bourgeoisie, its loud-mouthed petit-bourgeoisie, so unenterprising and fawning, its still completely unorganized workers, its masses of bureaucrats and hangers-on of nobility and court, its whole character as mere “residence’’.4
But, as would so often be the case with this endlessly divided city, there was another Berlin. Close by the parade grounds of his Kupfergraben barracks (renamed by the GDR in 1963 as the Friedrich Engels Barracks, home to the Wachregiment Friedrich Engels of the National Peoples' Army) lay a bustling public sphere of cafés, ale-houses and wine-cellars. By the mid-1830s Berlin boasted over one hundred cafés in the city centre alone, providing official and unofficial newspapers, debating clubs and drinking dens. This was the Konditorei culture of political and literary discourse in which over-opinionated and under-employed academics thrived. Each café attracted its own clientele: the Kranzler, on the corner of Fried-richstrasse and the Linden, was known as the ‘Walhalla of Berlin Guard Lieutenants’ for its officer regulars and swanky interior; the Courtin, near the Bourse, catered to the bankers and businessmen; and Stehely's, across the road from Schinkel's Schauspielhaus, was home to the city's artists, actors and ‘literary elements’.5
Feeding the bars of the Gendarmenmarkt neighbourhood was the nearby Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita – renamed in 1949 the Humboldt-Universitat after its founder, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Charged by Frederick William III during a more liberal period of office in the early 1800s with crafting an educational system for an enlightened citizenry, Humboldt and education minister Baron von Altenstein brought together in Berlin an extraordinary constellation of talents. Engels's one-time favourite theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, was appointed a professor; the more reactionary Karl von Savigny taught law; Georg Niebuhr lectured in history; whilst in 1818 Hegel succeeded Fichte as chair of philosophy. With Hegel on the faculty, the university naturally became a leading centre of Hegelian thought – so much so that the poet Heinrich Heine, a regular at Stehely's, expressed his relief in 1823 at leaving a city of ‘thick sand and thin tea’ inhabited by a population of know-alls ‘who have long comprehended everything under the sun… through Hegelian logic’.6
Not everyone regarded this profusion of Hegelian logic with such weary detachment especially not the new king, Frederick William IV (who had succeeded his father in 1840), and his chief minister, Johann Albert Friedrich Eichhorn. After a brief flirtation with a free press and political reform, the Hohenzollern genetic distrust of pluralism reasserted itself. ‘He [Frederick William] commenced with a show of liberality,’ Engels recounted, ‘then passed over to feudalism; and ended in establishing the government of the police-spy.’7 And so in 1841, as part of a broader clampdown on left-wing thinking, Eichhorn recalled the greying, 66-year-old Schelling to Berlin ‘to root out the dragon-seed of Hegelianism’ in the very university
where it had first been sown. This was the philosophical tussle Engels was so enjoying from his ringside seat in lecture hall No. 6.
Why was Hegelianism so feared by the Prussian authorities? It certainly hadn't unnerved von Humboldt and Frederick William III, who had consistently appointed known Hegelians to influential professorships and state posts. ‘The Hegelian system,’ Engels later remarked of this period, ‘was even raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of State,’ while ‘Hegelian views, consciously or unconsciously, most extensively penetrated the most diversified sciences and leavened even popular literature and the daily press.’ But that official endorsement was now set to be withdrawn.8
The answer to this divergence lies in two, often contradictory, readings of Hegel. The first is conservative. According to Hegel, that which exists at any one point in time necessarily embodies Spirit (Geist), the unfolding of which constituted the progress of human history and the existing power of reason. ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ was the famous Hegelian dictum. ‘Once that is granted, the great thing is to apprehend in the show of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.’9 If history is the process that oversees this triumphant march of reason towards freedom, then each consecutive era can be regarded as necessarily more progressive, rational and freer than the preceding one, and every component of that era – its art, music, religion, literature, forms of governance – represents a higher stage of reason than the last. This is most especially the case when it comes to the state, which Hegel took to mean an organic body encompassing elements of both government and civil society.
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