Bakunin inveighs energetically against those who demand from the "man of to-day" a precise plan of reconstruction and of the future. It suffices if we can achieve no more than a hazy idea of the opposite to all that is loathsome in contemporary civilisation. Our aim is to raze things to the ground; our goal, pandestruction. "It seems to us criminal that those who are already busied about the practical work of revolution should trouble their minds with thoughts of this nebulous future, for such thoughts will merely prove a hindrance to the supreme cause of destruction." Bakunin rails against the literature of the day, composed by informers and flatterers, by those in the pay of despotism, who write belletristic and scientific works in defence of the old order, and who have thought out this lie concerning the positive plan for the future. It is true, adds Bakunin, that there are honest dreamers, and socialists among them, who spin cobweb plans of a better life, but this is once more the same detestable business, for they construct their pictures of the future out of the repulsive material of existing conditions. "Let the deed alone now speak."
The absurd, scholastic, sophistical, and positively Jesuitical character of Bakunin's anarchistic humanism must be plain to every thinker. I have already said that this "new morality" (Bakunin considers the old morality, based upon religion patriarchalism, and class tradition lost beyond hope of rescue) is essentially founded upon materialistic and naturalistic determinism; but in addition it may be pointed out that it is Schopenhauerian voluntarism which is here presented to us as the gospel of the deed. Bakunin, like so many other politicians, insists upon the merits of practice as contrasted with theory. Schopenhauer's misanthropic tendencies notwithstanding, his philosophical nihilism is transformed by Bakunin into pandestruction.[1]
We have already learned what Bělinskii and Herzen thought of the deed as contrasted with the word.
Bakunin, despite his positive preference for science, combined with voluntarism a vigorous hostility towards intel-
- ↑ Insistence upon the deed was characteristic of the revolutionary mood of the forties. Proudhon continually demands deeds; and Hess, the Proudhonist, wrote a Philosophy of the Deed (1843); revolutionary practice was placed above theory. It must not be forgotten that postkantian philosophy in Germany had demanded on principle that theory should recede into the background as compared with practice. Fichte categorically demanded the deed.
