eighteenth century; and he condemns Saint-Simon. All are repudiated owing to their hostility to Christianity. Like Granovskii, Bakunin expressly defends the doctrine of immortality.
According to Bakunin, subjectivism leads to despair and self—destruction. "Reality is ever victorious; man has no choice but to come to terms with reality, to immerse himself deliberately in reality, and to love reality, for in default of this he must destroy himself." This anti-subjectivist formula of Bakunin is very different from the formula of Bělinskii and Herzen, for whereas the two latter discern in subjectivism the premisses for crime, murder, and revolution, Bakunin discovers the premisses for suicide. Many years afterwards, in 1874, when the rising in Bologna miscarried, Bakunin wished to take his own life, but was dissuaded by a friend. Yet Bakunin had then abandoned subjectivism, and upon objectivist grounds had preached murder—the right to kill.
§ 88.
FOUR years later Bakunin rejected, not Russian reality alone, but European reality as well, his rejection being no less emphatic than had formerly been his defence.
I refer to the essay in Ruge's "Jahrbücher" for the year 1842. From this writing it is customary to quote as characteristic of Bakunin's anarchism the saying, "The desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire." But the essay should be read in its entirety, for it is the best that Bakunin ever wrote, and furnishes a genuinely philosophical program of democracy.
Bakunin declares war on Schelling and his positive philosophy, which Schelling had counterposed to Hegel's negative rationalism. In 1841 Frederick William IV, "the romanticist on the throne," had summoned Schelling to Berlin, and Bakunin had heard Schelling lecture. Turning away from Schelling's romanticist mythology and revelation, Bakunin contrasts with the German's theosophy the theory of rationalistic democracy. The things which in Schelling's dreams were to appear in his Johannine church of the future were for Bakunin to be realised here and now by democracy.[1]
- ↑ Reaction in Germany, a Fragment, by a Frenchman. The essay is signed Jules Elysard and has a prefatory note by Ruge. "Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst," October 17–21, 1842.
