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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 27
lives on the barricades. We were the future of the nineteenth century.
‘This is why we have no future; we were the future.
We have become and stayed what they invented us to be. The three
fulfilled wishes from that evil story. Fevered brainchild, negative utopia:
with phalansteries, death camps, clairvoyance, gas attacks, carpet
bombing, voyages to the moon, children generated in test tubes,
intelligent machines, copies that can be made in infinite number that
have no original. With all its seeming eventfulness, the twentieth
century was nothing other than the realisation of the dominant ideas
of the nineteenth century, with final consistency, right up until the point
of self-liquidation.
What were these? (For now, I am talking about what they believed,
not what they did; not about the extent of the cruelty and misery which
are practically speaking a constant factor in history, but about the
concepts we inherited from them and their hopes, of which today so
few are left).
- The right of the heart. The freedom of individual choice, which means
above all else the freedom of choosing one’s love — the freedom of self¬
giving.
- The law of reason. The deduction of the criteria of true knowledge
from the universal and necessary laws of reason based solely on itself.
And what follows directly from this: the theoretical equality of every
person in the court of reason, which henceforth is alone competent to
judge in our affairs.
- The principle of historical progress. From this follow not only the
necessity of the direction and “substance” of development, but also for
all time the unconditional primacy of the historical community over the
individual, be it nation, class, culture or humanity itself, depending on
which one believes happens to embody the Spirit of Progress at the
moment.
‘The irreconcilable contradiction of the basic principles was already
noticed by the contemporaries, who thought up various systems for their
reconciliation. What proved fatal was not the fact of the contradictions
in themselves, but rather the repeated attempts at regime-construction;
even more so, the attempt — under the thrall of the universality of
thought; see the second fundamental principle — to carry the theoretical
attempts over into the field of practice.
Kant sought to convince his contemporaries that the individual will,
if it is free, can only will the universal law. (This is not true, but
regardless, guillotining was futile, and this is not Kant’s fault.) Hegel