Oldal 29 [29]
OCR
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 selfgiving. - 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
