6. CONTRADICTION IS THE SOURCE OF MOVEMENT

Bakunin followed up his promising start as a philosopher with a two-part article entitled “On Philosophy.” The first was published in 1840 in the journal Notes of the Fatherland, edited by Andrei Kraevsky. The article expanded on some of the issues Bakunin had raised in the preface to his translation of Hegel, and made even clearer his growing commitment to philosophy as a practical means aimed at the end of action and change. He set out to ask and answer three questions: What is philosophy? Is philosophy useful? Is philosophy possible? He distinguished “philosophy” from its literal translation as “love of wisdom,” for as he pointed out, “it would be a great pity if wisdom and love of it were the exclusive property of only a small number of people who studied philosophy, and remained inaccessible to the rest. These others constitute the majority of the human race, and mankind, no matter at what level of development it is, thirsts for wisdom and cannot exist without it.”[129] Philosophy was more than practical knowledge and experience of life, though that was often called “wisdom,” and it was not an attitude of taking adversity well by being “philosophical” about it. Philosophy went beyond logical analysis of “the questions of the day” and the “ratiocinations” of the French philosophes of the eighteenth century. In fact, Bakunin argued, their work was dangerous for philosophy, for it tore them away from “essential and important interests in life” and subjected them to the “pernicious rule of rash and senseless arbitrariness.” In this, of course, he was following Hegel, who believed the excesses and horrors of the aftermath of the French Revolution resulted from the attempt of a radical elite to impose its ideas on the people: while their ideas may have been logically consistent and correct, the attempt to impose them from above was artificial, arbitrary, and doomed to failure. No, he declared, in what would become a nice irony, real philosophy “will never be atheistic and anarchistic.” Philosophy was, he declared, the unity of “the real truth and true reality,” the absolute “knowledge of the truth.”

This truth went beyond the obvious acceptance of external reality, such as the existence of a table in one’s room. While it may be correct to point out that there was a table there, it was no more than contingency or accident, and as such was of little interest to the philosopher. For the philosopher, what was true and real in the nontrivial sense was that which was historically necessary. This argument was Bakunin’s attack on those thinkers who insisted that all that could be known and all that mattered were empirical facts as determined by objective observation and experiment. For them, there was no necessity in history, “only the empty play of contingency,” or what we might call the Joe Friday school of history: just the facts, ma’am, without interpretation or the suggestion that there is a purpose or meaning to history. While these empiricists claimed that their approach was scientific, because they insisted that the observer was neutral and outside the events under study, and thus objective, Bakunin pointed out that it was logically inconsistent to claim that history was both just one damn thing after another and a science. In his words, “If universal history is, in effect, nothing more than a senseless succession of accidents, then it cannot be of interest to man, it cannot be an object of his knowledge, and it cannot be useful to him.” History as accident could, by definition, have turned out very differently, and was thus meaningless, for it taught no lessons and led nowhere. Pursued in this way, human history “is reduced to the dead work of memory, the duty of which is contained only in the preservation of the accidental existence of contingent, singular facts.” His point was not that objective facts did not exist, or that only ideas were real, or that nothing existed but thought. It was the much more subtle observation that facts alone did not give understanding or truth. We might illustrate this by referring to the way much history is still taught in schools today, that is, as the memorization of names and dates. Knowing the date of the War of 1812 is a bit of trivia of little interest and absolutely no use in itself, apart from being a way to bludgeon students into submission and identify those who will sit up straight and become cheerful cannon fodder, dutiful workers, and frantic consumers. That, of course, is the purpose of much education, in Bakunin’s time and ours, and much of his critique of Russia and contemporary thought focused on education.

Furthermore, the empiricist could not be considered objective and impartial. Borrowing from Hegel, Bakunin noted that while the “ordinary consciousness,” that is, the untrained philosophical mind, tried to understand the “real world” through “observation, comparison, abstraction, and analogy,” these were insufficient. They were inadequate because “all men are formed under the influence of that society in which they were born. But each nation, each state, has its particular moral sphere, its popular beliefs, its prejudices, its particular limitations, depending in part on its individual character, on its historical development, and on its relationship to the history of all mankind.” Furthermore, each state was itself divided into different social strata, and each stratum had “its individual character.” In short, different cultures produced different ways of seeing the world, and passed these on to their members. As a result, no observer was neutral or objective. All attempts to understand the world, even those of the empiricists, were subjective and therefore were “always limited and one-sided” and “incapable of embracing the absolute truth.”

Bakunin acknowledged that empiricism as a scientific method freed the “natural consciousness from its individual limitations, from its prejudices”; it tore away the “fetters of determined space and determined time, enriching its experience with its experiments carried out in different spaces and times. As much as possible, it expands the spiritual sphere of ordinary consciousness.” But still it had limits. It divided the world into distinct, separate subjects and divided these subjects even further into arbitrary subdivisions for dissection and study. That encouraged the belief, false in Bakunin’s view, that the world was in fact divided and unconnected, and scattered understanding of the whole into knowledge of fragments and discrete bits. True knowledge, he insisted, “searches for the universal unity.” Real knowledge, “the essence of any knowledge,” he maintained, lay not in compiling dead facts but in “finding the internal, necessary link within facts.” This could not be accomplished only by theory, however. If empiricism “does not satisfy the principal criterion of knowledge, which requires thought, but not dry facts,” then theories alone “do not accomplish anything and are nothing more than fantastic flashes, not based on anything and proving nothing.” The problem with theory, he explained, was that the theorists started from the same point as the empiricists, that is, with “experimental observation, diversity of facts, and particular laws,” but then went “running to hypotheses, to presuppositions: the theorist takes some thought or other ... as a principle and attempts to explain and deduce all facts ... from it.”

In contrast, true knowledge required bringing together theory, or explanation, with empirical research, to avoid on the one hand mere collecting of trivia and on the other hand, abstract separation from the real world. Either approach, taken alone, was unable to discover real, existing, necessary truth and was therefore doomed to irrelevancy and sterility. What he called for, in short, was praxis, the unity of theory and practice, each informing the other. In truth, he admitted, there was no real contradiction between theory and empiricism, for in the real world, “there is no theorist who is not an empiricist, just as there is no empiricist who is not a theorist.” The battle between the two sides was really a struggle of contradictions, of two poles of thought that together pointed the way to real knowledge. In the heat of the struggle for knowledge, “abstraction and extremism” on both sides often resulted, and both sides could forget how necessary each was to the other. When the struggle was creative and energetic, “the arid collectors of facts prepare the materials for the theorists; the theorists elaborate and work them in all directions, elevate them to relative-universal thoughts, and hand over the great deed of human knowledge to philosophy, which crowns it, producing out of all these fractions a united, organic, and absolutely transparent whole.”

Through this chain of argument, Bakunin arrived at short answers to the three questions he had initially posed. Philosophy is the pursuit of real knowledge, of reality. It was useful because humanity could only advance when it had real knowledge. Finally, it was possible, but only if its students brought together empirical studies—practical action—and theory, in the best Hegelian tradition.

If this argument seems obscure or dated, we might remember that similar debates, though expressed in the language suited to our culture, still go on today within philosophy journals, and more importantly, in everyday life. Should children be taught history as facts to memorize or as explanations of process? Should history be taught as myth and propaganda or as critical inquiry? Is science value-free or blinded by the values of its culture? Should we pursue “pure science” or applied, practical science? Can the two be separated? Is there value to a liberal arts education or should it be abandoned for “practical” studies, by which is meant something that will lead to a specific job deemed useful by employers?

Bakunin’s article, while framed as a broad inquiry into the nature of philosophy, had practical implications for Russia. Philosophy as a subject was banned in Russian universities because the authorities understood that free, critical thought would undermine the regime. Yet Bakunin was insisting that without such thought, no knowledge was possible. His argument against the dry, dusty preservation of simple facts was a critique of tradition and conservatism. His suggestion that contingent, accidental occurrences were of no use in understanding the world strongly implied that the Russia of the tsar was temporary, or, in Hegelian terms, was irrational and thus unreal. If the official censor could not connect the dots, Bakunin’s enthusiastic readers certainly did. For anyone who might have missed the picture, he spelled it out, writing that Russia was stuck at the phase of “ordinary consciousness,” that is, empiricism, since it had “hardly followed the development of contemporary philosophical thought.”

“On Philosophy” outlined a dialectical approach to study, with the apparent opposites of theory and empiricism mutually reinforcing each other and reconciling their opposition with the creation of new knowledge. This too had political overtones. For Bakunin was declaring that the nature of the world was change, not stability or stasis. That which appeared real might not actually be real or remain real. That which was necessary today might not be necessary tomorrow, and could be done away with. History, not the pronouncements of the minister of the interior or the noose of the tsar’s hangman, would be the ultimate judge.

The article was greeted with much praise and excitement, even from Bakunin’s critics. Belinsky declared it “wonderful, so wonderful, as it is wickedly observant: I do not know any praise higher than this. This man can and must write—he will do much for the advancement of thought in his country.” Kraevsky, the editor of the journal in which it was published, thanked Bakunin for an article that was “simply the model for philosophical articles in the Russian language” and urged him to send in the second part.[130] Bakunin did, but the piece was never published. It is of some interest here, however, because in it Bakunin outlined two other Hegelian ideas: those of “negation” and “contradiction.”

The reader may by now be sharing Herzen’s opinion of German philosophy, that its chief defect was its “artificial, heavy, scholastic language of its own,” in which “very sensible and very simple things” were dressed up in a “strange jargon.”[131] But these two ideas, so central to Hegel, are worth some attention, for they make intelligible one of Bakunin’s most quoted remarks and established once and for all the revolutionary potential of Hegelian thought for young intellectuals of the 1840s.

Today “negation” is generally considered, well, negative. We’re told to overcome adversity with the power of positive thinking; the song encourages us to “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative,” and no one wants to be a nattering nabob of negativism, as Richard Nixon’s critics were once denounced. Nearly as bizarre as Nixon is the confounding world of negative numbers, and no one wants a negative balance in a bank account. It will come as no surprise by now, however, that Hegel and Bakunin used “negation” in a very different sense. While Herbert Marcuse is not recommended as a model of concision and clarity, in a preface to Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory he did outline nicely what Hegel meant by negation. “Philosophical thought,” Marcuse wrote, “begins with the recognition that the facts do not correspond to the concepts imposed by common sense and scientific reason—in short, with the refusal to accept them.”[132] The positive, for Hegel and Bakunin, was that which already existed. The negation was the critique of what existed, the realization that much of what we accept as true is in fact taught to us by those who profit from us believing it. For Hegel, “thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.”[133] From this criticism comes new thought, new ideas, and the determination of what is real and rational. Thus negation was the first step in resolving contradictions, a word that had many meanings for Hegel. It applied to the potential disjuncture between appearance and reality, to the conflict between what one is told to believe and what one experiences, and to concepts such as the struggle between freedom and oppression, where opposites clash.

Again, Marcuse helps make sense of the concept with an overtly political example. If we concede that freedom is desirable for humanity, then the “realities” of the status quo that “perpetuates itself through the constant threat of atomic destruction, through the unprecedented waste of resources, through mental impoverishment, and—last but not least—through brute force” are the “unresolved contradictions” we face. To confront these grim realities, we have the power of negation and refusal.[134]

Bakunin, less firmly anchored in politics in 1840, nonetheless stressed negation and contradiction—struggle, in other words—as the way in which humanity moved forward to discover truth and reality as it progressed toward freedom. Human “potentiality” was “infinite truth,” but it was contradicted by its “limited actuality.” As a result of this tension between potential and actuality, “man” was driven “forward toward the realization of the internal, potential truth,” and in that way elevated “above his external, temporary limitation.” He traced the development of human consciousness, from individual perception of physical objects, such as “the knowledge of this birch tree, standing before me,” through the development of generalized knowledge gained from experimental observation, “of birches in general, of the species or the type of birch ... independent of individual perception,” through the highest stages of reason and finally “absolute, true knowledge.” How this might be applied to birch trees was not made clear, but the more important point Bakunin made was that human thought developed through negation, contradiction, and struggle. Human life was not static or fixed, as the tsar might wish, and did not develop in a controlled, gradual, straightforward way, as the tsar might hope. Instead, existing ideas and institutions, however necessary and progressive they may once have been, became inadequate for the continued progress of humanity, were challenged, struggled with, and left behind, as the best elements were incorporated into the new forms and ideas. Again Bakunin insisted that human action and change were driven by the “contradiction between the infinity of [humanity’s] internal ideal essence and the limitation of his external existence; contradiction is the source of movement, of development, striving only toward its resolution.” As with Hegel, the resolution, the goal of this dialectical struggle, was human freedom.

His articles established Bakunin as Russia’s most influential Hegelian thinker. If this seems rather a dubious honor, it put Bakunin in the vanguard of progressive Russian thinkers and on par with some of the most interesting intellectuals in Europe. Even Herzen, who would later assail Hegelianism in his memoirs, stole some of Bakunin’s thoughts for his own article on Hegel five years later. Yet whatever personal satisfaction his writing may have brought Bakunin, it indicated only that he was bright, articulate, and in tune with the times. It did not amount to a vocation or a career, and could become neither in Russia. His interest was philosophy, not journalism, and his writing would never be popular enough to sustain a career. Nor was it possible to create a career as a philosopher. Philosophy was still banned as a university subject in Russia; in any case, an academic post required university degrees. Clearly Bakunin knew the material, but in the Russia of the 1830s, as in much of the world today, credentials mattered more. Despite his publications, there was little left for him to do in Russia as a writer or thinker.

The jobs that were open to him, managing the estate and service to the regime, were equally unpalatable. Worse, family life at Priamukhino, despite detente with his parents, meant wasting one’s energies on squabbles, quarrels, and crushed expectations all around. As he confessed in a letter to Stankevich, “the vile pettiness of everyday family and ... vain internecine dissension among family members and friends” was wearing.[135]

Worse, intellectual life in Russia was fissuring and collapsing. The circles were falling apart as people took up careers, married, or found other interests. Belinsky moved explicitly to a Right Hegelian position and tried to reconcile himself with the reality of a mind-numbing job. If everyone remained critical of the regime, now each was critical for different reasons. Some, like Bakunin and Herzen, looked to Western Europe for ideas and inspiration. Just as Bakunin insisted that Russia had no real, that is, original and modern, philosophy, so too did other “westernizers” such as Belinksy, Chaadaev, and Kireevsky hold that Russia had no genuinely national art or literature. By this they did not mean that no Russians produced art or even that were no Russian motifs. They meant that Russian art was in its essence borrowed and copied. More importantly, it was not progressive. It did not challenge the official ideas of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality; on the contrary, they held, sanctioned culture was pressed into the service of conformity. Other Russian intellectuals, known as the Slavophiles, felt differently. They saw much that was good in traditional Russia and did not abandon religious faith as a way to understand and know the world; the Russia they sought drew on what they believed was unique to “the people.” Personal problems too split the circles as everyone fell in and out of love. Old friends were gone: Bakunin’s sister Liubov had died of tuberculosis in 1838, while Stankevich, stricken by the same bacillus, had left for Europe; Varvara soon followed him. Bakunin had pursued his dream of studying philosophy and become accomplished at it, only to find that Russia had no place for men with such skills. If he had freed himself from the army, from service, from convention, he was not free to do what Fichte and Hegel insisted had to be done: to act in the service of freedom.

Rather than retreat into despair and clinical alienation, he planned to leave Russia and seek in Europe what was denied him at home. By the beginning of 1840, even before his articles were published, he wrote to Alexandra Beyer that his efforts now were dedicated to finding a way to get to Berlin; otherwise, his life would stagnate. It was necessary “to tear myself away from the narrow limits of our reality,” and to throw himself into “the life-giving atmosphere of Europe,” where all could “breath in the divine idea: science, religion, art, nature, people.”[136]

The problem was money. While the Bakunin family had impressive holdings, all were heavily mortgaged and could not provide ready cash. From his early days at military school, Bakunin had become accustomed to borrowing and spending freely, accumulating debts when necessary and living well when possible. When his father balked, he turned to his friends to stake him in his adventures. Belinsky, who had to count every penny, noted acerbically that “for you to ask someone, ‘Do you have any money?’ is the same thing as asking, ‘Do you have any woodchips?’“ He added, rather more kindly, “You also share and distribute it as if it were woodchips. I can’t ever remember that, having ten roubles in your pocket, you were not immediately prepared to give me five, and if I had expressed an extreme need, to give me the rest also, except for a few kopecks for tobacco and coach fare ... And you gave me that which you had borrowed from others or which you had earned from your lessons.”[137]

Many, including Belinsky, attributed Bakunin’s casual attitude toward money to his noble upbringing. After all, the definition of a gentleman is one who consumes without producing. If this also seems a useful definition of a tapeworm, a gentleman may conclude sadly that bourgeois ideology and the Puritan ethic have spread their baleful influences everywhere. They have spread especially among Bakunin’s critics, Marxist, liberal, and conservative alike, who have often used his casual attitude toward money to suggest that he was not entitled to speak on behalf of peasants and workers and was sufficiently detached from base reality as to be hopelessly Utopian. But of course Bakunin’s attitude was scarcely typical of a class. His father, for example, kept exceedingly careful records and did not, to his son’s constant dismay, freely hand out cash. That Marxists use this to attack Bakunin’s character and ideas is hypocritical, for Karl Marx lived off his father, his wife’s unpaid household labor, her work as editor on his writing, his wife’s family, the unpaid work of their maid, and of course, the largess of Friedrich Engels, who supported Marx from his own dividends and salary as a manager of his father’s textile works. Hundreds had to labor each day for Marx to research and write. The liberal and conservative pundits are usually in a worse moral position. The friends of Bakunin and Marx freely chose to support them. The tenured don, the syndicated columnist, the public relations flack, have their salaries paid from the taxes and prices exacted from workers and consumers who have no say in how the monies are collected or spent. The blunt fact is that all intellectual work is paid for by someone else, either retail or wholesale.

In any case, Bakunin turned to his list of usual suspects in the hopes of making his way to Berlin. He penned another lengthy confessional letter to his parents in March of 1840, apologizing for his misdeeds but remaining firm in his conviction that philosophy, not running the estate or service, could be his only pursuit. In words calculated to win over his skeptical father, he acknowledged that he had made mistakes and blunders, though a number of his disappointments and unfortunate circumstances were caused by events outside his control. Nonetheless, he had learned from all this. Especially he had learned that it was impossible to live only an “interior life.” He understood that humans had to live and work in the real world. He went further: it was necessary for all citizens to be “useful to their country,” and in conformity with the “forms and means dictated to him by the direction and spirit of the state to which he belongs.” More specifically, he went on, he had at last come to terms with the need to find a vocation that would enable him to earn his bread and take up a useful place in society. Deftly combining his alleged new leaf with Fichte and Hegel, Bakunin now understood that “real external activity” was the only way to be happy. But what occupation, what profession, what vocation, would be suitable? Teaching was out—it didn’t pay enough, and was not snooty enough for someone of his station, family, and education. The military was right out, as was service and managing the estate. All that remained was to become a professor. That would let him combine his studies and his career, and would confer on him a suitable rank and position in society.

This required more education, he pointed out, and that could not be obtained in Russia. While the University of Moscow looked good, his formal education was limited, and he would have to start at the beginning. That was unseemly for someone his age—he was now twenty-six—especially as he would be behind his younger brothers. Furthermore, he would be required to take a number of courses he was manifestly uninterested in to meet the requirements for the degree, and could not take up his real subject of study. All told, it would mean losing four years at a time when he wanted to get on with his life. Only the University of Berlin would give him the training he needed as quickly as possible and equip him to sit the exams to take up a position at a Russian university, in either law, history, or, with luck, philosophy. He had now, he affirmed, the talent, drive, and perseverance to succeed; he was interested only in studying and would not waste his time abroad on “debauchery” and “orgies.” Having lived without money, he had learned its value, and was watching each kopek, living on cabbage soup and gruel. In short, he told his parents, their money would not be wasted, and after only three years, he could return to Russia to take up a post at a university and never have to ask for money again. He formally requested that his parents forgive his previous ways and fund his studies. One of his colleagues had assured him that he could live frugally in Berlin on two thousand roubles a year. If that were too rich, perhaps fifteen hundred roubles would do, and he could make some money writing articles and doing translations. In any case, he concluded, despite the troubles of the last few years and the injustices of his parents toward his sisters and himself, he loved his parents deeply. Nothing they had done justified his own disloyal actions, and he repented, sincerely and totally.[138]

Was he sincere? The letter was an admixture of earnest declaration, calculated rhetoric, wishful thinking, and hope, and perhaps Bakunin himself would be hard pressed to know which was which. Undoubtedly he very much wanted to go to Berlin and study, to take part in “real external activity” and perhaps even open the door to a career. Probably he was happy enough living in poverty if he could read and write, but if he had learned to take care of his money, the lesson was lost soon after; for the rest of his life he wracked up debt and borrowed from friends, family, and strangers alike. It is likely that he did regret the family controversies and the hard feelings, not just because it made borrowing money awkward but also because he loved his parents and siblings deeply. Perhaps it is enough to conclude that he was as capable of sincerity and self-deception, straight talk and duplicity, as any of us.

His father, still dubious enough to dub his son “Don Quixote,” was suitably impressed by his plans to agree to fund him to the tune of fifteen hundred roubles, contingent on the income of the estate and its new paper mill, and in any case not until the fall of 1840. Desperate to leave, Bakunin turned to a new friend, Alexander Herzen. The two met in early 1840, when Herzen, just returned from five years of exile, was keen to become involved again in the life of the circles. He and Bakunin shared a similar background, though Herzen’s family was much wealthier, and both were strident westernizers. Herzen was keen to learn about Hegel, and the two soon became fast friends. During the spat with Katkov, Herzen alone of the group sided with Bakunin. Of course, to be a friend of Bakunin’s was to be hit up for money, and Herzen agreed to lend him five thousand roubles for the passage to Berlin and his studies.

All was falling into place. Bakunin returned to Priamukhino in May to say his good-byes. He wrote enthusiastically to Stankevich, asking him for advice on studying, promising to write, looking forward to seeing him and his sister, delighted that the two were together. Tragically, Stankevich would be dead before the letter arrived, with Varvara Bakunin and their friend Efremov at his side at Novi, near Lake Como in Italy.

It would be some time before Bakunin would learn of Stankevich’s death. In the meantime, he was busy preparing for his trip. On 25 June, he arrived in St. Petersburg. He had come to peace with his family, but not with his friends. Katkov and he fought; Belinsky remained cold. He spent the three days before his ship left with Herzen and his wife, Natalie, and Herzen saw him off. He would not return to Russia for eleven years, and when he did, it would be in chains and under sentence of death.

[129] I rely here on the translation of “On Philosophy” by Martine Del Giudice in her thesis, page 442, and the French translation in Bakounine: Oeuvres completes. This chapter draws heavily on the analysis she advances in her article and thesis and on McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin.

[130] Belinsky and Kraevsky cited in Del Giudice, page 341.

[131] Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, rev. by Humphrey Higgens, New York: Knopf, 1968, volume 2, page 399.

[132] Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Boston: Beacon Press, 1960, page vii.

[133] Cited in Marcuse, page vii.

[134] Marcuse, page xiv.

[135] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Stankevich, 11 February 1840.

[136] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Alexandra Beyer, 22 February 1840.

[137] Belinsky cited in Del Giudice, Ph.D. thesis, page 32.

[138] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 24 March 1840.