"By their raising of barriers against science the church and
religiousness have declared that they are what they always were, only
that this was hidden under another semblance when they were proclaimed
to be the basis and necessary foundation of the State----a matter of
purely private concern. Even when they were connected with the State and
made it Christian, they were only the proof that the State had not yet
developed its general political idea, that it was only instituting
private rights----they were only the highest expression for the fact
that the State was a private affair and had to do only with private
affairs. When the State shall at last have the courage and strength to
fulfil its general destiny and to be free; when, therefore, it is also
able to give separate interests and private concerns their true
position,--then religion and the church will be free as they have never
been hitherto. As a matter of the most purely private concern, and a
satisfaction of purely personal want, they will be left to themselves;
and every individual, every congregation and ecclesiastical communion,
will be able to care for the blessedness of their souls as they choose
and as they think necessary. Every one will care for his soul's
blessedness so far as it is to him a personal want, and will accept and
pay as spiritual caretaker the one who seems to him to offer the best
guarantee for the satisfaction of his want. Science is at last left
entirely out of the game."[94]
What is to happen, though? Is social life to have an end, and all
companionableness, all fraternization, everything that is created by the
love or society principle, to disappear?
As if one will not always seek the other because he _needs_ him; as if
one must not accommodate himself to the other when he _needs_ him. But
the difference is this, that then the individual really _unites_ with
the individual, while formerly they were _bound together_ by a tie; son
and father are bound together before majority, after it they can come
together independently; before it they _belonged_ together as members of
the family, after it they unite as egoists; sonship and fatherhood
remain, but son and father no longer pin themselves down to these.
The last privilege, in truth, is "Man"; with it all are privileged or
invested. For, as Bruno Bauer himself says, "privilege remains even when
it is extended to all."[95]
Thus liberalism runs its course in the following transformations:
"First, the individual _is_ not man, therefore his individual
personality is of no account: no personal will, no arbitrariness, no
orders or mandates!
"Second, the individual _has_ nothing human, therefore no mine and
thine, or property, is valid.
"Third, as the individual neither is man nor has anything human, he
shall not exist at all: he shall, as an egoist with his egoistic
belongings, be annihilated by criticism to make room for Man, 'Man, just
discovered'."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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