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ABSTRACT
The longing for total revolution described in Bernard Yack’s seminal book, which he analyzes as an effort to find a place for human freedom and morality in a world governed by natural necessity, can be traced to Reformation debates between predestinarian Calvinists and free-will theologians. These debates were reflected in Kant’s efforts to establish the very possibility of freedom and in those of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Considered in this light, the longing for total revolution is a yearning not merely to overcome dehumanization but to become something more than human, which must always come up short in the face of human finitude and mortality.
Notes
1 Quoted in Simplicius, Comments on Aristotle’s Physics (24, 13).
2 On this point, see Gillespie 2006, 44-100.
3 On this point see Funkenstein Citation1986. Funkenstein (Citation1992) rejected Blumenberg’s claims about the novelty of modernity, which Yack accepts.
4 Immanuel Kant, letter to Garve, 26 September 1798, in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Reimer, 1900-) 12:257-58. (He misremembers the order of the Antinomies here.) See also his footnote in the Prolegomena: “I wish that the critical reader would concern himself primarily with this antinomy, because nature itself seems to have established it in order to make reason in its most audacious presumptions perplexed and to require of it a self-examination.” Ibid., 4:341n.
5 The free-will theologians argued that a grant of human freedom is compatible with divine omniscience since God can foresee the choices individuals will make without foreordaining them. God in this way is saved from the implication that he is the origin of evil, and human beings can be held morally responsible for their choices and actions.
6 On this latter point see Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” and his “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.”
7 Kant’s view of human freedom is deeply indebted to the thought of the Pietist Christian August Crusius, who argued for absolute freedom, although at times Kant seems limited by Christian Wolff’s more rationalist view that human freedom is limited by the principle of sufficient reason.
8 “But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice.” CitationMarx [1844] 1959, 49.
9 CitationTrotsky ([1924] 1957, 256) later argued that through permanent revolution, man would be able to “raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman. . . . The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”
10 I develop this argument more fully in Gillespie Citation2017.
11 On this point see his early essay, The Greek State.
12 To affirm this doctrine is to take upon oneself all the joy and suffering of the world, or to be, as he alternately signed his last letters, “Dionysus” and “the Crucified.” Nietzsches Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, 18 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975-84), III 5:578
13 Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967-), VII 2:289; VI 1:198.