• . . History seldom repeats itself, it uses every accident, simultaneously knocks at a thousand doors . . . doors which may open . . . who knows?
And again :
Human beings have an instinctive passion to preserve anything they
like. Man is born and therefore wishes to live for ever. Man falls in
love and wishes to be loved, and loved for ever as in the very first
moment of his avowal . . . but life . . . gives no guarantees. Life
does not ensure existence, nor pleasure; she does not answer for
their continuance . . . Every historical moment is full and is
beautiful, is self-contained in its own fashion. Every year has its
own spring and its own summer, its own winter and autumn, its
own storms and fair weather. Every period is new, fresh, filled
with its own hopes and carries within itself its own joys and
sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not
content with this, they must needs own the future too . . .
What is the purpose of the song the singer sings? . . . If you look
beyond your pleasure in it for something else, for some other goal,
the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will
only have memories and vain regrets . . . because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else . . . You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this
goal for which you [he means Mazzini and the liberals and the
socialists] are seeking-is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable?
or not? If it is, are we simply puppets? . . . Are we morally free or
are we wheels within a machine?; I would rather think of life, and
therefore of history, as a goal attained, not as a means to something
else.
And:
We think that the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does
grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child.
If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life
is death.
ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN
This is Herzen's central political and social thesis, and it enters
henceforth into the stream of Russian radical thought as an antidote
to the exaggerated utilitarianism of which its adversaries have so often
accused it. The purpose of the singer is the song, and the purpose of
life is to be lived. Everything passes, but what passes may sometimes
reward the pilgrim for all his sufFering�. Goethe has told us that there
can be no guarantee, no security. Man could be content with the
present. But he is not. He rejects beauty, he rejects fulfilment today,
because he must own the future also. That is Herzen's answer to all
those who, like Mazzini, or the socialists of his time, called for
supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the sake of nationality, or human
civilisation, or socialism, or justice, or humanity-if not in the present,
then in the future.
Herzen rejects this violently. The purpose of the struggle for liberty
is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them. To crush
their freedom, their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some
vague felicity in the future which cannot be guaranteed, about which
we know nothing, which is simply the product of some enormous
metaphysical construction that itself rests upon sand, for which there
is no logical, or empirical, or any other rational guarantee-to do that
is in the first place blind, because the future is uncertain; and in the
second place vicious, because it offends against the only moral values
we know; because it tramples on human demands in the name of
abstractions-freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,
mystical sounds, idolised sets of :ovords.
Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is
what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to
perform an act of human sacrifice.
This is Herzen's ultimate sermon, and from this he develops the
corollary that one of the deepest of modern disasters is to be caught up
in abstractions instead of realities. And this he maintains not merely
against the western socialists and liberals among whom he lived (let
alone the enemy-priests or conservatives) but even more against his
own close friend Bakunin, who persisted in trying to stir up violent
rebellion, involving torture and martyrdom, for the sake of dim,
confused and distant goals. For Herzen, one of the greatest of sins
that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral
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responsibility from his own shoulders to those of an unpredictable
future order, and, in the name of something which may never happen,
perpetrate crimes today which no one would deny to be monstrous
if they were performed for some egoistic purpose, and do not seem
so only because they are sanctified by faith in some remote and
intangible Utopia.
For all his hatred of despotism, and in particular of the Russian
regime, Herzen was all his life convinced that equally fatal dangers
threatened from his own socialist and revolutionary allies. He believed
this because there was a time when, with his friend, the critic Belinsky,
he too had believed that a simple solution was feasible; that some great
system-a world adumbrated by Saint-Simon or by Proudhon-did
provide it: that if one regulated social life rationally and put it. in
order, and created a clear. and tidy organisation, human problems
could be finally resolved. Dostoevsky once said of Belinsky that his
socialism was nothing but a simple belief in a marvellous life of
'unheard-of splendour, on new and . . . adamantine foundations'. Because
Herzen had himself once believed in these foundations (although
never with simple and absolute faith) and because this belief came
toppling down and was utterly destroyed in the fearful cataclysms of
1 848 and 1 849 in which almost every one of his idols proved to have
feet of clay, he denounces his own past with peculiarly intense indignation: we call upon the masses, he writes, to rise and crush the tyrants.
But the masses are indifferent to individual freedom and independence,
and suspicious of talent: 'they want a . . . government to rule for their
benefit, and not . . . against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter
their heads.' 'It is not enough to despise the Crown; one must not be
filled with awe before the Phrygian Cap . . .' He speaks with bitter
scorn about monolithic, oppressive communist idylls, about the barbarous 'equality of penal servitude', about the 'forced labour' of socialists like Cabet, about barbarians marching to destroy.
Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or
the wild barbarism of communism; the bloody sabre, or the red
Aag? . . .
. . . Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempestdreadful, bloody, unjust, swift . . .
[Our] institutions . ; . will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be