131214840-Carl-Schmitt

Page 61
of his own perfect knowledge of the phases of the historical past which lay behind him. He
would not think correctly and would contradict himself if this development were not most
deeply conscious of itself in his thought. If an epoch can be grasped in human consciousness,
then that furnishes proof for a historical dialectic that this epoch is historically finished. For
the face of the thinker is turned toward the historical, that is, toward the past and the passing
present; nothing is more false than the popular belief that Hegelians believed they could
foresee the future like a prophet. The thinker, however, only knows coming things concretely
in the negative, as the dialectical contradiction of what is already historically finished. He
discovers the past as a development into the present, which he sees in its continuous
evolution; and if he has correctly understood it and correctly constructed it, then there is the
certainty that this, as a thing known perfectly, belongs to the consciousness of a stage that has
already been overcome and whose last hour has arrived.
In spite of expressions such as iron necessity, Marx did not calculate coming things as an
astronomer calculates coming constellations of the stars; in the same way he was not what
psychologial journalism tries to make of him, a Jewish prophet who prophesied future
catastrophe. That Marx has a powerful moral pathos that influences his argument and
descriptions is not difficult to recognize, but it is not specific to Marx any more than is a
venomous contempt for the bourgeoisie. Both can be found in many nonsocialists as well.
Marx's achievement was to lift the bourgeois out of the sphere of aristocratic and literary
resentment and elevate him into a world-historical figure who must be absolutely inhuman,
not in a moral sense, but in the Hegelian sense, in order to appeal from an immediate
necessity to the good and absolutely human as its contradiction, just as Hegel argues that "it
can be said of the Jewish people that precisely because they stand directly before the gates of
heaven that they are the most profligate." 12 In Marxist terms it can only be said of the
proletariat that it will be the absolute negation of the bourgeoisie. It would be
Create PDF with PDF4U. If you wish to remove this line, please click here to purchase the full version