12
Max Adler’s olympian distance from the political arena of daily life did not prevent the chaos of the earthly polis from affecting his reason. The man who had struggled so hard to penetrate to the truth of the immediate reality in order to see clearly the general will of the times, and thus be in the forefront and in control of the general will, was carried in the stream of blind passion that supported the “Day of the German Nation.”
For more than a year after the outbreak of the war, Adler struggled for an overview, a conceptual way to link the meaning of his present to the dogma of his past. A review of Adler’s publications in Der Kampf during the world war provides a psychic autobiography of one who sought to save his will from submersion in the common stream. As long as the Austrian state had remained within the fixed banks of its century-old channel and Vienna had served as the immovable and unmoving center of all inactivity, Max Adler could neglect the torpid presence of the state in his concern with the will of the individual. When the state began to erupt and move in all directions, fed by the volcanic flow of Germany, Adler’s dependence upon the state’s presence, hitherto unconscious, became a powerful shadow that overwhelmed his previous distance from it. For the first time, Adler began to consider the state in his writings; in fact, in his first flush of recognition, Adler became a patriotic enthusiast of the state.
Before 1914 the state for Adler was a spontaneous generation of individual wills, a mirror image of living personalities. In the first article he published during the war, an essay on Ferdinand Lassalle, the state became a body divorced from the human personality. In a subtle shift of consciousness, Adler followed the pattern of Karl Renner, another lover of Lassalle, in finding the state to be an organism prior to the presence of the individual. The Promethean task of avoiding the abstract ideas relative to the state, which necessarily subordinated one’s will to the impersonal “they,” a task once vital to Max Adler, was forgotten in an instant. On the threshold of his entry to a mass hypnosis, Adler confessed in this article, “This is no time in which to review one’s past and celebrate one’s memory, even when such memory is the solidity of spirit that could strengthen the present and prepare the way for the future.”1 He was subsequently cursed with the burden of following a will beyond his person.
Characteristically, the force that he followed for the first time was invested with pedagogical authority; the state assumed the role of teacher with “the task of developing the germs of humanity into man.” Seen in this light, what was formerly merely a negative presence of bourgeois power became a midwife of the spirit:
Today it is clear that what Lassalle designates as the essence and task of the state . . . stands in no way contradictory to a Marxist understanding. For the Marxist the state is the means whereby one is educated toward freedom, even though the historical state is also viewed by the Marxist as the compelling presence wherein the will of one class becomes the will of all. What may seem like a contradiction here ceases to be a contradiction when one regards the development in the historical structure of the state. For the historical structure of the state must pass through the various phases of class domination toward a form that allows increased freedom for the individual.2
Although at any given moment an individual might suffer from the seemingly arbitrary decisions that emanated from the impersonality of an unseen executive power, Adler held that with a proper understanding of the state as a historical structure that evolves toward a better organization for man’s freedom, the individual might accept with appreciation his own role in history: “One cannot go astray in the fevered heat of the times if he preserves the Marxist-Lassallean manner of thought. One is lifted above the titanic storm and stress of events with the Marxist-Lassallean conceptual tool, and the chaotic nature of the times assumes its true aspect as regulated laws of historical becoming. One who is aware of this knows that what immediately may demand all of his personal freedom, yes, even may mean his surrender to annihilation [des Untergange preisgibt] is in terms of the whole only a winding that history must take.3
The surrender of one’s personal vision to the exigencies of the time generated in Adler’s twilight zone of consciousness a need to reformulate the principles upon which he had based his existence. In an article appropriately entitled “Das Prinzip des Sozialismus,” Adler attempted to justify his support of the Austrian war effort with concrete economic and social arguments. The result, however, was merely a parroting of Karl Renner’s principle of social imperialism:
Certainly, the way things were before the outbreak of the war allowed the people no choice between war and freedom . . . no state wished this war, but every one was compelled to join it, for all states today are driven by the present system of economic organization . . . . Because the war is a historical necessity, an even greater necessity exists for the proletariat to win theoretical clarity over the causes that have led to the present situation, and to see the consequences that must follow from the present situation. Appropriate historical goals for the future must be developed out of the historical necessity of the present.4
A careful reading of this statement exposes the still small voice of Adler’s political conscience. Inevitably the question of human will rises to the surface of the stagnant water of Adler’s passive pursuit of other war aims and theories. To be sure, Adler calls upon the proletariat to win a greater understanding of their actions and a future policy consequent to their actions, but it is apparent that the proletariat is here a catch-all for Adler’s own guilt. Adler’s growing unrest with the easy answers that cloaked his war enthusiasm led to an article in April 1915 entitled “Was ist Notwendigkeit der Entwicklung?” (What is necessity of development?), which brought the problematic of historical determinism and individual will into sharp focus. This article served as a bridge that led Adler toward socialists who had not been seduced by the passions of the majority:
Above all one must protect himself from being trapped by the abstraction that social life is a kind of law above our heads, a fate which carries men beyond their will, making them happy or destroying them as it wills, allowing them only to observe the consequences. Social development is not the fate of men, however, it is their work. Nothing occurs to man that he himself has not prepared, only many are not conscious of their role in what occurs, thus it seems to such men that a great deal happens to them beyond their will. Such men point to some mystical objetive force of social development which in its loss of real presence in their immediate lives becomes an inexorable force that directs “mankind” where it will.5
Adler, obviously guilty of this syndrome, then makes a distinction between two kinds of “necessity of development,” one growing out of the decisions of “observers” and one out of the decisions of “actors.” For the man who passively observes the facts of his environment, the actions to which he submits take on the cloak of necessity, but, Adler stresses, the real necessity in one’s life can be found only within a conscious act initiated upon individual principle.6 One must set his own goals, not wait for them to be thrust upon him. Then, by way of example, Adler loses himself to the abstraction of the proletariat once more:
The war imperialism can only be a preliminary stage of socialism if the proletariat sets their own goals and forces the realization of these goals. Therefore it is of overwhelming necessity that the proletariat keep itself from being seized [anwandeln]7 with the imperialistic spirit and maintain its class-conscious ideology with all its strength. In this effort, however, not much can be done at the present time. Because the proletariat of necessity must defend their homeland, socialism assumes the same goal as imperialism . . . here the old proverb “When two people do the same thing it is still not the same” assumes special meaning.8
In Adler’s case the proverb underlined a “double-mindedness” that still could not differentiate his own goals from those inherited with the conundrums of his political party and its theory. The ideas of class and economic development still kept him paralyzed as an individual actor; he continued to observe the forces that existed around and outside of him. In June 1915, however, Adler removed one more veil between himself and responsibility for his own life. In an article entitled “J.G. Fichte ueber den wahrhaften Krieg,” Adler stated: “Even yet the nightmare [Alpdruck] of the first days of the war burdens the deeper perceptions of sensitive people. And what contemporary philosophy proves impotent to explain, classical German philosophy, the source of all thought, makes possible. Above all the voice of Fichte makes itself heard as a leader of our time.” Adler quoted Fichte as saying: “Only a war that proceeds from a state of reason, or lacking this state leads to its realization, can be called a true war . . . the justification of such a war does not lie in what we do . . . rather in how we do it, in what spirit. Only when a war is fought in a spirit that seeks to establish a realm of freedom for all is a war something other than a degradation of human culture.”9
Fichte’s philosophy of the isolated ego allowed Adler to regain the Olympus of intellect sacrificed a year before; Fichte’s idealization of a German nation became an archetype that allowed Adler to retreat from the chaotic world formerly graced with that appellation, a world in which he had vainly sought to keep step. Adler developed in silence a personal arsenal of theory with which he might confront his fathers. Between June 1915 and November 1915 we hear nothing from him. Then in the November–December issue of Der Kampf Adler returned to the public world as a man with a vision. His article “Weltmacht oder Volksmacht?” (world power or people’s power?), introduced the theme he would develop for the duration of the war. He returned to his major idea, the importance of the individual will in the face of group abstractions, but with an apparent self-consciousness of his former sins against this principle. He attempted in this article to awaken his fellow intellectuals to the unconsciousness with which they justified the war as a force of progress. He cried out against the “darkening of the intellect,” the “infinite self-delusion,” and the “admiration of all consequences without any critical attempt at understanding whatsoever” by members of Austrian Social Democracy. He continued that “history in the last years has not brought with it a genuine transformation or new ordering internally of social forces, it is in no way the result of a new creative unity of the people’s will, rather only the product of extraordinary misery.”10
The following month saw Adler’s first attempts to provide his fellow intellectuals with a positive program of principle for relating to society within a nation at war. In an article entitled “Ueber Kriegsethik” (Over war Ethics) Adler examined the question, What is reality, and upon the ground of his answer suggested a concrete basis for an intellectual to turn against participation in the war effort.11 In regard to the esoteric qualities of this article Karl Renner explained to Friedrich Adler, “Max Adler is very praiseworthy in his intentions, although I do not have any idea what the thing he discusses has to do with our people. Is it good to burden Der Kampf with such stuff?”12 Max Adler’s metaphorical path of argument provides the reason for Renner’s difficulty in finding a foothold upon that ground:
In Grillparzer’s profound fairy tale play Der Traum, Ein Leben,13 there is a passage with a wonderfully gripping power. As Rustan sees that he is hopelessly entangled in the net of his dream crime, and as his physical and mental existence stands on the verge of collapse, suddenly reality breaks into the life of the dream. He hears a bell ringing in the night, and for a moment the dream picture disappears, as he says to himself: “Listen, it rings. Three o’clock. The day comes, the dream is soon over! . . . When the day comes, then I am no longer a criminal. No, things will be as they were before, as I was before.” Since the outbreak of the world war there are many . . . who live within the nightmarish force of a horrible dream. . . . They stare into the world in which all that was formerly valuable to them now appears a valueless nonsense. . . . And no clock rings with its bright notes to release one from the torture of events in which he stands. . . . Philosophy could have been and should have been such a clock: for philosophy does not measure things in terms of the contemporary or historical, criteria that would involve one in the confusion [Strudel] of events, rather philosophy measures in terms of the pure laws of the human spirit. From the height of this tower of thought one may await with certainty the bell that will release him from the nightmare of events, from the compulsions and misery of the times, from the darkness of war in which all mankind has sunk.14
The timeless time, the bell removed from the ground of history, the bell of the human spirit above the confusion of the contemporary—such a bell was extolled as the salvation of the intellectual. The world of Vienna was relegated to the realm of dream life; Max Adler insisted that one live only in the daylight land of philosophy. One must dwell in the “ivory tower” above the masses until the healing light of day dispelled the crippling phantasms of the present. Adler’s use of Grillparzer to develop this ethic of intellectual withdrawal from the nightmarish world of the present embraces a tremendous irony: Grillparzer adapted Der Traum, Ein Leben from the original by Calderon in such a way as to emphasize how a dream might expose the seeds of good and evil within a man, a revelation that might transform a man’s consciousness of himself during the dream and, thereby, his later waking life.15 Adler, however, seems only to wish an end to his dream and sees Grillparzer’s play only as a paean to the reason of daylight, neglecting the self-revelation inherent in the nightmare. Instead of facing wartime Vienna and experiencing the hidden life that prompted his behavior in the first year of the war, Adler withdrew from the world and himself, awaiting an end to the painful pedagogy of the nightmare he sought to deny. Adler’s bad dream was Karl Renner’s new Europe.
The need for a conscious act founded upon individual principle within a society whose legal and informal norms jeopardize any individual action not within the ethos of the time, the state of a wartime nation, verges on martyrdom. Max Adler’s resistance to cooperative action, his puer aeternus attraction to pure idea, and his natural inclination to introverted relations to events channeled his desire for a significant act into a verbal cul-de-sac. He identified with martyrs of the past who “died for ideas.” His challenge would be to live for one. In an essay commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of Johannes Hus, he wrote: “To die for an idea which expresses the whole being and activity of he who is dedicated to death changes the character of death itself. It allows the most frightful death to appear as merely the highest completion of one’s own life, as a victory of the spirit and the will not only over the ignorance and evil of an opponent, but also over one’s own doubts and weakness.” Adler qualified this statement by saying that one who died for his “fatherland” did not really embrace the proletariat, the real backbone of the state; thus, since the idea the patriot died for was false, his death could not be a noble one.16 Friedrich Adler was taken by Max Adler’s reflections on courage and publicly commended the notion a month before he himself lived its words.17
Max Adler, however, managed to avoid any action that might expose him to violation of Austria’s war regulations. Although he had become a member of the radical Karl Marx Verein, Adler was among those members who discouraged any radicalism outside the closed circle of their discussion group.18 As might be expected, when the streets of Vienna were filled with revolutionary workers in January 1918, Adler took no overt action, although in that month’s Der Kampf an article by him appeared that would ironically highlight his schizoid separation between thought and deed: “Even if the political and labor union movement within socialism represents socialism’s two legs, they are still not the whole body, above all not the head which provides the intellect that allows the feet to march and gives the feet direction. The political and labor union movement . . . may have a socialist meaning if they wholly subordinate themselves to socialism.”19
Presumably, the article in which this statement appeared, an article commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, was written before the strikes began in January.20 Adler seems to be chiding the conservative nature of the political (Austrian Social Democracy) and union movements in Austria that monopolized the mantel of socialism; he was riding on the coattails of Friedrich Adler’s revolutionary act and the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Yet how macabre were Adler’s medieval metaphors of the corporate body when this appeared in print, enabling the workers to read of their dependence upon party intellectuals at a time when they were betrayed by the mental paralysis of that intellectual.
In the last year of the war, in the months that preceded the Austrian “revolution” of October–November 1918, Adler manifested an increasing radicalism in all his utterances. He was a more overt supporter of the Bolshevik revolution than any of the other Austro-Marxists, yet his enthusiasm was phrased more as a celebration of the socialist idea over the philosophers of the bourgeois world than as a social upheaval of the Russian proletariat. He wrote on November 16, 1917, in the Arbeiter-Zeitung:
The old proverb “Ex oriente lux” [from the East comes enlightenment] has assumed a new, wonderful, magnificent truth in our day. In the dark night of madness and horror the Russian revolution has kindled a torch of reason. . . . The whole world now follows with breathless tension the fate of the revolution, especially the international proletariat. One must learn to see the conformity of this historical struggle between the forces of light which promise a beautiful future and the powers of darkness which offer a hopeless present with the passion of one’s own reason and life interest [Leidensschaftlichkeit des eigenen Vernunft und Lebensinteresse]; moreover, one must stand with a clear understanding in the causes and goals of this historical event, and maintain an acute consciousness of one’s task which grows from this event, and becomes a compelling need for everyone, especially, however, for the proletariat.21
Russia’s every move after the Bolshevik revolution appeared to Adler as a realization of his dream—a state created by the general will. Adler stressed the consciousness and will of the Russian people and the selfless desire of the Bolshevik leaders to make way for the free development of the masses. As rumors of the violence in Russia came back to Austria and the Bolsheviks were pictured as barbarians by Social Democrats such as Renner, Max Adler excused the revolution’s excesses in the name of historical necessity. He compared the Bolshevik mission with that of Jesus Christ and his promulgation of a new faith and a new law, writing: “Didn’t Jesus Christ say when he sought to establish his teaching, that I come to you not to bring peace, but with a sword?”22 And when in October 1918 German Social Democracy settled for a coalition with the bourgeois and Junker parties in a new parliamentary government, Adler disappointedly compared this compromise with the stormy renewal in Russia: “Any democracy which did not arrive at that state through revolution, that is, through the fire of a new transformation of nation impelled by the revolutionary will of people who wish to destroy all the old and repressive institutions, carries already the mark of impotence upon its brow.”23
Adler’s hopes for Russia were a vehicle for his own desires for personal renewal and for a social milieu that reflected his ideal conceptions. Personal and social change for Adler, however, would require positive social interaction that improved upon the social norms that had led to the general betrayal of the socialist principle he abhorred. A moment of decision came to him in October 1918 as it had to Otto Bauer. Would he cooperate with the more radical elements of the socialist party and seek to found the socialist state, following the model of the Bolsheviks, or would he withdraw into the compliant antagonism he had shared with his fellow party members before the war? On October 29, 1918, the day before Karl Renner made official the Austrian Social Democratic acceptance of a constitutional monarchy, Adler wrote:
We stand already in the middle of the revolution, even if one must admit that revolution is not that which the police and legal minds of the state see it as, namely, street battles, blood justice, and the dissolution of all order, concepts of revolution completely foreign to us Socialists. For as Lassalle said, revolution means the victory of the new principle: the rule of a new spirit in the people which in one fell stroke tears them away from their old life and fills them with new energy and new tasks and with a determined will. A will with which they will fight if necessary until death—that is revolution. And this revolution in full progress in central Europe.24
Again Adler turned to Lassalle and a subordination to the state of things and the disparity between violent words and nonaction. When radicals, especially Austrians who called themselves Bolsheviks, attempted to bring the fiery transformation of the state as experienced in Russia, Adler clung to the constitutional womb of Austrian Social Democracy. He attacked the Austrian Bolsheviks as a “party of confusion” and insisted that socialism had come to Austria without need of violence. After all, he reasoned, Austria had become a republic a few weeks after Austrian Social Democracy began to govern, and the bourgeois elements of the state had never desired a republic; when such progress was possible in a matter of weeks, the possibilities for the New Man and the New Society were unlimited.25 Adler, never a politician, was able to rest in the delusion of the newness of the Austrian spirit throughout the crisis of decision and “revolution.”