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From Marx To Hegel And Back: Capitalism, Critique, And Utopia 1st Edition
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The unity of theory and practice exists not only in theory but also for practice.
Geor G Lukács, History and Class Cons C iousness
Contents
Introduction 1
Part o ne On Marx’s Theory of Practice 7
On Culture and Civilization 9
Plato’s Republic and Human Flourishing 10
Rousseau’s Problem 12
On Property, Private Property, and Human Flourishing 16
Hegel, Recognition, and the Modern State 19
Hegel on Human Flourishing in the Modern State 21
Hegel and Economic Flourishing 24
Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right 29
Marx on Theory, Practice, and Changing the World 39
On the Marxian Subject 40
Feuerbach, Fichte, and the Marxian Subject 43
On the Marxian Alternative to Modern Political Economy 49
Marxian Political Economy as Economic Constructivism 52
Marx on Human Flourishing and Communism 55
Human Flourishing as Social Freedom 62
Part t wo Marx and Marxism on Materialism, Feuerbach, and Hegel 73
What Is Materialism? 74
Materialism in Marx’s Early Writings 82
Engels’s (Marxist) View of Feuerbach 89
Materialism, Idealism, and The German Ideology 96
Marx’s (Non-Marxist) View of Feuerbach 102
Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” 105
Vico, Materialism, and Constructivism in Capital 114
Materialism, Dialectic, and the Second Afterword to Capital 119
Excursus on the Reflection Theory of Knowledge 125
On Hegel’s Dialectical Theory of Cognition 133
Marx on Hegelian Dialectic 139
Part t hree On the Practice of Marx’s Theory, or the Transition from Capitalism to Communism 147
1. Transition through the Revolutionary Proletariat 148
2. Transition through Economic Crisis 157
Normal and Abnormal Economic Crises 161
Introduction to Marx on “Crisis” in Theories of Surplus Value 168
Marx Attacks Ricardo’s View of Profit 172
The Mature Marxian View of Economic Crisis 175
Financial Crisis and the Marxian Model of Economic Crisis 177
Economic Crisis and Value Theory 178
Limitations to the Falling Rate of Profit 183
Croce, Okishio, Piketty, and the Falling Rate of Profit 184
Critical Remarks on the Marxian Model of the Final Economic Crisis 187
An Excursus on Marx and Financial Crisis 189
3. Transition through Politics 193
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat 194
On the Practice of Proletarian Dictatorship 197
On the Withering Away of the State 200
Lenin on the Party as the Revolutionary Vanguard 201
Lenin on Democracy 203
Dictatorship over the Proletariat 206
4. Transition through Critical Social Theory 209
Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory 211
Critical Theory, or Critical Social Theory 213
Excursus on Pollock and Critical Theory 217
Pollock, Habermas, and Critical Social Theory 220
Habermas on Historical Materialism 222
Conclusion: Marx’s Dream 232
Notes 243 Index 275
Karl Marx was trained in classical German philosophy. Though he later became a political economist, in some respects he always remained a German idealist philosopher.1 He is, by any measure, one of the most important thinkers of modern times. In the middle of the nineteenth century he dreamed a powerful dream of an alternative vision of modern industrial society. His effort to solve the ancient philosophical problem of human flourishing provides a position as well as the criterion to evaluate it in his famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world but the point is to change it. In rejecting the suggestion that philosophy as such is useful, he formulates a view that neither overlooks nor isolates theory from practice, nor substitutes practice for theory. The practical possibility of such a theory is not evident but must be examined.
One of the differences between this volume and the usual way to approach Marx is that this book attempts as much as possible to understand him through his own texts rather than seeking to understand him through Marxism. Marxism was mainly created by and still often follows Friedrich Engels. It was initially formulated in the 1880s, shortly after Marx’s passing, at a time when many of Marx’s central texts were not yet available. They include a number of his most important writings: “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [Elements of the Philosophy of Right],” the Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, Capital volumes 2 and 3, and the Theories of Surplus Value. There are clearly political reasons for understanding Marx through Marxism
in continuing to maintain the fiction that Marx and Engels hold the same view but that, as is sometimes said, Engels explains it better. Yet there are clearly philosophical reasons to understand Marx through his own writings. Since Marxism was formulated before the majority of these texts were available, there is an obvious tendency to insist on various forms of the Marxist view of Marx that has historically often been defended against the view Marx works out in writings that in many cases only later became available. In parting with this tendency, this study will base its account of Marx’s position on what he in fact says as distinguished from what is often said in his name. For the present aim is not other than incidentally to find out what is living and dead in Marxism but rather to find what is living and dead in Marx.
This study breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in four main ways. First, it depicts the concern with the relation of theory to practice as arising in the tradition as early as Socrates and as constitutive of philosophy in its best moments. Second, it seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. Third, it relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, hence without special pleading of any kind. Fourth, it seeks to read Marx in his own context as well as from the present perspective in order to present, as far as possible, a wideranging, informed view of Marx for our times.
The need to read Marx not only in his own historical moment but in ours as well is obvious. This is a historical moment in which Marx’s contribution lies less in his possible contribution to bringing about revolution however understood than in helping us to understand the contemporary world. Since Marx stresses practice, and since the world has changed, we should no longer read Marx in the way that, say, he was understood by Vladimir Lenin shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. It is more useful to read Marx against the background of current problems and possible solutions. Hence one aim of this volume is to suggest a different way to grasp Marx at a time when, unlike the 1920s, it no longer seems as if the entire world, or at least Europe, is teetering on the verge of revolution.
Though I will often be critical of Marx, let me say that I regard his criticisms of capitalism in the middle of the nineteenth century as correctly identifying deep, persistent problems of modern industrial society that for the most part are unfortunately still with us. The difficulty lies less in the diagnosis, which mainly appears sound, than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound.
Marx, who died in 1883, is a rare original thinker. This study is largely concerned with piecing together, interpreting, and evaluating Marx’s over
all position, which he never presents in any single text. Marx’s view is more than usually difficult to interpret. He is not always a precise or clear writer. Further, few of his texts, with the obvious exception of the first volume of Capital, were intended for publication or even finished. His extensive bibliography is composed of often very interesting, important, but incomplete fragments that, taken together, represent Marx’s gigantic effort in a huge corpus over many years to work out his position.
Marx is often, indeed routinely, conflated with those who claim to speak in his name. Statements by influential Marxists are often taken as an authoritative description of Marx’s position. In places where Marxism is historically strong, such as the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China, Marx has often been and in the latter is still often studied through textbooks prepared by Marxists rather than through his own writings. This practice amounts to reducing Marx’s position to a form of ideology. His success or failure in addressing the problem or problems for which his theory was formulated is less often studied.2
Classical Marxism depicts Marx, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, as leaving philosophy behind in order to solve the problems of classical German philosophy. This Marxistinspired Feuerbachian approach to interpreting Marx is developed in different ways in the debate. These include the claim that Marx was concerned to leave philosophy, the idea that there is a socalled epistemological break between the early philosophical position and the later supposedly extraphilosophical scientific or at least more scientific position, the view that Marx seeks to overcome problems that German idealism is incapable of overcoming, and so on.
Yet it is false that he followed Feuerbach (or indeed anyone else) in leaving Hegel, or philosophy, behind. Marx is often depicted as leaving philosophy behind for science. According to Engels, Marx, in departing from philosophy, discovered the law of the development of human history. I will be describing Marx’s position, on the contrary, as a continuous series of developments initially arising out of his philosophical critique of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right and eventually leading without breaks of any kind to his alternative model, including his rival economic theory of modern industrial society.
Marx follows Socrates and many later thinkers in seeking to apply philosophical insights to the world in which we live. From ancient Greece to the present, selected thinkers have sought to bring philosophy to bear on a range of social problems. Socrates famously claims that the unexamined life is not worth living. In the seventh letter, Plato says that “the true philosophy . . . enables us to discern what is just for a city or an individual in every case and that the human race will have no respite
from evils until those who are really and truly philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in cities become real philosophers.”3 Others have been content merely to practice philosophy, secure, like Immanuel Kant, in the belief that it is in all its forms intrinsically useful.
I will be arguing that Marx does not break with but rather builds on his philosophical background in formulating his own distinctive position, initially through his dialogue with G. W. F. Hegel. This updated version of the struggle between the gods and giants ( gigantomachia peri tes ousias), or quarrel about reality, takes different forms running throughout his entire position.4 Marx does not turn his back on philosophy but rather strives to provide a distinctive new response to the ancient problem of human flourishing. This traditional philosophical theme arises in the early Greek tradition and assumes a distinctive new form in the modern tradition beginning with JeanJacques Rousseau.
The present work is, like Gaul, divided into three parts. The first section depicts Marx’s philosophy as a theory of human flourishing. It situates Marx within the broader ethical tradition from Plato onward, with special attention to Hegel but also to Johann Gottlieb Fichte and others.
The first section seeks to free Marx from his selfappointed Marxist followers to understand him through his own writings. It is well said that Marxism is a series of misunderstandings about Marx.5 Marxism makes the implausible, politically motivated suggestion that Marx’s view arose as a single position jointly invented and jointly held by Marx and Engels. In this way it directs attention away from important differences in philosophical temperament, training, and capacity. These differences emerge from crucial philosophical disagreements between them. Marx, who earned a doctorate in philosophy according to the standards of the day, was a product of classical German philosophy. Engels, who did not finish high school, was a philosophical autodidact. His views are often closer to positivism than to Marx’s own views.
Marx and Engels were closely associated over many years. They agree politically but disagree philosophically. Marxism claims their views are identical in attributing different roles to each of them. Marxism often depicts Engels as a philosopher and Marx as a political economist. It would be closer to the mark to say that Marx was a philosopher as well as a political economist, but Engels, who had many interests, was neither one. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels invented an influential but largely imaginary tale of how Feuerbach enabled Marx to escape from philosophy to science, from idealism to materialism, and, by implication, from ideology to truth.
The second section discusses aspects of Marx’s relation to Hegel in some detail in developing the nonMarxist interpretation of Marx presented here. It depicts Marx as a philosopher either within or at least close to the German idealist tradition. It argues that the Marxist account of Feuerbach as the key to Marx’s transition from idealism to materialism is false. It further argues that the traditional Marxist account of Marx as a materialist arises mainly through a series of misunderstandings invented by Engels and should be rejected.
Marx’s effort to understand the relation of theory to practice is not intended as an end in itself but rather as a means to transcend modern industrial society through the transition to a postmodern form of society often called communism (and less often socialism). The third section considers four main accounts of the transition from capitalism to communism, including the action of the revolutionary proletariat hand in hand with the philosophers, as following from an unmanageable economic crisis, as orchestrated by an organized revolutionary communist party, and finally as brought about by critical social theory.
Marx’s overriding concern is not to overcome Hegel and even less to overcome Feuerbach. It is rather to solve (or resolve) the modern version of the theme of human flourishing, roughly free and full development as a human individual in the social context. This theme takes different forms at different times. After Rousseau the ancient philosophical concern with happiness or virtue is transformed through the Industrial Revolution into the problem of freedom in modern industrial society.
Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others discuss this theme in different ways, though not under that name. According to Marx, human flourishing is not and cannot be realized in the modern industrial world. It can only be reached in the postcapitalist or communist phase for which capitalism is a necessary presupposition.
Marx’s answer to this theme arises through his dialogue with Hegel and others. Marx’s early text “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [Elements of the Philosophy of Right]” (1843)6 shapes his critique of Hegel, German idealism, and philosophy in general as well as his own alternative view. His “productive” misreading of Hegel’s view of the conditions and nature of human flourishing leads to his rival theory of this theme.
In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right Hegel answers Rousseau through a multilevel account of human flourishing within the confines of the modern world. Marx’s sharp critique of Hegel’s account of modern society that begins at the beginning of his intellectual career runs throughout his writings until the end of his life. In a sense, all of his later writings
are successive steps in his effort to go further than Hegel in formulating a multidimensional view of human flourishing in the context of modern industrial society.
Marx’s position takes shape as his response to the complex question of the transition from capitalism, the central element in modern industrial society, to communism, also known as socialism. The suggestion that theory must not only interpret but also change the world points toward the unclear, never realized, in all probability unrealizable transition from capitalism to communism as Marx understands it. Marx’s view is heroic, insightful, and in many ways still useful. Yet when judged by his own standard as a theory that not merely interprets but also realizes itself, his position fails. In other words, it fails as a theory that appears likely or even possibly capable of realizing itself in practice as he understands it.
It will be useful to say a word about the edition of Marx’s writings I will rely on here. Except for rare instances, I will be citing the Collected Works of Marx and Engels (CW ) published in fifty volumes by Lawrence and Wishart in London, also known as the MECW, or MarxEngels Collected Works. This edition is currently the most complete edition of the collected works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels translated into English. As such it is preferable to the MEGA (MarxEngels Gesamtausgabe), which, when it is finished, will be the definitive edition and when it is translated into English will displace the CW, but which is currently still a work in progress. I do not deny that there are better partial editions. The scholar may wish to verify particular texts in the MEGA edition. Yet, like the MECW, this study is not intended solely for the scholar, though it does not intentionally slight scholarship, but is rather intended for educated people everywhere. At present this aim seems best served by a more widely available, though less scholarly edition.
On Marx’s Theory of Practice
Philosophical views, like theories of all kinds, are formulated to respond to problems, enigmas, and puzzles of the most varied kinds. Marx’s main concern is a modern variation on the traditional ethical theme of human flourishing. This theme, which overlaps with such related conceptions as nature and nurture, happiness, self-actualization, human development, and other near synonyms, is as old as the Western philosophical tradition. It is, though not under that heading, anticipated by Socrates, stated by Plato, restated by Aristotle, and reformulated in modern times by Rousseau as what I will be calling Rousseau’s problem.
Rousseau asks the crucial question, In what social conditions, or in what kind of society, do human beings flourish and, if there is a difference, in what conditions do they flourish best? This theme emerges in the ancient tradition and runs throughout the modern tradition. It clearly engages Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Yet at present, after John Rawls, it is possible we are in the midst of a turn away from a concern with human flourishing and toward the more limited and perhaps less interesting question of what is just, not, as Plato asked, in the state writ large, but rather for the modern individual.1
Marx and Hegel react to Rousseau’s problem, and more generally to the modern world, in sharply opposing ways. In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and other texts, Hegel studies freedom within modern industrial society.
This is a theme he does not discover but analyzes in depth and embraces. He thinks finite human beings “recognize” themselves within the modern world. Marx rejects Hegel’s view of capitalism as even potentially an acceptable solution. He focuses on liberating individuals from the consequences of modern industrial capitalism, hence from the modern world, as a condition of flourishing in communism or a future social phase lying beyond capitalism.
Hegel was consistently interested in property throughout his career, starting with his early theological writings, then again in the early Jena lectures, before culminating in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. He approaches the modern state through a quasi-Fichtean conception of the finite human subject as basically active from the related perspectives of property, morality, and ethics. Hegel’s ethical theory builds on a number of predecessors, including Rousseau. Hegel regards Rousseau as the first thinker to recognize that free will is central to political philosophy.
Hegel shares Rousseau’s view of the unity of morality or, perhaps better, ethics and desire when the subjective desire is objectively right. Yet he rejects the idea of the noble savage who acts on immediate desires. Hence he turns away from the idea of the isolated individual subject in favor of a plural conception of the subject2 as well as from the social contractarian position to which the concept of the noble savage leads.
Hegel believes that it is only in spirit that one is free. He thinks that human freedom is a product of human history, which is finally and best attained in the modern state. We know that Marx was already reading Hegel as a teenager. The beginning of his lifelong dialogue with Hegel is his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s [Elements of the] Philosophy of Right” (1843), the essay that later led to his mature position; Marx initially encounters the problem of human freedom in modern industrial society in criticizing Hegel in the initial installment of a dialogue between these two conceptual giants that runs in different ways throughout all Marx’s later writings. Except for the introduction, this text was not published during Marx’s lifetime. The whole text, which only finally appeared in 1927, was not available as Marxism was taking shape.3
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel analyzes the problem of recognition in the context of an analysis of the relationship of master (Knecht) and slave (Diener). The Elements of the Philosophy of Right studies human freedom in the modern world, culminating in an account of recognition in the institutions of the modern state. Property is crucial to Hegel’s idea of modern self-recognition as well as to capitalism. According to Hegel, “A person, in distinguishing himself from himself, relates himself to another person, and indeed it is only as owners of property that the two
have existence for each other.”4 Marx denies the Hegelian view that we recognize ourselves in modern society, particularly through property.
It would be incorrect to claim that Marx calls attention to private property, which Hegel somehow overlooks. Yet their views clearly differ on this topic. According to Hegel, property is a basic form of social possession that gives a person status protected by contract and against crime with respect to others. Marx believes that private ownership of the means of production does not enable but rather prevents human selfrecognition, hence human flourishing in modern society.5 Hegel thinks individuals can and do flourish within the institutions of the modern world. According to Marx, an indispensable condition of human flourishing is to leave capitalism behind in making the transition to communism. Marx, for whom Hegel misunderstands the modern world, holds that we must change the world to bring about human flourishing.
The Marxian intention to change the world is a qualified restatement of the Aristotelian theory of the sublunar world in which we live. Marx’s position includes theories of the subject, modern industrial society, communism as opposed to capitalism, and human flourishing as real social freedom possible only under communism. These four views function as pillars of Marx’s solution to Rousseau’s problem of the real conditions of human freedom in the modern world. The Marxian conception of the subject arises in rejecting the Hegelian conception of the subject as the absolute, as well as the economic conception of what is often described as homo economicus, in favor of a modified form of the Fichtean view. Marx identifies capitalism and communism through the institution of private property. One of the great surprises is that Marx, who spent a life of enormous intellectual toil struggling to bring about the flourishing of human beings, and who wrote voluminously, said very little about how he understood this goal. He seems never to have identified a final view of human freedom. His solution to the theme of human flourishing in communism is perhaps best characterized through the shortening of the working day. I come back to this point below.
On Culture and Civilization
Human flourishing is studied in a bewildering series of domains including religion, medicine, sociology, philosophy, and so on. It includes such conceptions as happiness (eudaimonia), independence or self-sufficiency (autarkeia), virtue or excellence of function, health, welfare, full development, and so on. According to Christianity human flourishing depends
on reversing the fall. Augustine describes this approach, which for Christians of all stripes has always centered on a relation of finite human being to an infinite God, as returning from Athens to Jerusalem.6 Another approach is to understand culture and civilization as human constructions, in short as a series of indirect relations to themselves.
Human beings emerge within nature in constructing culture as well as, if there is a difference, civilization. It has been widely believed since Greek antiquity that human beings are social animals who naturally live in groups of various kinds, including the Greek polis and later cities and modern states. The city in all its many forms has a special role for human beings as a site for living, living better, and living well. In different ways the relation of humanly constructed surroundings to human flourishing, roughly what Aristotle called happiness (eudaimonia) as the consequence of excellence of function, has been on the agenda over a very long period. Plato’s Republic is an early effort to respond to this problem through a rationally designed city-state at a point in time when city and state had not yet been separated. The vocabulary and in part the problem changes in the modern tradition, where the ancient concern with happiness7 gives way to emphasis on freedom. In modern times human flourishing is understood as variously referring to self-determination or human development8 by Adam Smith,9 Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and many others.
Plato’s Republic and Human Flourishing
The relation of nature and culture attracted interest in early Greek philosophy. In the Republic, Socrates is challenged to demonstrate that justice is better than injustice. He responds by describing a just city that, since no one is self-sufficient, relies on cooperation for meeting human needs.10 The Platonic conception of the city-state echoes through the later debate, where it is understood in different ways. What for Hegel is only an empty ideal11 is for Martin Heidegger the very model for the Nazi state12 from the totalitarian perspective K. R. Popper rejects.13
In different ways, the theory of the rational state links politics, aesthetics, and epistemology. According to Plato, those engaged in cultural pursuits, including artists, sculptors, and poets, should be banned from the polis. For they do not and cannot know what they depict. This view supposes a mimetic conception of art that was the norm in ancient Greece. Nonphilosophical art must be excluded from the just polis that is based on philosophical insights. Plato contrasts philosophers, who
alone have access to reality, hence know, to artists, sculptors, painters, and others of all kinds who do not and cannot know. He depicts philosophers as the true artists, who construct a republic that, as a work of art in his sense, is simultaneously true, good, and useful.
The Platonic account of human flourishing is based on a conception of human being. The main insight is the conception of function (ergon) that, if properly exercised, constitutes human well-being. The basic argument emerges in the course of thinking about living better in a just state late in Republic, book 1. Socrates asks, in calling attention to a conception of human being underlying the theme of living better in the just state: “Do you think there is such a thing as the function of a horse?”14 This leads to an important argument linking function and virtue. A function is what someone or something alone can do or does better than anything else, and a virtue is excellence of function. Socrates illustrates this doctrine in pointing out that a horse has a function, or what one can do with it. In the same way, the function of the eye is to see and of the ear it is to hear. Socrates goes on to suggest that, if the soul is just, a person will live well.
The key insight is that a human being has a function best expressed in a particular kind of social context. Plato links his conception of human function to the organization of the city-state, or the individual writ large. The Platonic republic is conceived as a living work of art, in which, through division of labor corresponding to intrinsic capacity, each person is subordinated to the whole in exerting a function that that person is most capable or even only capable of performing.
Plato draws attention to a link between human capacity and human function that echoes through the later debate. He believes that living well—what Aristotle later thinks of as human happiness (eudaimonia),15 which is also sometimes translated as human function16 depends on excellence of human function in a social context, in short, in doing the job well for which one is assigned by nature as it were. This view echoes through the later tradition. In modern times, it returns as the idea of the division of labor in two ways. On the one hand, there is one’s specific capacity to be happy in a social context. Thus Aristotle describes human flourishing as an activity, or the exercise of virtue, also called excellence (arête), according to reason, a characteristic he understands as unique to human beings. On the other hand, there is the maximization of profit within the process of production condemned by Smith, Marx, and many others. Smith points out that, as Marx later emphasizes, especially in his account of alienation in the Paris Manuscripts, “the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are,
perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be. . . . But in every improved and civilized society this is the state in which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”17
Rousseau’s Problem
The problem of human flourishing takes different forms at different times. Plato bases his solution to the problem of human flourishing in the ideal city-state on his view that human beings have a fixed nature, hence a fixed social function. In modern times, Rousseau and others call this Platonic assumption into question. This assumption is understood from many different perspectives. In his influential version of human flourishing,18 Rousseau examines the Platonic assumption of a fixed link between human being and the social surroundings. In this way he transforms the theme of human flourishing, which the Greeks approach through happiness, into the problem of freedom in the modern social context.
In the seventeenth century, in Leviathan Thomas Hobbes is concerned with the problem of defending the mere possibility of life that, as he famously observes, is “nasty, brutish and short”19 through a social contract. When around a century later in the eighteenth century, Rousseau equally famously observes that “man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,”20 his objective in entering into a social contract is not merely life itself. It is rather a meaningful form of freedom in the social context as the central modern place of human flourishing.
The challenge Rousseau posed in the middle of the eighteenth century was interpreted in vastly different ways. Kant was deeply interested in Rousseau. He depicts the latter’s problem from a recognizably Aristotelian perspective in terms of the relation of morality and happiness. According to Kant, Rousseau, “in his Emile, in his Social Contract, and other works . seeks to answer this more difficult question: how must culture progress so as to develop the capacities that belong to mankind’s vocation as a moral species and a natural species? From this conflict . . . arise all true evil that oppresses human life and all vice that dishonors it.”21 In his “Handschriftlicher Nachlass,” he repeats his acceptance of Rousseau’s thesis in adding a kind of early ecological point about the proper relation to nature. According to Kant, humanity must strive for
“the unity of happiness and morality” that reaches its high point not in dominating nature but rather in enabling it to flourish.22 Other observers, including Hegel and Marx, treat Rousseau’s challenge as a problem of civilization.
There are in general three main modern solutions to the problem of human flourishing. These include, first, returning beyond the socially constructed context to an earlier, more primitive but clearly imaginary state of development, sometimes called the state of nature. Some observers think the state of nature is comparatively more advanced than alternative approaches to human well-being. Second, there is the concern to seek the human good not outside of but within the modern social context in all its many forms. Third, there is the view that it is only in transcending the modern social context, hence in leaving the modern world behind, that human beings will finally be able to become fully human. These three approaches can be illustrated through remarks concerning Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx.
At the time he wrote the Discourse, Rousseau already held the antiChristian view, strongly resisted by Roman Catholicism, that human beings are naturally good. We can leave to one side the problem of whether his view basically changed between the Discourse (1755) and the Social Contract (1762). In the latter work he raises the question that, as Shlomo Avineri notes, he was unable to answer, about “the gap between history and the good life.”23 In other words, how can we construct an authentic and true society in view of the evils and corruption of conventional society?
Everyone knows that, according to Rousseau, human beings, who are naturally good in the state of nature, are supposedly later corrupted by civilization. There is a close relation between the state of nature and human nature. Georg Lukács usefully notes that “nature” is understood in different ways. He points to differences among conceptions of nature as a mechanical model, beginning with Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, which is later restated by Kant; as a value concept; and finally as a series of human capacities supposedly thwarted in various social stages such as capitalism. The latter is discussed by J. C. F. von Schiller, the German poet, then by Hegel, and then in enormous detail by Marx, and is at least implied much earlier in Rousseau’s conviction that “modern social . . . institutions strip man of his human essence.”24
Rousseau is either uninterested in, or unable to grasp, the origin of this state of affairs in which in modern society human beings have lost their supposed original freedom. He seems to understand political legitimacy as deriving from a so-called common liberty that belongs to
human nature in the natural state. He takes as his political model, as Hegel later does, the family in which, since everyone is born free and equal, and individuals justly alienate their freedom for utility.
Rousseau bases his fictitious idea of liberty prior to and apart from the modern state in the equally fictitious state of nature that holds sway prior to government. This fiction was widely popular when he was active. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others think it is rational to leave the so-called state of nature to overcome deficiencies for which government is the appropriate remedy.
The general conception of the state of nature goes back to Thomas Aquinas and perhaps even to Aristotle. Modern social contract theorists characterize it in different ways. According to Hobbes, it is a realm in which “the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice . . . have no place.”25 But according to Locke it is a prepolitical state in which “the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”26 Hegel, though influenced by Rousseau, strongly denies that the state of nature is one of natural happiness.27 According to Hegel, “original sin” means that in the state of nature, which is immediate and uncivilized, one is in a situation from which one must liberate oneself.28 Hegel further objects that Rousseau’s idea of freedom in the state of nature misunderstands human beings as savages.29
In simplifying, we can say that Rousseau reverses the (shared) view of Aristotle and perhaps Aquinas that, since man is a social animal, the political state is natural for human beings in suggesting that it is unnatural. Human beings, who are naturally good, are corrupted by society. Through the general will (volonté générale) that applies equally to all and comes from all, the entire citizenry achieves sovereignty over itself in promoting virtues (e.g., liberty, equality, and fraternity) later enshrined in the American and the French Revolutions. Writing at a time when capitalism was emerging, Rousseau is misunderstood as rejecting the modern social context, hence civilization, which is unnatural, in favor of returning to nature. Rousseau rejects this suggestion in stressing, for instance in the Second Discourse, that he does not think that we “must . . . destroy Societies, annihilate thine and mine, and go back to life in the forests with Bears.”30
It is, in Rousseau’s view, not possible to return to the simplicity and happiness of the state of nature. Left unclear is how the general interests of all human beings, which on his account cannot be satisfied within
the modern world, which corrupts natural goodness, can be satisfied outside it. For Rousseau, the path to freedom does not lie behind but rather before us. According to Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau’s idea of freedom excludes a Kantian conception of free choice (Willkür).31 It rather presupposes, parenthetically in anticipating Kant, that the individual freely agrees to a strong law that he constructs, and which is the true and real nature of freedom.
Rousseau’s aim is to find a form of society in which everyone is protected and linked to everyone else, but in which the individual person obeys only himself. He finds the appropriate mechanism in what he calls the general will (volonté générale), through which each individual recognizes himself in the state. According to this view, the individual realizes himself in the state, which is constructed in a way that realizes the general will in which everyone participates, but not under the dictates of the state.
Though Rousseau says little about the general will, this conception is extremely influential. It is, for instance, restated in article 6 of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789): “Law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to contribute personally, or through their representatives, to its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, positions, and employments, according to their capacities, and without any other distinction than that of their virtues and their talents.”
Rousseau’s conception of the general will is controversial.32 It is sometimes objected that this concept anticipates the Marxist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Hegel’s nuanced view, the state is the actuality of the highest form of the ethical idea, and the individual has substantial freedom in the state.33 He like Smith thinks that in satisfying individual needs in civil society one in fact also satisfies the needs of others.34 But he also argues that Rousseau’s general will, which is not grounded in objective reason, necessarily leads to the terror exemplified in the French Revolution. A similar view is held by others as well, for instance, Benjamin Constant.
If the general will, unlike the will of all, reflects the common interests of everyone, as Denis Diderot thinks,35 then Rousseau can be read as suggesting that the modern social context falls below that standard. For instance, as he indicates, in certain circumstances the general will is subordinated to the purposes of individuals who distinguish their private interests from the common interest.36
On Property, Private Property, and Human Flourishing
The debate on property goes all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy and includes many views, including those of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau, John Locke, and others. The views on property are very disparate. Locke, for instance, argues that property that is acquired justly is just and Marx that it is unjust in all its many forms in impeding and even preventing social freedom. Yet Hegel, who by inference presupposes that there can be just property, suggests its crucial role in achieving freedom in the modern social context.
The discussion of property or private property starts very early. In the Republic, Plato indicates that the guardians must have neither silver nor gold nor private property.37 He further insists on specialization, which he justifies on economic grounds as key to justice in the state.38 When Socrates describes the living situation of the guardian classes in the ideal city,39 he is clear that personal property will be sharply limited. When he discusses the kinds of regulations the rulers need to have in place for the whole city, he is again clear that the producers will have enough private property to make the regulation of wealth and poverty a concern.40 In the Laws, a dialogue left unpublished at his death, Plato alters his earlier economic views in arguing that virtue is incompatible with great wealth.41 Plato now argues that property must be held in common in order to provide for common pursuit of shared goals. Hegel thinks that through private property, but not through possession of the means of production, someone comes to exist objectively and not merely abstractly.42 Hence in and through private property an individual comes to exist as a person.43 In other words, property is the condition of development of the person.44
Plato counts as a critic of this institution. But Aristotle is a nuanced defender of the right to private property. The exact nature of Aristotle’s view of property is, like much else in his position, a matter of debate. Yet it is clear that he favors ownership as the best way to serve the common good,45 that he discusses legitimate ways to acquire property,46 and that he opposes confiscation of property as unjust.47
In the modern debate property is centrally important in different ways for Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and others. Private property is understood differently by those who, more or less distantly following Locke and have in mind ownership of land, and Marx, who focuses more broadly on private ownership of the means of production, including land and other means. Rousseau criticizes but does not oppose private property, though
his view is inconsistent. In his “Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind,” he attacks private property. But in his articles on political economy in the Encyclopédie, he describes this right as more important even than freedom. Further, in Emile he says property infects everything it touches, and in the Social Contract he contends that work will protect the person and property of its associates.48
In the Social Contract, Rousseau rejects Locke’s view that any individual can appropriate property. Rousseau claims that this person is the “true founder of civil society,” which leads to countless horrors due to “forget[ting] that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to nobody!”49 Hegel, on the contrary, insists on the importance of the modern institution of property in the account of abstract right, which begins the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. He sees property as necessary for human freedom in the modern social context. In his examination of that work, Marx does not attack property in general but rather private ownership of the means of production. He regards this institution not as useful but as pernicious, and as the main obstacle to human development in modern industrial society beyond the realization of the very minimal capacity to meet basic or reproductive needs. Here and in later writings, Marx simply assumes without argument that private property in all its forms is illegitimate, hence that it is legitimate to do away with it. In this way he rides roughshod over a practice that many think is an important, indeed vital component of human development, in simply ignoring the many efforts to justify this institution.
Many different defenses of the institution of property have been devised.50 Marx, who apparently never examines any of them, rejects the institution as such in all its forms in favor of communism lying beyond the institution of private property, whose justification lies in its contribution to the solution of the problem of human flourishing. Marx’s aim is not to bring about communism, which is not an end in itself, but rather a crucial means to realizing human freedom in postindustrial society. Marx thinks that human freedom is only possible, if it is possible at all, in a political regime in which the absence of private property, which impedes rather than fosters human development, is not an exception but rather the rule.
In the modern world, there seem to be two main justifications of the institution of property, including the relation of human beings to God and through natural right. Both defenses suggest that property is not due to theft, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon thinks and Marx accepts, but rather is in fact earned. The former view is discussed by many authors, such as Samuel von Pufendorf. According to Pufendorf, “Things were
not yet assigned to certain individuals, there was a tacit convention that each man could appropriate for his own use. . . . And such a universal use of things in some way took the place of proprietorship, while, what a man had taken in this way, another could not take from him without doing him an injury.”51 The latter view is identified with Hugo Grotius, Locke, and others. Grotius writes:
now, as there are some things which every man enjoys in common with all other men, and as there are things which are distinctly his and belong to no one else, just so has nature willed that some of the things which she has created for the use of mankind remain common to all, and that others through the industry and labor of each man become his own. Laws moreover were given to cover both cases so that all men might use common property without prejudice to any one else, and in respect to other things so that each man being content with what he himself owns might refrain from laying his hands on the property of others.52
The latter view is enormously developed by Locke.
We owe to Locke an important anticipation of the labor theory of value as well as the most influential modern view of the legitimate acquisition of private property. The basic insight is in all cases that an individual possesses the fruits of his own labor, since his body is his own. According to Locke “the Labour of his Body and the Work of his Hands . . . are properly his.”53 Locke suggests that value is created by labor when he writes, “For ’tis Labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing.”54 He also writes, “From all which it is evident, that though the things of Nature are given in common, yet Man has still in himself the great Foundation of Property.”55 He further claims in many places, for which a single passage shall suffice, that in mixing one’s labor with nature one justifiably acquires it as private property: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby make it his Property.”56
Marx agrees with Locke that value is created through labor, which belongs or at least ought to belong to the individual, but denies that either an individual worker or indeed anyone else can justifiably acquire private property. Yet Marx fails to mount an argument that this acquisition is illegitimate. His view further seems inconsistent. For if the worker fails to but ought to possess the results of his work, and if as Locke says he mixes his work with nature, the result should belong to the worker. That is, unless one takes the stance that nature cannot belong to any single human being, since, as some religious thinkers hold, it belongs to God.
Hegel, Recognition, and the Modern State
Since Marx begins to formulate his position in reacting against Hegel’s theory of the modern state, it will be useful to describe this theory in more detail. Rousseau and Hegel divide about the proper response to political Platonism. Rousseau, who proposes a kind of political anti-Platonism, relies on the general will as his criterion. He thinks that the human good cannot be found in the social context either as it exists or could exist unless it instantiates the general will. From his perspective one must not and cannot decide in the name of the people, who must rather determine for themselves their shared general interest. For Rousseau, who seeks to navigate between the natural state and the never-reached instantiation of the general will, the modern world is only a “false” construction in which human beings do not and cannot recognize themselves.
This controversial view has provoked many responses. Kant points out that the rational will is, as Hegel later insists, first realized in the state. Hegel thinks that in the social contract Rousseau conflates a romantic concept of freedom as mere caprice and real social freedom. According to Hegel, the universal will is not rational because it includes all the individual wills, but rather because it is rational.
Hegel understands the impulse behind Plato’s Republic as an unsuccessful, in fact counterproductive effort to counter destructive forces present in then contemporary Greek ethics through a mere idea. He rejects this effort in preferring ideals to ideas.57 According to Hegel, philosophy, which cannot knowingly transcend its own historical moment, must comprehend the state as it is, not as it ought to be. He follows Fichte in understanding human being as essentially active in adding his own neo-Aristotelian view that all human activity of whatever kind is goaldirected, hence always rational. It follows that it as well as its results are always graspable through reason.
Hegel offers a complex argument for the conclusion that human beings flourish in the modern state, which, since human activity is intrinsically rational, he understands as “an inherently rational entity.”58 This does not mean that Hegel absurdly endorses all forms of the state. It also does not indicate that he endorses the state of his own time after the Prussian reformation. This criticism was raised against the Elements of the Philosophy of Right by a number of Hegel’s contemporaries. It is still often raised by his Marxist critics, but there is inadequate proof in the texts.
According to Hegel, human beings relate to each other in different ways that are antagonistic, violently antagonistic, or nonantagonistic
and that in the best of circumstances culminate in mutual recognition, whose most significant form is love. Mutual recognition leads in different directions depending on the form it takes. One form is the deeply destabilizing force unleashed through awareness of one’s function within the modern capitalist framework that Lukács identifies as the class consciousness central to Marx’s understanding of modern industrial society.59 This centrifugal force does not stabilize but rather destabilizes the modern state. It is at the root of many freedom movements, recently in what has come to be known as the Arab Spring. Another form is selfrecognition or recognizing oneself in modern industrial society. This depends on the existence of various structures that make it possible for an individual to find oneself, so to speak, in the modern social world. Recognition is accompanied by consciousness and at its highest level by self-consciousness. It is not immediate but is rather mediated through modern social institutions and practices that belong to the framework of the modern state.
We can reconstruct Hegel’s argument through his views of human activity and recognition.60 The basic insight of mutual recognition is apparently first mentioned in Fichte’s initial version of the Wissenschaftslehre (1794). Under Fichte’s influence, the concept of recognition emerges in the early Jena Realphilosophie (1805–1806), which belongs to Hegel’s Nachlass. Hegel, as noted, develops this insight into an important theory in later writings, including The Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
The different kinds of recognition include recognition between individuals and of an individual in the state. In the former case, an individual can be said to accord recognition to, or acknowledge recognition by, someone else. This kind of recognition is two dimensional. According to Hegel, an individual reaches self-consciousness as a consequence of being acknowledged by another person. In the Phenomenology, recognition is linked to desire (Begierde), which forces human beings into the social surroundings to meet their basic needs, including the need for recognition from others. This view was later developed by Marx in the Paris Manuscripts. The relationship between two or more individuals can either be one of equality or inequality as in the case of friendship, as discussed in detail by Aristotle, or love, as described more rapidly by Hegel. The relationship can also be unequal, as in the so-called master-slave relationship that arises in the debate as early as Plato.61 This interaction takes two main forms. One form is the situation in which the master kills the slave, which in turn definitively stultifies the drive for recogni-
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in vain. There were colors in the weapons such as Miller had never seen.
“Photon showers,” Llesi told him briefly. “Very high-frequency light waves with an energy increase great enough to utilize the mass of the light. Those latticed patterns would be smashed by the impact—if we could reach them.
“When you deal with anything as delicate as this you need a delicate weapon. The lattices would be impervious to heavy weapons but the mass of light itself could crush the patterns if I had some way to penetrate the cloud.”
“The photons should do it,” Orelle said in a worried voice. “Always before—”
“Brann has something new this time.”
The cloud rolled on. Through the shattered walls they saw it engulf the men in its path, moving like a velvet-soft juggernaut that crushed all before it. It pressed its misty surface against another wall —there was a surging all through the mass and, briefly, a pattern of clouded lights glimmered deep in the smoky bulk.
The castle rang with the jangled music of another falling wall.
“It’s making straight for the Power,” Orelle said, quietly now. “Llesi, you’ve got to stop it.”
Miller felt in his own brain Llesi’s rapid, orderly thoughts, marshalling the facts and measuring against them his varied resources. Then, decisively, he spoke.
“We must get to the Power first. I can stop it but we’ll have to hurry.”
To Miller it seemed as if the castle spun around him again as, in obedience to the orders in his brain, he whirled and ran with Orelle at his heels. The corridors opened up before them, unfamiliar pathways looking strangely familiar to the double vision in his mind. Another wall smashed into ringing fragments behind them as they ran.
With his new night-sight Miller could see a long way through the translucent walls of the glass castle. Lights had been kindled through the building now so that the glimmers, far and near, reflecting beyond intervening barriers, made the whole castle glow bewilderingly.
But ahead of them, growing larger as they neared, was one part of the building that even this new sight could not penetrate. It was a great cube whose walls gave back the vision opaquely, as it loomed before them.
Orelle pushed past him as they reached it, spread both hands flat upon the dark surface. It parted before her, melting away as the other walls melted to admit entry, and she pressed through into the hidden room. Miller followed her, his brain spinning with his own curiosity and the complicated planning of Llesi who shared it.
Afterward Miller could never remember clearly what he had seen in that great dark room. He had only an impression in retrospect of an immense number of delicate shining things that might have been instruments—of countless rows of containers over which light seemed to ripple and play from within the colored holders, like votive lights seen far off down the aisle of a cathedral—of things without name or recognizable shape. . . .
In the center of the room, hanging in the heart of a filligreed framework which it did not seem to touch anywhere, a clear transparent cube three feet through floated free. Within it a tilted halo of—of stars?—rotated slowly through the solid substance of the block. And very faintly, Miller thought he could hear music as it turned, the same music he had caught from the night sky, subsonic but still perceptible to his new senses.
“The Power,” Orelle said, nodding toward the cube.
Miller went forward slowly until he stood by the delicate framework within which the block floated. He could feel a slight pressure constantly beating out from the rotating stars, and at the same time a slight equal suction—an impossible sort of double force that did not equalize itself but kept him in a continual state of muscular readjustment to balance the opposite pulls while he stood within its range.
He was trying to control the excitement that poured through him at his nearness to this unimaginable thing he had come so far to find. Slade would give all he had to possess it for, inexplicable as it was, there was a harnessed power in the mysterious thing unlike any power at man’s disposal in the lower world beyond Peak Seven Hundred.
Then, in his brain, Llesi said impatiently, “Later you can examine it. I need you now, if we’re going to stop Brann’s beast. Turn around —go to the far wall, reach up to that container of blue light and. . . .”
Miller’s conscious mind ceased to make sense out of the orders Llesi gave it but his body was obedient. He did not try to resist. He relaxed his own will and allowed Llesi full control, so that he was only dimly aware of what his body did in the next few minutes. His hands were busy, and there was an intense, quiet activity in his mind.
An activity that gradually began to slow. Lights swelled and sank beneath his busy fingers. Heat and cold and other stranger sensations he could not name bathed his hands and arms, beat against his intent face bent above them. But into his mind slowly a sense of frustration crept.
He made an effort to bring his own mind back into focus and asked Llesi a quick mental question.
“I don’t know,” Llesi’s mind replied. “It isn’t easy. I think I can stop the thing but at a cost we can scarcely afford. And I could only do it once. Brann will know that. He’ll have only to send another just like it and—” The thought blanked out as if even in his subconsciousness Llesi did not want to shape the end of that idea.
Miller put forth greater effort and shrugged off the inertia of his mind which had been necessary while Llesi worked. He was keenly alert now. He had a job to do.
“Will you listen to me?” he asked. “I think I’ve got an answer—if you’ll trust me.”
Llesi’s reply was wary but there was eagerness in it too. “What do you want us to do?”
“Tell me first—can you duplicate this Power source?”
With a double accord both Llesi and Miller turned to gaze at the floating cube with its lazily rotating halo of glittering light.
“I can, yes,” Llesi said. “Why?”
“Easily? Soon?”
“Not in time to stop Brann’s creature, no. It would take several hours.”
“Then,” Miller said, bracing himself for the storm he knew must follow his suggestion, “then I think you’ll have to let the thing
downstairs take your Power and carry it back to Brann.”
There was a mental explosion of fury and refusal.
After it had died down, while Orelle still gazed at him with burning dark eyes full of distrust and hatred, and Llesi still smouldered angry thoughts in his brain, Miller went on.
“I know—I know. In your place I’d feel the same. But look at it dispassionately if you can. Brann has you where he wants you now. You can only drive off this mechanism downstairs once and Brann can send another to take the Power source anyhow. If you stay passive you’re beaten. But listen to me—and maybe you can still win. Attack! Let the Power go—but follow it.”
There was silence for a moment, while the two others digested this idea. Then Orelle said, “We could only follow to Brann’s walls. We’ve never been able to get into his castle and—”
“Don’t you see, this is the only way! He’ll have to make room for the cube of the Power to enter. If we follow, there ought to be a way for us to force an entry too. Especially if he doesn’t suspect. Oh, I know—you think I am Brann. I wish there were some way to—wait! Could you read my mind if I opened it to you? Would you believe me then?”
Slowly Orelle said, “I think it might be possible. Are you willing to let me try?”
Miller hesitated for a moment. There is a curious reluctance in the human mind to strip aside the last dark barrier that separates each individual from the world he lives in. The privacy of the mind is so jealously guarded a secret that not even if a man wills it can he wholly bare his thoughts to another. But unless Miller let Orelle into those innermost chambers there was little hope of success for any of them.
“If I don’t,” he thought, “Brann will win, in the end. And if he wins —well, I have more to lose than anyone here.” Aloud, in his mental voice, he said to Orelle, “Yes—try if you’re able.”
She smiled a little. “Let your mind go blank. Don’t offer any resistance—no, none at all—you are resisting me, Miller. Let me have the truth. Brann—Brann . . . are you Brann? I must know. . . .”
Her eyes held his and, as they had done once before, began to grow larger and larger until they blotted out the room and were a
dark pool in which his consciousness was sinking.
“Thank you,” Orelle said quietly. “I’m sorry. You were telling me the truth all along—unless you’re more cunning than I think you are and know how to hide your secrets even deeper than the unconscious mind. I see that you mean us well. I see another thing, too—why you came here.”
“Yes. You had to know that anyhow. It was why I asked about duplicating the Power cube.”
“He wants to take it away with him, Llesi,” Orelle said and for the first time Miller realized that Orelle had been in even closer communion with his mind than Llesi himself, who dwelt in its very center. For Llesi had not seen the depths of it—he did not know what Orelle knew now.
“To take it away?” Llesi demanded, incredulity in his thought. “But —”
“Yes,” Orelle said quickly. “We could arrange for that, Llesi. If this plan works well owe him more reward than that.”
“But Orelle,” Llesi persisted, “doesn’t he understand? Doesn’t he know that—”
The thought ceased abruptly, and Miller had the uneasy feeling that the two were communicating on some higher plane of silence where he could not follow them. He was suddenly uneasy. There was something here he didn’t understand. The two of them knew something—about himself?—that he did not yet know, something that affected his future intimately.
“What is it?” he demanded. “If I help you, I’ve a right to know.”
Orelle turned to him, her dark eyes gentle now, the hatred and mistrust gone out of them. “There isn’t time,” she said. “Listen.”
Far off, but audible through the opaque walls, the tinkle of falling glass came clearly to them.
“It’s the machine,” Llesi said. “We haven’t time to waste now. If we follow your plan we mustn’t let it win too easily or Brann will suspect. Do you have any ideas of what to do after we enter Brann’s castle?”
“Not yet,” Miller said almost absently. He was thinking hard about the strange little passage just ended. Until this moment he had not dared offer to open his whole mind for their inspection, because he
had had nothing to bargain with. Inevitably Orelle would have seen that he wanted the Power and he had nothing to offer in return—until now.
Well, it was a success in one way, but in another—failure? He couldn’t be sure. Oddly the balance had shifted and it was he who mistrusted his companions and they who believed at last that he could be depended on. Certainly they were hiding something vital from him.
“Not yet,” he said again, forcing his mind to take up the immediate problem as the jangle of another falling barrier came more loudly through the walls. “I only know it’s easier to work on inspiration when you’re on the offensive—and once in Brann’s castle, we’ll need inspiration!
“Brann’s—unbalanced. We know that. Push him farther off balance by attacking and maybe we’ll have an advantage. You know, there must be something important he’s hiding or he wouldn’t operate from the dark as he does. If we can see him face to face— well, who knows?”
“When you say ‘we’,” Orelle interrupted, “whom do you mean?”
“Myself. Llesi and me.”
“And Orelle,” the girl said quietly.
“Of course not! It’s going to be dangerous. Besides—”
“No more dangerous to go than to wait for Brann’s vengeance if you fail. Tsi is my sister. I think I can control her and that should be a weapon you may need. You can’t take more than one or two with you if you hope to get in secretly so an army would do no good. But one companion—I think I could be useful to you, Miller.”
“Llesi,” Miller said to the voice in his brain, “what do you think?”
There was silence for a moment. “Let her come,” Llesi said. “What she says about Tsi is true enough. We may need her.”
In the quiet a musical ringing of more breaking glass sounded clearer than before.
“It’s coming,” Llesi said. “Now we have work to do. Are you ready, Miller? Take down that lens mounted on the tesseract and do as I tell you. We mustn’t let the machine win without a struggle. . . .”
CHAPTER VII
Battle of the Titans
In the light of earliest dawn they could see it rolling toward them far off across the plain. Crouching under the loom of Brann’s castle walls, Miller and Orelle waited almost in silence. It had seemed wisest to hurry ahead by teleportation and take shelter while Brann was presumably occupying all his powers with the direction of his mechanical warrior as it broke down the walls of the Power chamber and seized at last the thing he had sought so long.
Now the two watchers—three, for Llesi waited in Miller’s brain— saw the lazily turning halo of pointed lights which was the Power glowing through the cloudiness of the machine that carried it. Faintly the soundless music of its turning floated to their ears.
“We’ll have no time to waste,” Llesi warned them. “Brann’s wanted the Power for a purpose, you know. Once he learns how to use it there’ll be no hope of controlling him. Whatever we do we must do fast.”
“Can he learn quickly how to operate it?” Miller asked. “You’re thinking of yourself.” Llesi sounded amused. “Yes, it can be mastered without too much difficulty. But don’t think about it now, Miller. You have our promise. Be content with that.”
Miller stirred restlessly. “You’re hiding something. I’ve opened my mind to you, Orelle. If I deserve any reward for what I’m helping you do I deserve the truth from you. What is it?”
Orelle shook her head. “Don’t ask us now. I’ll tell you if we come out of this alive. But it will only distract you now. I promise you it’s nothing that will affect our plans to conquer Brann. You need all your thoughts to do that. Afterward there’ll be time to talk of other things. Look—it’s nearly here. I wonder where Brann means to let it into the castle.”
The music of the turning stars was clearer now. Miller could feel remotely that extraordinary attraction-repulsion action which the Power constantly exerted—it was so near to them as they crouched in hiding. The machine rolled its cloudy bulk past them, almost
brushing their faces with the periphery of its mist, and moved up over the jumble of rocks that bordered Brann’s castle.
It pressed close against the surface of the wall. Light glowing down from that extraordinary barrier which ran like water and shone like fire cast colored shadows upon the mist, so that it was like a cumulus of sunset-lighted cloud as it flattened itself against the wall.
Miller could see Orelle’s anxious face lighted with strange hues from the water-wall as she watched. He held his breath.
Within the sunset cloud patterns of latticed diamond moved and shifted. The wall surface dimmed as if a breath had blown upon it. Darkness grew where the dimness was—and suddenly a door had opened in the streaming water-light of the barrier.
“Now!” Llesi breathed. “Now—follow it in!” She rushed forward.
There was one breathless, heart-stopping moment when the rocks turned beneath their feel and Orelle, stumbling, nearly fell. The darkness of the opened door was already beginning to mist over with solidity when they reached it.
“Dangerous.” Llesi’s thought flashed through Miller’s brain, lightning-like, far faster than it takes to express in words. “If we miss the turn of the wall-substance we’ll be caught in the solid mass. Hurry! Never mind making a noise. Hurry!”
It was like pushing through a thin jelly of darkness that gave way readily enough but thickened perceptibly even as they moved. “Don’t breathe!” Llesi warned them. “Hold your breath if you can—I think you’ll be through in a moment.”
The substance of the wall was a stiff, scarcely yielding stuff by the time they pushed free into clear air. They had made it with nothing to spare. Orelle reached back to touch the surface with a wondering hand as soon as she caught her breath, and the way they had come was already a solid resilient surface that lost its resilience as she pressed it and became hard unyielding wall again.
They stood in a steeply sloping corridor that echoed with the thin voiceless music of the Power Ahead of them the slowly spinning stars were visible through cloudy grey moving rapidly up the ramp away from them.
Silently they followed.
They were far down under the main floors of the castle. On their left, as they climbed the steep ramp, the wall of flowing light moved ceaselessly, tracing their shadows in the inner wall of the corridor.
“Somewhere there must be guards,” Orelle said.
“I’d feel better if we’d seen some before now,” Llesi told them uneasily. “I have a feeling Brann may be more omniscient than we know.”
The ramp came to a steep end and turned back upon itself in a second long zig-zag rise. They toiled up in the wake of the cloudy robot that carried the Power. Still no guards.
The ramp zig-zagged twice more and then there was a great open area, like a spacious chimney, rising overhead. The ramp had ended. Lightly, like the cloud it was, the robot left the ground. Teleportation carried it out of sight with startling swiftness. From high above the sound of voices drifted down the well, laughter, music.
Without a word Orelle put out her arm and clasped Miller’s hand. A moment later the ground no longer pressed his feet. The light-wall slid down past them like a Niagara of colored water.
The hall in which Brann held court was a vast domed circle. In the center of it rose a dais—and over the dais a curtain of darkness hung in straight columnar folds from the great height of the ceiling, veiling the platform. On its steps a woman was sitting, a stringed instrument on her knee. Rainbow hair swung forward about her shoulders as she bent her head and swept a hand across the strings. Wild, high music rang through the room.
Someone called, “Brann! Where is Brann?” and the woman looked up, smiling. It was Tsi.
“He’ll be here. He’s coming. He expects guests,” she said and looked straight across the room toward the far wall where, in an alcove, the robot stood motionless, enshrouding the Power in a misty cloud.
Behind the robot, huddled against the alcove wall, Miller felt Orelle’s fingers tighten upon his. So long as the robot stood quiet, they were hidden behind its foggy outlines. When it moved—
“She means us,” Orelle whispered. “I know Tsi. What shall we do?”
“Wait,” Llesi counseled. “Listen.”
In the great room beyond, where Brann’s court of brilliantly robed men and women lounged on divans that seemed cushioned with substance as immaterial as mist, a discontented cry was beginning to rise. Many mental voices blended in the clamor now.
“Brann! Call him up, Tsi, call him up! Tell him the robot’s here. We want Brann again!”
Tsi swept the strings musically. “He’s still asleep, down below,” she said. “I’m not sure if I dare wake him yet. Shall I try?”
“Go down and call him,” someone urged, petulance in the voice that spoke. “We’ve waited too long already. Call him, Tsi!”
Tsi smiled. “His visitors must be here by now,” she said maliciously. “Yes, I’ll go down and waken Brann.” She laid the harp on the steps and rose.
At the same moment Miller felt a surge of force suddenly burst into blinding violence in the center of his brain. For an instant he was stunned by the power that seemed to pour tangibly forth from him and through him. . . .
The robot that had screened them from view rose from the floor, lightly as a cloud, drifted forward over the heads of the gaping audience and turned suddenly incandescent just above the dais where Tsi stood.
Miller knew it was Llesi’s doing, even before the quiet voice in his brain said, “This is the best way, after all. Attack. You were right, Miller. Now watch.”
The robot was pure flame now. With a detached part of his mind Miller understood that it must have been deactivated once its mission was completed, so that any mind which teleported it now could do with it as it would. Llesi chose to destroy it in as spectacular a manner as he could contrive.
Out of the blinding cloud of its dissolution the cube of the Power fell, the singing halo in it turning with slow, indifferent steadiness. The transparent block struck the steps a yard from where Tsi stood. It struck—and crashed through, splitting the white marble from top to floor. Tsi staggered.
The crash rang from the high vaults above, rebounding from arch to arch in distant, diminishing echoes that came slowly back to the
watcher below, long after the dais had ceased to vibrate.
Tsi recovered her balance, turned on the shattered steps, looked straight across the hall to the alcove where Miller and Orelle stood.
She was shaken but she had not lost her poise.
“Sister!” she said, “Welcome to Brann’s castle. Shall I call him to greet you?”
From Orelle a strong steady thought went out, compelling and quiet.
“Tsi, sister, you must do as you think best. Is it best for us that Brann be called?”
The woman on the dais hesitated. Miller could see that the quiet confidence in Orelle’s mental voice has shaken her a little. He knew now what Orelle had meant when she said she could control Tsi.
It was a simple matter of sister speaking to sister with the voice of authority, calling back to mind the precepts of conscience and childhood training. Tsi was not, he thought, evil as Brann was evil. She was weak, certainly—and perhaps the weakness would stand them in good stead.
She said uncertainly, “Orelle, I think perhaps—” But the voices from the audience around her, rising with sudden violence, drowned out whatever it was she meant to say. Miller was reminded of Roman audiences clamoring for blood in the arena.
“Brann, Brann!” the voices howled. “Waken Brann! Go call him up to meet his guests! Brann, waken from your sleep! Brann, Brann, do you hear us?”
Tsi hesitated a moment longer. Miller was aware of a desperate stream of thought-waves pouring out from Orelle beside him but the noise of the assembled people was too strong for her. She could not get through to her sister. Tsi turned suddenly, putting both hands to her face, and stumbled up the broken steps toward the dais.
The long curtains that hung a hundred feet or more from the height of the ceiling trembled down all their dark length as she put them aside and vanished into the big tent they made, hiding the platform.
There was a moment’s profound silence.
Then Miller said quietly to Orelle, “Come on,” and, seizing her hand, strode forward across the floor. He had no idea what he meant
to do but if he had come to attack then attack he must—not stand waiting for Brann to make an entrance on his throne.
Heads turned avidly to watch their progress across the great room. No one made a move to block their way, but eager eyes watched every motion they made and searched their faces for expression. This was the audience, Miller thought grimly, that would have watched Brann’s terrible “experiments” upon him if he had not escaped from the castle—with Tsi’s help. It was the audience, he realized, that might yet watch, if he failed.
Llesi was silent in his brain, waiting.
They were almost at the steps when the curtains stirred as if a breath of wind had blown through the hall. Tsi’s voice came weakly from the hidden place, “Wait, Brann—you mustn’t—”
But drowning out the feeble protest another voice sounded clear. Miller, hearing that thin, sweet, sneering pattern which was the mental voice he had heard before, the voice of Brann, felt a chill sliding down his spine and a tightening of all his muscles. It was a hateful, a frightening voice, evoking a picture of a hateful man.
“Come out, Brann!” Miller said strongly. “Unless you’re afraid of us—come out!”
Behind him in the hall two or three intrepid voices echoed the invitation. “Come out Brann! Let us see you. You aren’t afraid, Brann —come out!” He knew from that how high curiosity must run even in Brann’s stronghold and he realized that not even here, then, had Brann ever yet showed his face. It made him a little more confident. If Brann had so much to hide, then, there must be weaknesses behind that curtain upon which he could play.
He said, “Here’s the Power you wanted, Brann. We broke your platform but here it is waiting. Do you dare come out and look at it?”
Brann said nothing. But his thin, sardonic laughter rang silently through the hall.
Miller felt it rasping his nerves like something tangible. He said roughly, “All right then—I’ll come and bring you out!” And he set his foot firmly on the lowest step.
A breath of excitement and anticipation ran rippling through the hall. Llesi was still silent. Orelle’s hand in Miller’s squeezed his
fingers reassuringly He mounted the second step, reached out his free hand for the curtain. . . .
There was a deep, wrenching sound of stone against stone, and under his feet the steps lurched sickeningly. And then he was falling.
The walls spun. The floor tilted up to strike him a solid blow—that did not touch him. For some firm, supporting mind closed its protection around his body and he floated gently a dozen feet and came to solid footing again, dazed but unhurt.
The marble block of steps lay upturned upon the floor. Teleportation again, he realized. Brann had uprooted the steps he had climbed to prevent him from reaching the curtain. And someone —Llesi or Orelle—had reached out a mental beam to teleport him to safety.
Brann’s cold clear laughter rang silently through the hall. He had not yet spoken. He did not speak now but his derision was like vitriol to the ears and the mind. Brann was waiting. . . . Somehow Miller could sense that, as he waited, an eagerness and impatience went out from him toward that block of transparence on the broken steps, where the halo of the Power revolved on its singing axis.
Llesi realized it in the same instant and Miller felt in his brain the beginnings of some plan take shape—too late. For now there was a strange heaviness in the very air about him—a familiar heaviness. . . . This was the weapon Brann had used on him once before, turning the air itself to a crushing weight that had all but smashed his ribs in upon the laboring lungs.
He felt his knees buckle under that sudden, overwhelming pressure. The air screamed around him and the vast hanging curtains of the dais billowed with a serpentine motion as displaced air moved with hurricane suddenness through the great room. Miller’s breath was stopped in his chest by that unbearable pressure. His ears sang and the room swam redly before him. Brann’s careless laughter was a distant ripple of sound.
Power from outside himself gathered in Miller’s brain, gathered and spilled over in a wave like molten flame. He felt it gush out toward the platform where Brann sat hidden. But he was blind and deaf with the crushing weight of that suddenly ponderable air.
Even above his own deafness and the shriek of the unnatural wind in the room he heard the scream of riven marble. And the weight upon him lessened a little. He could see again. He could see the great block of stone uprooted with jagged edges from the broken floor at the foot of Brann’s dais.
It seemed to tear itself free, to leap into the air of its own volition —to hurtle toward Brann’s curtains as if Brann’s castle itself had suddenly turned upon him with great jagged stone fangs. In his brain Miller could feel the tremendous, concentrated effort of Llesi’s teleportation, balancing the marble weapon and guiding it on its course.
The weight upon him ceased abruptly. The release was so sudden that the congested blood drained from Miller’s brain and for an instant the great room swam before him. In that moment of faltering the hurtling marble fragment faltered too and Llesi and Miller together struggled with the faintness of Miller’s overtaxed brain.
Brann seized the opening that brief hesitation gave him. He could not stop the flying weapon but he could block it. . . . A broken segment of the marble steps flew up in the path of the oncoming boulder, grated against it, deflected its course.
The two struck together upon the dais steps and thundered down them with a ponderous sort of deliberation, bounding from step to step, their echoes rolling from the high ceiling. They went crashing across the floor, ploughing into the divans where Brann’s court had lain watching this unexpected sight.
The screams of the watchers as the great marble blocks rolled down upon them added a frenzied accompaniment to the echoes of thunder wakened by the stone itself. The room was a tumult of sound re-echoing upon sound.
Miller felt a renewed outpouring of Llesi’s power move in his brain. He saw a gigantic marble pillar across the room stagger suddenly on its base, crack across, lean majestically outward and fall. But it did not strike the floor. Instead it hurtled headlong, jagged end first, toward the dais.
Above it the ceiling buckled. There was a terrible shriek of metal upon stone as the vaulted roof gave way. But the falling debris, in
turn, did not strike the floor Deflected in a rain of shattered marble, it moved to intercept the flying pillar. Column and broken stone together crashed to the ground at the very foot of Brann’s dais.
The great hall was full of the shrieks of the scattering court, the cries of men caught beneath the falling ceiling, the uproar of echo upon echo as Brann’s throne room collapsed in thunderous noise upon its own floor.
When the thunder ceased all who could flee had vanished. Half the ceiling lay in fragments upon the floor and Miller stood dizzily looking up at the dais whose long curtains still billowed in the wind. Brann was silent for a moment as if gathering his resources for another try. And Llesi was whispering,
“My strength is failing, Miller. I can’t keep it up much longer. I’m going to try one last thing. I’ve got to know what it is Brann’s hiding. Help me if you can—and watch!”
For an instant there was silence. Then, from far overhead, a long shudder began and rippled down the length of those vast hanging curtains which shrouded Brann’s dais. Stone groaned deeply upon stone in the ceiling.
From the hidden platform Brann shrieked a soundless, “No!” as the block from which the curtains hung tore itself free of the vault above and came crashing down to rebound from the shattering pavement.
The curtains themselves fell far more slowly. Like smoke they wavered in the air, collapsing softly, deliberately, parting to one side and the other. . . .
Miller could see Brann trying to stop that fall. Invisibly the forces of his mind seemed to claw at their drifting lengths. But there was something wrong now in Brann’s mind. Even Miller could sense it.
A dissolution was taking place that the mind felt and shrank from. Something worse than hysteria, more frightening than fear itself. Llesi was suddenly intent and Orelle caught her breath.
Like smoke the last fragments of the curtains parted, lying to left and right along the broken floor, far out, in long swaths of shadow.
On the platform stood Brann. . . .
The figure that had terrorized such a multitude for so long stood swaying, clutching a black cloak about it as if to hide the shape of
the body beneath. The face was contorted into a terrible grimace of anger and cold grinning hate. But the face itself was one they had all seen before.
It was the face of Tsi.
Her eyes were closed. She did not look at them nor speak nor move. And, Miller thought to himself, as Brann perhaps she had never opened her eyes. As Brann perhaps that grimace of chill hate always distorted her features. For it was clear to them all now that Tsi was mad.
“Schizophrenia,” Miller thought automatically “Split personality.” But there was no answering thought from Llesi or from Orelle. Stunned amazement held them both frozen.
Tsi turned her unseeing eyes to Orelle. In Brann’s thin, cold, highpitched voice-pattern she said, “Now you know. Now you’ve seen Brann. But before I kill you both, tell me—Orelle, where is Tsi?”
Miller felt a cold shudder ripple over him.
CHAPTER VIII
The
Consuming Fire
At the same moment he realized that Orelle and Llesi could not help him against—Brann. Their thoughts came into his mind with a stunned, incredulous tinge of astonishment, a blank bafflement that, strangely, seemed to leave them helpless. And Miller thought he knew why.
Orelle and Llesi and all their race had been conditioned to mental perfection. Never before in their history, he sensed, had there been any case of mental aberration. The race had been too perfect for that. And now, faced with the pattern of schizophrenic splitpersonality, they were utterly unable to comprehend its meaning. It was too alien to them.
Insanity had never before existed in Orelle’s race.
Miller sent a frantic message to Llesi—inchoate confused memory-pictures from his scant knowledge of psycho-therapy. But Llesi did not understand. Instead he suddenly closed his mind. And, beside Miller, Orelle, too, closed her mind against a concept so shocking to this race that worshiped mental perfection that they could not consciously face it.
The blind figure on the dais bent forward. “Orelle. . . .” it said.
So Brann did not know that the other half of his mind belonged to Tsi. Naturally! Brann would not know that he was a half, an incomplete split personality. Nor would Tsi know that Brann was part of herself. What curious warp in the inherited genes had brought about this cleavage Miller never knew, but he did not think about that now.
He stepped forward. “Brann!” he called.
“So you are back.” The thought came coldly into his mind. “Well, the machine I tricked you into carrying failed to kill Llesi but I’ll remedy that soon enough. As for you. .” Thin mental laughter mocked Miller.
He felt sweat crawling down his forehead. “Wait,” he thought urgently. “I can tell you where Tsi is.”
He sensed a hesitancy and then an urgent, straining question.
“Where? Where is she?”
“You are—”
Miller felt the mind on the dais close swiftly against the thought. Brann would not let himself listen to the truth. He could not.
Brann thought. “Well? Answer me?”
Troubled, uncomprehending, Orelle and Llesi waited and listened. And suddenly Miller knew the answer. He unbuckled the wrist-watch from his arm. Orelle had returned it to him, the deadly lightning machine removed. As a timepiece it was useless but habit had made Miller keep the watch.
“Take this,” he said.
Brann—Tsi—waited.
Miller held it up. “It’s not dangerous any more. Can’t you tell that?”
“A trick. You know nothing of what I wish to know. Why should I waste time on any of you?”
“If you want to find Tsi,” Miller thought, “you must take this thing. Unless you’re afraid to find her.”
The watch spun from his hand and shot glittering across the room. It was in Brann’s hand.
Miller drew a long breath. “Turn it over. That’s it. Hold it up before your face. Yes. Now . . . open your eyes.”
“My eyes will not open.”
“Open them!”
“They have never opened.”
Tension sang through the still air. Miller felt Orelle’s sudden movement toward him.
“If you open your eyes you will find Tsi.”
That was the gap in the armor. That was the one thing that could pierce Brann’s insane half-mind. The blind white eyelids quivered . . . the long lashes lifted, slowly, slowly. . . .
Brann’s eyes looked into the polished steel back of the watch. In that tiny mirror Brann’s eyes looked into—Tsi’s!
Tsi’s eyes—wide, horrified—stared into Brann’s!
There was no protection against the mental avalanche that roared out from that rocking, screaming mind—the two minds—in the
single body of Tsi. For the first time Brann saw the girl he had searched for since his strange birth. And for the first time Tsi saw her own face twisted, distorted, into the grimace of chilly hatred that was irrevocably stamped on Brann’s features.
But what Miller felt was—pity. It was the basic principle of mental therapy—making the patient face his problem squarely. But no ordinary human schizophrenic had ever thus had the curtains of his brain ripped away with such sudden violence. The normal human brain has automatic safeguards against such intrusion.
Tsi was of another race—a race mentally developed to a tremendously high standard. She had been warped before birth though the madness had remained latent for a long time—but her mind was nevertheless powerful enough to be able to face the shocking incredible truth.
She had never been evil, as was Brann—weak, yes, but incapable of that cold cruelty her alter ego loved.
Face to face, for a thunderous, eternity-long instant, the two stood—good and evil mated, monstrously wedded in one body and one brain. The silence roared.
Then the hand that held the mirror dropped. The face of Tsi swung round so that her mad, wild, terrified eyes met Miller’s—and he read destruction there. The double mind looked out of those eyes into his and for an instant it was as if both Tsi and Brann spoke to him—as he had first heard them speaking when he woke in this incredible world.
But then they had not known the truth. It had been a split mind talking to itself, good and evil debating together and not guessing they were housed in a single brain. Now they knew. At some point in the past the evil inherent in Tsi had lost its battle with the good in her —and pulled free of the control of her conscious mind. It had called itself by a new name, given itself a masculine identity to disguise its origin still further, grown so strong that not even Tsi could control it any longer.
Brann was abhorrent to Tsi. And to Brann the knowledge that Tsi was himself was a thing he could not face. The split mind, rocking on
its foundation, reached out into Miller’s mind with a mad destructive violence.
“You brought ruin on me!” cried the double voice. “You wrecked my castle and my life! You must die and all your kind with you!”
The eyes caught Miller’s in a drowning stare. He could not look away, and the eyes were growing larger and larger, engulfing him in darkness and in the darkness the madness of two minds swirled terribly, carrying away his own sanity on those dreadful, reasonless vortices. . . .
Miller could no longer see Orelle but he heard her moan, a soft whimper of helpless terror. “I can’t—help you,” she was saying from far away. “I can’t fight the two of them. Llesi—Llesi—where are you?”
For a moment there was no answer. The mad twin-mind buffeted at Miller’s from both sides at once, pulling it asunder, spinning in two opposite directions and straining him apart between them. No single mind could withstand the doubled strength of that split brain dragging him down to madness. . . .
And then, suddenly, he was not fighting alone. Out of the darkness Llesi’s mind came swiftly, intangibly, yet with a strength as if the man himself had set his shoulder against Miller’s, bracing him against the whirlpool whose vortex led down to insanity.
Perhaps no other mind in existence could have stood against the riven mind of Brann-Tsi. But in Miller’s brain too a double mind had been housed—his own and Llesi’s. They had learned to work together. And now they could fight. . . .
There was a voiceless scream of fury—Brann’s thin, high, sweettoned rage. And the buffeting redoubled from two sides at once. But now there were two minds to meet the attack. Miller drew a deep breath and set himself stubbornly against the whirling drag that was pulling him down to darkness. He could feel the strong resistance of Llesi’s mind, fighting beside his own, struggling hard against the double pull.
For a timeless moment the vortex held them both. In that roaring silence, while madness raved about them, neither side seemed able to shake the others. Attacker and attacked stood matched so perfectly that the balance might have held forever with the fury of the split mind screaming its soundless cry in infinity.
