NEGATIVITY OF ANARCHISM • authority. Anarchist thought gains unity if its atheism is taken as assertion that human being must establish its freedom within Nature. (By Nature I do not mean a material universe merely. Nature I understand as coextensive with what is.) Anarchism then would be expressive of universal rejection of power, in the symbol, for the case of the institutional Christian religions, of the Divine Monarch, the universal despot who, on grounds of transcendental ideology, i.e., theology, claims Man's obedience and His priority in being. Correlatively, anarchists have generally set great store, even excessive store, by science, philosophy, and reason, thereby expressing faith, I believe, that these means will enable us to achieve such understanding or Nature as will establish our freedom within it. Unlike Marxist socialism, however, unlike Marx, 4:young Marx» included, anarchism is rarely anthropocentrically humanistic in the sense of a vision of Nature as enemy, menace, object of conquest and control by technology, arena for human dominance - the inverse of theistic subjugation. I understand anarchism as affirming humankind and opposing our subordination or subjugation to either divinities or to natural laws that ·we do not understand and make our own - as seeking our freedom but not our dominance or our independence of Nature. To be careful I should not say that anarchists have always been clear about these matters. The Christian context of the Western world to which anarchism has mainly been limited has not made such clarity easy. I mean to suggest that anarchism readily extrapolates, and that its spirit calls for extrapolation, to a certain vision of Nature analogous to its vision of society; where individual persons, human societies, and the human species, live in relationship with other individual beings and species, affirming our being our creative uniqueness, and 9ur freedom, but not seeking a supremacy that would signify an alienation of humankind in antagonism to what we cannot control or understand. This the harmony of society and person ca11be transposed to the larger case, and anarchism gains force and scope and completion insofar as it stands for such harmony of persons .and world. Whether only contingently, because anarchism took root mainly outside Germanic Europe, or for more essential reasons, anarchism does not much reflect that Feuerbachian humanism, according to which the God-idea is merely a projection of human ideals, that Marx adopted and by which he disposed 51
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