DAVID T. WitCK easily of the religious question, with the consequence, one might speculate, that Nature lost its sacredness, without which it is difficult if not impossible that human beings be sacred to themselves. For anarchism, perhaps more Catholic than Protestant in its religious background and sources, God has had a more serious reality than for Marx - reality as image of power, as pretended reality of power. One may not be mistaken - but one may be - in thinking that the angry rebelllon of anarchist against the God of the Christian churches has represented a profound and thwarted spirituality. In contemporary anarchist literature, the theme of atheism is less conspicuous, less urgent - perhaps because our cosmic freedom has been gained, but in the mode of independence and dominance, or in the mode of illusion of freedom, and our problem is rather one of rediscovering our being in Nature, a different religious problem than that of the God-monarch. Anarchism as Social Philosophy THE CHIEF THING that I have wanted to show is that anarchism represents a fundamental ideal of human existence: that it represents something other than mere absence of government, something other than the freedom to do anything one wants, something different that a freedom limited by what will harm others. It represents instead the aim of social union, on a ground of unique individuality, where no class or caste divisions exist between people and where integral individuality and integral society, non-antithetical, have become two aspects of the same life. The deepest meaning of this anarchist freedom, if I see rightly the implications of what I have written, is that certain significant barriers to the realization of potentialities of human being will have been broken. Integral individuality and integral society are ancient· as well as modem values, and every system of ethics and social philosophy could be said to have endeavored to accommodate them to each other. I suggested that anarchism is a social idea of importance, and not merely a peculiar kind of member in the series «tyranny, monarchy, oligarchy, democracy. . . anarchy,> because it claims to identify, in power, the missing clue. It presents both a conception of general and ultimate social/personal harmony, which may well turn out to be an ideal beyond reach, and a conception of social/personal harmony in any circumscribed realm, any relatively closed human «system,> as small as the sphere 52
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