Let us now take quite another area of this morality of duty, the morality of public service. It was most clearly expressed in our Russian past, in the moral cult of revolutionary heroism. We remembered him in contemplation of the "idol of the revolution"; We recalled there that this idol, now exposed as the life-devouring Moloch, had its inspired servants, its ascetics and voluntary heroes. But now we would like to draw attention to another, reverse side of the matter: for every voluntary hero and ascetic, this idol of revolutionary service, like every other idol, had dozens, if not hundreds, of involuntary victims, driven to service and death by the scourge of moral and public opinion. Instead of general considerations, I would like to cite here one concrete, individual example from personal recollections.

As has already been pointed out, about twenty-five years ago, in certain circles of Russian youth, a universal, all-consuming cult of revolutionary service reigned supreme. It was assumed that the student youth was completely divided into two groups: either unprincipled careerists and "white-lining" revelers, or "ideological" people who devoted themselves to progress and the salvation of the people, i.e., revolutionary heroes. It is true that most of these heroes were engaged in nothing but endless verbiage, discussions about Marx's "theory of surplus value" and the fate of the peasant commune, and, except for reading illegal political literature, only a few of the chosen ones were privy to real political secrecy. But even the former always risked being expelled from the university, exiled, if not to Siberia, then to a remote province, or to be imprisoned, and therefore they considered themselves activists and heroic fighters. In one such innocently "revolutionary" student circle in Moscow participated a quiet, well-mannered, shy young man from a family of Russified German nobles.

Before his death, he confessed that he was tormented by his inability to become a real revolutionary, his inner disgust for this occupation, his irresistible desire for an ordinary peaceful life; He recognized himself as a creature good for nothing and came to the decision to commit suicide. Of course, we, his comrades, did not at all understand the tragedy of this confession at the time. His death shocked us, but we blamed it on the "despotism" of the hated regime; From his funeral, we duly staged an anti-government demonstration and calmed down in the consciousness of our own revolutionary virtue. But when now, after all that I have experienced and happened, I remember this incident, I feel the blood of this innocent victim on me; I feel myself to be a moral accomplice in all the murders and atrocities that are being committed in the Emergency Rooms in the name of the revolution. For it was we, the ideological servants of duty, who, by our moral compulsion to a revolutionary way of thinking and revolutionary heroism, condemned to death this innocent young human soul; we, though not noticing it, tyrannically raped her with our merciless demand of her for revolutionary service, to which she was not inclined.

And how many sacrifices were made on the altar of revolutionary or "progressive" public opinion! How many talents have perished or, at least, have been subjected to the most severe persecutions, a real merciless moral boycott for violating the "categorical imperative" of "progressive" public opinion. It is hardly possible to find at least one genuinely gifted, original, inspired Russian writer or thinker who would not have been subjected to this moral boycott, who would not have endured persecution, contempt and mockery from it. Apollon Grigoriev and Dostoevsky, Leskov and Konstantin Leontiev — these are the first names that come to mind, the greatest names of geniuses, or at least of real inspired national writers, persecuted, if not persecuted, by the moral judgment of progressive society. Others, little-known victims of this trial, are innumerable.

We are inclined to recall with contempt, or at best with a smile of condescending irony, this recent despotism of public opinion. In vain. For nothing has changed in it, except the content and name of the idols to whom these human sacrifices are made. With the same pharisaical complacency, with the same cruel and cold inattention to the living human personality, people are being persecuted at the present time, whose living soul cannot lie down in the stencils of "counter-revolutionary" social duty. And again there is a preaching of social heroism as a sacred and therefore morally coercive duty of every individual, outside of which he cannot be recognized. And again, in a fatal way, for one genuinely inspired and free hero, drawn to the feat by inner love and calling, there are dozens of victims persecuted by the scourge of moral public opinion.

How many people are there in the world who, whether in the field of public service or in some other sphere of moral life, live and even die with the glory of a "hero," not because they are real heroes, but only because they are too cowardly to throw off the yoke of forced heroism—because it is often morally easier even to die under compulsion than to endure public contempt and resist moral public opinion. So often soldiers go on a deadly attack and die in it not because they are full of selfless self-denial, but only because there are machine guns in the rear, cutting off the way back and threatening the retreating with certain death.

Perhaps we will be reproached for allowing an impermissible substitution of concepts: our theme was the power of "ideas" and "moral ideals", and we are talking about the pressure of public censure, about the oppression of human opinion. The moral ideal, we will be told, is that which the individual himself acknowledges, in which he truly believes inwardly; the moral ideal, according to Kant's explanation already cited, is always "autonomous," while the power of public opinion is "heteronomous." But the fact of the matter is that this distinction, which is so clearly established theoretically, is constantly erased in the practice of psychic life and is almost always completely absent. And since we are dealing precisely with moral norms, expressed in rational concepts, equally obligatory for all people and occasions of life, and not substantiated by anything other than their own authority, we assert precisely that the living person, in his own, internal, genuinely free relation to them, does not recognize them, but only submits to them out of necessity, as if they were a yoke imposed from without. The genuine, concrete moral life, both the personal needs of man, not only the lower ones, but also the higher, spiritual ones, which he cannot renounce, and the living environment, the living relations with people – all this is so complex, individual, that the moral truth here can always be only concrete and does not fit into any general principles, norms and ideas. That is why, by the way, all philosophical attempts to logically deduce the content of moral ideals, understood as universally binding norms of behavior, are completely hopeless, have not yet led to anything, and cannot lead to anything. The ethics of the "morality of duty" theoretically hangs in the air; In this sense, ethics is not a science at all, it is simply a code of authoritarian precepts in which I am blindly obliged to believe. Kant's attempt to deduce its concrete content from the mere form of the "categorical imperative" as a universally binding moral law is clearly exposed as a hopeless and fruitless sophistic contrivance of thought, which logically rests on unconvincing (and rejected by Kant himself) considerations of a utilitarian nature. All the other possibilities of the scientific and logical foundation of ethics, in turn, were convincingly refuted by Kant himself. All of them boil down to an attempt to derive moral ideals from the actual, empirical needs of man; But that is precisely why they all allow for a hopeless logical abyss, containing, logically speaking, an inadmissible metabasiz eiz allo genoz (an unjustified leap from one area to another). For it does not follow from the fact that all men strive for one or the other that their strivings are morally valuable, that I am obliged to respect them and to subordinate my life to them, that is, to mutilate for their sake my own strivings, which for me have no less right to exist than the prevailing strivings. Moral principles, in all moments of complex, tragic conflicts, have neither internal self-evidence for the individual, nor the character of scientific and logical validity. They are simply imposed, like legal norms, as a restrictive and oppressive force, with the only difference that their force is aggravated by all the ruthlessness of public censure for their violation. We have already made a reservation above, and we repeat once again: of course, we do not mean by this to say that moral landmarks in life are not at all necessary, that all moral beliefs are empty prejudices that can be easily discarded in order to surrender to unlimited freedom. On the contrary, we seek a light that can illumine and comprehend for us the true moral ideals, which will make clear to us, with the last indisputable inner persuasiveness that the soul needs here, the path along which we must go: but we do not feel this light in the seemingly self-sufficient authority of moral legislation itself.

There is one more aspect of the matter that exposes to us an immanent lie, an inner untruth in the usual structure of the moral norm of life. Every moral principle or ideal, in whatever form it may be expressed, so long as it is expressed in an abstract and rational way, involves the elevation of a particular content of life or interest to the dignity of the supreme lord and administrator of that infinite whole which is given in living human life. Whether we are declared to be obliged to serve the people or the state, or to remain faithful to the family, or to remain faithful to the family, or any other duty as the supreme and absolute duty, everywhere the immeasurable fullness of our spirit is artificially limited, squeezed into narrow, strictly delineated limits, mercilessly pushed into a certain Procrustean bed. We are well aware, of course, of the need for some kind of self-restraint in general, the spiritual formation of the personality, without which we are in danger of melting into chaos, losing the guiding thread in life; But we seek this formation from within, from the integral nature of our spirit, from the depths of our personal, uniquely unique calling. Squeezing our personality into some particular form, prepared in advance, without attention to its peculiarity, we inevitably feel as violence and mutilation, which we do not want to submit, nay, to which we cannot submit, even if we wanted to. For we are conscious of our spirit in all its fullness and wholeness as something absolutely valuable, which we have no right to enslave, and which we cannot actually dispose of, because its original essence is stronger than all our conscious intentions. And even in the most spontaneous, partly even in the vicious inclinations of ours, we feel, perhaps, the lower, requiring purification and enlightenment, but nevertheless genuine, the revelation of this inner originality of our being, which overcomes our reason.

Therefore, the fatal, inevitable consequence of the abstract moral norming of life is moral hypocrisy. Life is divided into two parts - official and genuine, intimate. In the first one, we are all decent, "decent" people, inwardly calm, freely obedient to all the "principles" and norms of morality, and some of us even deserve the reputation of "bright personalities", "deeply ideological" and "principled people". But how little inner light, silence, tranquility, how much rebellion, torment, darkness and depravity in the depths of the soul of even the most "bright personalities"! Moral norming not only does not achieve its true goal, but usually achieves exactly the opposite goal. For the relative ease of outward, visible obedience to moral norms and the reputation that we deserve for it easily leads to moral self-satisfaction, to pharisaical self-admiration, the individual learns to hide from himself, and not only from others, the darkness, vagueness and weakness of his true being, his true spiritual need, and to look at himself from the outside as the universally recognized bearer of moral ideals and values; And the dormant impulses to inner moral perfection, to spiritual purification and formation, to the search for a solid spiritual ground, gradually die out. Official service to high principles, faith in them, and therefore in oneself as their herald and servant, has the same corrupting effect on weak human souls as high rank, power, and wealth; A person becomes spiritually blind from them. Most of us play some kind of "role" in life, in one area or another, and try only to play it well and earn the approval of the audience; We get used to this role so much that we continue to play it without an audience, for ourselves, maybe even die with memorized words on our lips. And only in rare moments do we, for the most part, vaguely feel the untruth of this role; and only a few people who are quite courageous and truthful are not afraid to admit to themselves that they bear as little resemblance to the roles they portray as the actor has an inner resemblance to Julius Caesar or the Marquis of Poza, whom he portrays on the stage.

You can cripple the human spirit, you can outwardly rule over it; But it is impossible to enslave it internally, even if its bearer consciously agrees to it. And therefore moral principles and abstract moral ideals do not regulate spiritual life; they regulate only its external manifestations, for the most part at the cost of its internal moral distortion, pollution, imprisonment in a stifling and poisonous underground prison. Whoever has once realized this—and some spiritual currents of modernity, incomprehensible to ourselves, lead us to do so, as if forcing us to open our eyes and boldly see the truth—can no longer worship the idol of "ideas" and "moral idealism."

And finally, the last thing. In a state of mind subordinated to "moral idealism," to the service of "ideas" and "principles," there is a fatal dialectic at work, by virtue of which everything that appears to be obviously good in moral intention and aspiration becomes evil in its real realization. The moral ideal, descending from its misty abstract heights to earth, penetrating into life and really acting in the complex, always imperfect and contradictory conditions of human life and concrete human nature, unexpectedly reveals itself not as an enlightening, elevating, ennobling force of life, but precisely as a force that destroys and oppresses. We have already noted this in the reflection on the idol of the revolution and the idol of the political ideal. Here we can extend this to every "ideal" in general, i.e., to every model expressed in an abstract formula, to which life must be subordinated and according to which it must be remade. Moral idealism is always quite right in its castigation of the vices and imperfections of existence; and he attracts hearts to himself by his martyrdom in the name of the higher principles, by his devotion to the dream of the good to be realized. But when its heralds pass from the role of dreamers, accusers, and fighters for truth into the role of realizers of this truth, the real administrators and rulers of life, they arouse hatred by their tyranny, by their inattention to the concretely complex needs of life, to the diversity of human needs and the weakness of human nature. The more ardent their faith in a certain ideal, the more unshakable the authority of this ideal, the more blindly and cruelly they mutilate and destroy life. For hatred of evil turns into hatred of all living life, which cannot be squeezed into the framework of the "ideal". It is then that it is usually discovered that, however imperfect real life may be, spontaneously composed of imperfect, weak, vicious human strivings, it already has that enormous, immeasurable advantage over any abstract ideal of life, that it has somehow actually taken shape, grown organically, adapted itself to real human nature, and expresses it, while the ideal is only that which must be, that which is prescribed for realization. but which has no real roots in life itself, and for the sake of which real life is destroyed and crippled. In order to return to the first and most powerful external impression under the influence of which our present moral crisis is taking place: what, in fact, lies the ultimate source of the evils of socialism so stunningly and so clearly revealed? Of course, socialism is the extreme degree of moral and social rationalism, the dream of subordinating all life without exception, including even the entire sphere of man's bodily needs and their economic satisfaction, to the strict general, abstractly expressed, uniform principles of moral justice. After all, socialism is quite negatively right: a person, even if he does not consciously offend anyone, does not intentionally harm anyone, even if he does. only he devotes himself to the peaceful cultivation of his plot of land or to work in his workshop, and then just as peacefully exchanges what he produces for other objects he needs, is guilty of the existing evil and untruth, is responsible for the poverty and hunger of his neighbors; he is guilty because he thinks only of his own needs, and not of the needs of his neighbor and of objective justice; And, of course, the spontaneous clash of blind egoistic desires does not always and not in everything, as the liberal optimists thought, ensure the realization of social harmony and general happiness.

And then it becomes clear that, however true a moral idea may be in itself, it is false and disastrous in that it is only an idea, only an abstract "postulate," and not a living creative force, and that therefore, when it collides with life, it does not enrich it, but impoverishes and destroys it.

But such is the fate of every idea in general, of every abstract idealism; the difference can only be in the degree of their destructiveness, but not in the very nature of their harmfulness; And this degree is determined by the degree of logical forming, abstract precision and therefore narrowness of the moral ideal, one might say, by the degree of idealism of the ideal, its remoteness from life, its adherence to principles and therefore anti-realism. And in this sense it can be said that there is only one ideal which is even worse than materialist socialism: it is consistently "idealist" socialism, the theocratic dream of planting on earth with the help of abstract principles of morality a perfect society of saints, the ideal of all Tolstoyans and similar sectarians. For such a society, if it could be realized, would be the realization of the complete evil engendered by hypocrisy, fanaticism, hypocrisy, cruelty, and moral stupidity.

Such is the fatal fate of idealism. His saints and ascetics inevitably become Pharisees, his heroes become monsters, rapists and executioners. No, let us, today's people, be hopelessly weak, sinful, wandering without a path and a goal, it is no longer possible to tempt us with moral "idealism" and service to an abstract "idea."