Brecht On Art And Politics by Brecht Bertolt

Author:Brecht, Bertolt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474243346
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

45

Speech on the Power of Resistance of Reason

In view of the stringent measures, both methodical and violent, being taken against reason by the Fascist states, it seems appropriate to ask whether human reason will be in any position to resist such a violent assault. It is, of course, not enough to fall back on optimistic generalisations, like ‘in the end reason will always triumph’, or ‘the human spirit demonstrates its greatest freedom in violent adversity’. Such assertions are themselves hardly reasonable.

In fact, the human capacity for thought can be damaged to a surprising degree. This is true of the rationality of individuals and of whole classes and peoples. The history of human rationality has great periods of partial or total infertility, examples of appalling regression and decay. Given the right means, apathy can be organised on a grand scale. Mankind is just as capable of learning, in the right conditions, that two and two makes five, as that two and two makes four. The English philosopher Hobbes remarked, back in the seventeenth century, ‘If the rule that the angles of a triangle together add up to two right-angles were to contradict the interests of commerce, then the men of commerce would set to and burn the geometry textbooks.’

One must assume that individual nations never produce more reason than they can use (if more were produced, it would simply not be used), but that they often produce less. So if we cannot give a specific use for reason, a quite specific and immediate necessity for the maintenance of the status quo, then we cannot claim that reason will necessarily survive the current period of severe persecution.

When I say that reason has to be necessary for the maintenance of the status quo if we are to give reason any decent chance, then this is something I have thought about carefully. There are good reasons why I don’t say, reason should be necessary for the transformation of the status quo. Just because reason is necessary in order to improve the appalling status quo, does not, in my opinion, mean that we can hope reason will be summoned into being. Appalling conditions can persist for an unbelievably long time. One should say: the worse the conditions, the less reason there is, rather than: the worse the conditions, the more reason is produced.

Nevertheless, I do believe, as I’ve said, that as much reason is produced as is necessary for the maintenance of the status quo. So the question arises, how much reason is that? For, once again, if we ask how much reason will be produced in the near future, then we have to ask how much of that reason will be necessary to maintain the status quo.

One can hardly doubt that conditions in the Fascist countries are appalling. The standard of living is falling, and they need, all of them, wars in order to keep going. But one should not assume that the maintenance of such poor conditions requires especially little reason. The rational

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