JUSTICE: Metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, "Program," section V.

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§ V. — That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction.

The definition of philosophy implies by its terms: 1) someone who seeks, observes, analyzes, synthesizes and discovers, which we call the Subject or Moi; 2) something which is observed, analyzed, the reason of which we seek, and which we call the Object or Non-moi.

The first - the observer, subject, moi, or mind - is active; the second - the thing observed, object, non-moi, or phenomenon - is passive. Let us not frighten ourselves with words: this means that the one is the artisan of the idea, and that the other furnishes their material. There is no statue without the sculptor: this is very simple, is it not? But neither is there a statue without the marble: this is also clear. Now, it is thus for ideas. Suppress one or the other of these two principles, the subject or the object, and no idea will be formed; thought will no longer be possible. Philosophy vanishes. Suppress the sculptor or the block of marble, and you will have no statue. Every artistic or industrial production is like this. Remove the worker, you will remain eternally with your raw materials; remove the materials from the works, and if your ask him to produce anything by his thought alone, he will think that you are mocking him.

However, in this competition, or this opposition, of the subject and object, of the mind and things, we want to know in a more precise manner what is the role of each; in what consists the action of the mind, and what are the natures of the materials he puts to work.

The mind or the moi is, or at least it acts as if it is, prone to affirm itself as a simple and indivisible nature, consequently as if it is more penetrating and impenetrable, more active and less corruptible, more prompt and less subject to change. Things, on the contrary, appear extended and composite, consequently divisible, successive, variable, penetrable, subject to dissolution, susceptible to a greater or lesser degree in all their qualities and properties.

How the mind, put in relation with external objects by the intermediary of the senses, perceives a nature so [18] different from itself is what seems at the first abord inexplicable. Can the simple see the composite? That repels us. On reflection, however, we recognize this it is precisely that difference of nature which renders objects perceptible to the mind, and subjects them to it. For it sees them, remark it well, not in their substance, which it cannot conceive as other than simple (atomistic), after its own example, and which consequently escapes it; it sees them in their composition and their differences. The intuition of the mind, its action on objects, comes thus from two causes: by its acuity, it divides them and differentiates them infinitely; then, by its simplicity, it restores all these diversities to unity. What the mind sees in things is their differences, species, series and groups, in a word their reason, and it is because it is mind, because it is simple in its essence, that is sees all that. What the mind cannot discover is the nature or the in itself of things, because that nature, laid bare of its differences, of its unity of composition, etc., becomes then like the mind itself, something simple, amorphous, unapproachable and invisible.

The consequence of all this is easy to grasp. The mind put in the presence of things, the moi in communication with the non-moi, in receipt of impressions and images; it grasps differences, variations, analogies, groups, genera, species: all that is the fruit of its first perception. But the mind does not stop there; and the representation of things would not be complete in its thought, it would lack basis and perspective, if the mind did not add something more of its own.

In seeing then that infinite diversity of things, such a diversity that each thing seems to denounce itself as having been able to be completely different than it is, the mind, which feels itself single, in opposition to things, conceives the One, the Identical, the Immutable, which is not to be found;

In observing the contingency of phenomena, the mind conceives the Necessary, which it does not find either: lucky, if it did not decide to adore it under the name of Destiny!

In taking the comparative dimensions of objects and establishing their limits, it conceives Infinity, which is no more real; [19]

In following, in its consciousness, the revolutions of time, and measuring the duration of existences, it conceives the Eternal, which cannot be said of any person or any thing;

In recognizing the mutual independence of creatures, it conceives of itself as superior to the creatures, and affirms it Free Will and his Sovereignty, of which nothing can yet give it the model;

In seeing movement, it conceives of Inertia, a hypothesis without reality; in calculating speed, it conceives of force, which it never grasps;

In noting the action of being on one another, it conceives of Cause, in the analysis of which it only grasps a contradiction;

In comparing the faculties of some to the faculties of others, it conceives of Life, Intelligence and Soul; and by opposition, Matter, Death and Nothingness: abstractions or fictions? it does not know;

In classing and grouping creatures according to their genera and species, it conceives the Universal, superior to every collectivity;

In calculating the relations of things, it conceives of Law, the notion of which immediately gives it that of an Order of the world, although there has been struggle everywhere,and consequently as much disorder as order;

Finally, in condemning, according to the purity of its essence, all that appears to it out of proportion, small, mean, monstrous, discordant and deformed, it conceives the Beautiful and the Sublime, in a word the Ideal, which it is condemned to follow always, without ever enjoying it.

All these conceptions of the mind, famous in the School under the name of the categories, are indispensables for the understanding of things; reasoning is impossible without them: while they do not result from sensation, since, as we see, they exceed sensation, the perceived image, by all the distance from the finite to infinity. What they take from sensation are the various points which have served to form them antithetically; the point of view of diversity, of contingency, of the limit, etc. Except, the categories or conceptions of reason all merge in with one another; they are adequate to one another and [20] imply each other mutually, since all are invariably related, not to things, but to the essence of mind, which is single and incorruptible.....

The formation of the categories or ideas, conceived by the mind apart from experience but on the occasion of experience, their collection and classification, forms what we call metaphysics. It is entirely in grammar, and its teaching belongs to the schoolmasters.

From the manner in which the categories form, and from their usage in language and in the sciences, it results that, as analytic or synthetic signs, they are the condition sine qua non of speech and of knowledge, that they form the instrumentation of intelligence, but that by themselves they are sterile, and consequently that metaphysics, excluding, by its nature and destination, all positivism, can never become a science.

All science is essentially metaphysical, since every science generalizes and distiguishes. Every man who knows, however little he knows, every man who speaks, provided that he understands, is a metaphysician; just as every man who seeks the reason of things is a philosopher. Metaphysics is the first thing that infants and savages think: we could even say that in the mind of every man, metaphysics is present in inverse proportion to science.

Thus, by what fanaticism of abstraction can a man call himself exclusively a metaphysician, and how, in a knowledgeable and positive century, do professors of pure philosophy still exist, these people who teach the young to philosophize apart from all science, all art, all literature and all industry, people, in a word, making a trade, the most consciensciously in the world, of selling the absolute?

Those who should once understand the theory of the formation of ideas, and who will carefully take into account these three capital points: 1) the intervention of two agents, the subject and the object, in the formation of knowledge; 2) the difference in their roles, resulting from the difference in their natures; 3) the distinction of ideas into two species, sensible ideas given immediately by objects, and [21] extra-sensible or metaphysical ideas, resulting from the action of the mind solicited by the contemplation of the outside; that one, we say, can boast of having taken the most difficult step of philosophy. He is freed from fatalism and from superstition. He knows that all his ideas are necessarily posterior to the experience of things, metaphysical ideas as well as sensible ideas; he will remain unshakably and forever convinced that, just as adoration, prophecy, the gift of tongues and of miracles, somnambulism, idealism, whether subjective, objective or absolute, and all the practices of the great work of alchemy, has never produced for indigent humanity an ounce of bread, has created neither shoes, not hats, nor shirts; so it will not have added an iota to knowledge. And il will conclude with the great philosopher Martin, in Candide: "We must cultivate our garden." The garden of the philosopher is the spectacle of the Universe. Verify unceasingly your observations; put your ideas in order; take care in your analyses, your recapitulations, your conclusions; be sober in your conjectures and hypotheses; mistrust probabilities and above all authorities; do not believe the word of any soul who lives, and use the ideal as a means of scientific construction and control, but do not worship it. Those who, all all times, have claimed detach science from all empiricism and to raise the edifice of philosophy on metaphysical ideas alone, have only succeeded in making themselves plagiarists of the ancient theology. Their counterfeits have fallen on their own heads; their transcendentalism has brought to ruin the supernatural in which the people have at all times believed, and they have managed to lose what they wanted to save. Remember, finally, that there is no more innate or revealed science than there are innate privileges or wealth fallen from heaven; and that, as all well-being must be obtained by labor, or be theft, so all knowledge must be the fruit of study, or be false.

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PROGRAM:

1. The coming of the people to philosophy
2. The definition of philosophy
3. On the quality of the philosophical mind
   
4. The origin of ideas
   
5. That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction
   
6. That philosophy must be essentially practical (next)
7. The character that must be presented by the guarantee of our judgments and the rule of our actions.--Conversion from speculative to practical reason: determination of the criterion.
   
8. . . .
   

Anarchoblogs relaunched!

Thanks to Charles Johnson for reviving and improving the Anarchoblogs aggregator!

JUSTICE: The origin of ideas

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, "Program," section IV.

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IV.-- The origin of ideas.

Here is the great temptation, I should say the great conspiracy of the philosophers; here is also their chastisement.

This principle so luminous, so simple, that in order to know the reason of things, it is necessary to have seen them, has not always been (can you believe it?) accepted in philosophy. Without speaking of those, in so great a number, aspired to sound the nature of things, one encounters profound geniuses who have asked if the human mind, so subtle and so vast, could not, by a concentrated meditation on itself; come to that intelligence of the reason of things, which is only, after all, the intelligence of the laws of the mind; if the man who thinks had such a need, in order to learn, to consult a nature which [14] does not think; if a soul created in the image of God, the sovereign organizer, did not possess, by virtue of its divine origin, and prior to its communication with the world, the ideas of things, and if it truly needed the control of phenomena in order to recognize ideas, that is, eternal exemplars. I think, thus I know, cogito, ergo cognosco such is the principle of these arch-spiritualist philosophers. Never has a brain which came from the ranks of the people conceived of a chimera like that. Some, interpreting in their own way the hyper-physical dogma of creation, go so far as to pretend that external realities are products of pure thought, and the world an expression of mind, so that it would be enough to have the full possession of the Idea, innate it our soul, but more or less obscured, in order, without further information, to possess the reason and grasp the very nature of the universe!

That manner of philosophizing, which would dispense with all observation and experience, if it had been justified by the least success, would be, we must admit, very attractive and could not be more convenient. The philosopher would no longer be that labored explorer, winning the bread of his soul by the sweat of his brow, always exposed to error by the omission of the least detail, reaching only a limited comprehension, obtaining often, instead of certainty, only probabilities, and sometimes ending in doubt, after having lived through an affliction of mind. He would be a clairvoyant, a thaumaturge, a rival to the Divinity, directing thought as a sovereign, to say nothing of creative power, and reading fluently the mysteries of Heaven, Earth and Humanity, at home with the divine thought. Ambition, as one sees, is never lacking among the philosophers.

Where does this titanic presumption come from?

From the start we have sensed, in a confused manner, what philosophical observation later clarified, that, in the formation of ideas, the perception of phenomena does not render reason by itself; that the understanding, by the constitution which is proper to it, plays a role; that the soul is not exclusively passive in its conceptions, but that in receiving the images or impressions from outside it, [15] it reacts to them and derives ideas from them; so that, for half if not for all, the passage of ideas, or the discovery of the truth in things, pertains to the mind.

Thus there was, one recognized, in the soul, like the molds of ideas, archetypal ideas, prior to all observation of phenomena: what were these ideas? Can we recognize them, among the multitude of those, more or less empirical, that the understanding strikes on its press? How to distinguish the patrimony of the mind from its acquisitions? If something in knowledge properly belongs to it, then why no everything? Wouldn't we be in the right to suppose that if the mind, possessing the innate principles of things, advanced in science only with the aid of arduous observation, that was the effect of the heterogeneous union of the soul and the body, a union in which the ethereal substance, offended by the matter, had lost the greatest part of its science and of its insight, retaining only a memory of the fundamental principles which formed its framework property?... Others attributed the darkening of the intelligence to original sin. Man, for having wanted to eat, against the express order of God, the fruit of science, would be, according to them, blinded. All the rest convince themselves that with a good mental discipline and the secours of the Spirit of light, one could restore the human soul to the enjoyment of its high and immortal prerogatives, make it produce science without any imbibition of experience, by the energy of his nature alone, and by virtue of the axiom already cited: I am the child of God, I think, therefore I know...

What was at the bottom of all that? A diabolical thought of domination: for one must not be mistaken, privilege of knowledge and pride of genius are the most implacable enemies of equality. Now one thing is known: human science is not enriched by the slightest scrap of a fact or idea by this exclusively pneumatic practice. Nothing has served: neither metaphysics nor dialectics, nor the theory of the absolute, nor revelation, nor possession, nor ecstasy, nor magnetism, nor magic, nor théurgie, nor catalepsy, nor ventriloquy, nor the philosopher's stone, nor table-turning. All that we know, we have [16] invariably learned, and the mystics, the illuminati, the somnambulists, even the spirits which which they speak, have learned in their turn by the known means, that is, observation, experience, reflection, calculation, analysis and synthesis: God, doubtless, jealous of his work, wanting to maintain the decree that he had entered, namely, that we would see nothing with the eyes of the mind except by the intermediary of the eyes of the body, and that all that we claim to perceive by other means would be an error and a mystification of the devil. There is no occult science, no transcendent philosophy, no privileged souls, no divinatory geniuses, no mediums between infinite wisdom and the common sense of mortals. Sorcery and magic, once pursued by parliaments, are dispelled by the flame of experimental philosophy; the science of the heavens had only begun to exist on the day when the Copernicuses, the Galileos and the Newtons bit an eternal adieu to astrology. The metaphysics of the ideal taught nothing to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: when these men, whose philosophy is rightly honored, imagined they had deduced a priori, they had only, without knowing it, synthesized experience. By philosophizing more highly than their predecessors, they have enlarged the scope of science: the absolute, by itself, has produced nothing; translated into correctional policy, it has been jeered at as a con. In moral philosophy, mysticism, quietism and asceticism have led to the most disgusting turpitudes. Christ himself, Verb made flesh, had taught nothing new to the conscience; and the entirety of theology, patiently studied, is found, in the last result, convicted by its own testimony as nothing other than a fantasmagoria of the human soul, of its operations and its powers, liberty, justice, love, science and progress.

Willy-nilly it is necessary to keep to the common method, to confess in our hearts and with our mouths the democracy of intelligence; and since it is a question in that moment of the origin and the formation of our ideas, to demand the reason of the ideas, like all the rest, by observation analysis.

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PROGRAM:

1. The coming of the people to philosophy
2. The definition of philosophy
3. On the quality of the philosophical mind
   
4. The origin of ideas
   
5. That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction (next)
6. That philosophy must be essentially practical
7. . . .
   

JUSTICE: On the quality of the philosophical mind

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, "Program," section III.

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§ III. — On the quality of the philosophical mind.

But here is a rather different affair! It is a question of knowing if philosophy, of which it was first said that the people were incapable, will not, by its very practice, create inequality among men. What can we conclude from our definition?

Since philosophy is the search for, and, so far as it is possible, the discovery of the reason of things, it is clear that, in order to philosophize well, the first and most necessary condition is to is to observe things carefully; to consider them successively in all their parts and all their aspects, without permitting oneself a notion of the ensemble before being certain of the details. This is the precept of Bacon and Descartes, the two fathers of modern philosophy. Couldn't one say that in expounding it, they thought especially of the people? Philosophy is all in the observation, internal and external: there is no exception to that rule.

The philosopher, the man who seeks, who still does not know, can be compared to a navigator charged with making a map of an island, and who, in order to carry out his mission, being unable to take a photograph of the country from high in the atmosphere, is obliged to follow with attention, and to record one after another on paper, with exactitude, all the sinuosities and crevices of the coast. The circumnavigation completed, and the summary of observations finished, the geographer would have obtained as faithful a representation as possible of the island, in its parts and in the ensemble, which he never could have done, if, holding himself at a distance, he had been limited to drawing perspectives and landscapes.

The philosopher can also be compared to a traveler who, after having traversed in all directions a vast plain, having recognized and visited the woods, the fields, the meadows, the vineyards, the habitations, etc., would then climb a mountain. As he made his ascent, the objects would pass again before his eyes in a general panorama, which would [11] make him understand that of which the inspection of the details had only given him an incomplete idea.

Thus, must stick close to the facts and constantly refer to them, divide his material, make complete counts and exact description. He must go from simple notions to the most comprehensive formulas, testing his views of the ensemble and the glimpsed details against one another. Finally, where immediate observation becomes impossible, to show himself sober in his conjectures, circumspect with regard to probabilities, to challenge analogies, and to judge only self-consciously, and always with reserve, distant things by those near, the invisible by the visible. -- Under these conditions, would it be too much to say that the practical man is closer to the truth, less subject to illusion and to error than the speculative one? Regular contact with things preserves him from fantasy and vain systems: if the practitioner shines little from invention, he also courts less risk of making a mistake, and rarely loses by waiting. He who works prays, says an old proverb. Can we not also say: He who works, in so far as he pays attention to his work, philosophizes?

It is only by following this scrupulous and slowly rising method of observation, that the philosopher could flatter flatter himself to have reached the summit of philosophy, science, the condition of which is double, certainty and synthesis. These words should frighten no one: here again the most transcendent philosophy contains nothing outside the abilities and reach of the people.

Indeed, a man may have seen more of things than is common among his fellows; he may have viewed them in more detail and more closely; he can thus consider them from a higher level and in a larger ensemble: this question of quantity, which has no influence on the quality of the knowledge, adds nothing to the certainty, and consequently does not increase the value of the mind. This is of extreme importance for the determination of personal right, constitutive of society: allow me to clarify my thought with some examples.

2 multiplied by 2 equals 4: this is, for everyone, a perfect certainty. But how much is 27 multiplied by 23? Here, more than one innocent will hesitate, and [12] if he has not learned to calculate by figures, it will take a long time to find the solution, let alone dare to respond. Thus I take up the pen, and making the multiplication, I respond that the product demanded is 621. Now, knowing so easily the product of 27 times 23, and being able with the same promptitude and sureness to make the multiplication of all the possible numbers by all the possible numbers, I am clearly more knowledgeable that the one whose arithmetic capacity will stop at the elementary operation 2 x 2 = 4. Does this make me more certain? Not at all. The quantity of knowledge, I repeat, adds nothing to the philosophical quality of the knowing: it is by virtue of that principle, and another just like in that we will speak of below, that French law, coming out of the Revolution of 89, has declared us all equal before the law. Between two citizens, between two men, there can be inequality of acquired knowledge, of effective labor, of services rendered; there is no inequality of the quality of reason: such is, in France, the foundation of personal right, and such is the basis of our democracy. The old regime did not reason in the same way: is it clear now that philosophy is the legacy of the people?

It is the same for the comprehensive power of the mind.

2 multiplied by two produces 4, and 2 added to 2 still gives 4: on one side the product, on the other the sum are equal. However little the innocent to whom one makes the remark reflects on it, he will realize that addition and multiplication, although they begin from two different points of view and proceed in two different manners, resolve themselves, in this particular case, in an identical operation. By making a new effort, he will comprehend as well that 2 minus 4 or 4 divided by 2, it always remains 2, as subtraction and division still resolve, in this particular case, into one single and same operation. All this will interest, and perhaps astonish him: he will have, in the measure from 2 to 4, a synthetic view of things. But the arithmetician knows much more, and his synthesis is incomparably more comprehensive. He knows that whenever one operates on numbers larger than 2, the results can no longer be the same; that multiplication is an abbreviated addition, and division an abbreviated subtraction as well; that [13] more, subtraction is the opposite of addition, and division the opposite of multiplication; in summary, that all these operations, and others more difficult which are deduced from them, come down to the art of composing and decomposing the series of numbers. Does this give him the right to believe himself superior to the other, in nature and dignity? Certainly not: the only difference is that one has learned more than the other; but reason is the same for both of them, and this is why the legislator, at once a revolutionary and a philosopher, has decided that he will take no account of persons. It is for this reason, finally, that modern civilization tends invincibly to democracy: where philosophy reigns, where as a consequence the identity of philosophical reason is recognized, the distinction of classes, like the hierarchy of church and State, is impossible.

We can make analogous arguments about all of the genres of knowledge, and we will always arrive at that decisive conclusion, that, for whoever knows, certainty is of the same quality and degree, despite extend of the knowledge; just as, for whoever grasps the relation of several objects or ideas, the synthesis is of the same quality and form, despite the multitude relations grasped. In no case will there be room to distinguish between the reason of the people and the reason of the philosopher.

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PROGRAM:

1. The coming of the people to philosophy
2. The definition of philosophy
3. On the quality of the philosophical mind
   
4. The origin of ideas (next)
5. That metaphysics is within the province of primary instruction
6. That philosophy must be essentially practical
7. . . .
   

Justice: The definition of philosophy

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Volume I, "Program," section II.

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§ II. — The definition of philosophy.

Philosophy is composed of a certain number of questions that have been regarded at all times as the fundamental problems of the human mind, and that for that reason have been declared inaccessible to the common people. Philosophy, it was said, is the science of the universal, the science of principles, the science of causes; this is why we can speak of universal science, the science of things visible and invisible, the science of God, of man and of the world,Philosophia est scientia Dei, hominis et mundi.

We believe that the questions which philosophy occupies itself are all questions of common sense; we believe all the more that, far from constituting a universal science, these questions only deal with the very conditions of knowledge. Before we think of becoming erudite, it is necessary to begin by being philosophical. Is that so much to boast of?

Thus the first and most important question, for all of philosophy, is to know what philosophy is, what it wants, and above all what it can do. What does all this come down to? The reader will judge.

Philosophy, following the etymological signification of the word, the constant practice of thinkers, the most certain results of their labors, and the best-accredited definitions, is the Search for, and, insofar as it is possible, the Discovery of the reason of things.

It has required much time and effort by the seekers, to come to that conclusion, which it seems the first [8] comer would have found, if he had only followed common sense, and which everyone will definitely understand.

It follows that philosophy is not science, but the preliminary to science. Isn't it rational to conclude, as we just did, that education, instead of ending with philosophy, must begin with it? What we call the philosophy of history, or the philosophy of the sciences, is only an ambitious way to designate science itself, that is to say, that which is most detailed, most generalized in our knowledge, scientists by profession liking to stick to the pure and simple description of facts, without seeking their reason. As the reason of things is discovered, it assumes rank in science, and the scientist follows the philosopher.

Let us examine our definition more closely.

The word thing, one of the most general in the language, must be understood here to refer, not only to external objects, in opposition to persons, but to all that which, in the man himself, both physical and moral, can furnish material for observation: sentiments and ideas, virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, speculations, errors, sympathies, antipathies, glory and decadence, misery and felicity. Every manifestation of the human subject, in a word, all that passes in his soul, his understanding and his reason, as well as in his body; everything that effects him, either as an individual or in society, or which emanates from him, becoming thus an object of philosophy, is considered, with regard to the philosopher, a thing.

By reason we mean the how and why of things, as opposed to their nature, which is impenetrable. Thus, in each thing, the philosopher will note the beginning, duration and end; the size, the shape, the weight, the composition, the constitution, the organization, the properties, the power, the faculties; the increase, the diminution, the evolutions, series, proportions, relations and transformations; the habits, variations, maxima, minima et means; the attractions, appetites, accompaniments, influences, analogies; in short all that can serve to name known the phenomenality of things [9] and their laws. He will abstain from all investigation, and from any conclusion, on the very nature or en soi of things, for example on matter, mind, life, force, cause, substance, space or time, considered in themselve, and setting aside their appearances or phenomena.

Thus, by its definition, philosophy declares that there is a side in things which is accessible to it, which is their reason, and another side about which it can no absolutely nothing, which is their nature: can one show at once more sincerity and more prudence? And what would be better for the people than this modesty?... Philosophy, by its own testimony, is the search for, and, if possible, the discovery of the reason on things; it is not the search for, and still less the discovery of their nature: we will not complain about this distinction. What would a nature be without a reason or appearances? And if the latter were known, who would dare to say that the former was to be missed?

To render account, in three words, of that which occurs inside, that he observes or carries out outside, of which his senses and his consciousness give testimony, and the reason of which his mind can penetrate: that, for man, is what it is to philosophize, and all that which allows itself to be grasped by the eyes and the mind is matter for philosophy. As for the intimate nature of things, that je ne sais quoi of which metaphysics cannot stop talking, and which it imagines or conceives after having set aside the phenomenality of things as well as their reason, if that residue is not a pure nothing, we don't know what to make of it; it interests neither or sensibility nor our intelligence, and it does not even have anything in it to excite our curiosity.

Well, now. In what way is all that outside the range of the common people? Just as we are, do we not incessantly, and without knowing it, make philosophy, as the good M. Jourdain made prose? Who is the man who, in the affairs of the world, concerns himself with anything but that which interests his mind, his heart or his senses? To make ourselves consummate philosophers, it is only a question of making ourselves more sensitive to what we do, feel and say: is that so difficult? As for the contemplative, those who wanted to see beyond the reason [10] of things and to philosophize on their very nature, they have ended by putting themselves outside nature and reason; they are the lunatics of philosophy.

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PROGRAM:

1. The coming of the people to philosophy
2. The definition of philosophy
3. On the quality of the philosophical mind (next)
4. . . .
   

Kicking off a year of Justice

2008 was a transitional year for my various projects, and some, like the English-language archiving, suffered a bit from my relocation and the various transitions that surrounded it. I hope that an equivalent service to the movement has been rendered by the translation that has taken up so much of my time. The progress seems glacial in comparison to the years where I was able to add thousands of pages of material, but, as ought to be apparent, developing the skills to dig back into the early French texts has had some very important effects on my overall thinking about anarchism, and allowed me to pull together a number of threads from my various careers and avocations. I'm having a lot of fun getting to know Proudhon, Bellegarrigue, etc. And I feel like the work of 2008 has put me in a position to focus my labors a bit more in 2009, and finish up some half-finished (or, as in some cases, 9/10-finished) and long-promised works.

I'll talk more about those as they come back into more active play, but virtually all of them will involve a continued push through Proudhon's work, and my central goal for 2009, with regard to the translating and archiving work, is to get through the first four volumes of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, 1501 pages in the Collected Works edition, along with whatever else I can manage from the two volumes of notes, and some of the responses and criticisms, particularly from the Colinsean camp. That's a healthy chunk of work all by itself, although I have hundreds of pages in various states of preparation, and have access to some equally provisional translations from Jesse Cohn. I make no promises to complete it, as other things may well take precedent, as has happened before, and certainly might happen again in the uncertain times we're facing. But the plan is to make Proudhon's masterwork available in an English translation of sufficient quality that it can be studied, discussed and used.

So here, without further ado, begins:

JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH

Volume I

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY

PROGRAM

§ I. — The coming of the people to philosophy.

At the beginning of a new work, we must explain our title and our design.

Ever since humanity entered the period of civilization, for as long as anyone remembers, the people, said Paul Louis Courier, have prayed and paid.

They pray for their princes, for their magistrates, for their exploiters and parasites;

They pray, like Jesus Christ, for their executioners;

They pray for the very ones who should by rights pray for them.

Then they pay those for whom they pray;

They pay the government, the courts, the police, the church, the nobility, the crown, the revenue, the proprietor and the garnisaire, I meant the soldier;

They pay for every move they make, pay to come and to go, to buy and to sell, to eat, drink and breathe, to warm themselves in the sun, to be born and to die;

They even pay for the permission to work;

And they pray to heaven to give them enough, by blessing their labor, to always pay more.

The people have never done anything but pray and pay: we believe that the time has come to make them philosophize.

The people cannot live in skepticism, after the example of the gentlemen of the Institute et des beautiful souls of the city and the court. Indifference is unhealthy for them; they reject libertinage; they hasten to flee from that corruption which invades from on high. Besides, what they ask for themselves, they want for everyone, and make no exception for anyone. They have never claimed, for example, that the bourgeoisie must have a religion, that religion is necessary for the regulars at the Bourse, for the bohemians of the magazines and the theaters, or for that innumerable multitude living from prostitution and intrigue; but that, as for them, their robust consciences have no need of God. The people want neither to dupe nor to be duped any longer: what they call for today is a positive law, based in reason and justice, which imposes itself on all, and which nobody is allowed to mock.

Would a reform of the old religion be enough to respond to this wish of the people? No. The people have realized that religion had not been legal tender for a long time among the upper classes, while they continued to believe in it; that, even in the temples, it had lost all credit and all prestige; that it counts for absolutely nothing in politics and business; finally, that the separation of faith and law has become an axiom of government everywhere. The tolerance of the State now covers religion, which is precisely the opposite of what had taken place in the past. Thus the people have followed the movement inaugurated by their leaders; it is wary of the spiritual, and it no longer wants a religion which has been made an instrument of servitude by clerical and anticlerical Machiavellianism. Whose fault is that?

But are the people capable of philosophy?

Without hesitation we answer: Yes, as well as reading, writing and arithmetic; as well as understanding the catechism and practicing a craft. We even go as far as to think philosophy can be found in its entirety in that essential part of public education, the trade: a matter of attention and habit. Primary instruction requires three years, apprenticeship three more, for a total of six years: when philosophy, the popularization of which has become a necessity of the first order in our times, must be taken by the plebeian, in addition to the six years of primary and professional instruction to which he is condemned, an hour per week for six more years, would that be a reason to deny the philosophical capacity of the people?

The people are philosophical, because they are as weary of praying as of paying. They have had enough of the pharisee and the publican; and all it desires, and the point we have reached, is to know how to direct its ideas, and to free itself from this world of tolls and paternosters. It is to this end that we have resolved, with some friends, to consecrate our forces, certain as we are that, if sometimes this philosophy of the people spreads a bit too much from our pen, the truth, once known, will not lack abbreviators.

Colins' painful punctuation

Warning: Off-topic chatter about the process of translation.

Jean Guillaume Cesar Alexandre Hippolyte, baron de Colins was the chief theorist of Rational Socialism, and a frequent critic and intellectual rival of Proudhon. Indeed, Colins' crew were pitting the two figures against each other long after both had died. I'm planning on finishing up a translation of Adolphe Hugentobler's Dialogue of Dead Men sometime in 2009. Colins wrote a three-volume work, Justice in Science, apart from the Revolution and the Church, which begins with a 600-page attempted refutation of most of Proudhon's main theses in Justice in the Revolution and the Church. I think he's largely missing the point, but it's interesting stuff. Unfortunately, Colins had some peculiar habits in the realm of punctuation which make translation at least a little peculiar. Here's a taste of his prose:

— What is meant by absolute?

— Absolute means: independant.

— What is it that is independant?

— That which is eternal. If, the creator God exists; God alone is eternal; God alone is absolute. If, the creator God does not exist; the matter, the force, which modifies our sensibility, is eternal; is absolute. If the sensibility is a modification of matter; each sensibility is not eternal, is not absolute; but, it is: relative; temporal: dependent on modifications of matter. If, each sensibility is eternal; each sensibility is absolute. Then, there would be divisible absolute, matter; and, indivisible absolutes, the sensibilities; the immaterialities.

Obviously, some of this is difficult in precisely the same ways that Proudhon's own work is, or that any bit of specialized writing can be. But, there are also: the colons; the extra semi-colons; which, tend to make reading the stuff a little: odd. Proudhon was prone to sentences with 413 dependent clauses, which often makes clear translation a chore, but Colins raises all sorts of other problems. Ultimately, I expect I will just be leaving out two-thirds of his punctuation.

War: What's it good for?

It turns out that Proudhon's answer to the musical question is rather interesting, and challenging. His two-volume War and Peace represents an further exploration of some of the ideas he had developed in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church. The turning point in Proudhon's philosophy came in the 1850s, between the Philosophy of Progress and Justice, when he realized that, as he later put it, "the antinomy does not resolve itself." The immediate consequence of this realization was a move from the emphasis on synthesis, which had dominated his work from the last sections of What is Property? through the System of Economic Contradictions and beyond, to a much more complex treatment of the role of ultimately irresolvable conflict in social evolution. One consequence of this change in his dialectical approach was that the historical accounts that made up such an important part of Proudhon's work had to be revisited, in order to determine if and how this other dynamic revealed itself. Another, linked, consequence, was that the philosophy of progress and the theory of collective force and collective beings had to take what we might now consider an "anti-foundationalist" turn.

For the later Proudhon, the series (taking this term with all its Fourierist implications) of approximations of Justice, the successive balancings of more-or-less free forces, was Progress (big-P), even the Revolution, and there was something relentless about its upward climb. The theory of collective persons, what contemporaries like Pierre Leroux and William B. Greene addressed (with some variations) as a "doctrine of life" and theory of Humanity, made possible the theory of "immanent justice," which posited at least the constant possibility of advance, in the form of improved approximation. But that same theory meant that there were lots of actors on the social-historical stage, lots of kinds of actors, to which individual persons had a variety of kinds of connections and in which they had various investments. Add to that the additional wrinkle that each "stage," each element in the historical series, lingers. Nothing is magically "realized and suppressed" by synthesis, and each approximation ends up resting on other approximations -- all the way down, really.

For Proudhon, Justice, despite its key-word status, is never in-itself anything more than that balance of free forces. "An eye for an eye" is justice, as is The Golden Rule: they simply occupy difference places in the Justice-series. Obviously, "higher" approximations of justice have their advantages, both for individuals and for collective beings like Humanity or a given society. But the existence of "higher" approximations does not necessarily invalidate the "lower," particularly if, in the historical series, later, higher approximations are founded on those earlier and lower.

Proudhon's War and Peace is one of those texts routinely cited as a forerunner to "fascism" (a term that requires scare-quoting, not because there is any question that fascism has existed, but because the critics tend to lump a lot of "stuff we don't approve of" into the mix.) The literature on proto-fascism is a complex one, frequently involving the defense of certain models of rationality and science, as well as the particularly political and ideological forms we associate with the term. So Bergson can be blackened with Sorel's various political indiscretions, presumably because his treatment of "intuition" is "anti-science" and "anti-rational," rather than part of a debate about what science and rationality will be. Proudhon, already an undesirable for that "property is theft" stuff, gets the "insufficient degree of separation from Sorel" treatment, and his anti-semitic notebook entries are mentioned, and who would dare argue that his War and Peace was not an irrationalist glorification of war, even if its final line is "HUMANITY WANTS NO MORE WAR." Hey, he was "a man of paradox." Right?

No. But thanks, I guess, for playing...

Proudhon does, in fact, talk about war as having an important moral function. He talks about the extent to which it has been war which has driven human beings to acts of bravery, self-sacrifice and ingenuity. If he doesn't quite get to Marinetti's "war is the world's only hygiene," he does point out that we have relied pretty heavily on war to maintain what balance of forces we have achieved. It may not be nice to say so, but it doesn't appear to be incorrect. And the critics of war don't seem to deny the basic right of force, when push comes to shove, or to class war, or General Strike, etc. What Proudhon attempts to do, in a work which is not always a comfortable read (as if we required comfort from political philosophy or history), is to demonstrate the ways in which the right of force (not a right to force, about which more a little later) has functioned in the service of Justice, has contributed to the subsequent approximations of Justice, and continues to play a narrowly delimited role in the defense of Justice.

If you want to get a taste of how Proudhon argues in War and Peace, I've translated 17 pages from the first volume, where Proudhon is explaining the "right of force." Here are Chapter XI and the Conclusion of Book Two of Volume One.

A couple of things to remember, or to consider if you haven't read my other discussions of Proudhon:

1) He uses the French word droit, which can mean either "law" or "right" in a way that is most accurately translated, as far as I can see, as "right," but which does not, or does not necessarily refer to the sort of natural or political rights we are accustomed to talking about. Every group, ensemble, being, etc., has its own "law" (loi) of organization, which determines what is "right" (appropriate, proper, logical, natural, etc) for it to do. Likewise, it participates in larger ensembles with their own laws, which condition those of the individuals. Droit remains something of a mix of what we might call natural law and/or right, as well as covering more strictly descriptive (rather than normative) grand. Just don't necessarily assume that Proudhon is trying to anything more than describe the normal functioning of presently-existing "bodies" of one sort or another.

2) This is part of an explicitly historical, progressive account. The basic argument of the book is that all of our "higher-level" rights, and really all of our more peaceful institutions, as well as all those which we have yet to create, are part of a historical series which begins with relations mediated by raw force. Peace would be the end of that series, presumably, but war would always be its origin. Peace is, in a strong sense, the end product of the process of war. And, Proudhon says, we have got ourselves into some real trouble by denying this historical fact.

3) Proudhon speaks of "right of force" and "right of war," but these, he argues, are like all true rights, equal and reciprocal. If there are, or have been, certain circumstances in which the right of the strongest has been or can be our model for justice, justice is still a restless demand for balance, and ultimately justice cannot be fulfilled at any acceptable level by silencing or excluding the weak. It is not clear that there is a "right to war," but instead a sort of protocol for dealing with the wars that occur, and which can only justly occur in circumstances of social or political imbalance or injustice. Proudhon talks about the "right of labor" to its product, and contrasts that with the "right to work."

The translation is very rough and literal. I wanted to get through enough of this to clarify for myself how it fit with the things I'm working on more seriously. I'll try to clean it up sometime, but probably not for a few months.

Note: Parts of this post were lifted directly from a discussion at the Forums of the Libertarian Left which includes more discussion and context.

Proudhon's "Kronos"

In the biographical introduction to Tucker's edition of What is Property? is a brief mention that around 1851 Proudhon's "entertained the idea of writing a universal history entitled "Chronos." This project was never fulfilled." There was probably no shortage of "universal history" in France by 1850, although an entry by Proudhon would no doubt have been novel and interesting. The Saint-Simonians and their allies, including P. J. B. Buchez, Auguste Ott, Pierre Leroux, had written volume after volume on the subject. In 1849, William B. Greene published his Remarks On The History Of Science; Followed By An Apriori Autobiography, which was greeted by Boston's radical ministers with "inextinguishable peals of laughter," but which may have been a little French for his audiences in any event. Orestes Browson took issue with the notion of an "a priori history," but he, at least, should have known where all this was coming from, as he had been instrumental in introducing Leroux to American audiences. The truth is that all of this stuff is pretty hard sledding a century and a half later. But in its time, the assumption was widespread that a science of history or a philosophy of progress could be elaborated. In the "First Letter" of his Philosophy of Progress, for example, Proudhon (not generally one of the names associated with this tradition) wrote:

If then I could once put my finger on the opposition that I put between these two ideas, to explain what I mean by Progress and what I consider Absolute, I would have given the principle, secret and key to all my polemics; you would possess the logical link of all of my ideas; and you could, with that notion alone, become for you with regard to me an infallible criterion, not only estimate the ensemble of my publications, but forecast and signal in advance the propositions that sooner or later I must affirm or deny, the doctrines of which I will have to make myself the defender or adversary; you would be able, I say, to evaluate and judge all my theses by what I have said and by what I do not know. You would know me, intus et in cute, such as I am, such as I have been all my life, and such as I would find myself in a thousand years, if I could live a thousand years: the man whose thought always advances, whose program will never be finished. And at whatever moment in my career you would come to know me, whatever conclusion you could come to regarding me, you would have always, either to absolve me in the name of Progress, or to condemn me in the name of the Absolute.

We are not far from the realm of "a priori autobiography." And this is right in the midst of Proudhon's explanation of his own driving philosophy, what he will call his "religion." If the Chronos (or Kronos) was never written, it was probably not a passing fancy. The next work that Proudhon did complete was The Philosophy of Progress, and that work led naturally to War and Peace and Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, as well as the historical accounts in The Theory of Property and various of the posthumous works.

We know a bit about Proudhon's plans, from some letters he wrote. We know that he was working with Marc-Lucien Boutteville, who was eventually the editor of Proudhon's posthumously-published Contradictions politiques, and who published in 1863 a volume entitled La morale de l'église et la morale naturelle which shows considerable Proudhonian influence. So far, I've found no evidence that the collaboration went much of anywhere, but the correspondence relating to it is interesting. Here's the key letter:

Sainte-Pélagie, December 17, 1851.

A. M. BOUTTEVILLE

My dear Boutteville, the more I advance in my individual labors, the more I realize that the work that we make in common must be conceived and, as much as possible, written according the plan of mine, and in a manner so as to serve it as continuation and conclusion. The history of democracy is nothing other than the history of the emancipation of the human spirit in all spheres, and, and without counting the disadvantages for us to publish a book soon described as demagogic, it is clear that by taking the word democracy in a sense too close to that of jacobinism, we make quite uselessly the monograph of a hypothesis rejected for the moment, and perhaps for many years.

Thus, it is necessary to enlarge further our views and our plan, and to make ourselves more generalizing, more profound, by sacrificing something of the epic interest.

I have decided to give my book the title Kronos (or whatever you please), to match the Cosmos of A. de Humboldt.

It will include, from the origin of things, the creation, as they say, up to Luther, the moment where our history begins, and will be divided into sixteen periods.

From Luther's time until our own requires four others (twenty altogther), divided thus:

17th - From Luther to the Treaty of Westphalia (1517-l648)

18th - From the Treaty of Westphalia to the French Revolution (1648-1789)

19th - The French Revolution (1789-1848)

20th - Socialism (1848-****)

We will preserve that distribution; the last period will serve as the historic and prophetic conclusion of the nineteen preceding.

It is necessary then for you to attach to this summary all the facts relating to Christian-Muslim-European civilisation, including America (excluding China, India, Mongolia, the Asiatic archipelago, the Burmas, Siam, Japan, etc., with the exception of that which concerns the affairs of Europe), and take for a superior principle of historical direction the movement of nations towards an order of things which must realize at once liberty (individual, locale, etc.) in its highest expression, and the unityof the human race.

Thus, my work and yours will form a continuous series, without crossed purposes or repetitions. By conserving more space in the treatment of my first sixteen periods, I could give more scope, interest and evidence to the demonstration of recent times, as also, in condensing more the manner of the first part of Bossuet's Discours sur l'Histoire universelle, and including only that table of facts, citations, reflections of major interests, we will have made a work of sound philosophy, instead of a masterpiece of literature.

It is understood that in the Histoire de la Démocratie moderne, the exposition in order of dates, as I employ it in Kronos, will not be followed; in this regard, the two works, though forming a continuous whole, will differ noticeably. It will be necessary to follow the method of Poinson, du Rozier and Des Michels in their very substantial, conscientious and exact, but insufficiently philosophical summaries of the Greek, Latin and Medieval history.

In a word, let us not loose sight of the fact that we must not aim to render useless the works made before us, or those that will be made after, but to make a treatise which throws light on the whole history of humanity and establishes its philosophy.

At our next meeting, I will speak at more length of all these things, and, in making you a part of my own work, I will convince you of the ease with which I group in a single narrative, a single idea, and single general evolution, all the history for example of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which includes as you know besides:

The empire of Charlemagne and all its divisions;

The Greek empire of the Orient;

The papacy and the schism of Photios;

The Angles, Saxons, Normans, Slavs, etc.

Islam, subdivided in three or four independent caliphates and in two great parties;

The war of Spain against the Moors, etc.

All of that, and it is the whole world (minus the Far East, the evolution of which separate, but always on the same plan and by virtue of the same laws), all that, I say, so complicated moments, can only be one, absolutely one, and it is as easy to recount that universal history, by stating at once all the contemporary facts, as it is to describe a session of the Convention.

So group, research, accumulate the facts, and limit yourself to giving them the most faithful expression; do not manage the dates and the facts. We must raise a monument which overshadows Catholicism and tyranny, and which is as precious and as accessible to the ignorant as to the wise.

My firm conviction is that we can do this if we wish to, and that this double labor must cast on the destinies of the species an as yet unknown and inextinguishable light.

The Kronos alone will form two large volumes, as much as the Histoire de la Démocratie moderne. By abridging from it the whole space of time that the other includes, I will give it more lucidity, firmness and scope, and make our labor more complete, easier to make and to understand, and more conclusive. It will always be the same work, published in two forms and by two different publishers.

I hope, my dear friend, that instead of becoming impatient with my reshufflings, you understand as I do that it is not possible to make a special history or any monograph without knowing as a basis universal history, and that you will be grateful to me for contributing thus, although indirectly, to the composition of a work which, without that contribution would, I warn you, have run the risk of being only a plea for the good of the cause.

Besides, you understand that the plan that I have marked for you has no need of modifications. The large divisions and the general sense I have indicated are already the consequence of my own studies; I ask of you only more generality still, more universality, conciseness and fullness.

The century has enough literature: let us give it facts and truths. One is always eloquent enough when one is Newton, Cuvier or Jussieu; let us try to be something like those gentlemen. If they are justly admired, they are not, after all, gods.

I extend my hand to you.

P.-J. Proudhon.

Slowly but surely the shape of Proudhon's larger project emerges, and some of the key differences between his work and that of Greene seem to loom considerably less large.