De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Église/Tome III/Chapter Six
From CollectiveReason
IDEAS
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TO HIS EMINENCE
MONSEIGNEUR CARDINAL MATTHIEU
ARCHBISHOP OF BESANÇON
Monseigneur,
Jesus replied to the Pharisees who questioned him about the adulteress: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
Speaking for myself, as a sinner, I cannot use the language that the holiest of the holy, defending a sinner, allowed himself to use towards the hypocritical and fornicating Pharisees, with regard to you, an archbishop who, not content to indict my ideas, throws suspicion on my morals. I do not therefore accuse you or any of your colleagues in the priesthood of sin; I believe your life to be as pure as your faith, and abstain from any recrimination. Odiosa restringenda. You strike me in my person: I shall not make a reprisal in kind.
But here is what I say to you all, pontiffs of the Most High: Those of you who know the law cast stones at me.
Yes, I shall consent to any shame if you prove to me that the Church knows Justice, and that having been raised at her breast, it through my own fault, my fault alone, and through my very great fault that I have been culpable; I wish, in that case, to be humiliated, castigated, blasted, as if I were the first and only prevaricator.
But you know nothing of law nor of right. On all the things of human life, you lack principles and rules. I have already proved this five times; allow me, at the beginning of this Sixth Study, to remind you.
In that which concerns Persons, you have no morals. Your Decalogue is only an enumeration of categories, your Gospel a collection of parables, your charity the first stammering of Justice. Far from having a theory of personal right, your dogma repugns it, and the Church having founded its hierarchy and discipline on that dogma, your priestly interests oppose themselves to any theory which would contradict it.
In that which concerns Goods, you have no morals: your dogma repugns it and your interests are opposed to it.
Contents |
CHAPTER II
Difficulty of applying intellectual hygiene to the moral and political sciences.
X. — Thus according to the testimony of the scientists, the most serious testimony which can be invoked in this matter, the primary cause of our errors, in whatever order of knowledge, and thus the source of all the deceptions, illusions, jugglery and mystification of which we are victims, is in the abuse of metaphysics, that is, in the consideration of the in itself (en soi) of things, of that part of things which is outside of phenonema and relations, in a word, of the absolute.
Consequently, the remedy for error, safeguard against lies, rule of hygiene for the mind, consists, according to the scientists themselves, in recognizing, for the needs of our logic, the absolute, then in eliminating it from our conclusions, so that, the absolute posited, the judgment bears on nothing more than relations: this is what the natural sciences, for their part, demonstrate today brilliantly.
CHAPTER VI
XLIX. — Aristotle has written that the object of the theater was to purge the passions.
What we seek at this moment, to the need of which both the Church and philosophy attest, is to purge ideas.
To purge ideas, in the sphere of the natural sciences, M. Babinet has told us, is to study, by direct, repeated and carefully controlled observation, phenomena, the relations of things, or, as M. Cournot says, the reason of things; in other words, it is to eliminate from the consideration of things the Abolute. Our readers know already what we understand by that.
It follow, by reversing the proposition, that to eliminate the absolute is to make the reason of things appear; and as that reason of things makes up, for us, the very reality of things, it results in the last analysis that to eliminate the absolute is to give reality to things, it is, for the man who seeks utility in them, to create them.
To purge ideas, in the sphere of the moral sciences, will be then, to determine à pari, by means of historical observation and the study of social transactions, the relations or the reason of human acts, without mixing there anything of the human absolute, or, for stronger reasons, of the superhuman absolute, whatever name one or the other takes, angel, archangel, dominion, principality, throne, community, Church, council, parliament, cathedral, personality, property, etc., up to and including there the head of that incommensurable hierarchy, the Absolute of absolutes, who is God.
By that elimination of the absolute, we would obtain for the moral order that which we have obtained for the physical order, that is in making appear the reason of human things, we would demonstrate their reality, we would give to them a positive existence that they would not have without it.
It is thus that by defining Justice according to histical and social phenomenality, we have, so to speak, created it. What was Justice in the condition that theology had made of it? A pure myth. What does it become by the elimination of the absolute? A relation, first, and, as all relations suppose a power or subject which sustains them, a reality.
It is by the same process of elimination and of definition that we have recognized the reality of social power and as a result that of the collective being that produces it. What was the power in the ancient theological-political doctrine, with the divine absolute for master and head? Still a myth. What does it become by elimination that we have made of the absolute? A commutative relation between forces, and, as that relation is itself a force, a reality.
Now it is a question of giving to that collective being, of which we have demonstrated the power and reality, an intelligence, and that is what we will reach by a last elimination of the absolute, the effect of which will be to create the Public Reason, guardian of all truth and all Justice, center and pivot of all individual reason, without which the Public Faith, what the men of affairs, in a more restrained sense, call confidence and a precious good that all governments pride themselves on giving, is impossible.
L. — How then does the purgation of ideas occur in the order of the moral sciences? In other words, how is the collective or public reason constituted?
To which I respond: By the opposition of the absolute to the absolute.
You don't understand? The thing is not, however, difficult: it is what is commonly called liberty of opinions or freedom of the press.
Isn't it true that this is not at all marvelous, and that there is no great merit in finding it? But look closely; see what happens in a country where the opinions are free, and they are still free in France in a sufficiently large measure that we can observe the phenomenon; then tell us, after reflection, your opinion on it.
Man is a free absolute. I use the word free here in same manner as the physician distinguishing the free from the latent caloric. It is thus that I have already said free spirit and latent spirit, in order to distinguish the intelligence which knows itself and which moves in man, from that of which we recognize the imprint and which seems asleep in nature.
In short, the free absolute is that which says moi; the non-free absolute is that which cannot say moi.
As a free absolute, man tends to subordinate all that surrounds him, things and persons, beings and their laws, theoretical truth and empirical truth, though as inertia, conscience and love as stupidity and egoism.
Hence the character of individual reason, in which the absolute, the very law of individuality, comes to occupy an ever greater place, unlike that of the collective reason, in which the absolute tends to occupy an ever-smaller space. It is in the collective reason, indeed, that relations, sustained by one another, according to the expression which M. Lenoir attributes to me, are at once the law and the social reality.
That difference of character between the particular reason and the collective reason will become sensible at once by the facts; but it is necessary to explain first how the second rises from the contradictions of the first.
From the side of nature, the tendency of particular reason to absolutism meets neither resistance nor control; and one could doubt that science existed, that it was even possible, if the truth and reason of things sole object of philosophy, was to interpret only that reason of the individual.
Before his fellow, an absolute like himself, the absolutism of man stops short; or, to put it better, these two absolutisms destroy one another, allowing to remain of their respective reasons only the relations of things, about which they struggle.
As only a diamond can cut a diamond, only a free absolute is capable of balancing a free absolute, of neutralizing it, eliminating it, so that, by the fact of their reciprocal cancellation, there remains of the debate only the objective reality that each tended to denature for his profit, or to make disappear.
It is the shock of ideas that casts the light, says the proverb.[1] Let us correct that slightly metaphysical proverb: it is by mutual contradiction that minds purify themselves of all ultra-phenomenal elements; it is the negation that the free absolute makes of his antagonist which produces, in the moral sciences, adequate ideas, pure of all egoist and transcendental dross, in conformity, in short, with reality and social reason.
LI. — This theory, which has nothing very subtle in it, will become, if we can put it that way, concrete and palpable, with the aid of the facts which alone can give it an explanation.
Let us consider what occurs in the human multitude, placed under the empire of absolutist reason, so long as the struggle of interests and the controversy of opinions does not bring out the social reason.
In his capacity as absolute and free absolute, man not only imagines the absolute in things and names it, which first creates for him, in the exactitude of his thoughts, grave embarrassment. He does more: by the usurpation of things that he believes he has a right to make, that objective absolute becomes internalized; he assimilates it, becomes interdependent (solidaire) with it, and pretends to respect it as himself in the use that he makes of it and in the interpretations that it pleases him to make of it. Each, in petto, reasoning the same, it results, in the first moment, that the public reason, formed from the sum of particular reasons, differs from those in nothing, neither in basis nor in form; so that the world of nature and of society is nothing more than a deduction of the individual self (moi), a belonging of his absolutism.
All the constitutions and beliefs of humanity are formed thus; at the very hour that I write, the collective reason hardly exists except in potential, and the absolute holds the high ground.
Thus, by virtue of his absolute moi, secretly posed as center and universal principle, man affirms his domain over things; all the members of the State making the same affirmation, the principle of societary absolutism becomes, by unanimity, the law of the State, and all the theories of the jurists on the possession, acquisition, transmission, and and exploitation of goods, are deduced from it. In vain logic demonstrates that this doctrine is incompatible with the data of the social order; in vain, in its turn, experience proves that it is a cause of extermination for persons and ruin for States: nothing knows how to change a practice established on the similarity of egoisms. The concept remains; it is in all minds: all intelligence, every interest, conspire to defend it. The collective reason is dismissed, Justice vanquished, and economic science declared impossible.
By that example, one can judge the system. What we call tradition, institution, custom, doctrine, from which we have been at so much pain to rid ourselves, is always only an unfaithful compromise of particular reason passed into a general rule, a deduction from the absolute. It will be enough for me to indicate here the principal terms.
Theory of Capital: an absolutist deduction, leading to legal usury, first cause, obstinately misunderstood, of all the crises that shake the economy of nations.
Theory of Charity: an absolutist deduction, giving place to the outrageous theory of public alms and of the Workhouse. [2]
Theory of Value: an absolutist deduction, denying in principle the commensuration of products and services, and concluding, in practice, in the legitimacy of agiotage.
Theory of the State of of Government: an absolutist deduction, leading from one side to the praetorian empire, from the other to the universal monarchy, and finally to the reason of the State,three things which would kill humanity, if it was possible that they could establish themselves absolutely.
Let us depart from the economic and the political.
Theory of concepts, Mind, matter, etc.: an absolutist deduction, leading to all the drams of mysticism and illuminism, to revelations, mysteries and miracles.
Theory of Language: an absolutist deduction, leading to the theory of the Verb,[3] of language and of the first revelation, as a result, to the infallibility of individual reason, emanation and image of the divine reason.
Theory of Justice: an absolutist deduction, which tracing it back from the human individual to the divine universal, poses it as a commandment from Heaven to humanity, from which is then deduced original sin and the whole system of Christian pardons and expiations. . .
I will stop. The entire system of practical reason has been constructed according to the personalistic and arbitrary deduction, where, the serving for principle and end, truth has no place but within the very logic of the absolute.
LII. — Now, this is not at all the way that the collective reason proceeds, and its deductions are entirely different.
Opposing the absolute to the absolute, so as to nullify at all points that unintelligible element, and considering as real and legitimate only the relation of antagonistic terms, it arrive at synthetic ideas, very different, often even opposite, from the conclusions of the individual moi.
It says to us, for example, that property, balanced by property, although always absolute in the proprietor, resolves itself before the public reason in a pure delegation; credit, always motivated by self-interest for the lender, in a mutuality without interest; commerce, agoiteur by nature, in equal exchange; government, imperative in essence, in a balance of forces; labor, repugnant to the mind [esprit], in an exercise of the mind; charity, in right; competition, in solidarity; unity, in series; etc.
And this conversion does not imply, remark it well, condemnation of individuality; it supposes that individuality. Men, citizen, laborers, the Collective Reason, truly practical and juridical, says to us, remain each what you are; preserve and develop your personality; defend your interests; prouduce your thought; cultivate that particular reason which today, through its tyrannical exorbitance, makes your so evil; debate one with another, except for the regard that intelligent and absolute beings always owe one another; stand up, criticize; respect only the rulings of your common reason, the judgments of which cannot be yours, freed as it is from that absolute from which you would only be shadows.
I believe it is useless to insist on that fundamental distinction of individual and collective reason, the first essentially absolutist, the second antipathetic to all absolutism. It would be necessary for me to take up again, from this new point of view of the two contrary reasons, what I have said about the rights of persons, the distribution of work and wealth, and the organization of government. Allow me to refer the reader there.
In summary, there is not a truth in the order of natural things, or, for stronger reasons, in the order of society, not a scientific or juridical formula, which has not been, at the day of its publication, regarded as a paradox. Now, the cause which thus renders truth and Justice paradoxical is the character of our individual reason, which is absolutist, from which we deduce the necessity of a superior reason, serving as model and corrective for the first.
LIII. — If liberty must be counted as something, and if nonetheless it must undergo a discipline, let us agree that it could not bear another than that there. Liberty disciplined by itself: that is the base and inmost core of our revolutionary philosophy. Most certainly, there is nothing more rational and more than that discipline; but nothing which has had more difficultly establishing itself in the practice of nations, governed from their origins by authority and faith, that is to say, by the absolute.
Christ has said:
That whoever will not listen to the Church will be for you as pagan and publican.
By these words, the author of the Gospel has posed the principle of authority in matters of opinion; he has condemned free examination, public, universal and reciprocal discussion; he has taken for a rule the formula The Master has spoken it, and condemned in advance the Revolution. If he had lived in our time, he would have spoken out against the liberty of the press. To faith and to theological charity, to the house of prayer and to the Church of God, he did not require less than that sanction of silence, the last and most absurd invention of absolutism.
And here is why the Christian Church was only democratic for an instant; why no Church founded on a principle of religion has known, in developing, how to persist in democracy. Free discussion leading fatally to the elimination of every absolute, one of these two things will always occur: either, if the religious element is preponderant in the minds, the collective reason will efface itself before the absolutist reason, and the government of society will pass entirely to the episcopate; or, if the spirit of equality carries it and maintains the controversy, theological reason will be vanquished, and society, having commenced with religion, will end by declaring itself superior to all religion.
Heresy in perpetuity, until the extinction of dogma and the exhaustion of matter for heresy, such is doubtless the inevitable effect of the freedom of discussion; but such is also the character of the public reason, the essence of which is to affirm only relations. Now, it is this that Christ, prophet and son of God, did not want; that which at all times and with reason has condemned the orthodox Church, in which resides the spirit of God; that which kills and dishonors the reformed Churches, submitting hypocritically to the sanctioning of their free examination of the word of God.
Only the Revolution, after having understood the condition of objective scientific truth, has understood what the condition of social truth could be. As frank in its liberty as the Church is in its dogma, it says to us:
All the French have the right to publish their opinions, in conformity with the laws. — The censorship can never be reestablished.
And again:
All the laws must be discussed publicly, and freely voted by the national assembly.
And elsewhere:
Secret proceedings are abolished: debates will be public in criminal matters, unless public honesty is opposed to it.
Let us add the famous phrase, The law is atheist; this does not mean precisely that the Revolution allows all species of worship, less still that it rejects the idea of the absolute, but that its reason is formed by the elimination of the absolute.
By these declarations, the Revolution has proclaimed the independence of thought; it has abolished, as injurious to man and citizen, the authority of the school; it has only required, for the definitions of the legislator parliamentarily formulated, for the decrees of the prince legally rendered, for the judgments of the tribunals solemnly pronounced, only a conditional adhesion and a de facto submission. Against the illusions of pietism, the arbitrariness of the State, the entities of philosophy, the reticences and hypocrisies of science, the coalitions of privilege, the training of the parties, the seductions of eloquence, the somnolence of the magistrates, and all the fantasies of the ideal, it has evoked, as supreme guarantee of truth and of Justice, what. . . ? The civil war of ideas, and the antagonism of judgments.
Let us admit that no philosopher has ever, philosophizing a priori on the conditions of social order, thought of this means: The free press, anarchy!
Our brave bourgeois, enamored of order to the point of rage, cannot see that there is, in the conflict of human thoughts, an organizing force; they do not understand that the equibilibrium of interests and of budget has for its condition the battle of opinions. They demand silence and obedience, like the followers of Pythagoras. The parliamentary system, to which they had been devoted in July and February, eventually made them uneasy; they have almost all called for the imperial peace. Are they happy? No. This race can neither live nor die; it reqires a middle ground between being and non-being!
LIV. — Consider what takes place in your soul: the opposition of the faculties, their mutual reaction is the principle of its equilibrium; let us say more, this is the cause of the sentiment which it has of its own existence. Your mental life, just like your sensory life, is composed of a continuous oscillatory movement, and you feel your self [moi] only through the play of the powers which constitute you. Assume a moment of rest, and you lose, as they say, consciousness, you drift into reverie. If one faculty then tries to usurp power, the soul is troubled, and agitation continues until the normal process is restored. It is the dignity of the soul that it cannot suffer one of its powers to subalternize others, that it requires each to be all at the service of all; there is its morality, there is its virtue.
So it is with society: the opposition of powers from which the social group, cities, corporations, societies, families, and individualities are composed, is the first condition of their stability. Who says harmony or agreement, indeed, necessarily presupposes terms in opposition. Attempt a hierarchy, a prepotency: you intended to create order, you only create absolutism. The social soul, oh obstinate spiritualist, is in fact no more than your own a sovereign prince, controlling passive faculties; it is a power of collectivity, resulting from the action and reaction of opposed faculties; and it is the well-being of this power, it is its glory, it is its justice, that none of its faculties precedes the others, but that all act in the service of all, in a perfect equilibrium.
Now, who will restore the troubled equilibrium, who will come to the assistance of Social Justice, who will execute its judgments, if not the oppressed faculties themselves?
After the Revolution of 1848, when the Constituent Assembly and later the Legislative Assembly found it appropriate, in order to quell the Revolution, to restrict freedom of the press, those who took up the defense proclaimed mostly on behalf of the rights of the man and the citizen, and pointed out the futility of the action, the danger of leaving power without control... Those concerns had their value, but it is mostly in the name of the public reason, to which it would carry a deadly attack, that they should have spoken. Without a free, universal, ardent, even provocative controversy, no public reason and no public spirit. Absolutism resumes its course: everywhere cowardice, lying, defection, and immorality. What says at this time of the alleged legislators in the order?
Eh! How could they forget, these Prudhommes of the counter-revolution, that the order in the streets, of which they showed themselves so ludicrously jealous, required the war of speech and pen? When the Convention, in its magnificent anger, voted these unnecessary items of the statement of 93:
That any individual who would usurp sovereignty be at that moment put to death by the free men;
When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred and most essential of duties,
did not the Convention intend that where the absolute cannot be opposed to the absolute verbally, it is inevitable that man should attack man bodily? Examples:
The Convention, following the expression of a montagnard, does not judge Louis XVI, it kills him: an act of absolutism, which exceeded the right of parliamentary elimination. The Paris guard corps kills the representative Le Pelletier: a rejoinder of monarchical absolutism to the absolutism affected by the Mountain. – Bonaparte, in the name of the public safety, dissolves the Directory; Pichegru, in the name of freedom, conspires against Bonaparte. History now blames both: it is marvelous. But at least you should acknowledge that the absolutism of one is produced by the absolutism of the other, which was not have happened if the voice of one man had not come to cover the voice of the republic. – Charles X suspends the Charter: Paris overthrows Charles X. The Bastille column has been erected to the glory of the insurrection? May it be replaced by the statue of Pichegru. But no: the column of the Bastille, despite the terms of its registration, is a monument to the freedom of the press and tribune. It tells you that Henry V would be king of France if his ancestor, afraid of the veto of the deputies, had wanted to put his personal reason to place of the general reason.
At the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe, a minister, using his prerogative, orders a professor whose speech, applauded by some, blamed by the other, seemed dangerous, to stop teaching. As the public has adopted the cause of the teacher, less because it approves his theories than because it suspects the power to obstruct the war of ideas, and it regards the war of ideas as its own prerogative, and its guarantee against the absolutism of the government. The Charter declaring, on the one hand, the equal eligibility of all French to employment, on the other, the equal right of faculty to publish its opinions, it was as if it had stated that there could not exist in any case and under any pretext, a conflict between the practoce of a public faction and the expression of an opinion. Royalty alone had been elevated above these attacks, because its role was precisely to preserve the power to attack, and if we could say in the end that the opposition was against the crown, it was the fault of the crown.
In order to ensure peace, maintain social energies in perpetual struggle: what an idea! No, once again, such a discovery could only be the fruit of long experience; the metaphysics from which all knowledge begins, spiritualism, religion, faith, the Church, the ideal, turn up their noses at it.
LV. — It is to this method of purging and stabilization of ideas, which has for our nation become second nature, that France has, for a century, owed the most real progress, a progress that we yet hope may not be stripped from it by any effort of absolutism, by any relapse into religion.
Let us render an account of this labor.
Just as in the natural sciences, the absolute is eliminated by constant criticism, which conserves of theories only the phenomena gathered and relations worked, and stops only before the evidence of facts and series;
Similarly, in the social sciences, the absolute is dispelled [écarté] by the general contradiction, which allows to remain only doctrines that the points of fact and right [droit] duly consituted, and which, exiting itself only with a view to Justice, is forced to bow to Justice in its turn.
The truth of relations and of Justice, those are the only two things that respects the universal controversy, and before which any irony evaporates.
Also, since Descartes, France produced no system of philosophy of which the principle, the means and purpose were in the absolute: the spirit of opposition and criticism that prevails among us would not allow it. What we took for a sign of the inferiority of our genius will be instead proof of the superiority of our intelligence.
Hence the elimination of metaphysical entities, persevering, universal, unprecedented in history, which, passing from France abroad, characterizes the present era, and that I have compared to a circumcision of the mind, or, following the expression of Aristotle, to a purgation.
Purgation of moral and religious ideas: theism, pantheism, as well as atheism, Catholicism, Protestantism, naturalism, illuminism, theo-philanthropy, messianism, etc. All of that is passé. France can no longer bear religion, and urges that one no longer speaks of it. And since religious ideas, which should, it is said, have no other purpose than to serve as a basis for Justice, compromise it, it begs that right be established, defined without their help, to give it a human and phenomenal basis, to free it, in a word, from any consideration of the absolute.
Purgation of economic ideas. What did the criticism of the physiocrats accomplish, what did that of all the socialists accomplish, what have I myself done, if not to demonstrate in all categories of science, in the corporation, in commerce, in credit, in property, in taxation, in employment, in industrial division, in competition, in value, the presence of the absolute; to protest against its baleful influence, to call for its elimination, that is, to seek the balance which, taking only goods and services into account, the reality and reason of values, neutralizes the claims of personalities by the claims of other personalities, and levels fortunes? Some schools, I know, only attack the reigning absolutism in order to substitute that of their own dogma; to property, one opposes community; to anarchic competition, the State as contractor and owner; to maceration, pleasure; to the spirit, the flesh. But the public, which seeks the right, opposes itself en masse to these counterfeiters of the absolute and eliminates them in their turn: tell me where, at this time, are the Babouvists, the Icarians, the phalansterians, what shall become of the Enfantinians and the lovers of the free woman?
Purgation of political ideas: aristocracy, bourgeoisie, theocracy, monarchy, democracy, empire, parliamentary system, universal suffrage, dual representation, federalism, etc. There is not one of those ideas that does not retain partisans: which imposes itself on the mass of the country? It is no longer even democracy, to which everyone, before February, seemed to rally, and that the socialist sifting and its own errors have dismissed as all the rest, at least in its traditional, official expression. The hour is not far off when those who have accused us with the most violence of having lost the Republic will recognize themselves that it was lost without this strong purgative. Wherever, in politics, the absolute is proven overbearing, Justice has been subordinated, and because Justice is absent from all systems, I mean, because it does not represent the proponderant element, they all succumb one after another under the disapproval of liberty.
Do you begin to understand that which is the elimination of the absolute, the purging of the ideas, the balance of ego by ego, which means the reduction of all the social, political, economic, and religious theories to pure equality, to justice? And does it not occur to you that the man who has best labored at this great and definitive expurgation might also be the one who will most effectively serve the social constitution?
LVI. — Let us sum this chapter by some propositions that focus the thought of the reader.
The theory of collective reason rests on this fact of noological observation, that no explanation can destroy:
When two or more men have to come to a conclusion contradictorily about a question, either of the natural order, or, and with stronger reason, of human nature, it results from the reciprocal and respective elimination that they are led to make of their subjectivity, i.e. the absolute that the ego affirms and represents, is a common manner of seeing, which no longer resembles, either in content or in form, what it would have been without this debate, their individual way of thinking.
This manner of seeing, into which only pure relations enter, without mixtures of metaphysical and absolutist elements, constitutes the collective or public reason.
It follows from this difference in quality between the two reasons that if, instead of referring the matter to a preliminary debate, the same individuals had prejudged by the tacit consent, nodding in agreement, as they say on the palace, their opinions, all emanating from the same sense of absolutism that is the essence of individuality, would be found perfect counterparts, but at the same time their interests would have been in a complete antagonism: a situation quite the opposite from that which creates the collective reason.
It is thus that property was originally established. It resulted from the consent of particular reasons, the bundle of which, spontaneously formed, has taken for authority the sanction of the legislature. But it is now apparent that property, despite the best efforts of jurists, has become incompatible with social order. It awaits its transformation, and we have been witnesses over the past two decades to a work of expurgation the goal of which I have attempted to mark by presenting the balance of the reciprocal rights and duties of the tenant and the owner.
It is thus for the entire social system, which is conceived first of all, and necessarily, from the absolutist point of view.
Therefore, elimination of that absolute, and the constitution of the collective reason by the equation or reciprocal balance of individual thoughts, this is what the concern for truth and Justice imperatively requires, what history demonstrates as the rectifying principle of societies, what the Revolution demands with even more force, but what Christ and his Church at the same time reject with the full force of their faith.
And why is religious authority, established with the aim of Justice, so hostile to the airing of ideas, without which the divine Word would remain without expression, without which Justice and good faith would be impossible?
It is because the individual absolutism that it is a question of eliminating is nothing other, in essence, than the transcendental absolute, of which the exorbitance in philosophical speculation makes all the reality of revelations, just as its intrusion into law causes the loss of morals and ruin of States.
CHAPTER VII
LVII. — But, one says, the distinction between particular reason and collective reason raises more problems than it solves.
First of all, is it enough to proclaim individualism, in order to conclude in a so-called general reason, of which we can only get an idea by a kind of castration of the understanding, as if the abstract separation of the attributes of the understanding would produce two kinds of intelligence? Is it sufficient to make a metaphor to throw down whatever institutions the reason of the nations has created, and wrest from civilization, already so compromised, its old, its eternal foundations? The elimination of the absolute is only a negation, after all: it is the sacrifice of self-interest, recommended under the name of charity by the Gospel, demanded in certain cases by Justice. Something else is needed for us to believe in the reality of the collective reason. What is the ensemble of its ideas? which comes down to asking, what is the system that we propose, in the name of this reason, to establish in place of the old order of things?
Let us go further. Even when, in the name of of new ideas, the system of social relationships has been renewed from top to bottom, is this a reason to admit the social body, as a noologique or mental reality, an intellect sui generis, in the same way that we recognize in the living being, man or animal, a thought, an instinct, an intellect? Allow the force of the collectivity, resulting from the relation of cooperation and from the commutation of particular forces, but the inner sense balks at an intelligence of the collectivity, a social soul. Where is it housed? Who expresses it? Shall we create a vicariate, a priesthood, to this other Logos? After having destroyed in ourselves that double conscience so reproached in religion, are we going to recreate it in the form of this collective reason, whose prescriptions have such difficulty penetrating the particular reason? Instead of bolstering the the public faith by means of this scaffolding, are we not thereby thrown into another hypocrisy?
Such are the difficulties. The system of public reason, its reality, its organism, its necessity for the guarantee of public faith, that is, its end: that is what I will try to clarify as briefly as possible.
LVIII. — System of public reason, or social system.
How many times have I heard addressed this compliment that the jealous critic would undertake, for the honor of the century, to withdraw, if he comprehended its scope: You are an admirable destroyer, but you do not build anything. You throw people in the road, and you do not offer them the least assistance. What do you put in the place of religion? What do you put in place of government? What do you put in place of property? One says to me now: What are you putting in place of this individual reason, which, for the need of your cause, you are reduced to deny the sufficiency?
Nothing, my good man, for I intend to suppress none of the things of which I have made such a resolute critique. I flatter myself that I do only two things: that is, first, to teach you put each thing in its place, after having purged it of the absolute and balanced it with other things; then, to show you that the things you know, and you have such fear of losing, are not the only ones that exist, and that there is considerably more still of which you must take account. Of this order is the collective reason.
One asks what is the true system, the natural, rational, legitimate system of society, since none of those previously tested were resistant to the secret action that disrupts them. This has been the constant preoccupation of socialist philosophers, from the mythological Minos to the director of the Icarians. As we had no positive idea of Justice, nor of the economic order, nor of social dynamics, nor of the conditions of philosophical certainty, a monstrous idea has been made of the social being: it has been compared to a large organization, created according to a formula of hierarchy which, prior to Justice, was his own law and the very condition of its existence; it was like an animal of a species mysterious, but which, following the example of all animals known, should have a head, heart, nerves, teeth, feet, etc. From this chimera of an organism, which all have tried their best to discover, Justice was then deduced, that is to say that one attempted to make morality emerge from physiology or, as they say today, right from duty, so that Justice was still placed outside of conscience, freedom subject to fatalism, and humanity fallen.
I have refuted in advance all these imaginations, by exposing the facts and principles which exclude them forever.
With respect to the substantiality and organization of the social being, I have shown the first in that surplus of effective power which is proper to the group, which exceeds the sum of individual forces that comprise it; I gave the law of the second, showing that it reduces itself to a series of the weightings of forces, services and products, which makes the social system a general equation, a balance. That organism, society, the moral being par excellence, differs essentially so much from living beings, in which the subordination of organs is the law of existence. That is why society is averse to any notion of hierarchy, and thus made the formula: All men are equal in dignity by nature and must become equivalent in conditions through work and Justice.
Now, as a being is organized, such will be its reason: that is why, while the reason of the individual affects the form of a genesis, as can be seen by all the theogonies, gnoses , political constitutions, syllogistics; collective reason reduces itself, like algebra, by the elimination of the absolute, to a series of resolutions and equations, which means that there is really not, for society, a system.
It is not a system, indeed, in the sense that usually attaches to this word, but an order in which all relations are relations of equality, where there exists neither rule nor obedience, neither center of gravity nor of direction; where the only law is that everyone abide by Justice, i.e., balance.
Does mathematics constitute a system? It does not fall into anyone’s mind to say so. If, in a treatise of mathematics, some trace of systematization is detected, it is due to the author, not at all the science. It is thus in the social reason.
Two men meet, recognize their dignity, state the additional benefit that would result for both from the concert of their industries, and consequently guarantee equality, which means economy. There is the whole social system: an equation, and then a power of collectivity.
Two families, two cities, two provinces, contract on the same footing: there is always that these two things, an equation and power of collectivity. It would involve a contradiction, a violation of Justice, if there were anything else.
