System of Economical Contradictions; or, the Philosophy of Misery Part 37

Given matter and attraction, the system of the world is their product: that is fatal. Given two correlative and contradictory ideas, a composition must follow: that also is fatal. Fatality clashes, not with liberty, whose destiny, on the contrary, is to secure the accomplishment of fatality within a certain sphere, but with disorder, with everything that acts as a barrier to the execution of the law. Is there disorder in the world, yes or no?

The fatalists do not deny it, for, by the strangest blunder, it is the presence of evil which has made them fatalists. Now, I say that the presence of evil, far from giving evidence of fatality, breaks fatality, does violence to destiny, and supposes a cause whose erroneous but voluntary initiative is in discordance with the law. This cause I call liberty; and I have proved, in the fourth chapter, that liberty, like reason which serves man as a torch, is as much greater and more perfect as it harmonizes more completely with the order of nature, which is fatality.

Therefore to oppose fatality to the testimony of the conscience which feels itself free, and vice versa, is to prove that one misconstrues ideas and has not the slightest appreciation of the question. The progress of humanity may be defined as the education of reason and human liberty by fatality: it is absurd to regard these three terms as exclusive of each other and irreconcilable, when in reality they sustain each other, fatality serving as the base, reason coming after, and liberty crowning the edifice. It is to know and penetrate fatality that human reason tends; it is to conform to it that liberty aspires; and the criticism in which we are now engaged of the spontaneous development and instinctive beliefs of the human race is at bottom only a study of fatality. Let us explain this.

Man, endowed with activity and intelligence, has the power to disturb the order of the world, of which he forms a part. But all his digressions have been foreseen, and are effected within certain limits, which, after a certain number of goings and comings, lead man back to order. From these oscillations of liberty may be determined the role of humanity in the world; and, since the destiny of man is bound up with that of creatures, it is possible to go back from him to the supreme law of things and even to the sources of being.

Accordingly I will no longer ask: How is it that man has the power to violate the providential order, and how is it that Providence allows him to do so? I state the question in other terms: How is it that man, an integrant part of the universe, a product of fatality, is able to break fatality? How is it that a fatal organization, the organization of humanity, is advent.i.tious, contradictory, full of tumult and catastrophes?

Fatality is not confined to an hour, to a century, to a thousand years: if science and liberty must inevitably be ours, why do they not come sooner? For, the moment we suffer from the delay, fatality contradicts itself; evil is as exclusive of fatality as of Providence.

What sort of a fatality, in short, is that which is contradicted every instant by the facts which take place within its bosom?

This the fatalists are bound to explain, quite as much as the theists are bound to explain what sort of an infinite intelligence that can be which is unable either to foresee or prevent the misery of its creatures.

But that is not all. Liberty, intelligence, fatality, are at bottom three adequate expressions, serving to designate three different faces of being. In man reason is only a defined liberty conscious of its limit. But within the circle of its limitations this liberty is also fatality, a living and personal fatality. When, therefore, the conscience of the human race proclaims that the fatality of the universe--that is, the highest, the supreme fatality--is adequate to an infinite reason as well as to an infinite liberty, it simply puts forth an hypothesis in every way legitimate, the verification of which is inc.u.mbent upon all parties.

3. Now come the HUMANISTS, the new atheists, and say:

Humanity in its ensemble is the reality sought by the social genius under the mystical name of G.o.d. This phenomenon of the collective reason,--a sort of mirage in which humanity, contemplating itself, takes itself for an external and transcendent being who considers its destinies and presides over them,--this illusion of the conscience, we say, has been a.n.a.lyzed and explained; and henceforth to reproduce the theological hypothesis is to take a step backward in science. We must confine ourselves strictly to society, to man. G.o.d in religion, the STATE in politics, PROPERTY in economy, such is the triple form under which humanity, become foreign to itself, has not ceased to rend itself with its own hands, and which today it must reject.

I admit that every affirmation or hypothesis of Divinity proceeds from anthropomorphism, and that G.o.d in the first place is only the ideal, or rather, the spectre of man. I admit further that the idea of G.o.d is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself, in science, industry, public affairs. Consequently I do not contradict humanism; I continue it. Taking up its criticism of the divine being and applying it to man, I observe:

That man, in adoring himself as G.o.d, has posited of himself an ideal contrary to his own essence, and has declared himself an antagonist of the being supposed to be sovereignly perfect,--in short, of the infinite;

That man consequently is, in his own judgment, only a false divinity, since in setting up G.o.d he denies himself; and that humanism is a religion as detestable as any of the theisms of ancient origin;

That this phenomenon of humanity taking itself for G.o.d is not explainable in the terms of humanism, and requires a further interpretation.

G.o.d, according to the theological conception, is not only sovereign master of the universe, the infallible and irresponsible king of creatures, the intelligible type of man; he is the eternal, immutable, omnipresent, infinitely wise, infinitely free being. Now, I say that these attributes of G.o.d contain more than an ideal, more than an elevation--to whatever power you will--of the corresponding attributes of humanity; I say that they are a contradiction of them. G.o.d is contradictory of man, just as charity is contradictory of justice; as sanct.i.ty, the ideal of perfection, is contradictory of perfectibility; as royalty, the ideal of legislative power, is contradictory of law, etc. So that the divine hypothesis is reborn from its resolution into human reality, and the problem of a complete, harmonious, and absolute existence, ever put aside, ever comes back.

To demonstrate this radical antinomy it suffices to put facts in juxtaposition with definitions.

Of all facts the most certain, most constant, most indubitable, is certainly that in man knowledge is progressive, methodical, the result of reflection,--in short, experimental; so much so that every theory not having the sanction of experience--that is, of constancy and concatenation in its representations--thereby lacks a scientific character. In regard to this not the slightest doubt can be raised. Mathematics themselves, though called pure, are subject to the CONCATENATION of propositions, and hence depend upon experience and acknowledge its law.

Man's knowledge, starting with acquired observation, then progresses and advances in an unlimited sphere. The goal which it has in view, the ideal which it tends to realize without ever being able to attain it,-- placing it on the contrary farther and farther ahead of it,--is the infinite, the absolute.

Now, what would be an infinite knowledge, an absolute knowledge, determining an equally infinite liberty, such as speculation supposes in G.o.d? It would be a knowledge not only universal, but intuitive, spontaneous, as thoroughly free from hesitation as from objectivity, although embracing at once the real and the possible; a knowledge sure, but not demonstrative; complete, not sequential; a knowledge, in short, which, being eternal in its formation, would be dest.i.tute of any progressive character in the relation of its parts.

Psychology has collected numerous examples of this mode of knowing in the instinctive and divinatory faculties of animals; in the spontaneous talent of certain men born mathematicians and artists, independent of all education; finally, in most of the primitive human inst.i.tutions and monuments, products of unconscious genius independent of theories. And the regular and complex movements of the heavenly bodies; the marvellous combinations of matter,--could it not be said that these too are the effects of a special instinct, inherent in the elements?

If, then, G.o.d exists, something of him appears to us in the universe and in ourselves: but this something is in flagrant opposition with our most authentic tendencies, with our most certain destiny; this something is continually being effaced from our soul by education, and to make it disappear is the object of our care. G.o.d and man are two natures which shun each other as soon as they know each other; in the absence of a transformation of one or the other or both, how could they ever be reconciled?

If the progress of reason tends to separate us from Divinity, how could G.o.d and man be identical in point of reason? How, consequently, could humanity become G.o.d by education?

Let us take another example.

The essential characteristic of religion is feeling. Hence, by religion, man attributes feeling to G.o.d, as he attributes reason to him; moreover, he affirms, following the ordinary course of his ideas, that feeling in G.o.d, like knowledge, is infinite.

Now, that alone is sufficient to change the quality of feeling in G.o.d, and make it an attribute totally distinct from that of man.

In man sentiment flows, so to speak, from a thousand different sources: it contradicts itself, it confuses itself, it rends itself; otherwise, it would not feel itself. In G.o.d, on the contrary, sentiment is infinite,--that is, one, complete, fixed, clear, above all storms, and not needing irritation as a contrast in order to arrive at happiness. We ourselves experience this divine mode of feeling when a single sentiment, absorbing all our faculties, as in the case of ecstasy, temporarily imposes silence upon the other affections. But this rapture exists always only by the aid of contrast and by a sort of provocation from without; it is never perfect, or, if it reaches fulness, it is like the star which attains its apogee, for an indivisible instant.

Thus we do not live, we do not feel, we do not think, except by a series of oppositions and shocks, by an internal warfare; our ideal, then, is not infinity, but equilibrium; infinity expresses something other than ourselves.

It is said: G.o.d has no attributes peculiar to himself; his attributes are those of man; then man and G.o.d are one and the same thing.

On the contrary, the attributes of man, being infinite in G.o.d, are for that very reason peculiar and specific: it is the nature of the infinite to become speciality, essence, from the fact that the finite exists. Deny then, if you will, the reality of G.o.d, as one denies the reality of a contradictory idea; reject from science and morality this inconceivable and b.l.o.o.d.y phantom which seems to pursue us the more, the farther it gets from us; up to a certain point that may be justified, and at any rate can do no harm. But do not make G.o.d into humanity, for that would be slander of both.

Will it be said that the opposition between man and the divine being is illusory, and that it arises from the opposition that exists between the individual man and the essence of entire humanity? Then it must be maintained that humanity, since it is humanity that they deify, is neither progressive, nor contrasted in reason and feeling; in short, that it is infinite in everything,--which is denied not only by history, but by psychology.

This is not a correct understanding, cry the humanists. To have the right ideal of humanity, it must be considered, not in its historic development, but in the totality of its manifestations, as if all human generations, gathered into one moment, formed a single man, an infinite and immortal man.

That is to say, they abandon the reality to seize a projection; the true man is not the real man; to find the veritable man, the human ideal, we must leave time and enter eternity,--what do I say?--desert the finite for infinity, man for G.o.d! Humanity, in the shape we know it, in the shape in which it is developed, in the only shape in fact in which it can exist, is erect; they show us its reversed image, as in a mirror, and then say to us: That is man! And I answer: It is no longer man, it is G.o.d. Humanism is the most perfect theism.

What, then, is this providence which the theists suppose in G.o.d?

An essentially human faculty, an anthropomorphic attribute, by which G.o.d is thought to look into the future according to the progress of events, in the same way that we men look into the past, following the perspective of chronology and history.

Now, it is plain that, just as infinity--that is, spontaneous and universal intuition in knowledge--is incompatible with humanity, so providence is incompatible with the hypothesis of the divine being. G.o.d, to whom all ideas are equal and simultaneous; G.o.d, whose reason does not separate synthesis from antinomy; G.o.d, to whom eternity renders all things present and contemporary,--was unable, when creating us, to reveal to us the mystery of our contradictions; and that precisely because he is G.o.d, because he does not see contradiction, because his intelligence does not fall under the category of time and the law of progress, because his reason is intuitive and his knowledge infinite. Providence in G.o.d is a contradiction within a contradiction; it was through providence that G.o.d was actually made in the image of man; take away this providence, and G.o.d ceases to be man, and man in turn must abandon all his pretensions to divinity.

Perhaps it will be asked of what use it is to G.o.d to have infinite knowledge, if he is ignorant of what takes place in humanity.

Let us distinguish. G.o.d has a perception of order, the sentiment of good. But this order, this good, he sees as eternal and absolute; he does not see it in its successive and imperfect aspects; he does not grasp its defects. We alone are capable of seeing, feeling, and appreciating evil, as well as of measuring duration, because we alone are capable of producing evil, and because our life is temporary. G.o.d sees and feels only order; G.o.d does not grasp what happens, because what happens is BENEATH him, beneath his horizon. We, on the contrary, see at once the good and the evil, the temporal and the eternal, order and disorder, the finite and the infinite; we see within us and outside of us; and our reason, because it is finite, surpa.s.ses our horizon.

Thus, by the creation of man and the development of society, a finite and providential reason, our own, has been posited in contradiction of the intuitive and infinite reason, G.o.d; so that G.o.d, without losing anything of his infinity in any direction, seems diminished by the very fact of the existence of humanity.

Progressive reason resulting from the projection of eternal ideas upon the movable and inclined plane of time, man can understand the language of G.o.d, because he comes from G.o.d and his reason at the start is like that of G.o.d; but G.o.d cannot understand us or come to us, because he is infinite and cannot re-clothe himself in finite attributes without ceasing to be G.o.d, without destroying himself. The dogma of providence in G.o.d is shown to be false, both in fact and in right.

It is easy now to see how the same reasoning turns against the system of the deification of man.

Man necessarily positing G.o.d as absolute and infinite in his attributes, whereas he himself develops in a direction the inverse of this ideal, there is discord between the progress of man and what man conceives as G.o.d. On the one hand, it appears that man, by the syncretism of his const.i.tution and the perfectibility of his nature, is not G.o.d and cannot become G.o.d; on the other, it is plain that G.o.d, the supreme Being, is the antipode of humanity, the ontological summit from which it indefinitely separates itself. G.o.d and man, having divided between them the antagonistic faculties of being, seem to be playing a game in which the control of the universe is the stake, the one having spontaneity, directness, infallibility, eternity, the other having foresight, deduction, mobility, time. G.o.d and man hold each other in perpetual check and continually avoid each other; while the latter goes ahead in reflection and theory without ever resting, the former, by his providential incapacity, seems to withdraw into the spontaneity of his nature. There is a contradiction, therefore, between humanity and its ideal, an opposition between man and G.o.d, an opposition which Christian theology has allegorized and personified under the name of Devil or Satan,--that is, contradictor, enemy of G.o.d and man.

Such is the fundamental antinomy which I find that modern critics have not taken into account, and which, if neglected, having sooner or later to end in the negation of the man-G.o.d and consequently in the negation of this whole philosophical exegesis, reopens the door to religion and fanaticism.

G.o.d, according to the humanists, is nothing but humanity itself, the collective me to which the individual me is subjected as to an invisible master. But why this singular vision, if the portrait is a faithful copy of the original? Why has man, who from his birth has known directly and with out a telescope his body, his soul, his chief, his priest, his country, his condition, been obliged to see himself as in a mirror, and without recognizing himself, under the fantastic image of G.o.d?

Where is the necessity of this hallucination? What is this dim and ambiguous consciousness which, after a certain time, becomes purified, rectified, and, instead of taking itself for another, definitively apprehends itself as such? Why on the part of man this transcendental confession of society, when society itself was there, present, visible, palpable, willing, and acting,--when, in short, it was known as society and named as such?

No, it is said, society did not exist; men were agglomerated, but not a.s.sociated; the arbitrary const.i.tution of property and the State, as well as the intolerant dogmatism of religion, prove it.

Pure rhetoric: society exists from the day that individuals, communicating by labor and speech, a.s.sume reciprocal obligations and give birth to laws and customs. Undoubtedly society becomes perfect in proportion to the advances of science and economy, but at no epoch of civilization does progress imply any such metamorphosis as those dreamed of by the builders of utopia; and however excellent the future condition of humanity is to be, it will be none the less the natural continuation, the necessary consequence, of its previous positions.

For the rest, no system of a.s.sociation being exclusive in itself, as I have shown, of fraternity and justice, it has never been possible to confound the political ideal with G.o.d, and we see in fact that all peoples have distinguished society from religion.

The first was taken as END, the second regarded only as MEANS; the prince was the minister of the collective will, while G.o.d reigned over consciences, awaiting beyond the grave the guilty who escaped the justice of men. Even the idea of progress and reform has never been anywhere absent; nothing, in short, of that which const.i.tutes social life has been entirely ignored or misconceived by any religious nation. Why, then, once more, this tautology of Society-Divinity, if it is true, as is pretended, that the theological hypothesis contains nothing other than the ideal of human society, the preconceived type of humanity transfigured by equality, solidarity, labor, and love?

Certainly, if there is a prejudice, a mysticism, which now seems to me deceptive in a high degree, it is no longer Catholicism, which is disappearing, but rather this humanitary philosophy, making man a holy and sacred being on the strength of a speculation too learned not to have something of the arbitrary in its composition; proclaiming him G.o.d,--that is, essentially good and orderly in all his powers, in spite of the disheartening evidence which he continually gives of his doubtful morality; attributing his vices to the constraint in which he has lived, and promising from him in complete liberty acts of the purest devotion, because in the myths in which humanity, according to this philosophy, has painted itself, we find described and opposed to each other, under the names of h.e.l.l and paradise, a time of constraint and penalty and an era of happiness and independence! With such a doctrine it would suffice--and moreover it would be inevitable--for man to recognize that he is neither G.o.d, nor good, nor holy, nor wise, in order to fall back immediately into the arms of religion; so that in the last a.n.a.lysis all that the world will have gained by the denial of G.o.d will be the resurrection of G.o.d.

Such is not my view of the meaning of the religious fables.

Humanity, in recognizing G.o.d as its author, its master, its alter ego, has simply determined its own essence by an ant.i.thesis,--an eclectic essence, full of contrasts, emanated from the infinite and contradictory of the infinite, developed in time and aspiring to eternity, and for all these reasons fallible, although guided by the sentiment of beauty and order. Humanity is the daughter of G.o.d, as every opposition is the daughter of a previous position: that is why humanity has formed G.o.d like itself, has lent him its own attributes, but always by giving them a specific character,--that is, by defining G.o.d in contradiction of itself.

Humanity is a spectre to G.o.d, just as G.o.d is a spectre to humanity; each of the two is the other's cause, reason, and end of existence.

It was not enough, then, to have demonstrated, by criticism of religious ideas, that the conception of the divine me leads back to the perception of the human me; it was also necessary to verify this deduction by a criticism of humanity itself, and to see whether this humanity satisfies the conditions that its apparent divinity supposes. Now, such is the task that we solemnly inaugurated when, starting at once with human reality and the divine hypothesis, we began to unroll the history of society in its economic inst.i.tutions and speculative thoughts.

We have shown, on the one hand, that man, although incited by the antagonism of his ideas, and although up to a certain point excusable, does evil gratuitously and by the b.e.s.t.i.a.l impulse of his pa.s.sions, which are repugnant to the character of a free, intelligent, and holy being. We have shown, on the other hand, that the nature of man is not harmoniously and synthetically const.i.tuted, but formed by an agglomeration of the potentialities specialized in each creature,--a circ.u.mstance which, in revealing to us the principle of the disorders committed by human liberty, has finished the demonstration of the non- divinity of our race.