Watchdogs of Established Power by Paul Nizan

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#21, SEPT-NOV/2016

The supreme function of bourgeois philosophy is to obscure the miseries of contemporary reality: the spiritual destitution of vast numbers of men, the fundamental dichotomy in the consciousness, and the increasingly intolerable disparity between what they could achieve and what little they have actually accomplished. This philosophy conceals the true nature of bourgeois rule. It does not serve the True (which does not exist) or the Universal (which does not exist) or the Eternal (which does not exist); rather it is a weapon in the struggle against the anger and the spirit of revolt now manifesting themselves. It serves to divert the exploited from the contemplation of their own degradation and debasement – an activity that might prove dangerous to the exploiters. Its mission is to gain universal acceptance for the established order by making it palatable, by conferring upon it a certain nobility, and by furnishing rationalizations for its every aspect. It mystifies the victims of the bourgeois regime, all those who might someday rise up against it. It leads them into a cul-de-sac where their rebellious instincts will be extinguished. It is the faithful servant of that social class which is the cause of all the degradation in the world today, the very class to which the philosophers themselves belong. In a word, the purpose of this philosophy is to explain, to fortify, and to propagate the half-truths manufactured by the bourgeoisie and so useful in consolidating its power.

The whole parasitic existence of this philosophy is a constant assault upon the lives of those men who, through some accident of birth or fortune, find themselves outside the gates of bourgeoisdom. It is time for us to declare that human needs, that human life itself, is absolutely incompatible with the values, the virtues, the hopes and the self-serving wisdom of the bourgeoisie. He who serves the bourgeoisie cannot serve mankind.

The philosophies produced by the bourgeoisie in power, when the spiritual hegemony of bourgeois thought has been established, are incomplete philosophies. They pay no attention whatsoever to the reality of poverty or the reality of servitude – one more reason why they are useful only to the oppressors.

But it must be emphasized that there is no law of Philosophy which requires that philosophers fight for real freedom and real material abundance for real men. Such a law is nothing but a figment of the imagination; it was never decreed by any god or promulgated by any mind. From this it follows that there exists no inexorable dialectic, no irresistible chain of reasoning, to compel today’s thinkers to take up this crucial struggle in the name of some absolute moral imperative of Philosophy. When we consider Philosophy from a historical, evolutionary standpoint, . . . it is clear that there is no intrinsically necessary principle in Philosophy that commands its practitioners to wage such a struggle. But there does exist – there has always existed – an unvarying set of extrinsic motives which have controlled, and will continue to control, the successive stages of Philosophy’s development. These extrinsic motives may accelerate this development or retard it, deflect it onto another path or completely reverse its course.

There is nothing absurd, nothing intrinsically irrational (that is, contradictory to fundamental principles) in the fact that Philosophy should choose poverty over material abundance, servitude over freedom. At the Societe Francaise de Philosophie, in the course of a symposium on the functions of Reason, a certain philosopher was so naïve as to declare: “Reason will never be shocked by the fact that a society is divided into rulers and ruled, rich and poor.”(1)

Indeed, no outrage could ever offend Reason, that dream-ridden machine whose sole function is to understand and explain, not to decide and to choose. If we experience an outrage in all this horrifying reality, we know immediately that this outrage is not directed against Reason; we know that it is directed against other faculties and needs than those of Reason, against other people that the learned clockmakers who serve Reason. There is no secret definition of Philosophy which contains within itself the key to all the realitionships between Philosophy’s development, its values, its consequences – no definition as complete as that of the triangle, for instance, which contains the key to all the properties of this figure and automatically excludes all possible absurdities (that the sum of the angels of a triangle is not equal to two right angles, for example). Philosophy, however, is nothing but a mass of historical contradictions. Philosophy is not a figure standing in the denuded space of geometry.

But it just so happens that there are real men living in the world, men who are desperately seeking that material abundance which has been denied them and that freedom which they do no enjoy in fact and can only contemplate in their imaginations. For the time being they can only dream what human life might be and fashion elaborate plans for this mirage-like future. But they bitterly resent the fact that their dreams should remain only dreams and that the realization of so many possibilities should be postponed indefinitely.

They have neither the time nor the inclination nor the logical tools to demonstrate to the philosophers that their philosophies stand in contradiction to some eternal Philosophy – one in which, in any case, most men could never believe. They are completely unaware that a historical contradiction of this sort exists. But they are fully conscious of that historical contradiction between what bourgeois philosophy promises and what it actually has to offer. They refuse to have anything to do with those philosophers who are false – false not in relation to Philosophy, but to mankind; philosophers whose falseness represents not a deficiency in their philosophical techniques, but a real assault upon human life.

One always comes back to the crude notion of the Sons of the Earth, who judge things on the basis of their actual consequences and not according to the principles and the purely formal arrangements governing ideas. The most abstract concept in any system of thought, regardless of the intentions of the thinker who created the concept, will necessarily have certain concrete implications. Such a concept can in no way be regarded as “scientific,” for the true scientist strives to define his subject with the greatest possible thoroughness and precision.

Biology describes phenomena associated with living organisms, just as physics describes the mechanics of falling bodies. Biologists do not wish that the things they study be different from what they actually are; not do they rejoice in the fact that these things are what they are; nor do they strive to transform them into something else. They neither disapprove or approve. But Philosophy, despite its aura of glacial objectivity, despite the rigid formalism of its methods, always behaves in precisely this manner. It is forever proclaiming: “It is imperative that this or that be done. All will be well if you proceed in this fashion; all will be ill if you proceed in that fashion. Mankind can no longer continue on the course which it is now following.” Philosophy wishes and fears and hopes. Whether its motives are prudent, timid, and hypocritical, or bold, forceful, and violent, it always has its motives. Its hopes, its wishes, and its prescriptions.

But now the Children of the Earth want Philosophy to help men achieve true abundance. The Children of the Earth do not write cold, objective studies of their condition. Although the geologists cannot refuse to recognize the existence of old rocks; although the physicists cannot expect a stone thrown into the air to continue rising indefinitely, we, on the contrary, have every right to hope that a whole new life may begin for mankind.

Since Philosophy does not possess a single eternal telos, and since there is no supreme, immortal arbiter of philosophical matters, the situation in which we find ourselves can be characterized as thus: on the one hand, there are those thinkers who have accommodated themselves to the enslavement of the greater part of humanity; and, on the other hand, there have already appeared a handful of men who are angered by this enslavement and who have launched a theoretical and practical offensive against the slavemasters and their allies, a handful of men who are convinced that slavery poses real problems.

The struggle has always been between these two types of men: the first insists that all is well or that all will be well, the second refuses to let itself be convinced. The proponents of harmony and those who do not see harmony where there is none. The first benefitting, in one way or another, from human degradation, the second suffering because of it. The first maintaining that plenitude and perfection are only dreams, the second demanding the fulfillment of these dreams and rejecting all the facile hopes, the imaginary promised lands, and the consolations offered by the first.

Excerpted from Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order, (Monthly Review Press, 1971) pp.91-96.