THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#4, SEPT-NOV/2018
The Revolutionary Myth[1]
Young people of today are uneasy. They no longer recognize their right to be young. It is as though youth were not an age of life, but a class phenomenon, an unduly prolonged childhood, a spell of irresponsibility accorded to the children of the well-to-do. The workers go without transition from adolescence to manhood. And it really does look as though our age, which is in the process of eliminating the various European bourgeoisies, is also eliminating that abstract and metaphysical period of which people have always said, "It will have its fling." Most of my former students have married early because they felt ashamed of their youth and of the leisure that was once the fashion.
They have become fathers before they have finished their studies. They still receive money from their families at the end of each month, but it is not enough. They have to give lessons or do translations or odd jobs. They are part-time workers. In one way, they are like kept women and, in another, like "home-workers." They no longer take the time, as we did at their age, to play about with ideas before adopting one set in particular. They are fathers and citizens, they vote, they must commit themselves. This is probably not a bad thing. It is fitting, after all, that they be asked to choose immediately for or against man, for or against the masses. But if they choose the first side, their difficulties begin, because they are persuaded that they must strip themselves of their subjectivity. If they consider doing this, it is for reasons which remain subjective, as they are still inside. They take counsel with themselves before plunging themselves into the water and, as a result, the more seriously they contemplate abandoning subjectivity, the greater the importance it assumes in their eyes. And they realize, with annoyance, that their notion of objectivity is still subjective. Thus they go round and round, unable to choose sides, and if they do come to a decision, they jump in with their eyes shut, out of weariness or impatience.
However, that is not the end of it. They are now told to choose between materialism and idealism; they are told that there is nothing in between and that it must be one or the other. Now, to most of them, the principles of materialism seem philosophically false; they are unable to understand how matter could give rise to the idea of matter. Nevertheless, they protest that they utterly reject idealism. They know that it acts as a myth for the propertied classes and that it is not a rigorous philosophy but a rather vague kind of thinking whose function is to mask reality or to absorb it into the idea. "It doesn't matter," they are told. "Since you are not materialists, you will be idealists in spite of yourselves, and if you rebel against the quibbling of the professors, you will find yourselves the victims of a more subtle and all the more dangerous illusion."
Thus, they are hounded even in their thoughts, which are poisoned at the source, and they are condemned to serve unwillingly a philosophy they detest or to adopt out of discipline a doctrine in which they are unable to believe. They have lost the carefree quality characteristic of their age without acquiring the certainty of maturity. They are no longer at leisure and yet they cannot commit themselves. They remain at the threshold of communism without daring either to enter or to go away. They are not guilty; it is not their fault if the very people who at present invoke the dialectic wish to force them to choose between two opposites and reject, with the contemptuous name of "Third Party," the synthesis which embraces them. Since they are deeply sincere and hope for the coming of a socialist regime, since they are prepared to serve the Revolution with all their might, the only way to help them is to ask oneself, as they do, whether materialism and the myth of objectivity are really required by the cause of the Revolution and if there is not a discrepancy between the revolutionary's action and his ideology. I shall therefore turn back to materialism and attempt to re-examine it.
It seems as though its first step is to deny the existence of God and transcendent finality; the second, to reduce the action of mind to that of matter; the third, to eliminate subjectivity by reducing the world, and man in it, to a system of objects linked together by universal relationships. I conclude in all good faith that it is a metaphysical doctrine and that materialists are metaphysicians. But they immediately stop me. I am wrong. There is nothing they loathe so much as metaphysics; it is not even certain that philosophy finds favour in their eyes. Dialectical materialism is, according to M. Naville, "the expression of a progressive discovery of the world's interactions, a discovery which is in no way passive but which implies the activity of the discoverer, seeker and struggler." According to M. Garaudy, dialectical materialism's first step is to deny the existence of any legitimate knowledge apart from scientific knowledge. And for Madame Angrand, one cannot be a materialist without first rejecting all a priori speculation.
This invective against metaphysics is an old acquaintance. It goes back to the writings of the positivists of the last century. But the positivists, who were more logical, refused to take a stand as to the existence of God because they considered all possible conjecture on the subject to be unverifiable, and they abandoned, once and for all, all speculation on the relation between body and mind because they thought that we could not know anything about it. It is indeed obvious that the atheism of M. Naville or Madame Angrand is not "the expression of a progressive discovery." It is a clear and a priori stand on a problem which infinitely transcends our experience. This is also my own stand, but I did not consider myself to be any the less a metaphysician in refusing existence to God than Leibnitz was in granting it to Him. And by what miracle is the materialist, who accuses idealists of indulging in metaphysics when they reduce matter to mind, absolved from the same charge when he reduces mind to matter? Experience does not decide in favour of his doctrine — nor, for that matter, does it decide in favour of the opposing one either. Experience is confined to displaying the close connection between the physiological and the psychological, and this connection is subject to a thousand different kinds of interpretation. When the materialist claims to be certain of his principles, his assurance can come only from intuition or a priori reasoning, that is, from the very speculation he condemns. I now realize that materialism is a metaphysics hiding positivism; but it is a self -destructive metaphysics, for by undermining metaphysics out of principle, it deprives its own statements of any foundation.
It thereby also destroys the positivism under which it takes cover. It was out of modesty that Comte's disciples reduced human knowledge to mere scientific knowledge alone. They confined reason within the narrow limits of our experience because it was there only that reason proved to be effective. The success of science was for them a fact, but it was a human fact. From the point of view of man, and for man, it is true that science succeeds. They took good care not to ask themselves whether the universe in itself supported and guaranteed scientific rationalism, for the very good reason that they would have had to depart from themselves and from mankind in order to compare the universe as it is with the picture of it we get from science, and to assume God's point of view on man and the world. The materialist, however, is not so shy. He leaves behind him science and subjectivity and the human and substitutes himself for God, Whom he denies, in order to contemplate the spectacle of the universe. He calmly writes, "The materialist conception of the world means simply the conception of nature as it is, without anything foreign added." [2]
What is involved in this surprising text is the elimination of human subjectivity, that "addition foreign to nature." The materialist thinks that by denying his subjectivity he has made it disappear. But the trick is easy to expose. In order to eliminate subjectivity, the materialist declares that he is an object, that is, the subject matter of science. But once he has eliminated subjectivity in favour of the object, instead of seeing himself as a thing among other things, buffeted about by the physical universe, he makes of himself an objective beholder and claims to contemplate nature as it is, in the absolute.
There is a play on the word objectivity, which sometimes means the passive quality of the object beheld and, at other times, the absolute value of a beholder stripped of subjective weaknesses. Thus, having transcended all subjectivity and identified himself with pure objective truth, the materialist travels about in a world of objects inhabited by hurrfan objects. And when he returns from his journey, he communicates what he has seen: "Everything that is rational is real," he tells us, and "everything that is real is rational." Where does he get this rationalistic optimism? We can understand a Kantian's making statements about nature since, according to him, reason constitutes experience. But the materialist does not admit that the world is the product of our constituent activity. Quite the contrary. In his eyes it is we who are the product of the universe. How then could we know that the real is rational, since we have not created it and since we reflect only a tiny part of it from day to day? The success of science may, at the most, lead us to think that this rationality is probable, but it may be a matter of a local, statistical rationality. It may be valid for a certain order of size and might collapse beyond or under this limit.
Materialism makes a certainty of what appears to us to be a rash induction, or, if you prefer, a postulate. For materialism, there is no doubt. Reason is within man and outside man. And the leading materialist magazine calmly calls itself "Thought (La Pensee) , the organ of modern rationalism." However, by a dialectical reversal which might have been foreseen, materialist rationalism "passes" into irrationalism and destroys itself. If the psychological fact is rigorously conditioned by the biological, and the biological fact is, in turn, conditioned by the physical state of the world, I quite see how the human mind can express the universe as an effect can express its cause, but not in the way a thought expresses its object. How could a captive reason, governed from without and manoeuvred by a series of blind causes, still be reason? How could I believe in the principles of my deductions if it were only the external event which has set them down within me and if, as Hegel says, "reason is a bone"? What stroke of chance enables the raw products of circumstances to constitute the keys to Nature as well? Moreover, observe the way in which Lenin speaks of our consciousness: "It is only the reflection of being, in the best of cases an approximately exact reflection." But who is to decide whether the present case, that is, materialism, is "the best of cases"? We would have to be within and without at the same time in order to make a comparison. And as there is no possibility of that, according to the very terms of our statement, we have no criterion for the reflection's validity, except internal and subjective criteria: its conformity with other reflections, its clarity, its distinctness and its permanence. Idealistic criteria, in short. Moreover, they determine only a truth for man, and this truth not being constructed like those offered by the Kantians, but experienced, will never be more than a faith without foundation, a mere matter of habit.
When materialism dogmatically asserts that the universe produces thought, it immediately passes into idealist scepticism. It lays down the inalienable rights of Reason with one hand and takes them away with the other. It destroys positivism with a dogmatic rationalism. It destroys both of them with the metaphysical affirmation that man is a material object, and it destroys this affirmation by the radical negation of all metaphysics. It sets science against metaphysics and, unknowingly, a metaphysics against science. All that remains is ruins. Therefore, can I be a materialist?
It may be objected that I have understood nothing of the matter, that I have confused the naive materialism of Helvetius and Holbach with dialectical materialism. There is, I am told, a dialectical movement within nature whereby opposites which clash are suddenly surmounted and reunited in a new synthesis; and this new product "passes" in turn into its opposite and then blends with it in another synthesis. I immediately recognize the characteristic movement of the Hegelian dialectic, which is based entirely on the dynamism of Ideas. I recall how, in Hegel's philosophy, one Idea leads to another, how every Idea produces its opposite. I know that the impulse behind this immense movement is the attraction exerted by the future on the present, and by the whole, even when it does not exist, on its parts. This is as true of the partial syntheses as of the absolute Totality which finally becomes Mind.
The principle of this Dialectic is, thus, that a whole governs its parts, that an idea tends of itself to complete and to enrich itself, that the forward movement of consciousness is not linear, like that which proceeds from cause to effect, but synthetic and multi-dimensional, since every idea retains within itself and assimilates to itself the totality of antecedent ideas, that the structure of the concept is not the simple juxtaposition of invariable elements which might, if necessary, combine with other elements to produce other combinations, but rather an organization whose unity is such that its secondary structures cannot be considered apart from the whole without becoming "abstract" and losing their essential character.
One can readily accept this dialectic in the realm of ideas. Ideas are naturally synthetic. It appears, however, that Hegel has inverted it and that it is, in reality, characteristic of matter. And if you ask what kind of matter, you will be told that there is only one kind and that it is the matter of which scientists talk. Now the fact is that matter is characterized by its inertia. This means that it is incapable of producing anything by itself. It is a vehicle of movements and of energy, and it always receives these movements and this energy from without. It borrows them and relinquishes them. The mainspring of all dialectics is the idea of totality. In it, phenomena are never isolated appearances. When they occur together, it is always within the high unity of a whole, and they are bound together by inner relationships, that is, the presence of one modifies the other in its inner nature. But the universe of science is quantitative, and quantity is the very opposite of the dialectical unit. A sum is a unit only in appearance. Actually, the elements which compose it maintain only relations of contiguity and simultaneity; they are there together, and that is all. A numerical unit is in no way influenced by the co-presence of another unit; it remains inert and separated within the number it helps to form. And this state of things is indeed necessary in order for us to be able to count; for were two phenomena to occur in intimate union and modify one another reciprocally, we should be unable to decide whether we were dealing with two separate terms or with only one. Thus, as scientific matter represents, in a way, the realization of quantity, science is, by reason of its inmost concerns, its principles and its methods, the opposite of dialectics.
When science speaks of forces that are applied to a point of matter, its first concern is to assert their independence; each one acts as though it were alone. When science studies the attraction exerted by bodies upon one another, it is careful to define the attraction as a strictly external relationship, that is to reduce it to modifications in the direction and speed of their movements. Science does occasionally employ the word "synthesis," for example, in regard to chemical combinations. But it never does so in the Hegelian sense; the particles forming a combination retain their properties. If an atom of oxygen combines with atoms of sulphur and hydrogen to form acid, it retains its identity. Neither water nor acid is a real whole which changes and governs its composing elements, but simply a passive resultant, a state. The entire effort of biology is aimed at reducing the so-called living syntheses to physico-chemical processes. And when M. Naville, who is a materialist, feels the need to construct a scientific psychology, he turns to "behaviourism" which regards human conduct as a sum of conditioned reflexes. Nowhere in the universe of science do we encounter an organic totality. The instrument of the scientist is analysis. His aim is to reduce the complex to the simple, and the recomposition which he afterwards effects is only a counterproof, whereas the dialectician, on principle, considers these complexes as irreducible.
Of course Engels claims that "the natural sciences . . . have proved that, in the last analysis, Nature proceeds dialectically, that it does not move in an eternally identical circle that perpetually repeats itself, but that it has a real history." In support of his thesis, he cites the example of Darwin: "Darwin inflicted a severe blow to the metaphysical conception of Nature by demonstrating that the entire organic world ... is the product of a process of development that has been going on for millions of years." [3] But, first of all, it is obvious that the notion of natural history is absurd. History cannot be characterized by change nor by the pure and simple action of the past. It is defined by the deliberate resumption of the past by the present; only human history is possible. Besides, if Darwin has shown that the species derive from one another, his attempt at explanation is of a mechanical and not dialectical order. He accounts for individual differences by the theory of small variations, and he regards each of these variations as the result not of a "process of development," but of mechanical chance. In a group of individuals of the same species, it is statistically impossible that there not be some who are superior in weight, strength or some particular detail. As to the struggle for existence, it cannot produce a new synthesis through the fusion of opposites; it has strictly negative effects, since it eliminates definitively the weaker elements. In order to understand it, all we need do is compare its results with the really dialectical ideal of the class struggle. In the latter case, the proletariat will absorb the bourgeoisie within the unity of a classless society. In the struggle for existence, the strong simply cause the weak to disappear. Finally, the chance advantage does not develop: it remains inert and is transmitted unchanged by heredity; it is a state, and it is not this state which will be modified by an inner dynamism to produce a higher degree of organization. Another chance variation will simply be joined to it from without, and the process of elimination will recur mechanically. Are we to conclude that Engels is irresponsible or dishonest? In order to prove that Nature has a history, he uses a scientific hypothesis that is explicitly meant to reduce all natural history to mechanical series.
Is Engels more responsible when speaking of physics? "In physics," he tells us, "every change is a transition from quantity to quality, from the quantity of movement — of any form whatever — inherent in the body or communicated to the body. Thus, the temperature of water in the liquid state is, at first, unimportant, but if you increase or diminish the temperature of the water, there comes a moment when its state of cohesion is modified and the water is transformed, in one case into vapour and in another into ice." But he is tricking us; it is all done with mirrors. The fact is that scientific investigation is not in the least concerned with demonstrating the transition from quantity to quality; it starts from the perceptible quality, which is regarded as an illusory and subjective appearance, in order to find behind it the quantity which is regarded as the truth of the universe. Engels naively regards temperature as if it were, as a matter of primary data, a pure quantity. But actually it appears first as a quality; it is the state of discomfort or of contentment which causes us to button up our coats or else to take them off. The scientist has reduced this perceptible quality to a quantity in agreeing to substitute the measurement of cubic expansions of a liquid for the vague information of our senses. The transformation of water into steam is for him an equally quantitative phenomenon or, if you prefer, it exists for him only as quantity. He defines steam in terms of pressure or of some kinetic theory which reduces it to a certain quantitative state (position, speed) of its molecules. We must therefore choose. Either we remain within the domain of perceptible quality, in which case steam is a quality and so is temperature; we are not being scientific; we witness the action of one quality on another. Or else we regard temperature as a quantity. But then the transition from the liquid to the gaseous state is scientifically defined as a quantitative change, that is, by a measurable pressure exerted on a piston or by measurable relationships among molecules. For the scientist, quantity gives rise to quantity; laws are quantitative formulas and science possesses no symbol for the expression of quality as such. What Engels claims to present as a scientific procedure is the pure and simple movement of his mind which passes from the universe of science to that of naive realism and back again to the scientific world and the world of pure sensation. And besides, even if we were to allow him this, does this intellectual coming-and-going in the least resemble a dialectical process? Where does he see a progression? Let us concede that the change of temperature, regarded as quantitative, produces a qualitative transformation of water; water is changed into vapour. What then? It will exert a pressure on an escape-valve and raise it; it will shoot up into the air, grow cold and become water again. Where is the progression? I see a cycle. To be sure, the water is no longer contained in the recipient, but is outside, on the grass and the earth, in the form of dew. But in the name of what metaphysics can this change of place be regarded as a progress? [4]
It will perhaps be objected that certain modern theories — like that of Einstein — are synthetic. We know that in his system there are no longer any isolated elements; each reality is defined in relation to the universe. There is considerable matter for discussion here. I shall confine myself to observing that there is no question of a synthesis, for the relations which can be established among the various structures of a synthesis are internal and qualitative, whereas the relations which, in Einstein's theory, enable us to define a position or a mass remain quantitative and external. Moreover, the question lies elsewhere. Whether the scientist be Newton, Archimedes, LaPlace or Einstein, he studies not the concrete totality, but the general and abstract conditions of the universe. Not the particular event which catches and absorbs into itself light, heat and life and which we call the "glistening of the sun through leaves on a summer's day," but light in general, heat phenomena, the general conditions of life. There is never any question of examining this particular refraction through this particular piece of glass which has its history and which, from a certain point of view, is regarded as the concrete synthesis of the universe, but the conditions of possibility of refraction in general. Science is made up of concepts, in the Hegelian sense of the term. Dialectics, on the other hand, is essentially the play of notions. We know that for Hegel the notion organizes and fuses concepts together in the organic and living unity of concrete reality. The Earth, the Renaissance, Colonization in the eighteenth Century, Nazism, are objects of notions; being, light and energy are abstract concepts. Dialectical enrichment lies in the transition from the abstract to the concrete, that is, from elementary concepts to notions of greater and greater richness. The movement of the dialectic is thus the reverse of that of science.
"It is true," a Communist intellectual admitted to me, "that science and dialectics pull in opposite directions. But that is because science expresses the bourgeois point of view, which is an analytical one. Our dialectic is, on the other hand, the very thought of the proletariat." That is all very well — even though Soviet science does not seem to differ much in its methods from that of the bourgeois countries — but why, in that case, do the Communists borrow arguments and proofs from science in order to support their materialism? I agree that the basic spirit of science is materialist. But on the other hand it is presented to us as being analytic and bourgeois. The positions are thereby reversed, and I distinctly see two classes struggling. One, the bourgeoisie, is materialist; its method of thinking is analysis, and its ideology is science. The other, the proletariat, is idealist; its method of thinking is synthesis, and its ideology is dialectic. And as there is a struggle between the classes, the ideologies should be incompatible. But this is not the case. It seems that the dialectic is the crown of science and makes full use of its results. It seems that the bourgeoisie, availing itself of analysis and then reducing the higher to the lower, is idealist, whereas the proletariat — which thinks synthetically and is guided by the revolutionary idea — even when affirming the irreducibility of a synthesis to its elements, is materialist. What are we to make of this?
Let us come back to science which, whether bourgeois or not, has at least proved itself. We know what science teaches us about matter. A material object is animated from without, is conditioned by the total state of the world, is subject to forces which always come from elsewhere, is composed of elements that unite, though without interpenetrating, and that remain foreign to it. It is exterior to itself. Its most obvious properties are statistical; they are merely the resultant of the movements of the molecules composing it. Nature, as Hegel so profoundly remarked, is externality. How are we to find room in this externality for the dialectic, which is a movement of absolute interiorization? Is it not obvious that, according to the very idea of synthesis, life cannot be reduced to matter and human consciousness cannot be reduced to life? There is the same discrepancy between modern science, which is the object of materialist love and faith, and the dialectic which the materialists claim to be their instrument and method, as we observed earlier between their positivism and their metaphysics; the one destroys the other. Thus, they will sometimes tell you, and with the same imperturbability, that life is only a complex chain of physic-chemical phenomena and, at other times, that it is an irreducible moment in the dialectic of nature. Or rather, they dishonestly try to think both ways at the same time.
One feels throughout their confused discourse that they have invented the slippery and contradictory notion of reducible irreducibles. M. Garaudy is satisfied with this. But when we hear him speak, we are struck with his wavering; at one moment he affirms, in the abstract, that mechanical determinism has had its day and that it must be replaced by the dialectic and, at another, when he tries to explain a concrete situation, he reverts to causal relationships, which are linear and presuppose the absolute externality of the cause in relation to its effect. It is this notion of cause, perhaps, which best indicates the great intellectual confusion into which the materialists have fallen. When I challenged M. Naville to define within the framework of the dialectic this famous causality which he is so found of employing, he seemed troubled and remained silent. How well I understand him. I would even say that the idea of cause remains suspended between scientific relationships and dialectical syntheses. Since materialism is, as we have seen, an explanatory metaphysics (it tries to explain certain social phenomena in terms of others, the psychological in terms of the biological, the biological in terms of physico-chemical laws), it employs on principle the scheme of causality.
But as materialism sees in science the explanation of the universe, it turns to science and observes with surprise that the causal link is not scientific. Where is the cause in Joule's law or Mariotte's law or in Archimedes' principle or in Carnot's? Science generally establishes functional relationships between phenomena and selects the independent variable that suits its purpose. It is, moreover, strictly impossible to express the qualitative relationship of causality in mathematical language. Most physical laws simply take the form of functions of the type y = f (x). Some set up numerical constants, and others give us phases of irreversible phenomena, but without our being able to tell whether one of these phases is a cause of the following one. (Can one say that nuclear dissolution in mitosis is a cause of the segmentation of the protoplasmic filament?) Thus, materialist causality remains suspended in air. The reason is that its origin lies in the metaphysical intention of reducing mind to matter and explaining the psychological by the physical. Disappointed because science offers too little to bolster his causal explanations, the materialist reverts to the dialectic. But the dialectic contains too much; the causal link is linear and the cause remains external to its effect. In addition, the effect never contains more than the cause; if it did, this residue would, according to the perspectives of causal explanation, remain unexplained. Dialectical progress is, on the contrary, cumulative; at each new stage, it turns back to the ensemble of positions transcended and embraces them all. And the transition from one state to another is always a process of enrichment. The synthesis always contains more than the united thesis and antithesis. Thus, the materialist cause can neither draw its support from science nor hang on to dialectic; it remains a vulgar and practical notion, the sign of materialism's constant effort to bend one towards the other and to join by force two mutually exclusive methods; it is the very type of the false synthesis and the use of it is dishonest.
This is nowhere more evident than in the Marxists' efforts to study "superstructures." For them, these are, in a sense, the "reflections" of the mode of production. "If," writes Stalin, "under a regime of slavery we encounter certain ideas and social theories, certain opinions and political institutions, while under feudalism we find others, and under Capitalism still others, this is not to be explained by 'nature' or by the 'properties' of ideas, theories, opinions and political institutions themselves, but by the different conditions of the material life of society at different periods of social development. The state of society and the conditions of its material existence are what determine its ideas, theories, political opinions and political institutions."[5]
The use of the term "reflection" and the verb "determine," as well as the general tone of this passage are sufficiently revealing. We are on detemunistic ground; the superstructure is completely supported and conditioned by the social situation of which it is the reflection; the relationship of the mode of production to the political institution is that of cause to effect. Thus, we have the case of the simple-minded thinker who regarded Spinoza's philosophy as a direct reflection of the Dutch wheat trade. But at the same time, for the very purposes of Marxist propaganda, ideologies must be, to a certain extent, self-sufficient and be able to act in turn upon the social situation that conditions them. That means, in short, a certain autonomy in relation to the sub-structures. As a result, the Marxists fall back on the dialectic and make of the superstructure a synthesis that does, to be sure, proceed from conditions of production and of material existence, but whose nature and laws of development have a real "independence." In the same pamphlet, Stalin writes, "New social ideas and theories arise only when the development of the material existence of society confronts society with new tasks. . . . If new social theories and ideas arise, they do so because they are necessary to society, because without their organizing, mobilizing and transforming action, the solution of urgent problems entailed by the development of the material existence of society is impossible."[6]
In this text, as is apparent, necessity has assumed a completely different aspect; an idea arises because it is necessary to the carrying out of a new task. This means that the task, even before it is carried out, calls forth the idea which "will facilitate" its being carried out. The idea is postulated and worked by a vacuum which it then fills. The word "evoked" is actually the one which Stalin uses a few lines later. This action of the future, this necessity which is one with finality, this organizing, mobilizing and transforming power of the idea very clearly leads us back to the terrain of the Hegelian dialectic. But how can I believe in both of Stalin's affirmations at once? Is the idea "determined by the state of society" or "evoked by the new tasks to be carried out"? Am I to think, as he does, that "society's mental life is a reflection of objective reality, a reflection of being," that is a derived and borrowed reality which has no being of its own, something analogous to the "lecta" of the Stoics? Or, on the contrary, am I to declare, with Lenin, that "ideas become living realities when they live in the consciousness of the masses"? Which am I to accept, a causal and linear relationship implying the inertia of the effect, of the reflection, or a dialectical and synthetic relationship which would imply that the last synthesis turns back to the partial syntheses which have produced it in order to embrace them and absorb them into itself, and, consequently, that the mental life, although proceeding from the material conditions of society, turns back to them and completely absorbs them? The materialists are unable to decide: they waver between one and the other. They assert abstractly the existence of dialectic progression, but their concrete studies are limited, for the most part, to Taine's explanations in terms of environmental determinism and the historical moment. [7]
That is not all. What exactly is this concept of matter that the dialecticians employ? If they borrow it from science, the poorer concept will fuse with other concepts in order to arrive at a concrete notion, the richer one. This notion will finally include within it, as one of its structures, the concept of matter, but far from being explained by it, the contrary will occur: the notion will explain the concept. In this case, one can start with matter as the emptier of the abstractions. One can also start from Being, as Hegel does. The difference is not very great, though the Hegelian point of departure, being more abstract, is the happier choice. But if we must really invert the Hegelian dialectic and "stand it on its feet again" it must be admitted that matter, chosen as a point of departure for the dialectical movement, does not appear to the Marxists to be the poorer concept, but the richer notion. It is identified with the whole universe; it is the unity of all phenomena; life, thoughts and individuals are merely its modes. It is, in short, the great Spinozist totality.
But if this be the case and if Marxist matter be the exact counterpart of Hegelian spirit, we arrive at the following paradoxical result: that Marxism, in order to stand the dialectic on its feet again, has set the richer notion at the point of departure. And certainly for Hegel the spirit exists from the start, but as a virtuality, as a summons; the dialectic is one with its history. For the Marxists, on the other hand, it is all of matter, as act, that is given in the first place, and the dialectic, whether applied to the history of species or to the evolution of human societies, is merely the retracing of the partial development of one of the modes of this reality. But then if the dialectic is not the very generating of the world, if it is not an act of progressive enriching, it is nothing at all. In obligingly dismissing the dialectic, Marxism has given it its death-blow. "Save me from my friends," one thinks. You may wonder how this could have passed unnoticed. Because our materialists have dishonestly constructed a slippery and contradictory concept of "matter." At times it is the poorest of abstractions and at others the richest of concrete totalities, depending on their needs. They jump from one to the other and mask one with the other. And when they are finally cornered and can no longer escape, they declare that materialism is a method, an intellectual orientation. If you pushed them a bit further, they would say it is a style of living. They are not far wrong in this, and I, for my part, certainly regard it as one of the forms of the conventional mentality and of flight from one's own self.
But if materialism is a human attitude, with all the subjective, contradictory and emotional aspects involved in such an attitude, it ought not to be presented as a rigorous philosophy, as the doctrine of objectivity. I have witnessed conversions to materialism; one enters into materialism as into a religion. I should define it as the subjectivity of those who are ashamed of their subjectivity. It is, of course, also the irritation of those who suffer physically and who are familiar with the reality of hunger, illness, manual work and everything that can sap a man's strength. It is, in a word, a doctrine of the first impulse. Now, the first impulse is perfectly legitimate, particularly when it expresses the spontaneous reaction of an oppressed person — but that does not mean that it is the correct impulse. It always contains an element of truth, but goes beyond it. To affirm the crushing reality of the material world in opposition to idealism is not necessarily to be a materialist. We will return to this.
Furthermore, how did the dialectic retain its necessity in its fall from heaven to earth? Hegelian consciousness has no need to set up the dialectical hypothesis: it is not a pure, objective witness observing the generating of ideas from without; it is itself dialectical; it is self-generating in accordance with the laws of synthetic progression. There is no need for it to assume necessity in relationships; it is this necessity; it experiences this necessity. And its certainty does not come from some evidence that is more or less open to criticism, but from the progressive identification of the dialectic of consciousness with the consciousness of the dialectic. If, on the other hand, the dialectic represents the way in which the material world develops, if consciousness, far from wholly identifying itself with the whole dialectic, is but a "reflection of being," a partial product, a moment of synthetic progress, if, instead of taking part in its own generation from within, it is invaded from the outside by feelings and ideologies which have their roots elsewhere and if it is influenced by them without producing them, it is merely a link in a chain whose beginning and end are very far apart. And what can it say with certainty about the chain, unless it be the whole chain? The dialectic deposits a few effects in it and pursues its way.
On considering these effects, one may conclude that they bear witness to the probable existence of a synthetic mode of progression. Or else one may form conjectures on the consideration of exterior phenomena. In any case, one must be content with regarding the dialectic as a working hypothesis, as a method to be tried, a method which is justified if proved successful. How is it that the materialists regard this method of research as a structure of the universe and that some of them declare that "the reciprocal relationships and conditioning of phenomena, established by the dialectical method, constitute the necessary laws of matter in motion"[8] since the natural sciences proceed in a spirit contrary to this and use rigorously opposite methods, since the science of history is only in its primary stages? It is obviously because in transferring the dialectic from one world to the other they did not want to forego the advantages it had enjoyed in the first world. They retained its necessity and certainty, while removing the means they had of checking them. They wished, thus, to give matter the mode of synthetic development which belongs only to the idea and they borrowed from the reflection of the idea in itself a kind of certainty which has no place in the world's experience. But matter itself thereby becomes an idea; it nominally retains its denseness, inertia and exteriority, but it presents, in addition, a perfect translucency — since one can decide, with complete certainty and on principle, about its internal processes — it is a synthesis, it progresses through constant enrichment.
Let us make no mistake; there is no simultaneous transcendence of materialism and idealism here; [9] denseness and transparency, exteriority and interiority, inertia and synthetic progression are simply juxtaposed in the spurious unity of "dialectical materialism." Matter has remained that which is revealed to us by science. There has been no combination of opposites, for lack of a new concept which might establish them within itself, something which is not exactly matter nor exactly idea. Their opposition cannot be surmounted by surreptitiously attributing the qualities of one of these opposites to the other. Actually, it must be admitted that materialism, in claiming to be dialectical, slides into idealism.
Just as the Marxists claim to be positivists and destroy their positivism through the use they implicitly make of metaphysics, just as they proclaim their rationalism and destroy it by their conception of the origin of thought, so, at the very moment they posit it, they deny their basic principle, materialism, by a furtive recourse to idealism. [10]
This confusion is reflected in the materialist's attitude towards his own doctrine; he claims to be certain of his principles, but he asserts more than he is able to prove. "The materialist grants . . . ," says Stalin. But why does he grant it? Why grant that God does not exist, that mind is a reflection of matter, that the world's development proceeds through the conflict of opposite forces, that there is an objective truth, that there are no unknowable things in the world, but only things that are still unknown? We are not told why. But if it is true that "new ideas and social theories called forth by the new tasks imposed by the development of society's material existence spring up, become the heritage of the masses which they mobilize and organize against society's decadent forces, thus promoting the overthrowing of these forces which hinder the development of society's material existence," it seems clear that these ideas are adopted by the proletariat because they account for its present situation and needs, because they are the most efficient instrument in its struggle against the bourgeoisie. "The failure of the Utopians, including the popu- lists, anarchists, and revolutionary socialists, can be explained, among other ways," says Stalin in the forementioned work, "by the fact that they do not recognize the major role of material conditions in the development of society. Fallen into idealism, they base their practical activity, not on the needs of the development of material existence in society, but independently and in defiance of these needs, on 'ideal levels' and 'universal projects' detached from the real life of society.
"The strength and vitality of Marxism-Leninism lies in the fact that it bases its practical activity on precisely those needs of the development of the material existence of society without ever detaching itself from the real life of society." Though materialism may be the best instrument for action, its truth is of a pragmatic kind. It is true for the working class, because it is good for it, and since social progress is to be brought about by the working class, it is truer than idealism, which served the interests of the bourgeoisie for a while when it was a rising class, and which today can only obstruct the development of the material existence of society. But when the proletariat will finally have absorbed the bourgeoisie and brought about the classless society, new tasks will make their appearance, tasks which will "give rise to" new ideas and social theories.
Materialism will have had its day, since it is the mode of thought of the working class and the working class will no longer exist. Regarded objectively as an expression of class needs and tasks, materialism becomes an opinion, that is, a mobilizing, transforming and organizing force whose objective reality is measured in terms of its power of action. And this opinion which claims to be certitude carries within it its own destruction, for it is obliged, in the very name of its principles, to regard itself as an objective fact, as a reflection of being, as an object of science, and, at the same time, it destroys the science which should analyze and establish it — at least as an opinion. The circle is obvious, and the whole system remains suspended in air, perpetually floating between being and nothingness.
The Stalinist extricates himself through faith. If he "grants" materialism, it is because he wants to act and to change the world. When one is engaged in so vast an enterprise, one hasn't the time to be too particular about the choice of principles justifying it. He believes in Marx, Lenin and Stalin, he admits of the principle of authority, and, finally, he retains the blind and tranquil faith in the certitude of Marxism. This conviction will influence his general attitude towards all ideas proposed to him. Scrutinize closely one of his doctrines or one of his concrete assertions and he will say that he has no time to waste, that the situation is urgent, that he has to act, to attend to first things first and to work for the revolution. Later on we will have the leisure to challenge principles — or rather they will challenge themselves. But for the moment, we have to reject all argument, because it is liable to have a weakening effect. That is quite all right, but when it's his turn to attack and to criticize bourgeois thinking or a particular intellectual position that he judges to be reactionary, he then claims to possess the truth.
The same principles which he just told you could not be disputed at the time suddenly became patent facts. They pass from the level of useful opinions to that of truths. "The Trotskyists," you say to him, "are wrong, but they are not, as you claim, police informers. You know perfectly well they are not." "On the contrary," he will reply, "I know perfectly well that they are. What they really think is a matter of indifference to me. Subjectivity does not exist. But objectively they play into the hands of the bourgeoisie. They behave like provocateurs and informers, because playing into the hands of the police and deliberately assisting it come to the same thing." You reply that it does not come to the same thing, and that in all objectivity, the behaviour of the Trotskyist and that of the policeman are not alike. He retorts that one is as harmful as the other and that the effect of both is to hinder the advancement of the working class. And if you insist, if you demonstrate to him that there are several ways of hindering this advancement and that they are not equivalent, even in their results, he replies proudly that these distinctions, even if true, do not interest him. We are in a period of struggle; the situation is simple and the positions clearly defined. Why be over-subtle? The militant Communist must not encumber himself with so many nuances. So we are back to the useful. Thus, the proposition, "the Trotskyist is an informer," wavers perpetually between the state of useful opinion and that of objective truth.[11]
Nothing demonstrates this ambiguity in the Marxist notion of truth better than the ambivalence of the Communist attitude towards the scientist. The Communists claim to derive from him; they exploit his discoveries and make his thinking the only kind of valid knowledge. But their mistrust of him remains guarded. In so far as they lean on the rigorously scientific idea of objectivity, they have need of his critical spirit, his love of research and challenging, his lucidity, which rejects the principle of authority and refers constantly to experience or rational proof. But in so far as they are believers and science challenges all beliefs, they are suspicious of these virtues. If the scientist brings his scientific qualifications with him into the Party, if he claims the right to examine principles, he becomes an "intellectual"; his dangerous freedom of thought which is an expression of his relative material independence, is countered by the faith of the militant worker who, because of his very situation, needs to believe in his leaders' orders.[12]
This, then, is the materialism they want me to choose, a monster, an elusive Proteus, a large, vague, contradictory semblance. I am asked to choose, this very day, in all intellectual freedom, in all lucidity, and that which I am to choose freely and lucidly and with all my wits about me is a doctrine that destroys thought. I know that man has no salvation other than the liberation of the working class; I know this before being a materialist and from a plain inspection of the facts. I know that our intellectual interest lies with the proletariat. Is that a reason for me to demand of my thinking, which has led me to this point, that it destroy itself? Is that a reason for me to force it henceforth to abandon its criteria, to think in contradictions, to be torn between incompatible theses, to lose even the clear consciousness of itself, to launch forth blindly in a giddy flight that leads to faith? "Fall to thy knees and thou shalt believe," says Pascal. The materialist's effort is very closely akin to this.
Now, if it were only a matter of my falling to my knees, and if by this sacrifice I could assure man's happiness, I ought certainly to agree to it. But what is involved is everyone's relinquishing the right to free criticism, the right to facts, the right to truth. I am told that this will all be restored to us later, but what proof is there of this? How am I to believe in a promise made in the name of mutually destructive principles? I know only one thing, that my mind has to relinquish its independence this very day. Have I fallen into the inacceptable dilemma of betraying the proletariat in order to serve truth or betraying truth in the name of the proletariat?
If I consider the materialist faith, not in its content but in its history, as a social phenomenon, I clearly see that it is not a caprice of intellectuals nor a simple error on the part of philosophers. As far back as I go, I find it bound up with the revolutionary attitude. The first man who made a deliberate attempt to rid men of their fears and bonds, the first man who tried to abolish slavery within his domain, Epicurus, was a materialist. The materialism of the great philosophers, like that of the "intellectual societies," contributed not a little to the preparation of the French Revolution; finally, the Communists, in defence of their thesis, readily made use of an argument which bears a strange resemblance to that which the Catholic employs in the defence of his faith. "If materialism were erroneous," they say, "how do you explain the fact that it is responsible for the unity of the working class, that it has enabled it to be led into battle and that during the last fifty years it has brought us, in spite of the most violent repression, this succession of victories?" This argument, which is scholastic, and which offers an a posteriori proof in terms of success, is far from insignificant.
It is a fact that materialism is now the philosophy of the proletariat precisely in so far as the proletariat is revolutionary. This austere, false doctrine is the bearer of the purest and most ardent hopes; this theory which constitutes a radical denial of man's freedom has become the most radical instrument of his liberation. That means that its content is suited to "mobilizing and organizing" revolutionary forces and, also, that there is a deep relationship between the situation of an oppressed class and the materialist expression of this situation. But we cannot conclude from this that materialism is a philosophy, and still less that it is the truth.
In so far as it permits of coherent action, in so far as it expresses a concrete situation, in so far as millions of men find in it hope and the image of their condition, materialism certainly must contain some truth. But that in no way means that it is wholly true as doctrine. The truths contained in it can be shrouded and drowned in error; it is possible that in order to attend to first things first, and to get back to these truths, revolutionary thinking has sketched out a rapid and temporary structure, what dressmakers call a basted garment. In that case, materialism offers much more than is required by the revolutionary. It also offers a good deal less, for this hasty and forced joining of elements of truth prevents them from organizing spontaneously among themselves and from attaining true unity. Materialism is indisputably the only myth that suits revolutionary requirements.
The politician goes no further; the myth is useful and so he adopts it. But if his undertaking is a long-range affair, it is not a myth that he needs but the Truth. It is the philosopher's business to make the truths contained in materialism hang together and to build, little by little, a philosophy which suits the needs of the revolution as exactly as the myth does. And the best way of spotting these truths within the error in which they are steeped is to determine these requirements on the basis of a careful examination of the revolutionary attitude, to reconstruct, in each case, the path by which they have led to the demand for a materialist representation of the universe, and to see whether they have not, each time, been deflected and diverted from their primary meaning. If they are freed from the myth which crushes them and which hides them from themselves, perhaps they may plot the main lines of a coherent philosophy which will be superior to materialism in being a true description of nature and of human relationships.
The Philosophy of Revolution
The game of the Nazis and their collaborators was to blur ideas. The Petain regime called itself a revolution, and things reached such a point of absurdity that one day the following headline appeared in the Gerbe: "The motto of the National Revolution is — hold fast." It is fitting, then, that we bear in mind a few basic truths. In order to avoid any presuppositions, we shall adopt the a posteriori definition of revolution given by a historian, A. Mathiez. In his opinion, revolution takes place when a change in institutions is accompanied by a profound modification in the property system.
We shall call revolutionary the party or the person in the party whose acts intentionally prepare such a revolution. The first observation to be made is that not anyone can become a revolutionary. The existence of a strong and organized party whose object is revolution can, to be sure, exert its attraction upon individuals or groups of any origin, but the organization of this party can belong only to people of a certain social condition. In other words, the revolutionary is in a situation. It is obvious that he is to be found only among the oppressed, but it does not suffice to be oppressed to choose to be a revolutionary. The Jews can be classed with the oppressed — and the same holds true for racial minorities in certain countries — but many of them are oppressed within the bourgeoisie and, as they share the privileges of the class which oppresses them, they are unable, without contradiction, to work for the destruction of these privileges.
In the same way, we cannot call the feudal colonial nationalists or the American Negroes revolutionaries, though their interests may coincide with those of the party which is working for the revolution. They are not completely integrated into society. The former ask for the return to an earlier state of things; they want to regain their supremacy and to cut the bonds which attach them to the colonizing society. What the American Negroes and the bourgeois Jews want is an equality of rights which in no way implies a change of structure in the property system. They wish simply to share the privileges of their oppressors, that is, they really want a more complete integration.
The situation of the revolutionary is such that he cannot share in these privileges in any way whatever. The only way he can get what he wants is by the destruction of the class that oppresses him. This means that the oppression is not, like that of the Jews or the American Negroes, a secondary and, as it were, lateral characteristic of the social regime under consideration, but that it is, on the contrary, a constituent one. The revolutionary is, thus, both an oppressed person and the keystone of the society which oppresses him. In other words it is as an oppressed person that he is indispensable to this society. That is, the revolutionary belongs to those who work for the dominant class.
The revolutionary is necessarily a worker and one of the oppressed, and it is as a worker that he is oppressed. This double character of producer and oppressed person is sufficient to define the revolutionary's situation, but not the revolutionary himself. The silk-weavers of Lyons and the workers of June, 1848, were not revolutionaries, but rioters; they were fighting for particular improvements and not for a radical transformation of their existence. That means that they were hemmed in by their situation and that they accepted it as a whole. They accepted being hirelings, working at machines of which they were not the owners; they recognized the rights of the propertied class; they were obedient to its morality. They were simply demanding an increase of salary within a state of things which they had neither transcended nor even recognized.
The revolutionary, on the other hand, is defined by his going beyond the situation in which he is placed. And because he does go beyond it towards a radically new situation, he can grasp it in its synthetic wholeness, or, if you like, he makes it exist for himself as totality. Thus it is by means of his thrust toward the future and from the point of view of the future that he realizes it. Instead of appearing to him, as it does to a resigned victim, as a definitive and a priori structure, it is for him only a moment of the universe. Since he wants to change it, he must consider it immediately from a historical point of view and he must consider himself an historical agent.
Thus, from the very beginning, as a result of this projection of the self into the future, he escapes from the society that crushes him and turns back towards it in order to understand it. He sees a human history which is one with man's destiny and of which the change he wishes to bring about is, if not the end, at least an essential stage. He sees history as progress, since he judges the state toward which he wishes to lead us to be better than that in which we are at present. At the same time, he sees human relationships from the point of view of work, since work is his lot. Now, work is, among other things, a direct link between man and the universe, man's hold on Nature and, at the same time, a primary kind of relation between men.
It is, therefore, an essential attitude of human reality which, within the unity of a self-same project, both "exists" and causes his relation with nature and his relation with others to exist in their mutual dependence. And in so far as he demands his liberation as a worker, he knows perfectly well that it cannot be brought about by a simple integration of himself with the privileged class. What he hopes for, quite to the contrary, is that the relationships of solidarity which he maintains with other workers will become the very model of human relationships. He hopes, therefore, for the liberation of the entire oppressed class; unlike the lonely rebel, the revolutionary understands himself only in his relationships of solidarity with his class.
Thus, because he becomes conscious of the social structure upon which he depends, the revolutionary demands a philosophy which considers his situation, and, as his action has meaning only if it brings man's fate into question, this philosophy must be total, that is, it must produce a total explanation of the human condition. And since he himself is, as a worker, an essential structural unit of society and the link between man and Nature, he has no need of a philosophy which does not express, primarily and essentially, the original relation of man to the world, which is precisely the coordinated action of one upon the other.
Finally, since this philosophy is born of a historical enterprise and must represent for him who requires it a certain mode of historicizing which he has chosen, it must necessarily present the course of history as being oriented or as being, at least, capable of being oriented. And as it is born of action and reconsiders, so as to clarify it, the action which necessitated it, this philosophy is not a contemplation of the world, but ought, itself, to be an action. We must understand that this philosophy does not come to tack itself on to the revolutionary effort, but that it is indistinguishable from this effort; it is embodied in the original plan of the worker who joins the revolutionary party, and is implicit in his revolutionary attitude, for any plan for changing the world is inseparable from a certain understanding which reveals the world from the viewpoint of the change one wishes to bring about in it.
The task of the philosopher of revolution will therefore consist in indicating, and elaborating upon, the great, guiding themes of the revolutionary point of view. And this philosophical effort is in itself an act, for it cannot elucidate these themes without taking its place within the very movement which begets them, namely, the revolutionary movement. It is an act also because once the philosophy is made clear it makes the militant revolutionary more conscious of his destiny, of his place in the world, and of his ends.
Thus revolutionary thinking is a thinking within a situation; it is the thinking of the oppressed in so far as they rebel together against oppression; it cannot be reconstructed from the outside; you can come to know it, once it has been developed, by reproducing within yourself the revolutionary movement and by considering it on the basis of the situation from which it arises. It should be noted that the thinking of philosophers of the ruling class also constitutes action. Nizan has clearly demonstrated this in his Chiens de Garde (Watch Dogs). It aims at defending, conserving and repelling. But its inferiority to revolutionary thinking is due to the fact that the philosophy of oppression tries to conceal its pragmatic character; as it is aimed not at changing the world, but at maintaining it, it claims to contemplate the world as it is. It regards society and nature from the viewpoint of pure knowledge, without admitting to itself that this attitude tends to perpetuate the present state of the universe by implying that the universe can be known rather than changed and that if one actually does want to change it, one must first know it.
The theory of the primacy of knowledge, unlike any philosophy of work which grasps the object through the action that modifies it by using it, exerts a negative and inhibiting influence by conferring a pure and static essence upon the object. But the theory contains within itself a negation of the action it involves, since it affirms the primacy of knowledge and rejects all pragmatic conceptions of truth. The superiority of revolutionary thinking consists in its first proclaiming its active nature; it is conscious of being an act, and if it presents itself as a total comprehension of the universe, it does so because the oppressed worker's scheme is a total point of view toward the entire universe. But as the revolutionary needs to distinguish between the true and the false, this indissoluble unity of thought and action calls for a new and systematic theory of truth. The pragmatic conception of truth will not do, for it is subjectivist idealism, pure and simple.
That is why the materialist myth was invented. It has the advantage of reducing thought to nothing more than one of the forms of universal energy and of stripping it of its wan will-o'-the-wisp look. In addition, it presents thought, in each particular case, as one objective mode of conduct among others, that is, as occasioned by the state of the world and turning back upon that state in order to modify it. But we saw earlier that the idea of a conditioned thinking is self- destructive; I shall presently show that the same holds true for the idea of a determined action. It is not a question of inventing a cosmogonic myth which will present thinking- action in symbolic form, but of abandoning all myths and reverting to the real revolutionary necessity, which is to unite action with truth and thought with realism.
What is needed is, in a word, a philosophical theory which shows that human reality is action and that action upon the universe is identical with the understanding of that universe as it is, or, in other words, that action is the unmasking of reality, and, at the same time, a modification of that reality.[13] As we have seen, the myth of materialism is, in addition, the representation in image form and within the unity of a cosmology and of historical movement, of the relation of man to matter. The representation, therefore, of the relation between men, and, in short, of all the revolutionary themes. We must revert to the skeletal structure of the revolutionary attitude and examine it in detail so as to see whether it does not call for something other than a mythical representation, or if, on the contrary, it calls for the groundwork of a rigorous philosophy.
Any member of the ruling class is a man of divine right. Born into a class of leaders, he is convinced from childhood that he is born to command and, in a certain sense, this is true, since his parents, who do command, have brought him into the world to carry on after them. A certain social function, into which he will slip as soon as he is of age, the metaphysical reality, as it were, of his person, awaits him. Thus, in his own eyes, he is a person, an a priori synthesis of legal right and of fact. Awaited by his peers, destined to relieve them at the appointed time, he exists because he has the right to exist.
This sacred character which the bourgeois has for his fellow and which manifests itself in ceremonies of recognition (the greeting, the formal announcement, the ritual visit, etc.) is what is called human dignity. The ideology of the ruling class is completely permeated with this idea of dignity. And when men are said to be "the lords of creation," this expression is to be taken in its strongest sense; they are its monarchs by divine right; the world is made for them; their existence is the absolute and perfectly satisfying value to the mind which gives its meaning to the universe. That is the original meaning of all philosophical systems which affirm the primacy of the subject over the object and the composition of Nature through the activity of thought. It is self-evident that man, under these conditions is a supra-natural being; what we call Nature is the sum-total of that which exists without having the right to do so.
For the sacrosanct, the oppressed classes are part of Nature. They are not to command. In other societies perhaps, the fact of a slave's being born within the domus also conferred a sacred character upon him, that of being born to serve, that of being the man of divine duty in relation to the man of divine right. But the same cannot be said in the case of the proletariat. The worker's son, born in an outlying working-class district, living among the crowd, has no direct contact with the propertied elite; he has no personal duty save those that are defined by law. It is not even forbidden him, should he possess that mysterious grace we call merit, to gain access, under certain circumstances and with certain reservations, to the upper class. His son or grandson will became a man of divine right. Thus, he is only a living being, the best organized of the animals. Everyone has felt the contempt implicit in the term "native," used to designate the inhabitants of a colonized country.
The banker, the manufacturer, even the professor in the home country, are not natives of any country; they are not natives at all. The oppressed person, on the other hand, feels himself to be a native; each single event in his life repeats to him that he has not the right to exist. His parents have not brought him into the world for any particular purpose, but rather by chance, for no reason; at best, because they liked children or because they were open to a certain kind of propaganda, or because they wanted to enjoy the advantages accorded to large families. No special function awaits him and, if he has been apprenticed, it was not done so as to prepare him to exercise the priesthood of a profession, but only to enable him to continue the unjustifiable existence he has been leading since his birth. He will work in order to live, and to say that the ownership of the fruits of his labour is stolen from him is an understatement. Even the meaning of his work is stolen from him, since he does not have a feeling of solidarity with the society for which he produces.
Whether he be a fitter or an unskilled labourer, he knows perfectly well that he is not irreplaceable; the worker is actually characterized by interchangeability. The doctor's or jurist's work is appreciated for its quality, the "good" worker's only for its quantity. He becomes conscious of himself through the circumstances of his situation as a member of a zoological species, the human species. So long as he remains on this level, his condition will seem natural to him; he will go on with his life as he began it, with sudden rebellions, if the oppression makes itself more severely felt, but these will be merely sporadic. The revolutionary goes beyond this situation because he wishes to change it, and considers it from the point of view of this will to change.
It should be observed, first of all, that he wishes to change the situation for his whole class and not for himself; if he were thinking only of himself, he could, as a matter of fact, leave the realm of the species and embrace the values of the ruling class. It stands to reason, then, that he would accept a priori the sacrosanct character of the men of divine right for the mere purpose of benefiting by it in turn. But as he cannot dream of claiming this divine right for his entire class, since the origin of this right lies in the very oppression that he wishes to destroy, his first step will be to contest the rights of the ruling class.
Men of divine right do not exist in his eyes. He has not approached them, but he senses that they lead the same existence as he does, an existence that is equally vague and unjustifiable. Unlike the oppressors, he does not seek to exclude the members of the other class from the community of men. But he wishes, first of all, to strip them of that magical aspect which makes them formidable in the eyes of those they override. By a spontaneous impulse he also denies the values they originally set up.
If it were true that their Good had an a priori existence, then the essence of revolution would be polluted; to set one-self up against the oppressors would mean setting oneself up against Good in general. But he does not dream of replacing this Good with another a priori Good, for he is not at a constructive stage. He wants only to free himself of all the values and rules of conduct that the ruling class has invented, because these values and rules act only as checks to his behaviour and, by their very nature, aim at prolonging the status quo. And since he wants to change the organization of society, he must first reject the idea that it was established by Providence. Only if he considers it as a fact can he hope to replace it with another fact that suits him better. At the same time, revolutionary thinking is humanistic.
The declaration that "we too are men" is at the bottom of any revolution. And the revolutionary means by this that his oppressors are men. Certainly he will do violence to them, he will try to break their yoke, but if he must destroy some of their lives, he will always try to reduce this destruction to a minimum, because he needs technicians and experts. Thus, in spite of everything, the bloodiest of revolutions involves coalition.
It is, above all, an absorption and an assimilation of the oppressing class by the oppressed. Unlike the turncoat or the persecuted minority which wishes to raise itself to the level of the privileged and to be identified with them, the revolutionary wishes, by denying the validity of their privileges, to bring them down to his level. And as the constant feeling of his own contingent nature inclines him to recognize himself as an unjustifiable fact, he regards the men of divine right as simple facts like himself. Thus, the revolutionary is not a man who demands rights, but rather a man who destroys the very idea of rights, which he regards as a product of force and custom. His humanism is not based on human dignity, but, on the contrary, denies man any particular dignity.
The unity into which he wants to merge himself and his fellows is not that of the human kingdom, but of the human species. There is a human species, a contingent and unjustifiable phenomenon; the circumstances of its development have brought about a state in which there is a kind of lack of inner balance; the revolutionary's task is to help it to achieve a more rational balance beyond its present state. Just as the species has taken possession of the man of divine right and absorbed him, so Nature takes possession of man and absorbs him. Man is a fact of nature and humanity one species among others.
Only in this way can the revolutionary think of being able to escape the hoaxes of the privileged class. The man who identifies himself with the natural can never again be taken in by an appeal to an a priori ethics. Materialism seems at this point to offer its aid; it is the epic of the factual. The links established throughout the materialistic world are probably necessary, but necessity appears within an original contingency. If the universe exists, its development and the succession of its states can be regulated by laws. But it is not necessary that the universe exist, nor is it necessary that being, in general, exist, and the contingency of the universe is communicated through all the links, even the most rigorous, to each particular fact. Each state, governed from without by the preceding one, can be modified, if one acts upon its causes. And the new state is neither more nor less natural than the preceding one — if we mean thereby that it is not based upon rights and that its necessity is merely relative.
At the same time, since the imprisonment of man in the world is involved, materialism has the advantage of offering a crude myth about the origin of the species whereby the more complex forms of life proceed from the simpler ones. The question is not one of merely replacing the end with the cause in each individual case, but of presenting a stereotyped image of a world in which ends are everywhere substituted for causes. It is apparent, even in the attitude of the first and most naive of the great materialists, that materialism has always had this function.
Epicurus recognizes the possibility of an infinite number of equally valid explanations that might account no less precisely for phenomena, but he challenges us to find one which will liberate man more completely from his fears. And Man's basic fear, especially when he suffers, is less the fear of death or of the existence of a harsh God, but simply rather that the state of things from which he suffers might have been produced and may be maintained for transcendental and unknowable ends.
In this case, any effort to modify it would be vain and wrong. A subtle discouragement would insinuate itself into his judgments and prevent his hoping for or even conceiving of any improvement. Epicurus reduced death to a fact by removing the moral aspect it acquired from the fiction of seats of judgment in the nether world. He did not do away with ghosts but regarded them as strictly physical phenomena. He did not dare do away with the gods, but reduced them to a mere divine species, unrelated to us; he removed their power of self-creation and showed that they were the products of the play of atoms, just as we were.
But, once again, is the materialistic myth, which may have been useful and encouraging, really necessary? The revolutionary's conscience demands that the privileges of the oppressor class be unjustifiable, that the primordial contingency he finds in himself also be a constituent part of his oppressor's very existence, that the system of values set up by his masters, the purpose of which is to confer de jure existence upon de facto advantages, may be transcended towards an organization of the world which does not yet exist and which will exclude, both in law and in fact, all privileges. But his attitude toward the natural is obviously ambivalent. In a way, he plunges into Nature, dragging his masters with him.
But, on the other hand, he proclaims that he wants to substitute a rational adjustment of human relationships for what has been produced blindly by Nature. The Marxist expression for designating the society of the future is antiphysis. This means that Marxists want to set up a human order whose laws will constitute the negation of natural laws. And we are probably to understand by this that this order will be produced only by obeying the prescriptions of Nature. But the fact is that this order must be conceived within a Nature that denies it; the fact is that in the anti-Natural society the conception of law will precede the establishment of law, whereas, at present, law, according to materialism, conditions our conception of it.
In short, transition to antiphysis means the replacement of the society of laws by the community of ends. And there is no doubt that the revolutionary distrusts values and refuses to recognize that he is trying to achieve a better organization of the human community. He fears that a return to values, even by an indirect path, may open the door to further chicanery.
But on the other hand, the mere fact that he is ready to sacrifice his life to an order, the coming of which he never expects to see, implies that this future order, which justifies all his acts but which he will not enjoy, acts as a value for him. What is a value if not the call of something which does not yet exist? [14]
In order to account for these various requirements, a revolutionary philosophy ought to set aside the materialistic myth and endeavour to show: (1) That man is unjustifiable, that his existence is contingent, in that neither he nor any Providence has produced it; (2) That, as a result of this, any collective order established by men can be transcended towards other orders; (3) That the system of values current in a society reflects the structure of that society and tends to preserve it; (4) That it can thus always be transcended toward other systems which are not yet clearly perceived since the society of which they are the expression does not yet exist — but which are adumbrated and are, in a word, invented by the very effort of the members of society to transcend it.
The oppressed person lives out his original contingency, and revolutionary philosophy must reckon with this. But in living out his contingency he accepts the de facto existence of his oppressors and the .absolute value of the ideologies they have produced. He becomes a revolutionary only through a movement of transcendence which challenges these rights and this ideology. The revolutionary philosopher has, above all, to explain the possibility of this movement of transcendence. It is obvious that its source is not to be found in the individual's purely natural and material existence, since the individual turns back on this existence to judge it from the viewpoint of the future.
This possibility of rising above a situation in order to get a perspective on it (a perspective which is not pure knowledge, but an indissoluble linking of understanding and action) is precisely that which we call freedom. No materialism of any kind can ever explain it. A series of causes and effects may very well impel me to a gesture or to behaviour which itself will be an effect and which will modify the state of the world; it cannot make me look back at my situation in order to grasp it in its totality.
In short, it cannot account for revolutionary class consciousness. Dialectical materialism undoubtedly exists in order to explain and justify this transcendence toward the future. But it endeavours to ascribe freedom to things, not to man — which is absurd. A state of the world will never be able to produce class consciousness. And the Marxists are so well aware of this that they rely upon militants — that is, upon a conscious and concerted action — in order to activate the masses and awaken this consciousness within them.
That is all very well, but where do these same militants derive their understanding of the situation? Must they not have detached themselves at some time or other to get perspective? In order to avoid the revolutionary's being duped by his former masters, he should be shown that established values are simply given facts. But if they are given, and, consequently, capable of being transcended, this is not because they are values, but because they are established. And in order that there be no self-deception on his part, he must be given the means of understanding that the end he is pursuing — whether he call it antiphysis, classless society or the liberation of man — is also a value and that, if this value cannot be transcended, the reason is simply that it has not been realized.
Moreover, this is what Marx foresaw when he talked of something beyond Communism, and what Trotsky meant when he spoke of the permanent revolution. Revolutionary man claims to be a contingent being, unjustifiable but free, wholly plunged into a society which oppresses him, but capable of transcending that society through his efforts to change it. Idealism deceives him in that it binds him with rights and values that are already given; it conceals from him his power to blaze his own path. But materialism, by robbing him of his freedom, also deceives him. Revolutionary philosophy should be a philosophy of transcendence.
But the revolutionary himself mistrusts freedom — and that prior to any use of sophistry. And he is right There have always been prophets to tell him he was free, and each time it was in order to fool him. Stoical freedom, Christian freedom, Bergsonian freedom, in hiding his chains from him, have only reinforced them. All of these can be reduced to a certain inner freedom that man could retain in any situation. This inner freedom is a pure idealist hoax; care is taken never to present it as the necessary condition of the act. It is really pure enjoyment of itself. If Epictetus, in chains, does not rebel, it is because he feels free, because he enjoys his freedom.
On that basis, one state is as good as another, the slave's situation is as good as the master's; why should anyone want to change it? This freedom is fundamentally reducible to a more or less clear affirmation of the autonomy of thought. But in conferring independence upon thought, this affirmation separates it from the situation — since truth is universal, one can think truth under any conditions. It also separates thought from action; since we are responsible only for intention, the act, in being realized, undergoes the pressure of the world's real forces which deform it and render it unrecognizable to its very author.
What remain for the slave are abstract thoughts and empty intentions, under the name of metaphysical freedom. And, meanwhile, his master's orders and the necessity of living have involved him in crude and concrete actions, and oblige him to think in concrete terms about matter and instruments. In fact, the liberating element for the oppressed person is work. In this sense it is work that is revolutionary to begin with. To be sure, it is ordered and has, at first, the appearance of the worker's enslavement. It is not likely that the worker would have chosen to do this work under these conditions and within this length of time for these wages, had it not been forced upon him.
The employer, more rigorous than the master of ancient times goes so far as to determine in advance the worker's gestures and behaviour. He breaks down the worker's act into its component parts, takes certain of them away from him, and has them performed by other workers, reduces the worker's conscious and synthetic activity to a mere sum of constantly repeated gestures. Thus, by putting the worker's conduct on the same footing as property, the master tends to reduce the worker to the state of a mere thing.
Madame de Stael, in the account of her trip to Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, cites a striking example of this: "Each of the twenty musicians (in an orchestra of Russian serfs) played one single note each time it recurred. Each of these men bears the name of the note he is supposed to execute. People say, as they pass by, 'There's Mr. Narishkine's "g," "e" or his "d'V " The individual is limited to a constant characteristic which defines him as atomic weight or melting temperature.
Modern Taylorism does the same thing. The worker becomes the man of a single operation which he repeats a hundred times a day; he is a mere object, and to tell a shoe-stitcher or the Ford employee who places the needles on the speedometers that they retain, within the action in which they are engaged, an inner freedom of thought, would be childish or hateful. But at the same time, work offers the beginning of concrete liberation, even in extreme cases, because it is, first of all, the negation of the accidental and capricious order that is the master's. The victim at work no longer worries about pleasing the master, he escapes from the world of politeness, ceremony, psychology and the dance; he does not have to guess what goes on in the boss's head, he is no longer at the mercy of someone's humour. His work is imposed upon him to begin with, of course, and its end product is finally stolen from him.
But within these two limits, his work bestows mastery over things upon him; the worker sees himself as a possibility of infinitely varying the form of a material object by acting upon it in conformance to certain universal rules. In other words, the determinism of matter gives him his first picture of his freedom. A worker is not a determinist in the way the scientist is; he does not make of determinism an explicitly formulated postulation. He lives it in his gestures, in the movement of the arm striking a rivet or pounding a crowbar. He is so thoroughly permeated with it that when the desired effect is not produced he tries to find out what hidden cause has prevented its realization, never conceiving of any waywardness or sudden and accidental break in the natural order. And since it is deep within his slavery, at the very moment at which the master's sweet pleasure transforms him into a thing that action, by bestowing upon him sovereignty over objects and a specialist's autonomy over which the master has no power liberates him, the idea of liberation is linked in his mind with that of determinism.
He does not learn of his freedom by a reflective movement back upon himself, but rather transcends his enslaved state by his action on phenomena which, through the very rigour of their connection, reflect the image of a concrete freedom, the power to modify these phenomena. And since the adumbration of his concrete freedom makes its appearance to him in the connecting-links of determinism, it is not surprising that he aims to replace the relationship of man to man, which seems to him that of a tyrannical freedom to a humiliated obedience, with that of man to thing and, finally — since the man who reigns over things is, in turn, and from another point of view a thing — by that of thing to thing.
Thus determinism, in so far as it is opposed to the psychology of civility, seems to him a kind of purifying thinking, a catharsis. And if he turns back to consider himself as a determined thing, he thereby liberates himself from his master's deadly freedom, for he sweeps them along into determinism's links, considering them, in turn, as things by explaining their commands in terms of their situation, instincts and history, that is, by plunging them into the universe. If all men are things, there are no more slaves, there are only slaves de facto.
Like Samson, who accepted burial under the ruins of the temple provided that the Philistines perished with him, the slave frees himself by doing away with his own and his master's freedom and by submerging himself with them in matter. The liberated society of which he conceives is, from that point on, a reversal of the Kantian community of ends; it is not based on the mutual recognition of freedoms. But since the liberating relationship is the relationship between man and things, that is what will form the basic structure of this society.
It is only a question of destroying the oppressive relationship between men so that the slave's will and that of the master, which exhaust themselves in struggling against one another, can be turned back wholly upon things. The liberated society will be a harmonious enterprise of exploitation of the world. Since it is produced by the absorption of the privileged classes and is defined by work, that is by action upon matter, and since it is in itself subject to deterministic laws, the wheel comes full circle, the world is closed.
The revolutionary, in contradistinction to the rebel, actually wants an order. And since the spiritual orders proposed to him are always to one degree or another the sham images of the society that oppresses him, he will choose material order, that is the order of efficiency in which he figures both as cause and effect. Here, too, materialism offers him its services. This myth offers the most precise image of a society in which freedoms are alienated. Auguste Comte defined it as the doctrine which tries to explain the upper in terms of the lower. The words "upper" and "lower" are obviously not to be understood here in their moral sense, but as designating more or less complicated forms of organization.
Now, the worker is considered as an inferior by those whom he nourishes and protects, and the oppressor class originally considers itself as the superior class. Because its internal structures are finer and more complex, it is this class which produces the ideologies, culture and value systems. The upper layers of society tend to explain the lower in terms of the upper, whether by seeing in it a degradation of the superior or by thinking that it exists in order to serve the needs of the superior.
This kind of finalist explanation naturally attains the level of a principle of interpretation of the universe. The explanation "from below," that is in terms of economic, technical and, finally, biological conditioning is, in an inverse sense, the one adopted by the oppressed individual because it makes of him the supporting element of the entire society. If the superior is only an emanation from the interior, then the "exquisite class" is merely an epiphenomenon. Should the oppressed refuse to cater to it, it will sicken and die; by itself it is nothing.
One has merely to widen this view, which is correct, and to make of it a general explanatory principle, and you have the beginning of materialism. And the materialist explanation of the universe, the explanation, that is, of the biological in terms of the physico-chemical and of thought by matter, becomes, in its turn, a justification of the revolutionary attitude; though an organized myth, the explanation makes what had been the victim's spontaneous impulse to rebellion against his oppressor into the universal mode of existence and of reality. Here, too, materialism offers the revolutionary more than he asks for. For the revolutionary does not insist upon being a thing, but upon mastering things. It is true that in his work he has acquired a just appreciation of freedom. The freedom reflected for him by his action upon things is far removed from the Stoic's abstract freedom of thought. It becomes manifest within a particular situation into which the worker has been cast by the accident of his birth and through his master's whim or interest.
It makes its appearance within an undertaking which he has not originated of his own free will and which he will not terminate; it is not to be distinguished from his very commitment within this undertaking; but if, within his slavery, he becomes conscious of his freedom, it is because he gauges the efficacy of his concrete action. He does not have the pure idea of an autonomy which he does not enjoy, but he does know his power which is proportionate to his action. What he notices while engaged in this same action is that he transcends the present material state through a precise plan of arranging it in one fashion or another, and that, as this project is identical with the management of means directed toward ends, he really does succeed in arranging it as he had wished.
If he discovers the relation between cause and effect, it is not in submitting to it, but in the very act which transcends the material state (the adhesion of the coal to the walls of the mine, etc.) towards a certain end which illuminates and defines this state from within the future. Thus the relation of cause to effect is revealed in and through the efficacy of an act which is both plan and realization. It is, indeed, the tractability and, at the same time, the resistance of the universe which reflects for him the steadiness of causal series and the image of his freedom, but that is because his freedom is indistinguishable from the use of causal series toward an end which establishes this very freedom. Without the illumination bestowed upon it by this end the present situation could contain neither a causal relationship, nor the relationship of means to end, or rather, it would contain an indistinct and infinite number of means and ends, effects and causes, just as without the generating act of the mathematician who traces a figure in relating a series of chosen points according to a certain law, geometric space would contain an undifferentiated infinity of circles, ellipses, triangles and polygons.
Thus, in the realm of work, determinism does not reveal freedom in so far as it is an abstract natural law, but in so far as a human project carves out and illuminates a certain partial determinism within the infinite interaction of phenomena. And in this determinism, which proves itself simply through the efficacy of human action — as Archimedes' principle was already in use and understood by shipbuilders long before Archimedes had given it conceptual form — the relation of cause to effect is indistinguishable from that of means to end.
The organic unity of the worker's plan consists in the simultaneous emergence of an end which did not originally exist in the universe and which is manifested through the organization of means adopted to obtain it (for the end is no more than the synthetic unity of all the means manipulated for producing it) and the under layer which underlies these means and reveals itself, in turn, through their very organization. It is the relation of cause to effect; like Archimedes' principle, it constitutes both support and content for the shipbuilder's technique. In this sense, we may say that the atom was created by the atomic bomb, which was inconceivable except in the light of the Anglo-American plan for winning the war.
Thus freedom is to be discovered only in the act, and is one with the act; it forms the basis of the relations and interrelations that constitute the act's internal structures. It never derives pleasure from itself, but reveals itself in and through its results. It is not an inner virtue which permits us to detach ourselves from very pressing situations, because, for man, there is no inside and no outside. But it is, on the contrary, the power to commit one's self in present action and to build a future; it generates a future which enables us to understand and to change the present.
Thus the worker really learns of his freedom through things; but precisely because he does learn of it through things, he is anything but a thing. And it is here that materialism deceives him and becomes, in spite of itself, an instrument in the hands of the oppressors. For if the worker discovers his freedom in his work, which is conceived as a primary relationship between man and material objects, in his relationship with his oppressor-master he thinks of himself as an object; it is the master who, in reducing him, through Taylorism or another process, to a mere sum of ever-identical operations, transforms him into a passive object, the mere support of constant properties.
Materialism, in decomposing man into behaviour patterns rigorously modelled upon Taylorist operations, [15] is playing into the master's hands. It is the master who sees the slave as a machine. By considering himself a mere natural product, as a "native," the slave sees himself through his master's eyes. He thinks of himself as an Other, and with the thoughts of the Other. The materialist revolutionary's conception harmonizes with that of his oppressors. And it may be objected that materialism ends by catching the master and transforming him into an object, like the slave.
But the master knows nothing of this and cares less; he lives within his ideologies, his rights, his culture. It is only to the slave's subjectivity that he appears an object. Instead of straining ourselves, by concealing his real freedom, to show him that the master is an object, it is, then, infinitely more valid and useful to let the slave discover his freedom to change the world, and, consequently, his own state, from his work. And if it be true that materialism, as explanation of the upper in terms of the lower, is a convenient image of the present social structures, it is then only all the more obvious that it is merely a myth in the Platonic sense of the word. For the revolutionary has no use for a symbolic expression of the present situation; he wants a kind of thinking that will enable him to forge the future. Now the materialist myth loses all meaning in a classless society in which neither uppers nor lowers will exist.
But, say the Marxists, if you teach man that he is free, you betray him; for he no longer needs to become free; can you conceive of a man free from birth who demands to be liberated? To this I reply that if man is not originally free, but determined once and for all, we cannot even conceive what his liberation might be. Some may say, "We will release human nature from its determining constraints." These people are fools.
What indeed can the nature of a man be, apart from that which he concretely is in his present existence? How can a Marxist believe in a real human nature, concealed, only, by oppressive circumstances? Other people claim to bring about the happiness of the species. But what is a happiness which is not felt and experienced? Happiness is, in its essence, subjectivity. How could it exist in the kingdom of objectivity? The only result one can really hope to attain in the hypothesis of universal determinism and from the point of view of objectivity is simply a more rational organization of society. But what value can an organization of this kind retain if it is not experienced as such by a free subjectivity and transcended toward new ends? No opposition really exists between these two necessities of action, namely that the agent be free and that the world in which he acts be determined. For these two things are not both necessary from the same point of view or in relation to the same realities.
Freedom is a structure of human action and appears only in commitment; determinism is the law of the world. And the act only calls for partial linkages and local constants. Similarly, it is not true that a free man cannot hope to be liberated. For he is not free and bound in respect to the same things. His freedom is like the illumination of the situation into which he is cast. But other people's freedoms can render his situation unbearable, drive him to rebellion or to death.
If a slave's freedom is manifest in his work it is nonetheless true that this work is imposed, nullifying and destructive, that he is cheated of its products, that he is isolated by it, excluded from a society which exploits him and in which he does not share, applied as he is against matter by a vis a tergo. It is true that he is merely a link in a chain of which he knows neither the beginning nor the end; it is true that the master's look, his ideology and his orders tend to refuse him any existence other than the material one.
It is precisely in becoming revolutionaries, that is, in organizing with other members of their class to reject the tyranny of their masters, that slaves best manifest their freedom. Oppression leaves them no choice other than resignation or revolution. But in both cases they manifest their freedom to choose. And, finally, no matter what end is allotted to the revolutionary, he transcends it and sees in it only a stage. If he is looking for security or a better material organization of society, it is in order that they may serve as his point of departure.
This is how the Marxists themselves replied when reactionaries, speaking about a minor demand concerning wages, talked of the "sordid materialism of the masses." They gave one to understand that behind these material demands there was the affirmation of a humanism, that these workers were not only demanding a few more sous, but that their demand was a kind of concrete symbol of their demand to be men. Men; that is, freedoms in possession of their own destinies.[16] This remark holds true for the revolutionary's final purpose. Class-consciousness demands a new humanism, above and beyond the rational organization of the community, it is an alienated freedom which has taken freedom as its end. Socialism is merely the means which will allow for the realization of the reign of freedom; a materialistic socialism is contradictory, therefore, because socialism establishes humanism as its end, a humanism which materialism renders inconceivable.
One characteristic of idealism which the revolutionary particularly loathes is the tendency to represent changes in the world as controlled by ideas, or better still, as changes in ideas. Death, unemployment, strike-suppression, poverty and hunger are not ideas. They are everyday realities that are experienced in horror. They certainly have significances, but they retain above all an underlayer of irrational opaqueness.
The First World War was not, as Chevalier said it was, "Descartes against Kant"; it was the inexpiable deaths of twelve million young men. The revolutionary, crushed beneath reality, refuses to let is sneak away. He knows that the revolution will not be a mere consumption of ideas, but that it will cost blood, sweat and human lives. He is in a position to know that things are solid and sometimes insuperable obstacles and that the best laid plan encounters resistances which are often responsible for its failure. He knows that action is not a felicitous combination of thoughts, but a whole man's efforts against the obstinate impenetrability of the universe. He knows that when one has deciphered the meanings in things that there remains an unassimilable residue, the otherness, the irrationality, the opaqueness of the real, and that it is this residue which in the end stifles and crushes.
Unlike the idealist whose slack thinking he denounces, he wants to think hard. Or rather, against the adversity of objects he wishes to set up not the idea, but action which comes down, finally, to effort, exhausting fatigue and sleeplessness. Here again materialism seems to offer him the most satisfying expression of his demand, since it affirms the predominance of impenetrable matter over the idea. For materialism, all is fact and conflict of forces, action. Thought itself becomes a real phenomenon in a measurable world; it is produced by matter and consumes energy. The famous predominance of the object has to be conceived in terms of realism.
But is this interpretation so deeply satisfying? Does it not overstep its purpose and defraud the need which generated it? If it is true that nothing gives less of an impression of effort than the generation of ideas by other ideas, the effort fades away just as entirely as if we regard the universe as the balance of various forces. Nothing gives less of an impression of effort than a force applied to a physical point; it accomplishes the work of which it is capable — neither more nor less — and is transformed mechanically into kinetic or caloric energy.
Nowhere, and in no instance, does nature itself give us the impression of resistance overcome, of rebellion and submission, of lassitude. This applied force is always all that it is capable of being, and no more. And forces in opposition produce resultants according to the calm laws of mechanics. In order to account for reality as a resistance to be overcome by work, this resistance must be experienced by a subjectivity that seeks to subdue it Nature conceived as pure objectivity is the opposite of the idea. But precisely because of this, it becomes transformed into idea; it is the pure idea of objectivity. The real vanishes.
For the real is that which is impermeable to subjectivity; it is the piece of sugar whose melting I wait for, as Bergson says, or, if you prefer, it is the subject's obligation to experience a similar waiting. It is the human design or scheme, it is my thirst which decides that it "takes a long time" to melt. When considered apart from a human situation, it melts neither slowly nor fast, but within a time which is dependent upon its nature, its thickness and the amount of water in which it is soaking.
It is human subjectivity which discovers the adversity of the real in and through the scheme it conceives to get beyond it toward the future. In order for a hill to be easy or hard to ascend, one must have planned to climb it to its summit. Both idealism and materialism cause the real to disappear in like manner, the one because it eliminates the object, the other because it eliminates subjectivity.
In order for reality to be revealed, it is necessary for a man to struggle against it. The revolutionary's realism, in a word, necessitates the existence of the world and of subjectivity; better still, it calls for such a correlation of one with the other that neither a subjectivity outside the world nor a world which would not be illuminated by an effort on the part of a subjectivity can be conceived of.[17] The maximum of reality, the maximum of resistance, will be obtained if we suppose that man is, by definition, within-a-situation-in-the-world and that he comes to learn the stubbornness of reality in defining himself in relation to it.
Let us take note, moreover, of the fact that an over-narrow adhesion to universal determinism runs the risk of eliminating all of reality's resistance. I received the proof of this in a conversation with M. Garaudy and two of his friends. I asked them if the stakes were really down when Stalin signed the Russo-German pact and when the French communists decided to take part in the de Gaulle government; I asked if, in both cases, the people responsible had not taken their chances with the rather anguished feeling of their responsibilities. For it seems to me that freedom is principally characterized by the fact that you are never sure of winning with it and that the consequences of our acts are probable, only. But M. Garaudy interrupted me; for him the stakes are down in advance; there exists a science of history and the interlinking of facts is rigorous, and so we bet on a sure thing. He was carried so far away in his zeal that he ended by saying excitedly to me: "And what does Stalin's intelligence matter? I don't care a rap for it!" I might add that, under the severe glances of his friends, he blushed, lowered his eyes and added, with a rather devout look, "Besides, Stalin is very intelligent."
Thus, in contradiction to revolutionary realism which asserts that the least little result is attained with difficulty and amidst the greatest uncertainties, the materialist myth leads certain minds to a profound reassurance as to the outcome of their efforts. It is impossible, they think, for them to fail. History is a science, its consequences are already inscribed, we have only to decipher them. This attitude is quite patently a flight. The revolutionary has overthrown the myths of the bourgeoisie, and the working class has undertaken, through a thousand vicissitudes, victories and defeats, to forge its own destiny in freedom and in anguish.
But our Garaudys are afraid. What they seek in communism is not liberation, but a re-enforcement of discipline; there is nothing they fear so much as freedom; if they have renounced the a priori values of the class from which they come, it is in order to find a priori elements in scientific knowledge and paths already marked out in history. There are no risks and no anxiety; everything is sure and certain; the results are guaranteed. Reality immediately vanishes and history is merely an idea that develops.
M. Garaudy feels sheltered within this idea. Some communist intellectuals to whom I reported this conversation shrugged their shoulders. "Garaudy is a scientist," they told me with contempt, "he is a bourgeois Protestant who, for purposes of personal edification, has replaced the finger of God with historical materialism." I agree. I admit, also, that M. Garaudy did not seem to me to be a shining light, but after all, he writes a great deal and the communists do not disown him. And it is not by chance that most of the scientists have joined hands with the Communist Party and that this party, so hard on heresies, does not condemn them.
We must, at this point, repeat the following: the revolutionary, if he wishes to act, cannot regard historical events as the result of lawless contingencies; but he by no means demands that his path be cleared in advance; he wishes to clear it himself. Certain partial series, constancies and structural laws within determined social forms are what he needs in order to see ahead. If you give him more, everything fades away into ideas and history no longer has to be made, but rather to be read, day by day; the real becomes a dream.
We were called upon to choose between materialism and idealism, we were told that we would be unable to find a middle way between these two doctrines. Without preconceived ideas, we have allowed revolutionary demands to speak for themselves and we have seen that they trace, of themselves, the features of an odd sort of philosophy that dismisses idealism and materialism unsuited. The revolutionary act seemed to us, at first, the free act par excellence. Not free in an anarchist and individualist way at all; if that were true, the revolutionary, by the very nature of his situation, could only claim, with a greater or lesser degree of explicitness, the rights of the "exquisite class," that is, his integration with the upper social layers.
But as he demands, within the oppressed class and for the entire oppressed class, a more rational social status, his freedom resides in the act by which he demands the liberation of his whole class and, more generally, of all men. It springs from a recognition of other freedoms and it demands recognition on their part. Thus, from the beginning, it places itself on the level of solidarity. And the revolutionary act contains within, itself the premises of a philosophy of freedom, or, rather, by its very existence it creates this philosophy.
But since, at the same time, the revolutionary discovers himself through and in his free designs, as an oppressed person within an oppressed class, his original position requires that we explain the nature of oppression. That means, once again, that men are free — for oppression of matter by matter cannot exist, but only the composition of forces — and that a certain relationship between freedoms can exist, so that one does not recognize the other and acts upon it from without to transform it into an object. And conversely, just as oppressed freedom wants to free itself by force, so the revolutionary attitude demands a theory of violence as an answer to oppression. Here too, materialistic terms are no more adequate to the explanation of violence than idealist ones are.
Idealism, which is a philosophy of digestion and assimilation, does not even conceive of the absolute and insurmountable pluralism of freedoms marshalled against one another; idealism is a sort of monism. But materialism is also monistic; there is no "conflict of opposites" within material unity. There are not really even any opposites; hot and cold are simply different degrees on the thermometric scale; you pass progressively from light to darkness; two equal forces in opposite directions cancel one another and simply produce a state of equilibrium. The idea of a conflict of opposites constitutes a projection of human relationships upon material relationships.
A revolutionary philosophy ought to account for the plurality of freedoms and show how each one can be an object for the other while being, at the same time, a freedom for itself. Only this double character of freedom and objectivity can explain the complex notions of oppression, conflict, failure and violence. For one never oppresses anything but a freedom, but one cannot oppress it if it lends itself in some way to this oppression, if, that is, it presents the appearance of a thing to the Other. The revolutionary movement and its plan — which is to make society pass through the violence of one state in which liberties are alienated to another state based on their mutual recognition — is to be understood in these terms.
Similarly, the revolutionary who lives through oppression bodily and in each of his gestures in no way wishes to underestimate the yoke imposed upon him nor to tolerate idealist criticism's dispelling this oppression in ideas. At the same time, he contests the rights of the privileged class and thereby destroys the general idea of rights. But it would be erroneous to believe, with the materialist, that he does this in order to replace them with the plain and simple fact. For facts can only generate facts, and not the representation of facts; the present generates another present, not the future.
Thus the revolutionary act demands that we transcend, in the unity of a synthesis, opposition — which can account for a society's disintegration, but not the construction of a new society — and idealism, which confers a legal existence upon facts. It calls for a new philosophy, with a different view of man's relations with the world. If the revolution should be possible, man ought to possess the contingent quality of the fact and be different, nevertheless, from the fact in his practical ability to transcend the present, to disengage himself from his situation.
This disengagement is in no way comparable to the negative movement through which the Stoic tries to take refuge in himself; it is by projecting himself ahead, in committing himself in ventures of one kind or another, that the revolutionary transcends the present; and since he is a man, doing a man's work, this power of disengagement must really be attributed to all human activity. The slightest human gesture can be understood in terms of the future; even the reactionary faces the future, since he is concerned with preparing a future that will be identical with the past.
The tactician's absolute realism demands that man be plunged into reality, menaced with concrete dangers, victim of a concrete oppression from which he will deliver himself through equally concrete acts. Blood, sweat, sorrow and death are not ideas; the rock that crushes and the bullet that kills are not ideas. But in order that objects may reveal what Bachelard rightly calls their "co-efficient of adversity," the light of a plan or illuminating scheme, be it only the very simple and crude one of living, is necessary.
It is not true, then, that man is outside Nature and the world, as the idealist has it, or that he is only up to his ankles in it, baulking like a bather having a dip while her head is in the clouds. He is completely in Nature's clutches, and at any moment Nature can crush him and annihilate him, body and soul. He is in her clutches from the very beginning: for him being born really means "coming into the world" in a situation not of his choice, with this particular body, this family, and this race, perhaps.
But if he happens to plan, as Marx expressly states, to "change the world," it means that he is, to begin with, a being for whom the world exists in its totality, as a piece of phosphorus or lead, which is a part of the world and ridden by forces to which it uncomprehendingly submits, will never be. This means that man transcends the world toward a future state from which he can contemplate it. It is in changing the world that we can come to know it. Neither the detached consciousness that would soar over the universe without being able to get a standpoint on it, nor the material object which reflects a condition without understanding it can ever "grasp" the totality of existence in a synthesis, even a purely conceptual one.
Only a man situated in the universe and completely crushed by the forces of nature and transcending them completely through his design to master them can do this. It is the elucidation of the new ideas of "situation" and of "being-in-the-world" that revolutionary behavior specifically calls for. And if he escapes the jungle of rights and duties into which the idealist tries to mislead him, it should not be only to fall into the gorges rigorously marked out by the materialist. Intelligent Marxists admit of a certain contingent element in history, of course, but only to say that if socialism fails, humanity will sink into barbarism.
If constructive forces are to triumph, historical determinism assigns them only one path. But there are many possible varieties of barbarism and socialism, and perhaps even a barbarous socialism. What the revolutionary demands is the possibility for man to invent his own law. This is the basis of his humanism and of his socialism. He does not, deep within himself, think — at least so long as he is not being tricked — that socialism waits for him around history's bend, like a bandit with a cudgel, concealed somewhere in the woods.
The revolutionary considers that he builds socialism, and since he has shaken off and overthrown all legal rights, he recognizes its existence only in so far as the revolutionary class invents, wills and builds it. And, in this sense, this slow, stern conquest of socialism is none other than the affirmation of human freedom in and through history. And precisely because man is free, the triumph of socialism is not at all certain. It does not lie at the end of the road, like a boundary mark; it is the scheme formulated by humanity. It will be what men make it; it is the outcome of the soberness with which the revolutionary envisages his action. He feels responsible not only for the coming of a socialist republic in general, but for the particular character of this socialism as well.
Thus the philosophy of revolution, transcending both idealist thinking which is bourgeois and the myth of materialism which suited the oppressed masses for a while, claims to be the philosophy of man in the general sense. And this is quite natural; if it is true it will indeed be universal. The ambiguity of materialism lies in its claim to be a class ideology at one time and the expression of an absolute truth at another.
But the revolutionary, in his very choice of revolution, takes a privileged position; he, unlike the militants of the bourgeois parties, fights not for the conservation of a class but for the elimination of classes; he does not divide society into men of divine right on the one hand, and natives or "Untermenschen" on the other, but calls for the unification of ethnic groups and classes, the unity, in short, of all men. He does not allow himself to be humbugged by the rights and duties lodged a priori in an intelligible heaven, but, in the very act of rebellion against them, posits human freedom, metaphysical and entire.
His cause is, thus, essentially, man's cause and his philosophy ought to express the truth about man. But, you will say, if his philosophy is universal, or true for all men, isn't it, as a matter of fact, beyond parties and classes? Don't we revert to rootless, a-political, and a-social idealism? My reply is as follows: the meaning of this philosophy is open, at first, to revolutionaries only, that is to men in the situation of oppressed persons, and it has need of them in order to become manifest to the world. But it is true that this ought to be the philosophy of all men, in so far as a bourgeois oppressor is the victim of his own oppression. For in order to maintain his authority over the oppressed classes, he is obliged to pay with his own person and to become entangled in the maze of rights and values of his own invention.
If the revolutionary retains the materialist myth, the young bourgeois can come to the revolution only upon the perception of social injustices; he comes to it through personal generosity, which is always suspect, for the source of generosity can be exhausted, and his swallowing of the materialism his reasoning power rejects and which does not express his personal situation constitutes an additional test.
But once the philosopher of revolution makes his point of view clear, the bourgeois who formulated a criticism of the ideology of his class, who has recognized his own contingent quality and his freedom, who has come to understand that this freedom can be asserted only by the recognition bestowed upon it by other freedoms, will discover that in so far as he wants to strip the middle class of its mystifying trappings and assert himself as a man among men. At this point revolutionary humanism does not seem to be the philosophy of an oppressed class, but the truth itself, humiliated, masked, oppressed by men whose interests lie in flight from it, and it becomes evident for all men of good will that truth is the revolutionary thing. Not the abstract Truth of idealism, but concrete truth, willed, created, maintained and conquered through social struggle by men who work at the liberation of man.
It may be objected that since the only existing revolutionaries are Marxists who give their allegiance to materialism, this analysis of revolutionary needs is abstract. It is true that the Communist Party is the only revolutionary party. And it is true that the party's doctrine is materialism. But I have not attempted to describe the Marxists' beliefs, but rather to bring out the implications of their actions. And the frequenting of communists has taught me that nothing is more variable, abstract and subjective than what is called their Marxism. What could be more at variance with M. Garaudy's naive and stubborn scientism that M. Herve's philosophy? You may say that this is the reflection of a difference in intelligence, and this is true.
But above all, it indicates the respective degrees of belief in the materialist myth. It is not by chance that Marxist thinking is passing through a crisis today and that it has resigned itself to adopting people like Garaudy for spokesmen. It is due to the fact that the communists are caught between the obsolescence of the materialist myth and the fear of creating division, or hesitation at least, in their ranks through the adoption of a new ideology. The best of them are silent; the silence is filled in with the chatter of imbeciles. "After all," the leaders probably think, "what does ideology matter? Our old materialism has proved itself and will surely lead us to victory. Ours is not a struggle of ideas; it is a political and social struggle between men." They are probably right in so far as the present, or even the near future, is concerned. But what kind of men are they forming? You cannot, with impunity, form generations of men by imbuing them with successful, but false, ideas. What will happen if materialism stifles the revolutionary design to death one day?
[1] As I have been unfairly reproached with not quoting Marx in this article, I should like to point out that my criticisms are not directed against him, but against the Marxist scholasticism of 1949. Or, if you prefer, against Marx through Neo-Stalinist Marxism.
[2] Marx and Engels; Complete Works; Ludwig Feuerbach, Volume XIV, p. 651, Russian edition. I quote this passage in order to show the use made of it today. I plan to show elsewhere that Marx had a much deeper and richer conception of objectivity.
[3] Engels.
[4] Let no one hope to get out of the difficulty at this point by talking of intensive quantities. Bergson long ago demonstrated the confusion and error of this myth of intensive quantity which was the undoing of the psychophysicists. Temperature, as we feel it, is a quality. It is not warmer today than it was yesterday, but
warm in a different way. And, conversely, the degree, measured according to cubic expansion is a pure and simple quantity, to which there remains attached, in the mind of the layman, a vague, idea of perceptible quality. And modern physics, far from retaining this ambiguous notion, reduces heat to certain atomic movements. What becomes of intensity? And what are the intensities of a sound or a light, if not mathematical relationships?
[5] Stalin, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism.
[6] My italics.— J.-P.S.
[7] Only they define the environment more precisely in terms of the
material conditions of existence.
[8] Stalin, Ibid., p. 13.
[9] Although Marx sometimes claimed there was. In 1844 he wrote that the antinomy between idealism and materialism would kave to be transcended, and Henri Lefebvre, commenting on his thinking, states in Materialisme Dialectique (pp. 53, 54), "Historical materialism, which is clearly expressed in Deutsche Ideologie, attains the unity of idealism and materialism foreshadowed and announced in the Manuscripts of 1844." But then why does M. Garaudy, another spokesman for Marxism, write in Les Lettres Frangaises, "Sartre rejects materialism and claims, nevertheless, to avoid idealism. That is where the futility of that impossible 'third party' reveals itself . . ." How confused these people are!
[10] It may be objected that I have not spoken of the common source of all transformations in the universe, which is energy, and that I have taken up my position on the ground of mechanism in order to appraise dynamic materialism. My reply is that energy is not a directly perceived reality, but a concept fashioned in order to account for certain phenomena, that scientists are familiar with it through its effects rather than through is nature, and that at the most they know, as Poincare said, that "something remains."
Besides, the little we can state about energy is in rigorous opposition to the demands of dialectical materialism. Its total quantity is conserved, it is transmitted in discrete quantities, it undergoes a constant reduction. This last principle, in particular, is incompatible with the demands of a dialectic which claims to be enriched with each step. And let us not forget, moreover, that a body always receives its energy from without (even intra-atomic energy is so received); it is within the framework of the general principle of inertia that we are able to study the problem of equivalence of energy. To make energy the vehicle of the dialectic would be to transform it by violence into idea
.[11] This is a resume of conversations about Trotskyism that I have had time and again with Communist intellectuals, and not the least important of them. They always follow the pattern I have just indicated.
[12] As can be seen in the Lysenko case, the scientist who recently provided Marxist politics with a groundwork by guaranteeing the truth of materialism, has to submit, in his research, to the demands of this politics. It is a vicious circle.
[13] This is what Marx, in his "theses on Feuerbach" calls "practical materialism." But why "materialism"?
[14] This ambiguity appears again in the Communist's judgments of his adversaries. For materialism ought actually to forbid his making judgments. A bourgeois is only the product of a rigorous necessity. But the climate of I'Humanite (the French Communist newspaper) is one of moral indignation.
[15] Behaviourism is the philosophy of Taylorism.
[16] That is what Marx explains admirably in Political Economy and Philosophy.
[17] It is, once again, Marx's point of view in 1844, that is until the unfortunate meeting with Engels.
originally published in Les Temps Modernes, 1946. Excerpted from Literary and Philosophical Essays, (Collier Books, 1962) pp.198-256.
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