University of Virginia Library

X.

Ethics, art, religion, science, are they then but products of economic conditions? — expositions of the categories of these very conditions? — effluvia, ornaments, emanations and mirages of material interests?

Affirmations of this sort, announced with this nudity and crudity, have already for some time passed from mouth to mouth, and they are a convenient assistance to the adversaries of materialism, who use them as a bugbear. The slothful, whose number is great even among the intellectuals, willingly fit themselves to this clumsy acceptance of such declarations. What a delight for all careless persons to possess, once for all, summed up in a few propositions, the whole of knowledge, and to be able with one single key to penetrate all the secrets of life! All the problems of ethics, esthetics, philology, critical history and philosophy reduced to one single problem and freed thus from all difficulties!

In this way the simpletons might reduce the whole of history to commercial arithmetic; and finally a new and authentic interpretation of Dante might give us the Divine Comedy illustrated with

the process of manufacturing pieces of cloth which the wily Florentine merchants sold for their greater profit!

The truth is that the declarations which involve problems are converted very easily into vulgar paradoxes in the heads of those who are not accustomed to triumph over the difficulties of thought by the methodical use of appropriate means. I shall speak here, in general terms, of these problems, but, as it were, by aphorisms; and certainly I do not propose to write an encyclopedia in this short essay.

And first of all, ethics.

I do not mean systems and catechisms, religious or philosophic. Both of these have been and are above the ordinary and profane course of human events in most cases, as Utopias are above things. Neither do I speak of those formal analyses of ethical relations, which have been elaborated from the Sophists down to Herbart. This is science and not life. And it is formal science, like logic, geometry and grammar. The one who latest and with so much profundity defined these ethical relations (Herbart), knew well that ideas, that is to say, the formal points of view of the moral judgment, are in themselves powerless. Therefore he put into the circumstances of life and into the pedagogic formation of character the reality of ethics. He might have been taken for Owen if he had not been a retrograde.

I am speaking of that ethics which exists prosaically

and in an empirical and current fashion, in the inclinations, the habits, the customs, the counsels, the judgments and the appreciations of ordinary mortals. I am speaking of that ethics which as suggestion, as impulse and as bridle, appears in different degrees of development, and more or less unmistakably, although in a fragmentary fashion, among all men; but the very fact of association because each occupies a definite position in the association, they naturally and necessarily reflect upon their own works and the works of others, and they conceive obligations and appreciations and all the first elements of general precepts.

There is the factum; and what is most important is that this factum appears to us varied and multiple in the different conditions of life, and variable through history. This factum is the datum of research. Facts are neither true nor false, as Aristotle already knew. Systems, on the contrary, theologic or rational, may be true or false because they aim to comprehend, explain and complete the fact, by bringing that fact to another fact, or integrating it with another.

Some points of preliminary theory are henceforth settled, in all that concerns the interpretation of this factum.

The will does not choose of itself, as was supposed by the inventors of free will, that product of the impotency of the psychological analysis not yet arrived at maturity. Volitions, in so far as they are facts of consciousness, are particular expressions

of the psychic mechanism. They are a result, first of necessities, and then, of all that precedes them up to the very elementary organic impulse.

Ethics does not place itself nor does it engender itself. There is no such universal foundation of the ethical relations varied and variable, as that spiritual entity which has been called the moral conscience, one and unique for all men. This abstract entity has been eliminated by criticism like all other such entities, that is to say, like all the faculties of the soul. What a beautiful explanation of the fact, in truth, to assume the generalization of the fact itself as a means of explanation. People reasoned thus: the sensations, the perceptions, the intuitions at a certain moment are found imagined, that is to say, changed in their form, therefore the imagination has transformed them. To this class of inventions belongs the moral conscience, which was accepted as a postulate of the ethical estimates, which are always conditioned. The moral conscience which really exists is an empirical fact; it is an index or a summary of the relative ethical formation of each individual. If there can be in it material for science, this cannot explain the ethical relations by means of the conscience, but the very thing it needs is to understand how that conscience is formed.

If volitions are derived, and if morality results from the conditions of life, ethics, in its completeness, is but a formation; its problem is altogether pedagogic.

There is a pedagogy which I will call individualistic and subjective, which, granted the generic conditions of human perfectibility, constructs abstract rules by which men, who are still in a period of formation, may be led to be strong, courageous, truthful, just, benevolent, and so on through the entire extent of the cardinal or secondary virtues. But again, can subjective pedagogy construct of itself a social background upon which all these beautiful things ought to be realized? If it constructs it, it simply elaborates a Utopia.

And, in truth, the human race, in the rigid course of its development, never had time nor occasion to go to the school of Plato or of Owen, of Pestalozzi or Herbart. It has done as it has been forced to do. Considered in an abstract manner, all men can be educated and all are perfectible; as a matter of fact, they have always been perfected and instructed as much as and in the measure that they could, granted the conditions of life in which they were obliged to develop. It is here precisely that the word environment is not a metaphor, and that the use of the word compact is not metaphorical. Real morality always presents itself as something conditioned and limited, which the imagination has sought to outgrow, by constructing Utopias, and by creating a supernatural pedagogue, or a miraculous redemption.

Why should the slave have had the ways of seeing and the passions and the sentiments of the master whom he feared? How could the peasant

relieve himself of his invincible superstitions, to which he was condemned by his immediate dependence upon nature and his mediate dependence upon a social mechanism unknown to him, and by his blind faith in the priest, who stands to him as a magician and sorcerer. In what fashion could the modern proletarian of the great industrial cities, exposed continuously to the alternatives of misery or subjection, how could he realize that way of living, regulated and monotonous, which was the one suited to the members of the trade guilds, whose existence seemed imbedded in a providential plan? From what intuitive elements of experience could the hog merchant of Chicago, who furnishes Europe with so many products at a cheap rate, extract the conditions of serenity and intellectual elevation which gave to the Athenian the qualities of the noble and good man, and to the Roman citizen, the dignity of heroism? What power of docile Christian persuasion will extract from the souls of the modern proletarians their natural reasons of hate against their determined or undetermined oppressors? If they wish that justice be done, they must appeal to violence; and before the love of one's neighbor as a universal law can appear possible to them, they must imagine a life very different from the present life which makes a necessity of hatred. In this society of differentiations, hatred, pride, hypocrisy, falsehood, baseness, injustice and all the catechism of the cardinal vices and their accessories make a sad appendage to the morality, equal for all, upon which they constitute the satire.

Ethics then reduces itself for us to the historical study of the subjective and objective conditions of how morality develops or meets obstacles to its development. In this only, that is to say, within these limits, we can recognize some value in the affirmation that morality corresponds to the social situations, and, in the last analysis, to the economic conditions. Only an idiot could believe that the individual morality of each one is proportionate to his individual economic situation. That is not only empirically false, but intrinsically irrational. Granted the natural elasticity of the psychic mechanism, and also the fact that no one lives so shut up in his own class that he does not undergo the influence of other classes, of the common environment and of the interlacing traditions, it is never possible to reduce the development of each individual to the abstract and generic type of his class and his social status. We are dealing there with the phenomena of the mass, of those phenomena which form, or should form, the objects of moral statistics: the discipline which has thus far remained incomplete, because it has taken for the objects of its combinations groups which it creates of itself by the addition of numbers of cases (for example, adulteries, thefts, homicides) and not the groups which, as classes, conditions, or situations exist really, that is to say, socially.

To recommend morality to men while assuming

or ignoring their conditions, this was hitherto the object and the class of argument of all the catechists. To recognize that these are given by the social environment, that is what the communists oppose to the utopia and the hypocrisy of the preachers of morality. And as they see in morality not a privilege of the elect, nor a gift of nature, but a result of experience and education, they admit human perfectibility through reasons and arguments which are, in my opinion, more moral and more ideal than those which have been given by the ideologists.

In other words, man develops, or produces himself, not as an entity generically provided with certain attributes, which repeat themselves, or develop themselves, according to a rational rhythm, but he produces and develops himself as at once cause and effect, as author and consequence, of certain definite conditions, in which are engendered also definite currents of ideas, of opinions, of beliefs, of imaginations, of expectations, of maxims. Thence arise ideologies of every sort, as also the generalization of morality in catechisms, in canons and in systems. We must not be surprised if these ideologies, once arisen, are afterwards cultivated alone by themselves, if they finally appear, as it were, detached from the living field whence they took their birth, nor if they hold themselves above man as imperative rules and models.

The priests and the doctrinaires of every sort

have given themselves for centuries to this labor of abstraction, and have forced themselves to maintain the resulting illusions. Now that the positive sources of all ideologies have been found in the mechanism of life itself, we must explain realistically their mode of generation. And as that is true of all ideologies, it is true also and, in particular of those which consist in projecting ethical estimates beyond their natural and direct limits, making of them anticipations of divine announcements or presuppositions of universal suggestions of conscience.

Therein lies the object of the special historic problems. We cannot always find the tie which unites certain ethical ideas to practical definite conditions. The concrete social psychology of past times often remains impenetrable to us. Often the commonest things remain for us unintelligible, for example, the animals considered as unclean, or the origin for the repugnance at marriage between persons of remote degrees of relationship. A prudent course of study leads us to conclude that the motives of many details will remain always concealed. Ignorance, superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these with many others are causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs, which now constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable.

The principal cause of all difficulty is precisely in the tardy appearance of what we call reason, so that the traces of the proximate motives of ideas

have been lost or have remained enveloped in the ideas themselves.

On the subject of science we can be much more brief.

For a long time history has been made in an artless fashion. Granted and admitted that the different sciences have their statements in manuals and encyclopedias, it seemed sufficient to work out chronologically the appearance of the different formulas, resolving the total of the systematic summary into the elements which have successively served to compose it. The general presupposition was simple enough; underneath this chronology is the rational conception which develops and progresses.

This method, if so it could be called, had within itself a certain disadvantage; it permitted us at best to understand how, one stage of science being granted, another stage of science may be derived from it by reason, but it did not permit us to discern by what condition of facts men were driven to discover science for the first time, that is to say, to reduce considered experience into a new and definite form. The question was, then, to find why there is an actual history of science, to find the origin of the scientific necessity, and what unites in a genetic fashion that necessity to our necessities in the continuity of the social processus.

The great progress of modern technique, which really constitutes the intellectual substance of the

bourgeois epoch, has worked, among other miracles, this one also, of revealing to us for the first time the practical origin of the scientific attitude. (We can never forget the Florentine Academy, which produced this phrase, when Italy was in the twilight of its past grandeur and when modern society was in the dawn of the great industry.) Henceforth we are in a position to take up the guiding thread of what, by abstraction, is called the scientific spirit; and no one is any longer astonished at finding that everything in scientific discoveries has come about, as was the case in other primitive times, when the clumsy elementary geometry of the Egyptians arose from the necessity of measuring the fields exposed to the annual inundations of the Nile, and when the periodicity of these inundations suggested, in Egypt and in Babylon, the discovery of the rudiments of the astronomical movements.

It is certainly true that when science is once created and partially ripened, as had already happened in the Hellenic period, the work of abstraction, of deduction and of combination continues among scientists in such a way that it possibly obliterates the consciousness of the social causes of the first production of science itself. But if we examine in their main features the epochs of the development of science, and if we confront the periods which the ideologists would characterize as periods of progress and of retrogression of intelligence, we perceive clearly the social reason for the impulses, sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing, toward

scientific activity. What need had the feudal society of Western Europe for this ancient science, which the Byzantines preserved, at least materially, while the Arabs, free agriculturists, industrious artisans, or skillful merchants, had succeeded in increasing it a little? What is the Renaissance, if not the joining of the initiatory movement of the bourgeoisie to the traditions of ancient learning, which had become usable? What is all the accelerated movement of scientific knowledge, since the seventeenth century, but the series of acts accomplished by intelligence, refilled by experience, to assure human labor, in the forms of an improved technique, the dominion over natural forces and conditions? Thence arises the war against darkness, superstition, the Church, religion; thence arise naturalism, atheism, materialism; thence the installation of the domain of reason. The bourgeois epoch is the epoch of minds in full play. (Vico) It is worth remembering that this government of the Directory, which was the prototype and the compendium of all liberal corruption, was the first to introduce in the University and at the Academy in a formal and solemn fashion the science of free inquiry with Lamark! This science, which the bourgeois epoch has, through its inherent conditions, stimulated and made to grow like a giant, is the only heritage of past centuries which communism accepts and adopts without reserve.

It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called antithesis between science

and philosophy. If we accept those fashions of philosophizing which are confounded with mysticism and theology, philosophy never means a science or doctrine separate from its appropriate and particular things, but it is simply a degree, a form, a stage of thought with relation to the things which enter into the domain of experience. Philosophy is, then, either a generic anticipation of the problems which science has still to elaborate specifically, or a summary and a conceptual elaboration of the results at which the sciences have already arrived. As for those who, that they may not appear behind the times, talk now of scientific philosophy, if we do not wish to stop over the humorous element that there is in that expression, it will suffice to say that they are simply fools.

I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great part and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, of religion and of science. To express this otherwise, or to go further, would be to put one's self voluntarily on the road toward the absurd.

Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion, that art, religion and science are subjective developments and historical developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific spirit, which would go on manifesting itself successively through its own rhythm of evolution, favored

or retarded on this side or that by material conditions. By this formula, it is desired to assert, moreover, the necessary connection, through which every fact of art and of religion is the exponent, sentimental, fantastic and thus derived, of definite social conditions. If I say in the second place, it is to distinguish these products from the facts of legal-political order which are a true and proper projection of economic conditions. And if I say in great part and indirectly the objects of these activities, it is to indicate two things: that in artistic or religious production the mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated, and again that men, while living in society, do not thereby cease to live alone by themselves in nature, and to receive from it occasion and material for curiosity and for imagination.

After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not possible to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic and significant moment of the production of new things, that is to say in the periods which I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of the things that have been produced, and the traditional repetition of a definite type, obliterated the sense of the origins of things.

Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the fables, which are at the foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic evolution

where we find the dawn of Aryan civilization in the basin of the Mediterranean, that is to say, from that phase of the higher barbarism in which arises, in Greece and elsewhere, the epic. Or try to imagine the birth and the development of Christianity elsewhere than in Roman cosmopolitanism, and otherwise than by the work of those proletarians, those slaves, those unfortunates those desperate ones, who had need of the redemption of the Apocalypse and of the promise of the Kingdom of God. Find, if you will, the ground for supposing that in the beautiful environment of the Renaissance the romanticism should begin to appear, which scarcely appeared in the decadent Torquato Tasso; or that one might attribute to Richardson or to Diderot the novels of Balzac, in whom appears, as a contemporary of the first generation of socialism and sociology, the psychology of classes. Far back, farther, farther, at the first origins of the mythical conceptions, it is evident that Zeus did not assume the characters of father of gods and men until the power of the patria potestas was already established, and that series of processus began which culminated in the State. Zeus thus ceases to be what was at first the simple divus (brilliant) or the Thunderer. And it is to be observed that at an opposite point of historic evolution, a great number of thinkers of the past century reduced to a single abstract God, who is a simple regent of the world, all that variegated image of the unknown and transcendental type, developed in so great a wealth of mythological, Christian or pagan creations. Man felt himself more at home in nature, thanks to experience, but felt himself better able to penetrate the gearing of society, the knowledge of which he possessed in part. The miraculous dissolved in his mind, to the point where materialism and criticism could afterwards eliminate that poor remnant of transcendentalism, without taking up war against the gods.

There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from things to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a multitude of problems, so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the projections which men have made of themselves and of their economic-social conditions, and thus of their hopes and their fears, of their desires and their deceptions, in their artistic and religious concepts. The method is found, but the particular execution is not easy. We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation of arriving by deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed in art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who explained the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic deduction, have remained forever buried in the notes of Hegel's logic.

Here I must state certain difficulties.

Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and religion) to the social conditions

which they idealize, one must first acquire a long experience of specified social psychology, in which the transformation is realized. Therein consists the justification of that sum of relations, which is designated in another form of language, under the name of Egyptian world, Greek consciousness, spirit of the Renaissance, dominant ideas, psychology of nations, of society or of classes. When these relations are established, and men have become accustomed to certain conceptions and certain modes of belief or of imagination, the ideas transmitted by tradition tend to become crystallized. Thus they appear as a force which resists new formations; and as this resistance shows itself through the spoken word, through writing, through intolerance, through polemics, through persecution, so the struggle between the new and the old social conditions takes on the form of a struggle between ideas.

In the second place, through the centuries of history properly so-called, and as a consequence of the heredity of the pre-history of savagery and of the conditions of subjection and those of inferiority in which the majority of men were and are placed, resulted acquiescence in what is traditional, and the ancient tendencies are perpetuated as obstinate survivals.

In the third place, as I have said, men living socially, do not cease to live also in nature. They are not, of course, bound to nature as animals are, because they live on an artificial groundwork. Every one understands, moreover, that a house is not a

cave, that agriculture is not natural pasturage, and that pharmacy is not exorcism. But nature is always the immediate subsoil of the artificial groundwork, and it is the environment which contains us. The industrial arts have put between us social animals, and nature, certain intermediaries which modify, set aside or remove the natural influences; but it has not for all that destroyed the efficacy of these, and we continually feel their effects. And even as we are born men or women, as we die almost always in spite of ourselves, and as we are dominated by the instinct of generation, so we also bear in our temperament certain special conditions which education in the broad sense of the word, or social compact, can modify, it is true, within certain limits, but which they can never suppress. These conditions of temperament, repeated in infinite cases throughout the centuries, constitute what is called the race. For all these reasons, our dependence upon nature, although it has diminished since prehistoric times, continues in our social life, just as the food which the sight of nature affords to the curiosity and the imagination continues also in our social life. Now these effects of nature, and the sentiments immediate or mediate which result from it, although they have been perceived, since history began, only on the visual angle which is given us by the conditions of society, never fail to reflect themselves in the products of art and of religion, and that adds to the difficulties of a realistic and complete interpretation of both.