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Title: Dialectics and Its Object
Author: Pierre Ansart
Language: en
Topics: Sociology, Dialectics, Proudhon
Source: Translated by Shaun Murdock. Originally Published in: Ansart, Pierre. 1984. Proudhon. Le Livre de Poche.

Pierre Ansart

Dialectics and Its Object

Chapter 2. Dialectics and its object

Proudhon, politically opposed to conservatives, liberals, republicans,

and communists, also wanted to analyse his opponents’ theoretical

positions (theology, statism, utopia) and put forward a way of thinking

that explains and proves his conclusions. Hence, for him, the critical

importance of an intellectual method to avoid the pitfalls of dogmatism.

His conclusions are understood only by reference to his framework of

thought: dialectics.

Dialectics

In this long investigation, whose steps can be followed from 1840 to

1848, he was aided by an impressive appetite for reading.

At the same time, he read the Bible, Fourier, Saint-Simon and the

Saint-Simonians, Sismondi, Adam Smith, Ricardo, the French economists,

and also translations or fragments of Kant, Leibniz, Fichte, Feuerbach,

Strauss, Hegel, and many others. But he never devoured these diverse

texts to

obey one school, but always to define his own method, one that, in his

view, could not be

established by theologians, bourgeois intellectuals, or socialist

utopians. Karl Grün, who dreamed of

converting him to the school of Feuerbach, linked this independent

spirit to his friend’s Franc-

Comtois origins:

“The French say that Germans are straightforward people. Plain,

stubborn, rigid: this is also

true of the Franc-Comtois Proudhon. I will please the German

nationalists by speaking to them of

this native of the highlands... and I will draw their attention to the

pattern that Fourier, Considérant,

Muiron, Proudhon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all derive their origin from

the foothills of the Jura. They

are all stubborn, straightforward people.”

164/K. GRUN, Die soziale Bewegung... [The Social Movement...], C.W.

Leske, p. 40.

When he wrote his “First Memoir” on property in 1839–1840, Proudhon

already had a

precise intellectual method.

His theory of social conflict was also imposed on him during his

experience as a printing

worker, and then as an independent printer, where he would face all the

difficulties of the worker

and the artisan vis-à-vis the owners of capital. It was in this

experience of work, bankruptcy, and

paying interest and debt, that Proudhon theorised the relationship

between capital and labour. In

this experience, the Saint-Simonians’ assertions on the exploitation of

man by man in work and the

analyses of Eugène Buret on the Misère des classes laborieuses...

[Poverty of the Working Classes...]

pointed the way for Proudhon to pursue the analysis of socio-economic

conflict.

Reading Kant was an important moment in this development. Besides the

theory of morality,

to which he would often return, the critical and rationalist conception

of problems confirmed his

intuitions. He would also continue to update the Kantian lesson, not

asking the classic question:

What is God? What is Property or the State? but instead asking: Where

does the idea of God come

from? How is property created? Why do we believe in the myth of the

State?

“For him, Kant is essentially a ‘moralist’, the greatest of the

moralists, which is why he

crowns him with so many garlands. From the First Memoir, Kant appears in

Proudhon’s works as the

one who wanted to solve the ‘problem of certainty’, and thus the

ultimate philosophical problem.

However, in 1840, he found ‘the metaphysics of Reid and Kant to be still

farther removed from the

truth than that of Aristotle’. But that did not stop him three years

later, in Creation, from presenting

himself as the successor of Kant, who came close to the ‘series’ without

reaching it: ‘the illustrious

author of the Analytic’ stopped too soon on his road, though he had had

the intuition of unity in

diversity and thus anticipated the ‘serial law’ through which the

‘anxieties of scepticism’ could finally

be overcome. It was Kant who revealed the ‘law of antinomy’ and the ‘law

of balance’: he counts

‘among the profoundest philosophers of modern times’. [...]

It was also Kant who, rather than asking himself the classic question

What is God? had the

brilliant idea of asking himself: Why does it happen that I believe in

God? He thus ushered in a

revolution comparable to that of Descartes, and deserved ‘the greatest

glory’ possible. He is truly

‘the one whom no philosopher has ever equalled, the immortal Kant’.

However, Kant could not free himself of the Absolute. After having

eliminated it in his

Critique of Pure Reason, he returned to it in his Practical Reason.

Nevertheless, what he sought,

wanted, called for in the best of his thought, is a ‘purely human’, not

transcendental, absolute – in

short, the absolute that Proudhon calls Justice, and which is seated in

the human conscience. Finally,

like all the great philosophers, Kant was ‘essentially a moralist’, and

while the immortal author of

Critique of Pure Reason did not understand the high morality, necessity,

divinity of war, which he

considered detestable, it did not escape him that ‘in the final

analysis, the only certainty about

human intelligence is that it derives from the conscience’.”

165/P. HAUBTMANN, Proudhon, Marx et la pensée allemande [Proudhon, Marx

and German

Thought], Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, pp. 23–24.

Reading Kant also forced him to answer the problem of mental categories,

the question of

whether dialectics is the essence of the human mind, of reason, or

whether it is an objective

dimension of reality. Proudhon rejects such a dichotomy between

rationalism and empiricism, and

likewise between spiritualism and materialism. It seems essential him to

recognise both the

objectivity of what he called “real series”, i.e. objective, ordered

divisions and distinctions, and, on

the other hand, “ideal series”, i.e. the systems of relations which the

mind learns from the real, but

which are not just reflections of reality. By ideal series, the mind

invents and reconstructs reality,

and can combine relations that do not exist in reality.

“The series is natural when it is proper and specific to the object,

when it arises from its

nature and properties.

The series is artificial when it is transferred from the object which is

proper to it another

which is foreign to it. Most products of art and industry are artificial

series. [...]

In nature, each series develops according to its proper object, without

being combined or

mixed up; then comes man who, having sovereignty over the earth [...],

begins, by transposing the

natural series, a second creation within creation itself.”

166/Création de l’ordre... [Creation of Order...], pp. 176–177.

Proudhon explains that this acquisition of “ideal series”, categories of

understanding and

logical structures, comes from action and in particular from labour. It

is through action that man

experiences the relations between things, corrects his ideas and invents

new relations. Philosophy

itself has been devised based on labour:

Philosophy is only a way of generalising and abstracting the results of

our experience, that is,

our work.”

167/Ibid., p. 119.

Thus, using Kantian philosophy in a very free and personal way, Proudhon

read Feuerbach

and Hegel with the same critical distance.

From Feuerbach, he takes the idea of alienation, essential to his

analysis, but by transposing

it to other objects, in particular to the critique of the State. While

for Feuerbach the alienation to be

analysed is that whereby man ascribes to God what properly belongs to

him, for Proudhon it is

specifically in the formation of Capital that this dispossession and

alienation is reproduced. But he