Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  It is only by following this scrupulous and slowly rising method of observation, that the philosopher could flatter himself to have reached the summit of philosophy, science, the condition of which is double, certainty and synthesis. These words should frighten no one: here again the most transcendent philosophy contains nothing outside the abilities and reach of the people.

  Indeed, a man may have seen more of things than is common among his fellows; he may have viewed them in more detail and more closely; he can thus consider them from a higher level and in a larger ensemble: this question of quantity, which has no influence on the quality of the knowledge, adds nothing to the certainty, and consequently does not increase the value of the mind. This is of extreme importance for the determination of personal right, constitutive of society: allow me to clarify my thought with some examples.

  2 multiplied by 2 equals 4: this is, for everyone, a perfect certainty. But how much is 27 multiplied by 23? Here, more than one innocent will hesitate, and if he has not learned to calculate by figures, it will take a long time to find the solution, let alone dare to respond. Thus I take up the pen, and making the multiplication, I respond that the product demanded is 621. Now, knowing so easily the product of 27 times 23, and being able with the same promptitude and sureness to make the multiplication of all the possible numbers by all the possible numbers, I am clearly more knowledgeable that the one whose arithmetic capacity will stop at the elementary operation 2 x 2 = 4. Does this make me more certain? Not at all. The quantity of knowledge, I repeat, adds nothing to the philosophical quality of the knowing: it is by virtue of that principle, and another just like in that we will speak of below, that French law, coming out of the Revolution of ’89, has declared us all equal before the law. Between two citizens, between two men, there can be inequality of acquired knowledge, of effective labour, of services rendered; there is no inequality of the quality of reason: such is, in France, the foundation of personal right, and such is the basis of our democracy. The old regime did not reason in the same way: is it clear now that philosophy is the legacy of the people?

  It is the same for the comprehensive power of the mind.

  2 multiplied by two produces 4, and 2 added to 2 also gives 4: on one side the product, on the other the sum are equal. However little the innocent to whom one makes the remark reflects on it, he will realise that addition and multiplication, although they begin from two different points of view and proceed in two different manners, resolve themselves, in this particular case, in an identical operation. By making a new effort, he will comprehend as well that 2 minus 4 or 4 divided by 2, it always remains 2, as subtraction and division still resolve, in this particular case, into one single and same operation. All this will interest, and perhaps astonish him: he will have, in the measure from 2 to 4, a synthetic view of things. But the arithmetician knows much more, and his synthesis is incomparably more comprehensive. He knows that whenever one operates on numbers larger than 2, the results can no longer be the same; that multiplication is an abbreviated addition, and division an abbreviated subtraction as well; that more, subtraction is the opposite of addition, and division the opposite of multiplication; in summary, that all these operations, and others more difficult which are deduced from them, come down to the art of composing and decomposing the series of numbers. Does this give him the right to believe himself superior to the other, in nature and dignity? Certainly not: the only difference is that one has learned more than the other; but reason is the same for both of them, and this is why the legislator, at once a revolutionary and a philosopher, has decided that he will take no account of persons. It is for this reason, finally, that modern civilisation tends invincibly to democracy: where philosophy reigns, where as a consequence the identity of philosophical reason is recognised, the distinction of classes, like the hierarchy of church and State, is impossible.

  We can make analogous arguments about all of the genres of knowledge, and we will always arrive at that decisive conclusion, that, for whoever knows, certainty is of the same quality and degree, despite the extent of the knowledge; just as, for whoever grasps the relation of several objects or ideas, the synthesis is of the same quality and form, despite the multitude relations grasped. In no case will there be room to distinguish between the reason of the people and the reason of the philosopher.

  §IV: THE ORIGIN OF IDEAS

  Here is the great temptation, I should say the great conspiracy of the philosophers; here is also their chastisement.

  This principle so luminous, so simple, that in order to know the reason of things, it is necessary to have seen them, has not always been accepted (can you believe it?) in philosophy. Without speaking of those, in so great a number, aspired to sound the nature of things, one encounters profound geniuses who have asked if the human mind, so subtle and so vast, could not, by a concentrated meditation on itself; come to that intelligence of the reason of things, which is only, after all, the intelligence of the laws of the mind; if the man who thinks had such a need, in order to learn, to consult a nature which does not think; if a soul created in the image of God, the sovereign organiser, did not possess, by virtue of its divine origin, and prior to its communication with the world, the ideas of things, and if it truly needed the control of phenomena in order to recognise ideas, that is, eternal exemplars. I think, thus I know, cogito, ergo cognosco such is the principle of these archspiritualist philosophers. Never has a brain which came from the ranks of the people conceived of a chimera like that. Some, interpreting in their own way the hyper-physical dogma of creation, go so far as to pretend that external realities are products of pure thought, and the world an expression of mind, so that it would be enough to have the full possession of the Idea, innate it our soul, but more or less obscured, in order, without further information, to possess the reason and grasp the very nature of the universe!

  That manner of philosophising, which would dispense with all observation and experience, if it had been justified by the least success, would be, we must admit, very attractive and could not be more convenient. The philosopher would no longer be that laboured explorer, winning the bread of his soul by the sweat of his brow, always exposed to error by the omission of the least detail, reaching only a limited comprehension, obtaining often, instead of certainty, only probabilities, and sometimes ending in doubt, after having lived through an affliction of mind. He would be a clairvoyant, a miracleworker [thaumaturge], a rival to the Divinity, directing thought as a sovereign, to say nothing of creative power, and reading fluently the mysteries of Heaven, Earth and Humanity, at home with the divine thought. Ambition, as one sees, is never lacking among the philosophers.

  Where does this titanic presumption come from?

  From the start we have sensed, in a confused manner, what philosophical observation later clarified, that, in the formation of ideas, the perception of phenomena does not render reason by itself; that the understanding, by the constitution which is proper to it, plays a role; that the soul is not exclusively passive in its conceptions, but that in receiving the images or impressions from outside it, it reacts to them and derives ideas from them; so that, for half if not for all, the extrication of ideas, or the discovery of the truth in things, is the work of the mind.

  Thus, it was said, we find in the soul, like the moulds of ideas, archetypal ideas, prior to all observation of phenomena: what were these ideas? Can we recognise them, among the multitude of those, more or less empirical, that the understanding imprints with its own stamp? How to distinguish the patrimony of the mind from its acquisitions? If something in knowledge properly belongs to it, then why no everything? Wouldn’t we be justified in supposing that if the mind, possessing the innate principles of things, advanced in knowledge only with the aid of arduous observation, this was due to the heterogeneous union of the soul and the body, a union in which the ethereal substance, offended by the material, had lost the greater part of its knowledge and acuity, retaining only a memory of the fundamental princip
les that had formed its framework and its property?… Others attributed the darkening of the intelligence to original sin. Man, for having wanted to eat, against the express order of God, the fruit of science, would be, according to them, blinded. All the rest convince themselves that with a good mental discipline and the help of the Spirit of light, one could restore the human soul to the enjoyment of its high and immortal prerogatives, make it produce science without any imbibition of experience, by the energy of his nature alone, and by virtue of the axiom already cited: I am the child of God; I think, therefore I know…

  What was at the bottom of all that? A diabolical thought of domination: for one must not be mistaken, privilege of knowledge and pride of genius are the most implacable enemies of equality. Now one thing is known: human knowledge is not enriched by the slightest scrap of a fact or idea by this exclusively spiritual practice. Nothing has served: neither metaphysics nor dialectics, nor the theory of the absolute, nor revelation, nor possession, nor ecstasy, nor magnetism, nor magic, nor theurgy, nor catalepsy, nor ventriloquy, nor the philosopher’s stone, nor table-turning. All that we know, we have invariably learned, and the mystics, the illuminati, the somnambulists, even the spirits with which they speak, have learned in their turn by the known means, that is, observation, experience, reflection, calculation, analysis and synthesis: God, doubtless, jealous of his work, wanting to maintain the decree that he had entered, namely, that we would see nothing with the eyes of the mind except by the intermediary of the eyes of the body, and that all that we claim to perceive by other means would be an error and a mystification of the devil. There is no occult knowledge, no transcendent philosophy, no privileged soul, no divinatory genius, no medium between infinite wisdom and the common sense of mortals. Sorcery and magic, once pursued by parliaments, are dispelled by the flame of experimental philosophy; the science of the heavens had only begun to exist on the day when the Copernicuses, the Galileos and the Newtons bid an eternal adieu to astrology. The metaphysics of the ideal taught nothing to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel:582 when these men, whose philosophy is rightly honoured, imagined they had deduced a priori, they had only, without knowing it, synthesised experience. By philosophising more highly than their predecessors, they have enlarged the scope of science: the absolute, by itself, has produced nothing; translated into a court of law, it has been jeered at as a con. In moral philosophy, mysticism, quietism and asceticism have led to the most disgusting turpitudes. Christ himself, the Word made flesh, had taught nothing new to the conscience; and the entirety of theology, patiently studied, is found, in the last instance, convicted by its own testimony as nothing other than a phantasmagoria of the human soul, of its operations and its powers, liberty, justice, love, science and progress.

  Like it or not, we must keep to the common method, profess in our hearts and with our mouths the democracy of intelligence; and since it is a question in that moment of the origin and the formation of our ideas, to ask the reason of ideas, as with everything else, from observation and analysis.

  §V: THAT METAPHYSICS IS WITHIN THE PROVINCE OF PRIMARY INSTRUCTION

  The definition of philosophy implies by its terms: 1) someone who seeks, observes, analyses, synthesises and discovers, which we call the Subject or Self; 2) something which is observed, analysed, the reason of which we seek, and which we call the Object or Non-Self.

  The first—the observer, subject, self, or mind—is active; the second—the thing observed, object, non-self, or phenomenon—is passive. Let us not frighten ourselves with words: this means that the one is the artisan of the idea, and that the other furnishes the material. There is no statue without the sculptor: this is very simple, is it not? But neither is there a statue without the marble: this is also clear. Now, it is thus for ideas. Suppress one or the other of these two principles, the subject or the object, and no idea will be formed; thought will no longer be possible. Philosophy vanishes. Suppress the sculptor or the block of marble, and you will have no statue. Every artistic or industrial production is like this. Take away the worker, and you will remain eternally with your raw materials; take away the materials from the worker and ask him to produce something by his thought alone, and he will think you are mocking him.

  However, in this competition, or this opposition, of the subject and object, of the mind and things, we want to know in a more precise manner what is the role of each; in what consists the action of the mind, and what are the natures of the materials he puts to work.

  The mind or self is, or at least it acts as if it is, prone to affirm itself as a simple and indivisible nature, consequently as if it is more penetrating and less penetrable, more active and less corruptible, more quick and less subject to change. Things, on the contrary, appear extended and composite, consequently divisible, successive, variable, penetrable, subject to dissolution, susceptible to a greater or lesser degree in all their qualities and properties.

  What seems at first inexplicable is how the mind, put in relation with external objects by the intermediary of the senses, perceives a nature so different from itself. Can the simple see the composite? That implies a contradiction. On reflection, however, we recognise this it is precisely that difference of nature which renders objects perceptible to the mind, and subjects them to it. For it sees them, remark it well, not in their substance, which it cannot conceive as other than simple (atomistic), after its own example, and which consequently escapes it; it sees them in their composition and their differences. The intuition of the mind, its action on objects, comes thus from two causes: by its acuity, it divides them and differentiates them infinitely; then, by its simplicity, it restores all these diversities to unity. What the mind sees in things is their differences, species, series and groups, in a word their reason, and it is because it is mind, because it is simple in its essence, that is sees all that. What the mind cannot discover is the nature or the in itself of things, because that nature, laid bare of its differences, of its unity of composition, etc., becomes then like the mind itself, something simple, amorphous, unapproachable and invisible.

  The consequence of all this is easy to grasp. The mind put in the presence of things, the self in communication with the non-self, receives impressions and images from it; it grasps differences, variations, analogies, groups, genera, species: all that is the fruit of its first perception. But the mind does not stop there; and the representation of things would not be complete in its thought, it would lack basis and perspective, if the mind did not add something more of its own.

  Witnessing, then, that infinite diversity of things, such a diversity that each thing seems to denounce itself as having been capable of being something completely different than it is, the mind, which feels itself to be something singular, in opposition to things, conceives of the One, the Identical, the Immutable, which is nowhere to be found;

  In observing the contingency of phenomena, the mind conceives of the Necessary, which it cannot find anywhere either: it would be fortunate if it did not dare to worship it under the name of Destiny!

  In taking the comparative dimensions of objects and establishing their limits, it conceives of Infinity, which is no more real;

  In following, in its consciousness, the revolutions of time, and measuring the duration of existences, it conceives the Eternal, which cannot be said of any person or any thing;

  In recognising the mutual independence of creatures, it conceives of itself as superior to the creatures, and affirms it Free Will and its Sovereignty, of which nothing can yet give it the model;

  In seeing movement, it conceives of Inertia, a hypothesis without reality; —in calculating speed, it conceives of force, which it never grasps;

  In noting the action of being on one another, it conceives of Cause, in the analysis of which it only grasps a contradiction;

  In comparing the faculties of some to the faculties of others, it conceives of Life, Intelligence and Soul; and by opposition, Matter, Death and Nothingness: abstractions or fictions? it does not know;


  In classing and grouping creatures according to their genera and species, it conceives the Universal, superior to every collectivity;

  In calculating the relations of things, it conceives of Law, the notion of which immediately gives it that of an Order of the world, although there has been struggle everywhere, and consequently as much disorder as order;

  Finally, in condemning, according to the purity of its essence, all that appears to it out of proportion, small, mean, monstrous, discordant and deformed, it conceives the Beautiful and the Sublime, in a word the Ideal, which it is condemned to follow always, without ever enjoying it.

  All these conceptions of the mind, famous in the School583 under the name of the categories, are indispensable for the understanding of things; reasoning is impossible without them. At the same time, they do not result from sensation, since, as we see, they exceed the sensation, the perceived image, by the same distance that separates the finite from the infinite. What they take from sensation are the various perspectives that have served to form them antithetically; the perspective of diversity, the perspective of contingency, the perspective of the limit, etc. However, the categories or conceptions of reason all merge with one another; they are adequate to one another and imply each other mutually, since all are invariably related, not to things, but to the essence of the mind, which is single and incorruptible…

  The formation of the categories or ideas, conceived by the mind apart from experience but on the occasion of experience, their collection and classification, forms what we call metaphysics. It is entirely in grammar, and its teaching belongs to the schoolmasters.