Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

From the manner in which the categories form, and from their usage in language and in the sciences, it results that, as analytic or synthetic signs, they are the condition sine qua non of speech and of knowledge, that they form the instrumentation of intelligence, but that by themselves they are sterile, and consequently that metaphysics, excluding all positivism by its nature and purpose, can never become a science.

  All science is essentially metaphysical, since every science generalises and distinguishes. Every man who knows, however little he knows, every man who speaks, provided that he understands, is a metaphysician; just as every man who seeks the reason of things is a philosopher. Metaphysics is the first thing that infants and savages think: we could even say that in the mind of every man, metaphysics is present in inverse proportion to science.

  Thus, by what fanaticism of abstraction can a man call himself exclusively a metaphysician, and how, in a knowledgeable and positive century, do professors of pure philosophy still exist, these people who teach the young to philosophise apart from all science, all art, all literature and all industry, people, in a word, making a trade, the most conscientiously in the world, of selling the absolute?

  Those who should once understand the theory of the formation of ideas, and who will carefully take into account these three capital points: 1) the intervention of two agents, the subject and the object, in the formation of knowledge; 2) the difference in their roles, resulting from the difference in their natures; 3) the distinction of ideas into two species, sensory [sensible] ideas given immediately by objects, and extra-sensory or metaphysical ideas, resulting from the action of the mind solicited by the contemplation of the outside; that one, we say, can boast of having taken the most difficult step of philosophy. He is freed from fatalism and from superstition. He knows that all his ideas are necessarily posterior to the experience of things, metaphysical ideas as well as sensory ideas; he will remain unshakeably and forever convinced that, just as adoration, prophecy, the gift of tongues and of miracles, somnambulism, idealism, whether subjective, objective or absolute, and all the practices of the great work of alchemy, has never produced for indigent humanity an ounce of bread, has created neither shoes, not hats, nor shirts; so it will not have added an iota to knowledge. And he will conclude with the great philosopher Martin, in [Voltaire’s] Candide: “We must cultivate our garden.” The garden of the philosopher is the spectacle of the Universe. Verify unceasingly your observations; put your ideas in order; take care in your analyses, your recapitulations, your conclusions; be sober in your conjectures and hypotheses; mistrust probabilities584 and above all authorities; do not believe the word of any soul who lives, and use the ideal as a means of scientific construction and control, but do not worship it. Those who, all times, have claimed to detach science from all empiricism and to raise the edifice of philosophy on metaphysical ideas alone, have only succeeded in making themselves plagiarists of ancient theology. Their counterfeits have fallen on their own heads; their transcendentalism has brought to ruin the supernatural in which the people have at all times believed, and they have managed to lose what they wanted to save. Remember, finally, that there is no more innate or revealed science than there are innate privileges or wealth fallen from heaven; and that, as all well-being must be obtained by labour, or be theft, so all knowledge must be the fruit of study, or be false.

  §VI: THAT PHILOSOPHY MUST BE ESSENTIALLY PRACTICAL

  We would be gravely mistaken if we imagined that philosophy, because it has been defined as the Search for the reason of things, has no other end than to make us discover that reason, and that its object is exclusively speculative. Already, by showing that these conditions are those of common sense, its certainty the same for all, its highest conceptions of the same form and quality as its most elementary propositions, we have had occasion to recall its eminently positive character, its egalitarian spirit as well as its democratic and anti-mystical tendencies. It is philosophy, we have said, that made the French Revolution by deducing from its own pure essence the principle of civil and political equality. We have subsequently confirmed that premise by uprooting all pretensions to transcendence, and proving that de facto and de jure there is nothing for the mind apart from observation, consequently nothing which ordinary mortals can claim by virtue of simple good sense.

  Logic, which is to say philosophy itself, demands more.

  In ordinary life, which is that of the immense majority and which forms three-quarters of philosophy, the knowledge of things has value only insofar as it is useful; and nature, our great schoolmistress, has been of the opinion, in giving intelligence as the light of our actions and the instrument of our felicity.

  Philosophy, in a word, is essentially utilitarian, no matter what has been said: to make of it an exercise of pure curiosity is to sacrifice it. In that regard, universal testimony has judged without appeal. The people, eminently practical, asked what all that philosophy would serve, and the way to make use of it: and as one responded to them, with Schelling, that philosophy exists by itself and for itself, that it would be an injury to its dignity if one sought a use for it, the people have mocked the philosophers, and everyone has done as the people. Philosophy for philosophy’s sake is a thought which would never enter a sane mind. A similar pretension might appear excusable among philosophers who seek the reason of things in the inanity of genius, or among the illuminated in communication with the spirits. But since it has been proven that all that transcendence is but a hollow gourd, and that the philosopher has been declared subject to common sense, the servant, like everyone else, of practical and empirical reason, it is imperative that philosophy should humanise itself, and that it should be democratic and social, or else never amount to anything. Now, what is more utilitarian than democracy?

  Religion, which certainly had a very different birth than democracy, did not take it so high with our poor humanity. It has made itself all things to all people; it has been given to us, by grace from on high, to raise us from sin and misery, to teach us our duties and our rights, to give us a rule of conduct, to enlighten us on our origin and our destiny, and to prepare for us an eternal happiness. Religion responded, in its own way, to all the questions that our consciences and our hearts could address to it. It gave us rules for the conduct of our interests; it did not even disdain to explicate for us the beginnings of the world, the principle of things, the epoch of the creation, the age of the human race, etc. It only left outside its teaching, and did not deliver to our arguments, the things of which the knowledge was not of an immediate usefulness to our moral perfection and to our eternal salvation.

  Will philosophy do less than religion? It has taken it upon itself to destroy these venerable beliefs; could it have had in us any other mission than to fill the void?

  To pose the question in this way is to answer it. No, philosophy cannot be reduced to a kaleidoscope of the mind without practical application; its purpose is to serve us, and if the critique of religion that it allows is fair, the service that falls on to it close to us, in the place of religion, is determined in advance by that very critique. To the old dogma philosophy must substitute a new doctrine, with the only difference the first was of faith and was imposed by authority, while the second must be of science, and impose itself by demonstration.

  Under the empire of religion, man found everything simple by relating it to the word of God; on the strength of that guarantee, it rested in full security. Now that, thanks to philosophical reason, the supposed divine word has become doubtful, and the celestial guarantee itself subject to caution, what remains, except that man finds in himself the rule of his actions and the guarantee of his judgements? This is what the ancient philosophers had understood very well, and that they sought so long, under the name of criterion of certainty.

  Thus the aim of philosophy is to teach man to think for himself, to reason methodically, to make exact ideas of thing, to formulate truth in regular judgements, all in order to direct his life, to merit by his conduct the es
teem of his fellows and himself, and to insure, along with the peace of the heart, the well-being of the body and the security of the mind.

  The criterion of philosophy, deduced from its practical utility, is thus in some sense double: relative to the reason of things, that it is important for us to understand such as it is in itself, and relative to our proper reason, which is the law of our perfection and our happiness.

  A principle of guarantee for our ideas;

  A rule for our actions;

  As a consequence of this double criterion and of the accord of our practical and speculative reason, a synthesis of all our knowledge and a sufficient idea of the economy of the world and of our destiny: this is what philosophy must accomplish.

  But where do we find the criterion? As much as philosophy has shown itself powerless to discovery the smallest truth with the aid of metaphysical notions alone, so much it has up to the present been unsuccessful in establishing a principle that, serving all at once as critical instrument and rule of action, would also provide the blueprint for the scientific and social edifice, and would later show us the system of the universe.

  In that which concerns the rule of judgement, we have been served, lacking an authentic instrument, and we continue to be served by different principles, chosen arbitrarily from among the axioms that we suppose most capable of responding to the wants of philosophy. Such is, for example, the principle of contradiction, by virtue of which yes and no cannot be affirmed simultaneously, and from the same point of view, for a single thing. It is the principle which rules mathematics. But that principle, which at first appears so sure, when we work with definite quantities, has been judged insufficient with regard to the sophists who claim that all is true and all is false, as much in the ontological as in the moral order, since, in the fundamental questions, on which depend the certainty of all the others, one can affirm simultaneously, with an equal probability, the yes and the no... The absence of a higher principle, embracing all the content of the mind, appears to make itself felt up to the highest mathematics, the style, the definitions and the theories of which have been justly criticised, though one cannot, in fact, contest the results. Wearied of struggle, we have thought to say, after Descartes, that the guarantee of our judgements is self-evidence. And what is it that makes that a thing appear self-evident?...

  In that which concerns the rule of actions, the philosophers have not even taken the trouble to test anything. All have returned, by some detour, to the religious idea, as if philosophy and theology had exactly this in common, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It has even been said, and it is repeated every day, that a little philosophy leads away from religion, but that a lot of philosophy leads back to it, from which it is necessary to conclude that it is not truly the philosopher’s problem. If some adventurers in free thought have abandoned the beaten path, they have lost themselves in the mires of egoism.

  Finally, as to the unity of the sciences, the distress is still more noticeable. Each philosopher has built his system, leaving it to critique to show that that system was a work of marquetry. It is thus that, according to Thales, water is the principle of all things; according to others, it is fire or air; according to Democritus, it is the atoms.585 Philosophy, like language, is materialist in its beginnings: but that is not where the danger lies; it will only go too far in the ideal. Later, indeed, one has invoked by turns, as the principle of things, love, numbers and the idea; and philosophy, from abstraction to abstraction, has ended by burning what it first worshiped, adoring the spirit that it had only glimpsed, and falling into a hopeless superstition. It is thus that eclecticism was born, the meaning of which is that there is not a unitary constitution, neither for the world, nor for thought, and that consequently there are only specific, relative certainties, between which the wise must know how to choose, giving, according to the circumstances, satisfaction to all the principles, but not allowing themselves to be mastered by any of them, and reserving always freedom of judgement. Eclecticism, which has been so criticised in our days, has not yet received its true definition: it is polytheism.

  In this moment, it is with philosophy as with the public conscience: both are demoralised. Eclecticism in philosophy, just like the doctrinaire position in politics, laissez faire, laissez passer in economics, and free love in the family, is the negation of unity, death.

  However, an unresolved problem must not be considered an insoluble problem: it is even permitted to believe that we have come closer to the solution the longer we have searched for it. Also, the lack of success of philosophy on these capital questions of the certainty of ideas, of the rule of morals, and of the architectonic of science, has not prevented it from arriving at theories of which growing generality and rigorous logic seem a sure pledge of triumph. Why, indeed, if man has the certainty of his existence, would he not have at the same time certainty of his observations? Descartes’ proposition—I think, therefore I am,—implies that consequence. Why, if the intelligence of man is capable of connecting two ideas, of forming a dyad, a triad, a tetrad, a series, finally, and if each series leads to his self, why, we ask, will he not aspire to construct the system of the world? He must advance: everything invites us. If philosophy is abandoned, it is the end of the human race.

  §VII: THE CHARACTER THAT MUST BE PRESENTED BY THE GUARANTEE OF OUR JUDGEMENTS AND THE RULE OF OUR ACTIONS—CONVERSION FROM SPECULATIVE TO PRACTICAL REASON: DETERMINATION OF THE CRITERION

  Before passing on, will you allow me to make the observation that there is no artisan who is not in a perfect state to understand what philosophy proposes, since there is not one who, in the exercise of his profession, does not make use of several means of justification, measure, evaluation and control? The worker has, to direct him in his labours, the yardstick, the scale, the square, the rule, the plumb, the level, the compass, standards, specimens, guides, a touchstone, etc. Seemingly, there is no worker who cannot say the purpose of his work, the ensemble of needs or ideas to which it is attached, what its application must be, what its conditions and qualities are, and consequently its importance in the general economy.

  Now, what the artisan does within his speciality, the philosopher seeks to do for the universality of things: his criterion, consequently, must be much more elementary, since it must be applied to all; his synthesis much broader, since it must embrace all.

  What then is the yardstick to which we must relate all our observations, according to which we will judge, a priori, the harmony or discord of things, not only of the rational and the irrational, the beautiful and the ugly, but, what is more serious and which concerns us directly, the good and the evil, the true and the false? In the second place, on what basis, according to what plan, in view of what end, will we raise the edifice of our knowledge, so that we can say what Leibniz said of the world of which it must be the expression, that it is the best, the most faithful, the most perfect possible?586

  The day when philosophy will have responded to these two questions, philosophy, we do not say that it will be done, since, either as observation or investigation, or as acquired science, it has no limits; but it will be completely organised, it will know what it wants, where it tends, what its guarantees are, what its mission is in humanity and in the presence of the universe.

  Let us backtrack a little.

  From the definition of philosophy that we have given and the analysis that we have made from observation, it results for us, 1) that the idea comes to us originally, concurrently and ex aequo,587 from two sources, one subjective, which is the Self, subject or mind, the other objective, which designates objects, the non-self or things; 2) that as a consequence of that double origin philosophy bears on relations, already by the definition, and on nothing else; 3) finally, that every relation, analysed into its elements, is, like the observation which furnishes it, essentially dualistic, which is also indicated by the etymology of the word rapport or relation, returns from one point to another, from one fact, one idea, one group, etc., to
another.

  It follows from this that the instrument of critique we are looking for is of necessity dualistic or binary: it could not be triadic, since there would be below it simpler elements than it, ideas that it could not explain, and since, moreover, it is easy to convince oneself that every triad, trinity or ternary is only the abridgement of two dyads, obtained by the identification or confusion of two of their terms.588

  The principle of certainty can no longer be simplistic, as if it emanates exclusively from the self or the non-self; since, as we have seen, the subject, without an object to stimulate it, does not even think; and the object, without the faculty of the mind to divide, to differentiate and return diversity to unity, would only send itself unintelligible images. Metaphysical ideas themselves cannot serve as principle for philosophy, although they presuppose realistic apperceptions. The reason is that such ideas, obtained by the opposition of the self to the non-self, reflecting its simplistic nature, are extra-phenomenal, and by themselves contain no positive truth, although they are indispensable to the formation of every idea and the construction of every science.

  Let us hold then as certain, and let us attach ourselves strongly to that idea, that what the philosophers sought under the name of the criterion of certainty and which must serve in the construction of science cannot be a simplistic or metaphysical notion; that it is no longer a sensory image, representative of a pure reality, since that would be to exclude the mind from its own domain, and to make it accomplish its work without putting itself into it; that it cannot be, finally, a ternary or quaternary formula, or one of a higher number, since that would be to take the series in the place of its element.

  This principle must be at once subjective and objective, formal and real, intelligible and sensory, to indicate a relation of the self to the non-self, and consequently must be dualistic, like philosophical observation itself.