The Philosophy Of Georges Sorel by Gilbert Maire (1912)

* Source: Retrieved on 16/4/2022 from https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=1610083#Philosophy

* First published: Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon/2

Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, 1912 (p. 57-—).

Did not fate give birth to Mr. Georges Sorel only to give himself the pleasure of displeasing lovers of mediocre thought? I would be inclined to believe it, and I know of no philosopher before him, except Proudhon, who has similarly known how to exasperate the readers of conservative papers and the preachers of moderate wisdom. Hence the happy success of his work. Without a certain scandal, the glory of this philosopher mathematician would not have irritated the curiosity of the general public. It took Villeneuve-Saint- Georges, and sabotage, and the denting machine, and the spiked sock of unionism to assert itself to the frightened bourgeoisie as a doctrine capable of delivering action. But once these acts were provided, we tried to trace their cause, and this cause, for the most part, is made up of ideas. These ideas are expressed, developed, commented on in the Sorelian work. Let us contain our smiles by remembering that in the year 1908 the wise and ministerial newspapers attributed to Mr. Georges Sorel, author of Reflections on Violence, had great responsibility for the workers' riots. Mr. Clemenceau, who is a man of wit, had to doubt chuckling about it with Lucien Métivier; but were the Conservatives completely wrong? The taste for struggle, the courage in resistance. Who had emulated him to the disaffected workers? Their immediate guides, those of the General Confederation of Labor? Without a doubt, but what force for them and for public opinion to be in agreement with a learned philosopher! Who would dare, moreover, without temerity, distinguish with too much assurance the role of pure ideas in the arrival of acts? Let us agree that Sorel's work was in its own way an apology for violence and that we can relate to it more than one consequence that appeared at first singular and distant. And furthermore, how can one be surprised that this work naturally arouses an excitement to act, since the transformation of ideas into action is the necessary result of any abstract thought which regulates its deductions, or which guides its intuitions according to the natural order of things? This realism - in the proper sense of the word - of Sorelian philosophy and, if you will, of metaphysics, presents itself as its first characteristic. Sorel became a true philosopher, not an associate of philosophy, but an engineer. He did not take his system from the University. Perhaps one might think that attending an ideal Sorbonne would have been profitable for him. But the real one, the one judged by Pierre Lasserre and Agathon, was spared him and this great blessing of fate preserved him from verbal vanities. However, his realism appears to be due more to his moral health than to the vigor of his reason. This is because deep down in Sorel, we must not look for the logician, but discern the moralist. His first revolts against Dreyfusisme came less from his mind and more from his heart. Maurras, I am sure, before any anger against the pathetic champions of Israel, must have smiled in disdain, but neither Sorel nor Gohier could dream of smiling. They had engaged Dreyfusisme with the preserved parts of their sensibilities and became indignant, the day of their disillusionment, like deceived lovers less irritated by the perfidies suffered than by the cowardice of any betrayal. From The Trial of Socrates, published in 1899 in which he tried to resolve this famous cause in a simple political affair – in a High Court debate – Sorel asserted himself as a moralist. It is not always very fruitful. Very delicately and willingly awarding his praises to the gracious Aspasia, admirable for having known how to combine the Attic spirit with the Milesian pleasure, Sorel is quite wrong to be astonished. Unfortunate still perhaps, but significant, this audacious maxim: "To think without moral end is to prostitute the knowledge, the logic, and the eloquence.” And, more significant of his moralism than any other concern, then appears, in other works, his concern to apply psychophysics to aesthetics. The very substance of his thought at the time deserves only a mediocre interest. The failure of psychophysics is no longer contested or disputable, but in 1886 and 1890, one could still have some illusion. Georges Sorel took an interest in it and highlighted the purely psychological character of this new technique that was intended to be used in physiology. But what matters more to the understanding of the rest of his work is that, from his works of pure philosophy, a general idea of aesthetics emerges, which joins this one to morality. "Aesthetics," he roughly said, "is a simple branch of ethics." He proves this by solving the elements of artistic emotion. He distinguishes first of all a satisfaction obtained from the taste which escapes all scientific analysis, then a sensual passion, and finally the moral result of the action that the work of art exerts on our sensitivity. It is this last component which is, for Sorel, the object of the aesthetic. It is by seeking to define it that it seems to him to praise architecture for being chaste and to be wary of music which "extinguishes consciousness and diminishes reason.” Wouldn't this moral element of artistic emotion, however, be really immoral? Sorel, by asking himself this question, manages to discover the social value of art. In an important study, he retraces in a few pages the history of artistic technique and interprets it. Through his commentary, he still manages to discover in industrial work the glorification of the creative human spirit. This habit of judging works of art as a moralist leads Sorel to the solution of a new aesthetic and sociological problem at the same time: the social value of art. The history of art, according to him, teaches us that artists originally combined in manufactured objects the utility of the use with the pleasure of the form. But gradually, the craftsman separated from the artist, and art moved away from industry. In addition, the arts used to help each other conquer the same ideal of beauty. All of them contributed to expressing it in a religious or other monument, in a palace, in a temple. On the contrary, starting from the Renaissance, each art in isolation pursues a certain kind of beauty. Like Théodule Ribot, Sorel believes that modern art differs from primitive art by the “passage from the social to the individual.” But, to appreciate this individualized art, a greater knowledge of the technique is essential; aesthetics becomes a science of reasoning and becomes intellectualized. It discovers the role of spirit in matter. The effort of the tool is proof of intelligence; the main social value of art, according to Georges Sorel, is that it is an ennoblement of manual labor. What we see, in the end, of Georges Sorel's aesthetics reveals a constant tension of the will. It is less a doctrine applicable to all men and in all cases than the morality of a fighter in conflict with adversaries, and who remains in the midst of dangers. He himself grasps the nature of it when he later calls it pessimism, but it is a reasoned pessimism which denies owing anything to instinct. The three main aspects of Sorel's pessimism are as follows: first of all, there is a sympathy for human suffering which shows all that is Christian in his sensitivity; then there is the conviction that a set of human, and therefore social, ills can only be changed by total destruction and not by successive improvements; it is finally the obstinate idea that the union creates a force with incalculable effects, and that each closer group of suffering men takes an immense step forward in their march towards liberation. We can suppose in Georges Sorel, by the samples of deep sensibility that this adventurous morality gives us, a decidedly anti-intellectualist. But make no mistake about it, this is the complete opposite of a romantic who abandons himself to feeling out of the weariness of reason, he's a critic of the sciences who knows both the value and the impotence of their method and who wants to, in his understanding of the world, give a part to intuition. Mr. Michel Darguenat, in his response to Georges Valois' inquiry on the monarchy and the working class, perfectly defined the benefits of this critique of "scientism.” It showed us, he said, by analyses that were not arguments of seminary that this famous science, substituted for religionby the century of Comte, Renan, and Taine, was partly built by our mind and that the most artificial scientific laws were precisely the famous principles and dogmas of the new religion. Mr. Sorel's school helped to get rid of democratic prejudices: it gave us back our freedom, after which we made our freedom what we wanted. This is our business. However, the criticism of science and the anti-intellectualism that it engendered in Sorel made him a disciple of Bergson. Georges Sorel's disciples are also Bergsonians; the best known of them, Mr. Edouard Berth, is an enthusiastic follower of intuitive philosophy. Anti-intellectualism and Bergsonism are therefore two terms in Sorel with very similar meanings. It is all the more important to mark the purely critical origin of Sorelian anti- intellectualism. In 1881, analyzing the use of the notion of cause in the physical sciences, Sorel showed how current science admits the autonomy of causes and why it rejects the principle of the mutual action of all substances formulated by Kant. A little later, he showed the exaggerated importance given to postulates in contemporary mathematics. To promote the Kantian theses, it is made a science outside of nature, founded on pure data of the mind. But how the Ancients, creators of geometry, who must, after all, know about it, had a different notion of it. Ancient science - Sorel proves this in various places in his work - was originally taken from the practice of the arts. Geometry, for Euclid, was the doctrine of the graphic functions of straight lines and of circles, and quite naturally he supposes that one is armed to subject the circles and the straight lines to the operations which exhaust their nature in the isolated state, of the processes used by this same practice of the arts. It is a pattern of technical images borrowed from architecture which made the surface more interesting to the ancient surveyors than the line and conceived the line itself as the intersection of two surfaces involving the consideration of quantities whose sum is constant and which vary continuously. Our intuition guides us, itself guided by the memory of carved stones and stereotomic images. As for the number, of which Sorel admits, like Bergson, the spatial origin, it results from groups of rigid figures stripped of their expansive character. Finally, he shows that the starting point in the consciousness of mathematical reasoning explains the use of algebraic symbols, empty cells on which one operates freely, but where one can at will replace the real quantities. In another essay, Sorel untangles the metaphysical concerns of contemporary physicists. He regards the rupture between physics and the philosophy of nature as a consequence of the infinitesimal calculus. When we want to express the speed of the variation of two quantities, we only determine the differences which exist between the two quantities considered at any two times, as far apart as we want. There are therefore only extensive quantitative differences over the course of time and never a specific determination at any given moment. Science was not only a forecast, but a search for the essence of things; his first ambition was to talk about natura rerum. But today, the skepticism of physicists - sometimes excessive - makes them renounce these claims or at least gives them more. The main cause of this skepticism, as Sorel points out, is the frequently observed possibility of arriving at the same result by different assumptions. The Optical theories use two vectors, one of which represents a speed, the other a vortex. Replace the meaning of one vector for another and the conclusions remain identical. Finally, practically usable calculations can be caused by eccentric hypotheses that are aware of being. Should we recall the atomic gyroscopes of which Lord Kelvin composed matter, and Maxwell’s representation of the improper conductors of electricity in conductive cells locked in insulating walls? The general consequence is that we tend to look at the real world, not that of scientific experience, but that of our life, as constituted according to principles opposed to those which govern the artificial world of science. There is a rigorous determinism in scientific systems; it is almost absent in nature. His anti-intellectualism alone would have made Sorel a defender of liberty. But the natural movement of his mind which led him there was accelerated by his social studies and by meeting Bergson. "Georges Sorel is, it seems to me, too original and too independent a mind," said Mr. Bergson, "to enlist under anyone's banner; he is not a disciple. But he accepts some of my views and when he quotes me he does so as a man who has read me carefully and understood me perfectly.” No doubt, Mr. Bergson reduced his share of influence on Sorel's mind out of modesty, but it is certain that his Theory of Myth, reinforced afterwards by Bergsonian considerations, is found exposed or rather suggested from its first principles. The origin is in his works of history. The main reason for Sorel's meditation is that one cannot infer the consequences of a fact from its own value; the interpretation of this fact by its witnesses or their listeners must be taken into account. Formerly, he writes about the Trial of Socrates, the main concern was to solve (in front of a historical event) the problem of his reality… it does not have much importance. For example, in the history of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi, what does the exact and scientific nature of the phenomenon of stigmas matter to us? Even admitting that it was a complete fraud, it would still be true that the belief in stigma had a considerable influence on the history of the Middle Ages. What the philosopher is interested in is the idea that contemporary people have of the matter. “We have often rehearsed,” he adds, “that Islam originated from the hysteria of Muhammad. This is not correct. We readily admit that the Arab prophet was ill, but many others suffered from the same affliction without founding a religion. The engine of this great movement was the belief in the inspiration of Muhammad.” Sorel, very respectful of the Catholic religion, even tried to prepare on ideas of the same kind a "concordat between theology and science.” “The facts which have provoked abundant disputes,” he said, “do not matter at all to history. The consequences attributed to them might just as well have existed without them. Theologians do not want to be satisfied with what they call appearances or the external side of things. It is on the divine aspect that they bring their reasoning to bear, and as a result they pose problems that are unrelated to history. As for historians, they never need to enter this specific field of theology.” Therefore, the erroneous interpretation of a fact can lead to a fruitful effort. Likewise, a false prediction of the present action can lead its results far beyond the intended effects. But still, certain conditions are necessary; this is why the Theory of Myth is going to be established and why Bergsonian philosophy brings its assistance. "During my studies," writes Sorel, "I had observed something which seemed to me so simple that I did not think I had to insist much: the men who take part in great social movements represent their imminent action in the form of battle images to ensure the success of their cause.” Georges Sorel calls these constructions myths: for him, the general strike of the trade unionists and the catastrophic revolution of Marx are myths. The effective role of these myths is indisputable; to understand it, and with it the nature of these, Sorel uses Bergson's psychology. Moralists who seek to explain the reasons for our actions almost never reason about what is truly fundamental in our individual selves. “They usually seek to project our accomplished actions onto the field of judgments that society has drafted in advance for the various types of action that are most common in contemporary life.” On the contrary, Bergson shows to us two different selves, one of which would be the external projection of the other, its spatial and social representation. The true self, made up of our intimate states, presents them to us as refractory to measurement, constantly in the process of being formed. But this true self is rarely perceived by us; we only make ourselves masters of it in free action, because it is necessary to place ourselves in sheer duration for an act to escape the determinism of the spatial world. “It is obvious,” says Sorel, “that we enjoy this freedom, especially when we make an effort to create within ourselves a new man in order to break the historical frameworks which surround us." Then he shows how this free action should be represented. “When we act freely, we have created a completely artificial world placed in front of the present, formed by movements which depend on us. Freedom then becomes perfectly intelligible. Its first act, the antecedent of all the others, is the creation of an artificial world. These artificial worlds generally disappear from our mind without leaving any memories, but when the masses get excited, then a picture can be described which constitutes a social myth.”