The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly

Author:Aileen M. Kelly [Kelly, Aileen M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674737112
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-05-09T05:00:00+00:00

Herzen and Proudhon on Freedom

Anti-theism was an attack on utopian visions of human potential. It was also a working hypothesis to defend the alternative conception of the human psyche on which Proudhon’s anarchism was based. This conception was the source of his differences with contemporary socialists, and, as will be argued below, of his affinities with Herzen. As a preliminary to the discussion of their relationship, it will be useful here to summarize the parallels between Proudhon’s view of individual freedom and the one Herzen had formulated independently before his departure from Russia.

The two shared a view of the personality as bearer of moral and spiritual values that sprang from the Romantics’ revolt against Enlightenment rationalism. Two main influences had molded their concept of freedom: the religiously tinged humanism of early French socialism and the Young Hegelian demand for the liberation of humans in their concrete sensuous existence from the thrall of philosophical abstraction. But both rejected the Fourierist belief in the inherent virtue of the passions. Like Dilettantism in Science (published a year earlier), Contradictions économiques sets out an approach to human self-fulfillment equally distinct from the constructs of rationalist universalism and from the cult of feeling.

Proudhon argues there that human nature in the raw is a “constellation of potentialities” whose realization depends on the exercise of individual choice.35 While maintaining that the struggle between moral imperatives and “animal” instincts is a permanent feature of social existence, he rejected all conventional views—religious, conservative, and radical—of its nature, expressing equal contempt for the Christian notion of self-perfection as the practice of self-hatred in the hope of eternal life (“precisely the opposite to what reason prescribes”), and the ideal of communauté as preached by the socialists for “the iron yoke it imposes on the will, the moral torture in which it grips the conscience, the inertia into which it plunges society, and … the stupid uniformity in which it enchains the free, active, reasoning, unsubmissive personality of man.”36 Such a notion of moral obligation was repellent to the conscience. “Man is quite willing to submit to the law of duty, to serve his country, to oblige his friends, but he wishes … to give service through reason, not on command, to sacrifice himself through egoism, not servile obligation. If it is a duty to support the weak, man wants to perform this duty out of generosity.… Equity is sociability raised by reason and justice to the level of an ideal.”37

There are close parallels here with the model of moral life with which Herzen was already familiar from his reading of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education. Proudhon distinguishes between justice—the essential moral basis of social intercourse—and equity, variously defined as humanitas, urbanity, or politesse: the form the universal human instinct of solidarity takes in an intellectually and morally developed individual. It is equity that makes it “at one and the same time a duty and a pleasure to aid the weak … , to treat him as an equal, to give just tribute of recognition and honor to the strong without becoming his slave.

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