alienation from things-in-themselves, in Jaurès’s eyes, the work of human consciousness marks human beings as full citizens of the cosmos.
What Kant and French neo-Kantians failed to understand, Jaurès argues, is the importance of what we see when we look at the world around us.42 In the sensible world, we encounter not merely a series of objects and events; a world like that would be an incomprehensible “ghost in motion.” Instead, we perceive a drive toward form and toward orderly relationships. Jaurès does not mean that our perception of order in the world proves that the world is orderly. He has absorbed too much Kant to make such an argument; like Kant, he thinks that we see order because our consciousness arranges our sense perceptions into ordered systems. But human consciousness is itself part of the world, Jaurès argues, and so if we have a predisposition to perceive order it must be because human consciousness shares with the world as a whole certain structures and impulses. We perceive order because human consciousness, like the rest of the world, tends toward order. That pull toward order, he writes, is the world’s most fundamental trait.
That is why there is organization in the world; or, rather, that is why each part of the world is organized: thus we have the vast ensembles of intertwined movements that we call the systems of stars, we have the systems of forces united by secret affinities that make up chemical compounds, we have living organisms, we even have higher consciousnesses that try to draw the entire universe into their own smaller unities. These organized systems do not exist in relation to a purpose outside themselves. Each only serves itself, or at any rate it is never the essence of any of these systems to serve anything but itself. . . . Each becomes real only through an interior aspiration, through an obscure and conscious effort of its own toward beauty and independence of form. (PTA, 120)
All the pieces of the world—galaxies, living things, cells, molecules—are by nature both individuated and relational. Every “organized system” aspires toward autonomy, toward self-rule; at the same time, these autonomous systems are each members of larger and more encompassing systems with their own orderly patterns and internal rules. Jaurès’s account of the universe sounds so much like what Aristotle claimed about human beings—that we are most ourselves when we are members of communities in which members take turns ruling and being ruled, and in which the community aspires to a shared good life—that at times Jaurès seems to be writing not so much a metaphysical argument with political implications as an account of political life projected onto a cosmic screen.
Jaurès depicts this endless making of organized systems as both a physical phenomenon and a moral drive.
It is not that these organized systems are isolated from one another and that the world finds its being only by losing its unity, for, first, no phenomenon is part of these systems without also being part of the causal and mechanical series that link it to the totality of phenomena, and, moreover, all these organizations, to various degrees and in various ways, aspire to the same end: unity, beauty, freedom, joy. They are thus all linked together outwardly and inwardly, by the exterior and indefinite bonds of the causal series, and by the inner community of the superior and divine purpose that they share. (PTA, 120)
Precisely because we recognize in it something ideal, we can be confident about the reality of the world as we experience it, the reality of what Kant called “the phenomenal realm” and of what Jaurès variously calls “the sensible,” “the visible,” “the solid,” or “the palpable.” We might say that, in recognizing ourselves as parts of a whole, we recognize the sensible world as real and as aspiring to order. Jaurès insists equally on the inverse claim: recognizing the sensible world as real, we recognize ourselves as parts of a whole, as participants in the universal order and dynamics of Being (l’être).43
Thus Jaurès cannot accept the “famous comparison” between Kant’s critical philosophy and Copernicus’s theory that the sun, rather than the earth, is the point around which the planets of our system revolve. Quite the opposite: because it treats human consciousness as an anomaly, Kant’s philosophy is better compared to the medieval, earth-centered view of the cosmos. A true Copernican revolution in philosophy, Jaurès writes, would displace human consciousness from the center, treating it as simply one component of the world, not particularly different from any other; it would “place the self within the living system of infinite consciousness” (PTA, 356). Jaurès, in this respect, turns Kant inside out.
“Consciousness,” as Jaurès uses the term, is not a distinctively human quality of rational self-awareness, but something more like purposeful existence. Jaurès rejects “the opposition, or even the radical distinction, between Being and consciousness” (PTA, 235). Every fragment or aspect of the world contains aspirations that are, in this sense, conscious—although those aspirations might be more obscure here and more overt there. The rational consciousness with which Kantian philosophy is concerned is not to be thought of as something separate from the body and therefore separate from the physical world. Indeed, Jaurès writes nearly as often about the brain (le cerveau) as about consciousness (la conscience) or mind (l’esprit). After all, Jaurès argues, consciousness is located in the brain, an organ of the body. Thus, building on his lectures at Albi, Jaurès proposes that what philosophers study is not consciousness in and of itself, as Kant had argued, but rather “consciousness in its rapport with the reality of the world.”44 This rapport, this “continuity of the Being of the world and the being of the brain,” means that human perceptions give us access to the world as it really is (PTA, 370, 351). Our experiences of the sensible world are experiences of reality, of Being itself, and we ought to take with full seriousness the physical and sensual world as we find it.
But something other than the nature and limits of knowledge is at stake here. Jaurès has introduced the idea that Being is characterized not only by unity, but also by diversity and individuation—and by unity not only through “the causal series,” but also through aspiration toward a “divine end.” Jaurès’s universe is neither random nor uniform, neither static nor deterministic. It—and thus the human communities possible within it—can change, in an uneven but orderly fashion, in ways not so much dictated by causal laws as motivated by moral aims.
When Jaurès writes about Being’s ideal unity, he echoes the Platonic and Neoplatonic notion of Ideas or Forms more real than their tangible approximations.45 But Jaurès wants to account for Being’s diversity and complexity without repeating Platonic philosophy’s denigration of the sensible world; he wants to be able to say both that Being is a perfect whole and that it is composed of imperfect parts, but he does not want to treat those parts as illusions or distractions, as shadows on the wall of a cave. To account for these apparently incongruous ideas, Jaurès borrows the categories developed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.46 There Aristotle distinguished between actuality (entelecheia, conventionally translated into French as “acte”) and potency or potentiality (dynamis, conventionally translated into French as “puissance”). Jaurès proposes that Being be understood as having two faces: Being in actuality (l’être en acte) and Being in potentiality (l’être en puissance). Insofar as the world is intelligible, and therefore real, Jaurès writes, it must be because “the world participates in the continuity of time and space, as in the absolute continuity of indeterminate, homogenous, and continuous Being.” Being’s actuality, in other words, depends on or is grounded in Being’s potentiality.
Determinedness is thus not enough to constitute the reality of the world: there must also be the absolute continuity of Being considered as undetermined potentiality. To be real, the world must participate not only in the actuality of Being, but in the potentiality of Being. . . . The permanence of a form is possible only because the potentiality of Being is always mixed in all its activities. . . . It must be that every element of Being lives its own life and at the same time aspires to harmony of form and unity of type. Thus, within each element, aside from its own activity there must be a ground of Being and, if I can put it this way, there must be stored-up aspirations toward form. (PTA, 123–24)
