world—can be accounted for by deterministic theories, whether of cosmology or of human history. Every phenomenon trembles with unrealized possibilities; particular facts, Jaurès writes, are comprehensible only in relation to “an ideal end,” which must be “the immense harmony of all.” Jaurès’s occasional use of the word “unity” may be confusing since he also writes about “harmony” (PTA, 125). This is not a contradiction, however. The essential point is that the unity toward which Being aspires, in Jaurès’s account, is not unity of identity or erasure of distinctions. Rather, it is unity of purpose, common participation in an ordered whole. Being, in Jaurès’s understanding, wants to arrange itself like a musical composition whose distinct notes all harmonize with one another.
That ideal end of “immense harmony” is what Jaurès calls “Being in potentiality.” Because Being in potentiality makes possible—and thus in a sense is the origin of—all particular facts, it is logically prior to them. At the same time, Being in potentiality is in another sense the goal or the end of all particular things. Being in actuality, then, is the aspect of Being that remains particular, incomplete, unharmonized. Though infinite in its potentiality, Being is finite in its actuality. Being in actuality aspires to (and is grounded in) Being in potentiality, but a gap always remains: Being’s actuality never fully achieves or exhausts Being’s potentiality. Given the ideal end Jaurès claims for Being—a kind of joyful sociability among its fragments—this seems to be necessarily so. Only if Being aimed at a perfect unity of identity could the actual and the potential merge. Unity can be perpetual, but harmony among moving voices gives rise to new harmonies and new dissonant overtones.
Although he takes the actuality-potentiality distinction from Aristotle, Jaurès uses it in his own way. Aristotle wrote about the actuality and potentiality of particular beings; he wanted to understand the processes of development that beings undergo as they move through actuality toward potentiality—from acorn to oak, for instance, or from a set of people in one place to a political community. For Aristotle, actuality becomes (or can become) potentiality. For Jaurès, however, actuality and potentiality are aspects of Being as such. The relationship between the two is not one of change over time, but of permanent co-presence. “Infinite Being is not on the way to realization; it is already the fullness of Being. Infinity does not become; it is,” Jaurès writes. “The infinity of Being is present really, actually, in all fragments of reality” (PTA, 152). A pair of concepts that Aristotle used to account for growth and development becomes, for Jaurès, a way to give an account of the perpetual tension that constitutes Being. When Jaurès writes that the world’s parts all aspire to the common end of unity, beauty, freedom, and joy, he is not making a prediction about the degree to which those ends will be realized in the future; he is proposing that we can sense the presence of those ends now, in the world as we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel it. Thus the facts of conflict, ugliness, oppression, and sadness are not the last word on reality. Writing about the concept of movement, Jaurès proposes that trajectory is more significant than extent: “Every movement—whatever it is, whatever its form, its speed, its direction—is infinite since it gives form to a part of Being; Being is homogenous and singular, and so every one of its parts shares in its infiniteness. Every movement is thus infinite from the point of view of Being and of Being’s potentiality; it is so also from the point of view of Being’s form and Being’s actuality. . . . Each form of movement expresses in its own way the universal system” (PTA, 173–74). Thus, if we want to look for infinity—that is, for the potentiality of Being—we need not look elsewhere than the finite and particular organized systems and instances of movement that we meet in the sensible world. Every form, every organization, every movement intimates the unity, beauty, freedom, and joy that are the purpose of Being. The potentiality of Being is not to be waited for, but to be recognized here and now, in real spaces and at the present time. If we enter into the limited movements and not quite harmonious relationships of the world that surrounds us, we will not be distancing ourselves from the “ideal end” or “divine end” of Being. To pursue the ideal is not to depart from the sensible world, but to comprehend it. To take seriously the sensible world is not to neglect the ideal, but to find it.
Turning from the vocabulary of classical Greek philosophy to the vocabulary of biblical religion, Jaurès at times uses “Dieu” as a synonym for “l’être.” Twice, he quotes Paul’s “in God we live, and move, and have our being” (PTA, 154, 347).47 and he writes: “God, or Being, is at the same time, and in an indestructible unity, both actuality and potentiality” (PTA, 129). Jaurès’s God is not a self-contemplating “idol of perfection” like the god of Plato and Aristotle, but is active and “present in our struggles and in our sadness, in all struggles and all sadness.”
Because God is infinite, he has an infinite need to give himself, to pour himself out in all beings and to rediscover himself by that effort. . . . Because God is the supreme reality and the supreme perfection, he does not want to exist in a state of unperturbed and imperturbable perfection. He puts himself in question; he finds a way to give himself up to the uncertain work of the world; he becomes poor and suffering with the universe in order to complete his essential perfection through the holiness of voluntary suffering. The world is in a sense the eternal and universal Christ. (PTA, 154)
Always on the Cross, always rising from the tomb: that, for Jaurès, is the dynamic that constitutes Being. It is important to note here that Jaurès sees “Christ” as an appropriate symbol for the world, not for a particular event in the world. Every facet of the world’s yearning for harmonious order, not only one specific instance of that yearning, shows humanity what it is to live for the sake of something outside the self. Jaurès wants to say here that there will be no one moment at which potentiality overcomes actuality once and for all, no one day when a qualitative transformation takes place. Whatever new birth or resurrection—or revolution—the world experiences will be instead a perpetual, and thus perpetually incomplete, reordering of the world into a harmonious whole.
This is not to say that Jaurès was returning to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth.48 It is doubtful, to say the least, that his theology could have passed as orthodox. But the fondness for biblical language and sympathy for religious feeling that he shows here is more than a rhetorical decoration.49 Certainly the words “God” and “Christ” are likely to have a different effect for readers, especially readers schooled in the Christian tradition, than the words “Being,” “actuality,” and “potentiality.” To say that God is present not just in all struggles but in our struggles is to invite a response that is not detached or objective, and not merely cognitive. The danger, as Jaurès sees it, is that philosophical argument involves contemplation but not commitment. “This is an era of refined powerlessness and pretentious debility,” Jaurès writes. These features of the modern condition can be overcome, however, because “human consciousness needs God, and will know how to reach him,” just as “human society needs fraternal justice, and will know how to achieve it,” despite the “sophists and skeptics” who obscure these truths (PTA, 135). Philosophical language offers precision and transparency, but Jaurès suggests that theological language has its virtue, too: “The very essence of religious life is to leave behind the mean and egoistic self” (PTA, 347). Jaurès wants words that have effects beyond the conveyance of concepts, words that have the capacity to pull his readers or listeners out of moral isolation, or at least to instigate within them a protest against that isolation. Jaurès claims in his French thesis to be dealing in philosophical knowledge, but he lets slip now and then that he is at least as concerned with what he can express, or elicit, as with what he can prove. “De la realité du monde sensible” is—perhaps among other things, but perhaps nothing other than—an exposition of how the world looks to someone who has adopted a certain orientation toward it: active, critical, appreciative, engaged.
Every theology needs a theodicy; hope needs to be plausible. Since, by definition, Being in actuality cannot fully realize Being in potentiality, Jaurès reminds his readers, the “infinite joy” of Being in potentiality is present within and around the “infinite sadness” of Being in actuality. Joy is the ever
