File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2003/postanarchism.0308, message 23


Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 13:18:40 -0400
From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: [postanarchism] Re: Guyau


Well, i managed to do a second reading of Guyau's "A Sketch of
Morality independent of Obligation or Sanction" before the
library late fees starting hurting. I think this is a work of
particular interest, in part because it seems to me to put to
rest the notion that "optimism" is what is driving Kropotkin's
ethics (and it does this quite definitely, i think), but also
because it Guyau's approach and language is surprisingly
contemporary. I mentioned a number of resonances with Derrida
and Bataille's work. I was interested to find another passage
where Guyau speak about the "organization of the organs" as, at
least in part, a labor of the organism. This stuff raises the
question of the extent to which this material was a part of the
education of the poststructuralists. We know that, for their
teachers, philosophy was very much a matter of the history of
philosophy. The erudition the poststructuralists gained from
that education is part of what makes possible the "departure"
marked by poststructuralism, but there is also perhaps more
conventional precedent than we know for some of the
characteristic poststructuralist tropes. It would be
interesting to see if Guyau, Fouillee, and others figure in the
work of folks like Jean Wahl, Canguilhem, etc. There are a few
contemporary accounts of "recent French philosophy" in English,
which should help clarify matters.

Fouillee looks like another small goldmine of philosophical
contextual material. Alas, almost nothing has been translated
into english, so hopefully there are folks with more french
than i have who might be interested in exploring texts like
"Nietzsche and Immoralism," "Liberty and Determinism," and
"Morality, Art and Religion after Guyau." I'll get there, but
i'm pretty rusty these days.

I'm currently waiting for a copy of Guyau's "Non-Religion of
the Future" and looking over a couple of James Alexander Gunn's
contemporary accounts of Guyau, Fouillee, Bergson, etc. I'll
pass along what i find.

-shawn

"Shawn P. Wilbur" wrote:

> -----------------------------
> >From Kropotkin's Encyclopedia Britannica article on
> "Anarchism:
>
> It would be impossible to represent here, in a short sketch,
> the penetration, on the one hand, of anarchist ideas into
> modern literature, and the influence, on the other hand,
> which the libertarian ideas of the best contemporary writers
> have exercised upon the development of anarchism. One ought
> to consult the ten big volumes of the Supplément Littéraire
> to the paper La Révolte and later the Temps Nouveaux, which
> contain reproductions from the works of hundreds of modern
> authors expressing anarchist ideas, in order to realize how
> closely anarchism is connected with all the intellectual
> movement of our own times. J. S. Mill's Liberty, Spencer's
> Individual versus the State, Marc Guyau's Morality without
> Obligation or Sanction, and Fouillée's Lamorale, l'art et la
> religion, the works of Multatuli (E. Douwes Dekker), Richard
> Wagner's Art and Revolution, the works of Nietzsche,
> Emerson, W. Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, Alexander Herzen,
> Edward Carpenter and so on; and in the domain of fiction,
> the dramas of Ibsen, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Tolstoy's
> War and Peace, Zola's Paris and Le Travail, the latest works
> of Merezhkovsky, and an infinity of works of less known
> authors, are full of ideas which show how closely anarchism
> is interwoven with the work that is going on in modern
> thought in the same direction of enfranchisement of man from
> the bonds of the state as well as from those of capitalism.
> ----------------------
>
> It's interesting to see Kropotkin, in one of his best-known
> pieces, citing Nietzsche, particularly as it is common to
> associate an interest in Nietzsche with Emma Goldman and
> just a few others. But the really interesting stuff comes as
> you start to work through some of the currently lesser-known
> names on the list. Of these, Guyau stands out, if only for
> the number of times Kropotkin cites him and the warm of his
> approval when he does so.
>
> I managed to track down a library copy of "A Sketch of
> Morality independent of Obligation or Sanction" - the work
> mentioned above. It's fascinating. The first thirty or so
> pages clear the field of "optimism" and "pessimism" as bases
> for ethics, proposing the indifference of nature as at least
> a promising starting point for further investigation. The
> next section includes a critique of "practical certitude"
> and faith, with some more positive attention shown to doubt
> as a motivating force in ethics, though ultimately Guyau is
> not willing to rest there.
>
> The morality of doubt that Guyau describes has some
> interesting parallels with at least a certain reading of
> posstructuralism. The "relativity of knowledge" is a key
> element, leading to the importance of the "perhaps" (a term
> very familiar to readers of Derrida.) There are a number of
> usages that seem very contemporary. It would be interesting
> to check the histories of philosophy by folks like Jean Wahl
> - who taught the poststructuralists - to see if and how
> Guyau might have featured therein.
>
> Guyau then posits "intensity of life" as a motive force for
> action and morality. A "moral fecundity" arises out of our
> experience of having more powers than we require to survive.
> Life is apparently an economy of excess, rather than
> scarcity, and in this section the language has lots of
> parallels in Bataille.
>
> I'm still working my way through the fine points of the
> argument, and chasing some contextual stuff, but there is,
> at the very least, a very useful corrective to the argument
> about classical anarchism's "optimism" contained here. I
> heartily recommend the work to anyone interested in really
> understanding the context in which Kropotkin's _Mutual Aid_
> and _Ethics_ were written.
>
> -shawn


   

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