Born into a provincial family of modest means *,
Charles Péguy became an internationally famous intellectual in the years before
the Great War; he was killed in that war at the age of forty-one. As a poet,
journalist, and philosopher, for generations his writing prompted fascination,
awe, fury, scorn, searching criticism, laughter, wonder, little imitation, and
no indifference. Among Péguy’s most abiding
enquiries was the question of what it means to be modern . . .
The literary critic, Walter Benjamin, for example,, wrote enthusiastically and
at length about Péguy, finding in his work a ‘friendly togetherness’ and a
continual dialogue, a sense of touch absent in Proust. Benjamin also claimed
admiringly of Péguy’s politics and life
that the phrase ‘the enemy of the laws, indeed, but the friend of the powers
that be’ is one that ‘applies least of all the Péguy.’
Benjamin’s friend, the great scholar of Judaism Gershom Scholem, also wrote in
high praise of Péguy, defender of the unique and mystical character of Judaism.
Near the end of his life, Scholem said that Péguy ‘has incisively
understood the Jewish condition to an
extent that has been rarely achieved, and has never been surpassed by
non-Jews.’
For the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Péguy transcended
the characteristically modern tendency to assume a disjunction between the
aesthetic and the ethical. The theologian Henri de Lubac wrote that Péguy ‘will
save us from Nietzsche,’ because he responded to similar questions and dilemmas
in decisively different ways. Following the same path, for the philosopher
Charles Taylor, Péguy is a ‘paradigm example of a modern who has found his own
path, a new path’, to faith.’
In political life, Péguy long enjoyed a similarly varied and enthusiastic
readership. Charles de Gaulle –the single most influential person in 20th
century French politics – acknowledged, ‘No writer marked me as much’ as Péguy.
Yet a quite different political figure – the Sengalese intellectual and
optician Leopold Senghor – also took inspiration from Péguy for the Negritude
literary movement, with its emancipatory hope of bringing together traditional
African cultures and modern ones.
Immediately after WWII, Hannah Arendt clarified her disagreements with Péguy, but she counted him unhesitatingly
among the champions of ‘freedom for the people and reason for the mind’ In the
same postwar moment, the literary critic Rachel Bespaloff wrote that
Péguy transformed the language that would later be used by fascists by
directing it toward entirely different ends; he ‘had a mind whose rue
significance is just beginning to be recognized.’ In a very different way,
within the pages of Difference and
Repetition, Gilles Deleuze finds in Péguy
an indispensable thinker about time, who evokes the possibilities of
repetition other than an assimilable concretion of similitudes and iteration of
identity.’
[‘Anxiety’ is for Péguy a human experience, uniquely inflected in Judaism but
not a uniquely Jewish one. Man as such is a
‘Puits d'inquiétude’ (a well of anxiety) as he puts it in one of
his most famous lines of verse, and
Jewish anxiety is ‘grafted’ into Christianity
by Jesus.]
_____________________
Péguy is a practitioner of distinctive thinking, and hence he does not fit
neatly into our historiographical models. He is not easily collapsed into the
standard model of late modern history or the technocratic historicism that
accompanies it.
The appeal of shared conceptual preoccupations is not to be foresworn. But it
is also not to be taken as self-evidently ‘serious’ in relation to all other
forms of knowledge, including consciously embodied ones –particularly in
history. Conceived somewhat differently,
it is a good thing that many contemporary histories are suspicious of heroic,
promethean subjectivity. But calcified into an ideological commitment to affirm
its opposite, this suspicion itself becomes
implausible, and can only sustain itself by tendentious and preemptory readings, ones
determined not to see that distinct and consequential evens of thought and
action indeed happen within complex and unique historical moments. This in turn discloses a striking professional
contradiction: from their graduate
student days forward, historians are often evaluated supremely on the basis of
their ability to do individually distinctive
and original work, and yet the principle underwriting a great deal of that
individually distinctive and original history-writing assumes either that individual
singularity and originality do not exist, or that they are historically
insignificant.
In Péguy’s days, whatever possibilities scholars like Emile Durkheim saw in primitive
religion, the organic, messy contingency
of narrative history, with room for meaningful agency and free will, was for
many sociologists no less suspect than mysticism or universal love. For
example, the sociologist Francis Simland
took the pages of Le Revue de synthese historique in 1903
to criticize the practice of history for its failure to consign events and
personal agency to is own disciplinary past. For Simland, historians should
seek regularities and ‘if possible,
laws’ along with the the other positive sciences.’ Durkheim and other
sociologists agreed.
In his essay ‘Historical Method and Social Science’ Simland instructs
historians that, along with sociologists,
we are to ‘clear or minds of these
metaphysical relics’ that led them to assume
there are material facts but not social facts. The realm of the
objective is that which is ‘independent of our individual spontaneity’ and thus
social life can be considered objectively. All sciences are abstractions, but Similand
believes that ‘fortunate abstractions’ are those that lead to the establishing
of regularities and ultimate laws of natural science or social life. The notion
of individual agency as a cause of change was naïve, and itself a late
historical product of ‘social development’: the historian should be willing to
apply an assertive skepticism (it seems almost an assumption of error) to the
testimony of individuals in history trying to explain the reason for their own
actions. That is to introduce ‘explanation by final causes,’ which is an
illusion not acceptable in the ‘positive sciences’ . . .
Others would make even more expansive claims, as a ‘scientific’ ethos spread in
the humanities themselves.
Throughout higher education and educated
commentary, the prestige of natural and social science, and the imitative forms
in the humanities, had undergone a meteoric ascent between 1870 and 1900.
Altering Péguy’s term slightly, one
could speak of an intellectual coalition
–less united than Péguy’s term ‘party,’ more cohesive than a tendency – that had
achieved great prominence at the start of the new century.
For all their differences, the member of this coalition conceived time in
unwavering linear terms., and history as material, moral, social, and above all
scientific progress along that temporal line. It inclined strongly to reject
both religious revelation and ‘high’ metaphysics as incredible artifacts of a
more primitive past (‘really’ belonging to earlier points along that temporal
line),and believed that accompanied by a scholarly affect of of meticulous
bourgeois sobriety – adopted by trained specialists engaged in the Cartesian
crowd-sourcing of knowledge – a generally positivist notion of science would
lead humanity forward. Freedom was not to be found in an affirmation of free
will (now understood to be not only inflected or constrained but severely
restrained or even determined entirely by either material or social laws);
rather it was to be found through a cumulative critique and repudiation of the
past and its ‘illusions’ in favor of brain studies and neurology, social fact,
mathematically driven economics, history, and literature as scientific
disciplines, an so on.
By pursuing these ends, both national and global society would embark upon a
course of perpetual reformation, more just, more rational, and faithful to
fact. New laws of nature and society- variously of history, technology and
money- would be the fundaments of novel and uncompromisingly modern order of
things. In particular, with rare exceptions, the thought and culture of all
ages prior to the late eighteenth century now serve primarily as raw materials for academic industries of
scholarship and science, rather than seeking out the work of a more distant
history as a dialogical partner in understanding. In Renan’s radical forms of a
‘future science’, if human beings must
eventually become raw materials in turn- for a science that conquers human
nature as the last frontier in the conquest of nature- so be it.
Beyond their stated intellectual ambitions, the members of this broad coalition
held very considerable influence over academic appointments, as well as
ambitious reforms of French education, from primary school through university.
This was especially true of Durkheim and his students. Alongside changes in
higher education, reforms in 1902 created a sequence for secondary education. .
. .
What was clear to Henri Bergson, however, is that
the proposed solution on offer from many of contemporaries did not hold: the
collapse of conscious experience into material or sociological suppositions no
longer appears as a bold extension of scientific reasoning but as the latest
error in a long historical procession of errors designed to give human beings
power rather than truth.
Péguy started to attend Bergson’s lectures in the late 1890s, and was quickly a
fascinated student, with evident sympathy for Bergson’s conceiving human being
as something other than a material, positive, socially, or physically
quantifiable thing. Bergson’s psychology appears first in Péguy as a critical
foil for Zola’s psychological associationism, in which ideas are connected to
one another in a rote, mechanical fashion reminiscent of positivist psychology.
According to Péguy, this positivist psychology is not a natural ally of justice
and universal rights: it left Zola’s novels with a complacent anti-Dreyfusard
readership dramatically at odds with the political allies he acquired as a
result of J’accuse: ‘The circle of
those who fought with Zola in the Dreyfus affair had few men in common with the
circle of those who usually read Zola.’
Another of Péguy’s early citations of
Bergson also enlists Bergsian philosophy in political arguments. Here
observations ‘not unknown to Bergson are made in support of an account of time,
memory and history that emphasizes the accumulation of impressions and the
living, morphologically vivid, and mobile presence of events in memory. Péguy
argues from these remarks that a ‘true internationalism’ should ‘enlarge upon
nationalism and the history that sustains it, rather than aspiring to an internationalism
that rejects national and local attachments. ’In these early articles, Péguy
expressed one of his most sustained convictions: victories for universal
justice are only possible if substantial portions of different pasts are received
and reconfigured with a living, integrative
openness.
Yet, even as he contemplated his utopian city and found in Bergson a critique
of mechanical, materialist accounts of human motivation and experience, Péguy
has concluded that there were decidedly practical
barriers to the universal emancipation of human beings, perhaps above all the
press.. Like many of his contemporaries – real and fictional- he looked to the
press as an agent of political and cultural transformation in service of truth.
The journal he and his friends would found would start with the premise that
‘the bourgeois spirit is in the midst of destroying everything in France:
honesty, the family, France itself. Now there are workers and poor people who
are more bourgeois than certain rich people. The press contributes, more than
any other power, to the progress of the bourgeois spirit.
The false universality Péguy perceived in the embourgeoisement of society would be a perpetual spur for his
thinking. This perception also implied a practical question: How did the press
find itself as the principle advocate of a global embourgeoisement, opposed to
the universal emancipation of a humanist socialism? The root was the
relationship of media to their readers: “At present all newspapers live by their
readers, and are slaves to their readers.” Socialism would flourish in a regime
of lucidity and honesty; embourgeoisement thrived in a regime of sensationalism
and flattery.”
To prevent this ‘enslavement’ to a portion of the reading public, Péguy
intended to start a journal by voluntary contributions, one that would allow it
to challenge its readers with articles that did not confirm what they had
already believed or wanted to hear. Nor would it address the diversions and
sundry entertainments of modern life: as Péguy sharply put it : “In the place
where newspapers insert racing tips [e.g. for gambling] it would be written:
‘we do not give tips on racing, because those who lose money they are
imbeciles, and those who win are thieves.’
It is hard not to smile at Péguy’s tone; so accustomed are we to the ubiquity
of entertainment and the ingratiating tone of marketing as the signal tone of efficacy
and practical success that the scolding of readers in search of racing tips can
seem quaintly severe, much like the monitors of the Lycee Lakanal allowing
student bathing only once a month, or perhaps an earnest 19th
century Kantian’s disdain for the blandishments of hypothetical maxims. But
there was in this commitment of Péguy’s something that would shape his life,
and inspire others.
The daily newspaper is not for Péguy, as it was for Hegel, the daily prayer of
the realist; rather, Péguy claims it is ‘the beginning of decreation.’ It gives
people ‘ready-made thought’ and with it a ‘ready-made soul’ or a ‘habituated
soul’ shaped by both immediacy and seductive topicality of what it reads, and
by the selective account of reality within it. Like modern history and modern
sociology, journalism works towards a ‘second creation’ that will vindicate a
certain construal of the world, even though the world of one’s own stubbornly
complex and multidimensional experience does not. For these purposes, media and
scholarship describe a constantly renewing cascade of events and experiences
from the same metaphysical vantage point- while assuming that metaphysics
itself is not ‘relevant’ or otherwise suitable for discussion.
Péguy was convinced that an indispensable claim of metaphysically modern
persons was to deny that modernity had a metaphysics: that is, assumptions and
convictions in relation to ultimate questions about the nature of being,
knowledge, history, goodness, justice, beauty and truth that are not
demonstratively certain. Whatever the answer, the responses to these questions
transcend the findings of ‘physics’ in the Greek sense and exceed what can be
known by inquiry into nature by science. In Péguy’s words, the ‘great cry of
the modern world’ is that metaphysics can be dispensed with entirely. ‘What one
opposes is metaphysics; what one defends is never metaphysics.’
Once a metaphysics ( including ‘metaphysics’ of modernity) has taken hold of a
certain preponderance of influential persons and respected institutions it
begins to claim that its own
metaphysical assumptions stand beyond serious question – they become the
assumed template for all respectable opinion, with the same claim to consensual
assent as replicated scientific findings. It is this which makes them so
‘unbearable.’
Péguy believed that a broad swath of professors in the new research
universities, above all the professors associated with the New Sorbonne-
including social scientists like Durkheim and Mauss, as ell as historians like
Ernst Lavisse, Gustave Lanson, Charles Seignobos, and others – constituted a
kind of party, the ‘parti intellectuel’ . They shared what he called the
‘superstition of the modern intellectual party . . . after so many others,
before so many others. [That is] that they have said the last word about the
history of humanity, that they have put the final period upon the history of
human thought which comes back
essentially to this proposition: that man, that humanity can know, achieve,
seize or embrace an integral knowledge with an exhaustive grasp of the entire
event of reality, of man and of creation.’
For Péguy, late modern history observes the past but will not take the risk of
entering into its organic complexity, in part because it presents to human
beings their own limits, their own mortality, and their own perpetual
incompleteness. Representation confines the real into manipulable, inorganic
space: the map is preferred to the territory. Taken to its extreme end, it
finally ceases to be ‘objective’; rather, it is ‘not subjective or objective’,
it is simply removed from the reality of what it claims to address. History
consists essentially in passing
along-side the event. Memory consists essentially in being inside the
event, in above all not leaving it, remaining there, and in ascending back from
within. The turn towards memory requires
participation and vulnerability, and so it is not for those who wish to remain
merely secure. ‘To de Péguy scend into
one’s self, that is the great terror of
man.’ Memory, in ’s formulation, enters into the past and understands its
unique questions and tensions as ones that demand a human response that
includes risk, and a patient discernment. It is a multidimensional, exacting,
carefully critical receptivity on the
part of the author who recounts and investigates past events.
Yet for ‘Péguy events’ are not simply
historical or present ‘happenings’. Events were the unpredictable, startling
transformative developments that altered the horizons of possibility for a
person, a people, or history itself – in is in this way that the contemporary
philosopher Alain Badiou thinks of events,
with Péguy as forerunner. Nassim Taleb’s ‘Black Swan’ also has some of the
connotations Péguy places
on the event that inspires or constitutes transformative happenings in the history
of a culture or civilization, including the ultimate meaning and purpose of politics
, science, metaphysics, and revelation.
With the turn toward an ‘objective’ understanding of human being, the perpetually unpredictable quality of the transformative
event was no longer a respectable entrant into thought. For Péguy, the event eludes
all predictive, putatively ‘scientific’ or ‘realistic’ or comprehensively ‘contextual’ models of human behavior. It has
myriad elations to its own past, but it comes as a shock. ‘What is always most unforeseen,
is always the event. (For Péguy , The Christian Incarnation,
the French Revolution, and the Dreyfus affair all stand as events.) These
transformative discoveries are generally not only unforeseen but unwanted a
well: they ‘have almost never been desired by contemporaries.’
The leaders of the intellectual party believed that with modern metaphysics
they had found clear, foreseeable
patterns and meanings. They tended very
strongly that human beings can anticipate a final historical judgment –towards
universal freedom or equality, or the conquest of nature affected by human
beings for themselves. It was and idea for
appears with much greater
power in the modern period than in any of its predecessors. It was no longer an
eschatological judgment but drawn from history itself, a ‘laicization’ of
divine judgment. The future verdict of history is passionately sought, for it
has become a substitute for he judgment of God or gods. But for Péguy, this
hope of validation from history is founded on the ‘illusion of perspective.’
Many of his contemporaries imagined future persons and generations smiling
attentively upon their epoch, or their own lives, or perhaps simply their
opinions, and sanctioning their most important decisions in an ongoing future
that intimates eternity without taking leave of history. But Péguy
observes tartly that futures ( for him there was no singular ‘future’) will
have their own constantly changing priorities, as well as their own futures, the
futures will doubtless have their own flaws that make their judgments partial
and flawed like the judgments of one’s own time: posterity, he says, ‘will have
other fish to fry.’ It is also impossible to predict those futures merely by
extending the predilections of the present, which is what people living in
anticipation of future vindication want and expect, assuming that ‘posterity’ is like themselves . . .but later.
Yet if one actually believes that the judgment of one’s life will come from
posterity’s approval, then one’s expectations of history’s ‘direction’ take on
a heretofore inconceivable strength. They become the subject of an almost
religious awe and concomitant obedience in return for a purely temporal
salvation, bestowed on the elect that were ‘faithful’ to the future (with the
definite article) before it had fully realized itself. It is a futile if
poignant hope: for Péguy the notion of a single ‘tribunal of history’ or
‘judgement of posterity is quite touching. But the illusion of an extended and
continuous vindication in time never becomes real.
Above all, modern metaphysics – along with the
intellectual party- deployed a ubiquitous if subtle evasion when it
wanted, in Péguy’s formulation, to
present its metaphysics as a secure body of knowledge. It aspired to create
methods and systems, but these inevitably relied upon an ‘as if’ (Péguy made
this claim before the publication of Hans Valhinger’s famous book on the
subject). For Péguy the ‘as if’ involved a series of assumptions that animate
the discipline or resolve the enquiry that are themselves uncertain, and
require some metaphysical decision that is masked as a procedural necessity or
a dictate of disinterested reason. For example,, a modern discipline operates
on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally motivated by rational
self-interest, that religion is supremely or exclusively a social act, that
human experience can be satisfactorily quantified, and so on. No argument
is made; the discipline functions on the grounds that it acts as if these claims were true.
For Péguy, ‘the real absolutely can in no way welcome or accept this as if ‘that represents the forgetting of
‘organic memory’. The ‘as if’ becomes a ‘perpetual miracle’ and ‘monstrous’. It
allows a science of human being to exempt itself from reality. For Péguy, human
sciences aspire to by-pass lived human experience. Actual experience, he wrote,
‘as it is, as it comes from the womb of nature, earthly experience . . . not at
all sanitized . . .one would almost dare say anarchist,’ is set aside for
‘experience as it ought to be . . .washed experience, shaved, clad, dressed,
sanitized, presentable. This experience is ‘the sole object of truly scientific
knowledge,’ but it can never be more than an incomplete and abstract rendering
of reality.’
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*[Péguy had very modest origins. His father died before his son’s first birthday. He was raised by two women- his mother and grandmother- who earned their living by mending chairs. Both worked harrowing hours: his mother for sixteen hours a day beginning at four in the morning. His grandmother worked alongside her and told Péguy old peasant stories, folktales among them, including tales of the damned. The vivacity of her telling gave him a lasting memory memory of what she said. Péguy was struck by the fact that he had learned his mother tongue from a peasant grandmother who could neither read nor write. He later wrote of how a past of ‘unlettered souls’ in a culture were like a ‘reserve’, an ‘immense ocean, and a ‘secret treasure.’]
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