III. The Bourgeois Moral Ideal

The heroic ideal simple and logical, reflected in thought the surrounding reality without disguises and without distortions. It erected into primary virtues of the human soul the physical and moral qualities which the barbarian heroes had to possess in order to conquer and preserve the material goods which classed them among the first citizens and the happy men of earth.

The reality of the rising democratic bourgeois society no longer corresponded to this ideal. Riches, honors and enjoyments were no longer the prize of valor and of the other heroic virtues any more than in our capitalistic society property is the recompense of labor, method and economy. Nevertheless, riches continued always to be the end of human activity and even became more and more its sole and supreme end. To reach this end, so ardently desired, it was no longer necessary to put in action the heroic qualities formerly so prized; but as human nature was not despoiled of these qualities, while in the new social conditions they had become useless and even hurtful for making one’s way in life, and as they became in the ancient republics causes of trouble and civil war, there was urgent need of subduing and domesticating them by giving them a platonic satisfaction in order to utilize them for the prosperity and preservation of the new social order.

The sophists undertook the task. Some, like the Cyrenaics, not trying to disguise the reality, recognized squarely and proclaimed loudly that the possession of wealth was “the sovereign good” and that the physical and intellectual enjoyments which it procures were “the chief end of man.” They professed boldly the art of gaining wealth by all means, lawful and unlawful, and of escaping the disagreeable consequences which might ensue from the unskilful violation of laws and customs. Other sophists, like the cynics and many of the stoics, in open revolt against the laws and customs, wished to return to the pre-social state and to “live according to nature.” They affected contempt of wealth; “The wise man alone is rich,” they shouted ostentatiously. But this disdain for the wealth beyond their reach, was too violently opposed to the trend of the day and the general sentiment, and was often too declamatory to be taken seriously. Moreover, neither group gave any tendency of social utility to their moral theories, and it was precisely this that the bourgeois democracy demanded. Other sophists, like Socrates, Plato and a great number of stoics faced the moral problem squarely. They did not erect contempt for riches into a dogma, but on the contrary they recognized they were one of the conditions of happiness, and even of virtue, though they had ceased to be its recompense. The just man ought no longer to call on the out side world for the reward of his virtues but to seek for it within his inner sanctuary, in his conscience, which should be guided by eternal principles placed outside the world of reality, and he could hope to obtain this reward only in another life.

They did not revolt against the laws and customs, like the cynics; on the contrary they advised conformity to them and counseled each to remain in his place and to adjust himself to his social station. It is thus that St. Augustine and the fathers of the church imposed as a duty upon Christian slaves to redouble their zeal for their earthly master in order to merit the favors of their heavenly master.

Socrates, who had lived in intimacy with Pericles, and Plato, who had frequented the courts of the Tyrants of Syracuse, were profound politicians, seeing in ethics and religions nothing but instruments for governing men and maintaining social order.

These two subtle geniuses of sophistical philosophy are the founders of the individualistic ethics of the bourgeoisie – of the ethics which can only end by putting words and acts into contra diction, and by giving a philosophical sanction to the division of life into two parts; the ideal life, pure, and the practical life, impure – one being the antithesis of the other. It is thus, that “very noble and very honorable ladies” of the seventeenth century had succeeded in making love in a double fashion, consoling themselves for their intellectual love with platonic lovers by solid enjoyment of physical love with their husbands, completed according to their need by one or several lovers for good measure.

It is impossible for the ethics of any society based on mercantile production to escape this contradiction, which is the consequence of the conflicts in which the capitalist struggles: if to succeed in his commercial and industrial enterprises, he must capture the good opinion of the public by adorning himself with virtues, he cannot put them into practice if he wishes to prosper. But he understands that these virtues of parade are for others imperious – “categorical imperatives,” as Kant says. It is thus that if he unloads worthless merchandise, he demands payment in good money. The bourgeoisie, if it maintains its class dictatorship only by brutal strength, has need of sapping the revolutionary energy of the oppressed classes by making them believe that its social order is the realization as nearly as possible of the eternal principles which adorn the liberal philosophy, and which Socrates and Plato had partially formulated more than four centuries before Jesus Christ.

Religious ethics does not escape this fatal contradiction. If the highest formula of Christianity is “love one another,” the Christian churches, to draw customers to their shops, think only of converting the heretics by fire and sword, in order to save them, as they assure us, from the eternal fires of hell.

The barbarian social environment, engendered by war and the communism of the clan, resulted in stretching to their extreme limit the noble qualities of the human being – physical strength and courage and moral stoicism, the devotion of body and goods to the community, to the city. The bourgeois social environment, based on individual property and mercantile production, erects on the contrary into cardinal virtues the worst qualities of the human soul, egotism, hypocrisy, intrigue, profligacy and pilfering.

Bourgeois ethics, although Plato claims that it descends from the heavens and that it is on a plane above vile interests, reflects so modestly the vulgar reality, that the sophists instead of elaborating a new word to designate this principle, which according to Victor Cousin, who is a good judge of it, is “ethics in its entirety,” took the current word and called it the Good – to agathon. When the Christian ideal was formulated by the side of and in the train of the philosophical ideal, it underwent the same necessity. The fathers of the church impressed upon it the seal of vulgar reality.

Beatus, which the pagans employed for rich, and which Varro defines as “he who possesses much goods,” qui multa bona possidet, becomes in ecclesiastic Latin, “he who possesses the grace of God.” – beatitudo, which Petronius and the writers of the Decadence employ for riches, means under the pen of St. Jerome, heavenly felicity: – beatissimus, the epithet given by the authors of paganism to the opulent man, becomes that of the patriarchs, of the fathers of the church and the saints.

Language has revealed to us that the barbarians, by their habitual anthropomorphic way of proceeding, had incorporated their moral virtues into material goods. But the economic phenomena and the political events which prepared the ground for the mode of production and exchange of the bourgeoisie, dissolved the primitive union of the moral and the material. The barbarian did not blush for this union, since it was the physical and moral qualities of which he was the proudest which were set in action for the conquest and the preservation of material goods. The bourgeois, on the contrary, is ashamed of the low virtues which he is forced to put in play to arrive at his fortune, so he wishes to make believe, and he ends by believing, that his soul wanders above matter and feeds on eternal truths and immutable principles; but language, the incorrigible tell-tale, unveils to us that under the thick clouds of the must purified ethics hides the sovereign idol of the capitalists, the Good, the Property-god.

Ethics, like the other phenomena of human activity, is subject to the law of economic materialism formulated by Marx: The mode of production of the material life dominates in general the development of the social, political and intellectual life.

FINIS

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