Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Georges Palante
Table of Contents
Esprit de Corps 2
Respect 13
Anarchism and Individualism 15
The Secular Priestly Spirit 27
Notes 38
Individualism 40
The Future of Pessimism and Individualism 42
The Relationship Between Pessimism and
Individualism 43
Misanthropic Pessimism 48
Historical Pessimism 52
Esprit de Corps
Source: Combat pour lindividu. Paris, Alcan, 1904;
originally appeared as an article in La Revue
Philosophique in 1899;
Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike)
marxists.org 2006.
Esprit de corps is one of the most interesting of
phenomena for any observer of contemporary life. In the
midst of the disintegration of so many moral and social
they are like so many small towns spread across space and
disseminated across the entire extent of the French
territory. If one of its even slightly well-known members
commits some clumsy act or if something of interest
occurs then immediately, from Nancy to Bayonne and from
Dunkirk to Nice, news is spread around the entire corps,
in the exact same way that the gossip of the day goes from
salon to salon among the good women of a small town.
These remarks on the actions of esprit de corps
permit us to see in it a particularly energetic manifestation
of what Schopenhauer calls the will to life. Like all
organized societies a corps is the human will to life
condensed and taken to a degree of intensity that
individual egoism can never reach. Let us add that this
collective will to life is very different from that which
acts on a crowd, which is an essentially unstable and
transitory group. The corps has all those things that are
lacking in a crowd: its hierarchy, its point of honor, its
defined prejudices, its accepted and imposed morality.
Thus the corps, in its judgments of things and men, has a
stubbornness which the crowd, unstable and varying, is
not susceptible to to the same degree. Look at the crowd:
led astray, momentarily criminal, it can change its mind a
minute later and change its decision. A corps considers
itself and wants to be seen as infallible. Another
difference between a crowd and a corps: in general a
crowd is more impartial than a corps in its appreciation of
anarchism
Individualism is the sentiment of a profound,
irreducible antinomy between the individual and society.
The individualist is he who, by virtue of his temperament,
is predisposed to feel in a particularly acute fashion the
ineluctable disharmonies between his intimate being and
his social milieu. At the same time, he is a man for whom
life has reserved some decisive occasion to remark this
disharmony. Whether through brutality, or the continuity of
his experiences, for him it has become clear that for the
individual society is a perpetual creator of constraints,
humiliations and miseries, a kind of continuous generation
of human pain. In the name of his own experience and his
personal sensation of life the individualist feels he has the
right to relegate to the rank of utopia any ideal of a future
society where the hoped-for harmony between the
individual and society will be established. Far from the
development of society diminishing evil, it does nothing
but intensify it by rendering the life of the individual more
complicated, more laborious and more difficult in the
middle of the thousand gears of an increasingly tyrannical
social mechanism. Science itself, by intensifying within
the individual the consciousness of the vital conditions
made for him by society, arrives only at darkening his
intellectual and moral horizons. Qui auget scientiam
augel et dolorem.
We see that individualism is essentially a social
is not, as is the case with Bakunin, an appeal to pandestruction. Regarding society, it is a simple act of distrust
and passive hostility, a mix of indifference and disdainful
resignation. It is not a question of the individual fighting
against society, for society will always be the stronger. It
must thus be obeyed, obeyed like a dog. But Stirner, while
obeying, as a form of consolation, maintains an immense
intellectual contempt. This is more or less the attitude of
Vigny vis-a-vis nature and society. A tranquil despair,
without convulsions of anger and without reproaches for
heaven, this is wisdom itself. And again: Silence would
be the best criticism of life.
Anarchism is an exaggerated and mad idealism.
Individualism is summed up in a trait common to
Schopenhauer and Stirner: a pitiless realism. It arrives at
what a German writer calls a complete dis-idealization
(Entidealisierung) of life and society.
An ideal is nothing but a pawn, Stirner said. From
this point of view Stirner is the most authentic
representative of individualism. His icy word seizes souls
with a shiver entirely different from that, fiery and radiant,
of a Nietzsche. Nietzsche remains an impenitent,
imperious, violent idealist. He idealizes superior
humanity. Stirner represents the most complete disidealization of nature and life, the most radical philosophy
of disenchantment that has appeared since Ecclesiastes.
Pessimist without measure or reservations, individualism
already read on all the walls and all the tables their word
for the future: Free society. Free society? To be sure. But I
think you know, my dear sirs, what we will build it with:
Wood made of iron Individualism is clearer and more
honest than anarchism. It places the state, society, and
association on the same plane. It rejects them both and as
far as this is possible tosses them overboard. All
associations have the defects of convents, Vigny said.
Antisocial, individualism is openly immoralist. This
is not true in an absolute fashion. In a Vigny pessimistic
individualism is reconciled with a morally haughty
stoicism, severe and pure. Even so, even in Vigny an
immoralist element remains: a tendency to dis-idealize
society, to separate and oppose the two terms society and
morality, and to regard society as a fatal generator of
cowardice, unintelligence, and hypocrisy. Cinq mars,
Stello, and Servitude et Grandeur militaires are the songs
of a kind of epic poem on disillusionment. But it is only
social and false things that I will destroy and illusions I
will trample on. I will raise on these ruins, on this dust,
the sacred beauty of enthusiasm, of love, and of honor. It
goes without saying that in a Stirner or a Stendhal
individualism is immoralist without scruples or
reservations. Anarchism is imbued with a crude moralism.
Anarchist morality, even without obligations or sanctions,
is no less a morality. At heart it is Christian morality,
except for the pessimist element contained in the latter.
fanatics.
It remains for us to say a word about the most vulgar,
the worst, the crudest forms in which the secular priestly
sprit garbs itself. These are those it wears among those
people whose social situation or whose own stupidity
give them the illusion of a superior dignity, respectability,
and morality. We find here the tribe of honest men
infatuated with the oral pose, pontificating philistines,
functionaries crystallized in their vocation. Here of
course, the secular priestly spirit is emptied of all its
intellectual or ideal content. It is reduced to a flat
phariseeism, an idiotic fetishism and a tabooism. Here too
examples abound. We know a functionary, a likable young
man and not given to posing when we meet him in a caf
or at a club. But he visibly changes when he goes out to
visit in company with his wife and his daughters. He puts
on a special look, which he wears like a holy sacrament.
We feel as if he were going to officiate as a priest of the
religion of the family and the religion of high society,
those two religions sacrosanct in the eyes of certain
people.
These two religions are tabooist. They render taboo
certain things, certain rites, certain persons, certain ideas.
Thus, in a civil service office marriage renders you taboo.
A married functionary, if he is caught doing wrong, is less
severely penalized than another; for example, he wont be
transferred. The observance of the rites of high society
Individualism
Source: LAnarchie no. 323, June 15, 1911;
Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike)
marxists.org 2006.
As is the case elsewhere, the tendency to
underestimate the individual has made itself felt in the
intellectual field. Solitary thought invention has been
depreciated to the profit of collective thought imitation
preached under the eternal word of solidarity. The horror
of the previously untried, of intellectual and esthetic
originality, is a characteristic trait of Latin races. We love
regimented thought, conformist and decent meditations. A
German writer, Laura Marholm, accurately analyzed this
contemporary tendency: Intellectual cowardice is a
universal trait. No one dares makes a decisive statement
concerning his milieu. No one any longer allows himself
an original thought. Original thought only dares present
itself when it is supported by a group: it has to have
gathered together several adherents in order to dare show
itself. You must be one of many before daring to speak.
This is an indication of universal democratization, a
democratization that is still at its beginnings, and is
characterized by a reaction against international capital,
which until now has had at its disposal all the means of