Jaurès depicts this endless making of organized systems as both a physical phenomenon and a moral drive.
It is not that these organized systems are isolated from one another and that the world finds its being only by losing its unity, for, first, no phenomenon is part of these systems without also being part of the causal and mechanical series that link it to the totality of phenomena, and, moreover, all these organizations, to various degrees and in various ways, aspire to the same end: unity, beauty, freedom, joy. They are thus all linked together outwardly and inwardly, by the exterior and indefinite bonds of the causal series, and by the inner community of the superior and divine purpose that they share. (PTA, 120)
Precisely because we recognize in it something ideal, we can be confident about the reality of the world as we experience it, the reality of what Kant called “the phenomenal realm” and of what Jaurès variously calls “the sensible,” “the visible,” “the solid,” or “the palpable.” We might say that, in recognizing ourselves as parts of a whole, we recognize the sensible world as real and as aspiring to order. Jaurès insists equally on the inverse claim: recognizing the sensible world as real, we recognize ourselves as parts of a whole, as participants in the universal order and dynamics of Being (l’être).43
Thus Jaurès cannot accept the “famous comparison” between Kant’s critical philosophy and Copernicus’s theory that the sun, rather than the earth, is the point around which the planets of our system revolve. Quite the opposite: because it treats human consciousness as an anomaly, Kant’s philosophy is better compared to the medieval, earth-centered view of the cosmos. A true Copernican revolution in philosophy, Jaurès writes, would displace human consciousness from the center, treating it as simply one component of the world, not particularly different from any other; it would “place the self within the living system of infinite consciousness” (PTA, 356). Jaurès, in this respect, turns Kant inside out.
“Consciousness,” as Jaurès uses the term, is not a distinctively human quality of rational self-awareness, but something more like purposeful existence. Jaurès rejects “the opposition, or even the radical distinction, between Being and consciousness” (PTA, 235). Every fragment or aspect of the world contains aspirations that are, in this sense, conscious—although those aspirations might be more obscure here and more overt there. The rational consciousness with which Kantian philosophy is concerned is not to be thought of as something separate from the body and therefore separate from the physical world. Indeed, Jaurès writes nearly as often about the brain (le cerveau) as about consciousness (la conscience) or mind (l’esprit). After all, Jaurès argues, consciousness is located in the brain, an organ of the body. Thus, building on his lectures at Albi, Jaurès proposes that what philosophers study is not consciousness in and of itself, as Kant had argued, but rather “consciousness in its rapport with the reality of the world.”44 This rapport, this “continuity of the Being of the world and the being of the brain,” means that human perceptions give us access to the world as it really is (PTA, 370, 351). Our experiences of the sensible world are experiences of reality, of Being itself, and we ought to take with full seriousness the physical and sensual world as we find it.
But something other than the nature and limits of knowledge is at stake here. Jaurès has introduced the idea that Being is characterized not only by unity, but also by diversity and individuation—and by unity not only through “the causal series,” but also through aspiration toward a “divine end.” Jaurès’s universe is neither random nor uniform, neither static nor deterministic. It—and thus the human communities possible within it—can change, in an uneven but orderly fashion, in ways not so much dictated by causal laws as motivated by moral aims.
When Jaurès writes about Being’s ideal unity, he echoes the Platonic and Neoplatonic notion of Ideas or Forms more real than their tangible approximations.45 But Jaurès wants to account for Being’s diversity and complexity without repeating Platonic philosophy’s denigration of the sensible world; he wants to be able to say both that Being is a perfect whole and that it is composed of imperfect parts, but he does not want to treat those parts as illusions or distractions, as shadows on the wall of a cave. To account for these apparently incongruous ideas, Jaurès borrows the categories developed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.46 There Aristotle distinguished between actuality (entelecheia, conventionally translated into French as “acte”) and potency or potentiality (dynamis, conventionally translated into French as “puissance”). Jaurès proposes that Being be understood as having two faces: Being in actuality (l’être en acte) and Being in potentiality (l’être en puissance). Insofar as the world is intelligible, and therefore real, Jaurès writes, it must be because “the world participates in the continuity of time and space, as in the absolute continuity of indeterminate, homogenous, and continuous Being.” Being’s actuality, in other words, depends on or is grounded in Being’s potentiality.
Determinedness is thus not enough to constitute the reality of the world: there must also be the absolute continuity of Being considered as undetermined potentiality. To be real, the world must participate not only in the actuality of Being, but in the potentiality of Being. . . . The permanence of a form is possible only because the potentiality of Being is always mixed in all its activities. . . . It must be that every element of Being lives its own life and at the same time aspires to harmony of form and unity of type. Thus, within each element, aside from its own activity there must be a ground of Being and, if I can put it this way, there must be stored-up aspirations toward form. (PTA, 123–24)
Neither “permanence of form” nor “activity”—neither the world’s stability nor the evident possibility of new and surprising things in the 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