Jean Jaurès. Geoffrey Kurtz

tension that constitutes Being. When Jaurès writes that the world’s parts all aspire to the common end of unity, beauty, freedom, and joy, he is not making a prediction about the degree to which those ends will be realized in the future; he is proposing that we can sense the presence of those ends now, in the world as we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel it. Thus the facts of conflict, ugliness, oppression, and sadness are not the last word on reality. Writing about the concept of movement, Jaurès proposes that trajectory is more significant than extent: “Every movement—whatever it is, whatever its form, its speed, its direction—is infinite since it gives form to a part of Being; Being is homogenous and singular, and so every one of its parts shares in its infiniteness. Every movement is thus infinite from the point of view of Being and of Being’s potentiality; it is so also from the point of view of Being’s form and Being’s actuality. . . . Each form of movement expresses in its own way the universal system” (PTA, 173–74). Thus, if we want to look for infinity—that is, for the potentiality of Being—we need not look elsewhere than the finite and particular organized systems and instances of movement that we meet in the sensible world. Every form, every organization, every movement intimates the unity, beauty, freedom, and joy that are the purpose of Being. The potentiality of Being is not to be waited for, but to be recognized here and now, in real spaces and at the present time. If we enter into the limited movements and not quite harmonious relationships of the world that surrounds us, we will not be distancing ourselves from the “ideal end” or “divine end” of Being. To pursue the ideal is not to depart from the sensible world, but to comprehend it. To take seriously the sensible world is not to neglect the ideal, but to find it.

      Turning from the vocabulary of classical Greek philosophy to the vocabulary of biblical religion, Jaurès at times uses “Dieu” as a synonym for “l’être.” Twice, he quotes Paul’s “in God we live, and move, and have our being” (PTA, 154, 347).⁴⁷ and he writes: “God, or Being, is at the same time, and in an indestructible unity, both actuality and potentiality” (PTA, 129). Jaurès’s God is not a self-contemplating “idol of perfection” like the god of Plato and Aristotle, but is active and “present in our struggles and in our sadness, in all struggles and all sadness.”

      Because God is infinite, he has an infinite need to give himself, to pour himself out in all beings and to rediscover himself by that effort. . . . Because God is the supreme reality and the supreme perfection, he does not want to exist in a state of unperturbed and imperturbable perfection. He puts himself in question; he finds a way to give himself up to the uncertain work of the world; he becomes poor and suffering with the universe in order to complete his essential perfection through the holiness of voluntary suffering. The world is in a sense the eternal and universal Christ. (PTA, 154)

      Always on the Cross, always rising from the tomb: that, for Jaurès, is the dynamic that constitutes Being. It is important to note here that Jaurès sees “Christ” as an appropriate symbol for the world, not for a particular event in the world. Every facet of the world’s yearning for harmonious order, not only one specific instance of that yearning, shows humanity what it is to live for the sake of something outside the self. Jaurès wants to say here that there will be no one moment at which potentiality overcomes actuality once and for all, no one day when a qualitative transformation takes place. Whatever new birth or resurrection—or revolution—the world experiences will be instead a perpetual, and thus perpetually incomplete, reordering of the world into a harmonious whole.

      This is not to say that Jaurès was returning to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth.⁴⁸ It is doubtful, to say the least, that his theology could have passed as orthodox. But the fondness for biblical language and sympathy for religious feeling that he shows here is more than a rhetorical decoration.⁴⁹ Certainly the words “God” and “Christ” are likely to have a different effect for readers, especially readers schooled in the Christian tradition, than the words “Being,” “actuality,” and “potentiality.” To say that God is present not just in all struggles but in our struggles is to invite a response that is not detached or objective, and not merely cognitive. The danger, as Jaurès sees it, is that philosophical argument involves contemplation but not commitment. “This is an era of refined powerlessness and pretentious debility,” Jaurès writes. These features of the modern condition can be overcome, however, because “human consciousness needs God, and will know how to reach him,” just as “human society needs fraternal justice, and will know how to achieve it,” despite the “sophists and skeptics” who obscure these truths (PTA, 135). Philosophical language offers precision and transparency, but Jaurès suggests that theological language has its virtue, too: “The very essence of religious life is to leave behind the mean and egoistic self” (PTA, 347). Jaurès wants words that have effects beyond the conveyance of concepts, words that have the capacity to pull his readers or listeners out of moral isolation, or at least to instigate within them a protest against that isolation. Jaurès claims in his French thesis to be dealing in philosophical knowledge, but he lets slip now and then that he is at least as concerned with what he can express, or elicit, as with what he can prove. “De la realité du monde sensible” is—perhaps among other things, but perhaps nothing other than—an exposition of how the world looks to someone who has adopted a certain orientation toward it: active, critical, appreciative, engaged.

      Every theology needs a theodicy; hope needs to be plausible. Since, by definition, Being in actuality cannot fully realize Being in potentiality, Jaurès reminds his readers, the “infinite joy” of Being in potentiality is present within and around the “infinite sadness” of Being in actuality. Joy is the ever present aspiration of all existence, but “the perfect, because of its very perfection, and to earn its perfection, unfolds the world in effort, in contradiction, in struggle, that is to say, in suffering.” Being stretches toward joy and toward harmony only through an endless struggle, Jaurès writes. There can be progress of a kind, progress that “raises, transforms, and enlarges the conditions of the struggle,” but the struggle is never superseded. Thus the world “oscillates between conflict and harmony.” Moments of harmony are never more than provisional because “there remains at the base of the world an eternal contradiction” between Being in actuality and Being in potentiality, “a hidden root of suffering.” But Jaurès is quick—too quick?—to add that suffering is never absolute because “the divine activity that pours out the world remains like an inexhaustible spring of joy.” Indeed, the life of the world consists of a continual effort to achieve harmonious organization and shared joy, an effort that is always incomplete and always possible: “The battle is never wholly won; it is never wholly lost” (PTA, 175–77).

      The important thing, Jaurès wants to say, is not a transformation that will happen in the future. What matters is the contour of the present. Tellingly, Jaurès writes little in “De la realité du monde sensible” about time and a great deal about space. For Jaurès, the reality of space is a particularly important idea because the expansiveness and three-dimensionality of space guarantees the possibility of movement, and thus of freedom (PTA, 129–35). He distinguishes between the idea of “place” (lieu) as it was studied by Aristotle and other ancient thinkers—the position of objects in relation to one another—and the idea of “space” (espace), properly understood. For space to be conceivable, Jaurès writes, two intellectual “revolutions” were necessary. First, Christian theology—in particular the thought of Augustine, who was “amazed that images of extensiveness can pour out and move through the nonextensive soul”—taught that “the development of interior life, the habit of contemplation” does not distract us from the sensible world, but rather grounds our comprehension of it. Then, at the beginning of the modern era, Copernican thought posited a universe of infinite space, showing us that we are located within a limitless expanse of Being. After these two revolutions, Jaurès writes, it became possible to understand space as the site where the absolute is present in the world. For Jaurès, thinking spatially involves recognizing both the inclusion of particular spaces within the infinite expanse of Being and the presence of infinite Being within particular spaces. Thus Jaurès can say that the absolute—or the infinite, or the potentiality of Being, or divine perfection—is not an unembodied spirit or an event that will reach fullness at a future time; instead, the absolute becomes available to our senses through