P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet No. 8, 311-312): 154-155.
— The Marvelous [or the Supernatural] in Humanity, third cause of revolution. — Subordinate to the common sense, but distinct from it. — It is not a malady, a pathological state or transition, like teething or puberty in individuals: it is a faculty, a real function of the soul, [but one that is] little known, like the spleen or tonsils in animals. Everything provided by that faculty constantly vanishes before analysis, but it still exerts the greatest influence on the acts of the Species. Already we have seen that God is the great revolutionary agent, as privileged inheritor of the old abuses. — The old communist sects did not fail to make God sole proprietor. — Domini est terra, et plenitudo ejus.
P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet No. 8, 317-318): 159-161.
REVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE. — Of the Ideal, and of Supernaturalism in Nature. —
1. A third revolutionary agent is indispensable:
2. It is the Ideal, the Infinite, in Thought.
It acts more energetically on us than all the rest: example. — A man wants a women, but beautiful, which is more than a woman…
A king, but handsome, glorious, victorious.
And so on.
We affirm that ideal objectively in God and Heaven;
We create it in ourselves, and with our own hands;
Art is the reproduction of that ideal.
The absurd is all that is settled on as the ideal, but the ideal is not absurd.
The ideal always has an object or an idea as basis. But it is obviously something other than that object or that idea.
The ideal disappears and oscillates in Humanity like the ideas and interests.
3. There is no more ideal in society: neither God, nor Cult, nor Kings, nor Government.
God has lost all ontological and aesthetic value.
Utopia offers nothing.
Atheism is the negation of God, the ontological and aesthetic ideal; — without ulterior affirmation.
[318] More than a means, it is to change the idea of being into that of becoming; and since God does not exist, it is necessary to invent him.
It is necessary to realize that great, extra-natural, extra-sensible existence, which the understanding conceives, but the Reason does not comprehend.
We must make the collective man, first give him being and then beauty. In short, [it is necessary] to create the Supreme Being.
We have the clay with which to mold it, and a model according to which to give it shape.
The Collective Man is truly the supernatural in nature: it is the New God, which results from the unlimited liberty of its members.
On this subject, show that the Communities, coalitions, hierarchies and corporate bodies are negations of the Collective Man, and of the sovereign People (chapter on Unity.)
After having denied all government, and proclaimed anarchy, affirm the People, the reality and personality of the collective man.
After having denied Political Economy, and the Economics of the State, affirm Social Economy.
After having denied God, affirm HUMANITY.
That Humanity is not perfect, but it becomes so; its ideal consists in that [becoming]: — of constantly modifying itself and varying.
The brigand and the assassin affirm the beautiful and the sublime.
It is the sanction of right and of duty.
Thus to substitute the indefinite for the infinite, the perfectible for the PERFECT, becoming for BEING, the faciebat for the facit [fecit?], time for ETERNITY, movement for SUBSTANCE, progress for stability.
Everything is revolutionary, in Heaven and on the Earth.
So we are atheists as the first Christians were. — The divine, […], does not die in Humanity. The Christian God becomes as ugly as he is unintelligible, and every divinity conceived according to the ancient principles and method is inadmissible.
— Every worn-out idea become rococo, a ridiculous joke: the comic is the antidote for every chauvinism!
