and its withering skepticism. It was a fact neither Durkheim nor Renan could ever grasp no matter how much they sought to demystify religion by writing their histories. Indeed, Marxism contained a mythic aspect too, and in Sorel’s view the goal of revisionism was to recover that mythic core—the vision of catastrophe and revolutionary deliverance—from its disenchantment by the Marxists of his day (RV, 122-9). After all, the falsity of myths not “scientific” “does prevent us from continuing to make resolutions,” to on their behalf (RV, 116). act What is important to Sorel is not the true but banal claim that humans can be motivated by the irrational or the fictitious. What matters, rather, is that an appeal to the aesthetic is the means by which a voluntarist freedom is redeemable. When we act on mythic grounds, “our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible” (RV, 27). To act independently of rational or cognitive considerations is to come to know the deep psychology of our inner life, willing activity” “our and its moment” that rationalist sciences confuse and obscure by viewing our actions “creative from the outside and the standpoint of their completion (RV, 25-27). Or he put in Humanité around the same time, organize does not consist in placing automatons on boxes! nouvelle “to Organization is the passage from order which is mechanical, blind and determined from the outside, to organic, intelligent and fully accepted differentiation; in a world, it is a moral development.” The moral regeneration of society requires wrestling a politics of will out of a deterministic and atomized social order. While Sorel draws this redefinition of freedom as an inner subjective experience, as willing and invention, largely on the basis of his reading of Bergson, modeling freedom on creativity was also Sorel’s way of insisting on the moral superiority of the productive classes over intellectual ones. And because creative production was a mystery of the interior life, it made sense that socialism had mythic elements since it was a doctrine for producers.
and its withering skepticism. It was a fact neither Durkheim nor Renan could ever grasp no matter how much they sought to demystify religion by writing their histories. Indeed, Marxism contained a mythic aspect too, and in Sorel’s view the goal of revisionism was to recover that mythic core—the vision of catastrophe and revolutionary deliverance—from its disenchantment by the “scientific” Marxists of his day (RV, 122-9). After all, the falsity of myths “does not prevent us from continuing to make resolutions,” to act on their behalf (RV, 116). What is important to Sorel is not the true but banal claim that humans can be motivated by the irrational or the fictitious. What matters, rather, is that an appeal to the aesthetic is the means by which a voluntarist freedom is redeemable. When we act on mythic grounds, “our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible” (RV, 27). To act independently of rational or cognitive considerations is to come to know the deep psychology of our inner life, “our willing activity” and its “creative moment” that rationalist sciences confuse and obscure by viewing our actions from the outside and the standpoint of their completion (RV, 25-27). Or he put in Humanité nouvelle around the same time, “to organize does not consist in placing automatons on boxes! Organization is the passage from order which is mechanical, blind and determined from the outside, to organic, intelligent and fully accepted differentiation; in a world, it is a moral development.” The moral regeneration of society requires wrestling a politics of will out of a deterministic and atomized social order. While Sorel draws this redefinition of freedom as an inner subjective experience, as willing and invention, largely on the basis of his reading of Bergson, modeling freedom on creativity was also Sorel’s way of insisting on the moral superiority of the productive classes over intellectual ones. And because creative production was a mystery of the interior life, it made sense that socialism had mythic elements since it was a doctrine for producers.
The%20Cunning%20of%20Violence.docx