Man has powers, attributes, capacities; they are given him by Nature that he may live, learn, and love: he does not own them, but has only the use of them; and he can make no use of them that does not harmonize with Nature’s laws. If he had absolute mastery over his faculties, he could avoid hunger and cold; he could eat unstintedly, and walk through fire; he could move mountains, walk a hundred leagues in a minute, cure without medicines and by the sole force of his will, and could make himself immortal. He could say, “I wish to produce,” and his tasks would be finished with the words; he could say. “I wish to know,” and he would know; “I love,” and he would enjoy. What then? Man is not master of himself, but may be of his surroundings. Let him use the wealth of Nature, since he can live only by its use; but let him abandon his pretensions to the title of proprietor, and remember that he is called so only metaphorically.
What is Property?, chapter 2.
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Am I the only one that thinks the is one of Proudhon’s more confused moments? This passage seems full of fallacy and contradiction but I’ll admit I don’t know the context.
It seems a bit like a straw man to claim that proponents of ownership are working from false delusions of total mastery contra the laws of the universe (“this is my house because I can make it levitate if I wanted to”) when all it amounts to is a claim to a more objective link to the object in question than another person, however not omnipotent that link might be.
By: Neverfox on November 11 2009
at 0:06
No, but you can paint your house, you can change its temperature, you can add or subtract anything to it very easily. We don’t even know what happens in our own brains.
By: Francois Tremblay on November 11 2009
at 4:06
I haven’t read this particular work yet. But I somehow doubt that he uses the absolute mastery test when weather other things count as property. It would seem to be a confusion of the descriptive/ prescriptive distinction.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say you are yourself rather than you own yourself, but as you say It’s pretty much impossible to pin down what exactly the “you” is anyways so such things will likely remain fuzzy for quite some time.
By: WorBlux on November 11 2009
at 13:19