Following up on the French TAS noun source for Proudhon from my previous post,
I was able to find direct evidence of Proudhon having read a French book on the history of German philosophy which includes thesis-antithesis-synthesis in a direct quotation from Schelling, as well as a section on Hegel. So, against Mueller’s story, here’s a proposed counter-timeline.
1800 Schelling, in System of Transcendental Idealism, describes the progression from thesis through antithesis to synthesis, grounded in the activity of self-consciousness, and identifies philosophical method as a formal expression of this movement.1
1836 Auguste Barchou de Penhoën, in his book about the history of German philosophy, in a volume which contains his treatment of both Schelling and Hegel, translates that particular Schelling passage into French.2
1839 Proudhon states in a notebook in August that he has finished reading that Barchou book.3
1840 Proudhon posits community as thesis, property as antithesis, and seeks their reconciliation in a third form, synthesis. He explicitly calls this construction a “Hegelian formula”.4
1846 Proudhon invokes TAS in a book which Marx attacks the following year.5
1847 Marx repeats TAS to gloss a movement (which he does attribute to Hegel) while explaining, and mocking, Proudhon’s derivation of economic categories from impersonal reason.6
The inferred connection here is that Proudhon’s reading of Barchou could “cause” him to associate TAS with Hegel. Barchou at least provides a setting in which a reader could plausibly carry the formula from the account of Schelling into an interpretation of Hegel. Especially so if the reader is without German and has limited access to the source material. So my overall thesis here is that the vocabulary and concepts necessary for Proudhon’s mistake are furnished by Barchou.
However the attribution came to Proudhon, the fact remains that Chalybaus’s work is not necessary to explain its appearance in Marx’s polemic. He is responding to an author who already used TAS and had explicitly called such a construction Hegelian in 1840.
- Schelling, System des transscendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen: Cotta, 1800), 90–91. ↩︎
- Barchou de Penhoën, Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Leibnitz jusqu’à Hegel, vol. 2 (Paris: Charpentier, 1836), 307–8. ↩︎
- Pierre Haubtmann, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Sa vie et sa pensée, 1809–1849 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982), 195, n. 113. ↩︎
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (Paris: Brocard, 1840), 217. ↩︎
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (1846), vol. 1, chap. 2, §§1–2. ↩︎
- Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie (1847), chap. 2, §1, first and fourth observations. ↩︎
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