Perspectives on Our Age

Jacques Ellul Speaks on his Life and Work

Jacques Ellul, Willem H. Vanderburg

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780887848735
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Originally broadcast on CBC Radio's Ideas as a series of interviews, Jacques Ellul's first-person approach here makes his ideas accessible to readers looking for new ways of understanding our society, and also gives unique new insight into Ellul's life, his work, and the origins and development of his beliefs and theories.

Jacques Ellul, historian, theologian, and sociologist, was one of the foremost and widely known contemporary critics of modern technological society.

1
The Questions of My Life

I BELIEVE THAT AT the very start, one of the most important, most decisive elements in my life was that I grew up in a rather poor family. I experienced true poverty in every way, and I know very well the life of a family in a wretched milieu, with all the educational problems that this involves and the difficulties of having to work while still very young. I had to make my living from the age of fifteen, and I pursued all my studies while earning my own and sometimes my family’s livelihood.

I was born in Bordeaux on 6 January 1912, but my family was not native to that region. My mother, who was also born in Bordeaux, was French. But my father was a foreigner—a complete foreigner, since my grandmother was Serbian, of the high Serbian aristocracy, and my grandfather was Italian. This factor, my father’s background, is also very significant. One cannot imagine what it meant to be a Serbian aristocrat who was accustomed to very great wealth and a very easy life throughout his childhood, and then had to spend the rest of his life in extreme poverty after coming to France.

I was an only child and I lived with two parents who loved me very much, but in completely different ways. My father was very distant because he preserved a certain outlook from aristocratic life; my mother was very close to me, though extremely reserved.

In those days, I lived in great freedom, on condition that I fully respected the taboos, the orders, and the rules coming from my father. When he was absent, he didn’t care at all about what I might be or what I might do. My mother gave me very great liberty, not out of indifference, but out of the conviction that freedom could be very fruitful for me. Since there were no distractions, the milieu I grew up in, outside of the lycée, was the port of Bordeaux—its wharves, its docks. I spent all my free days and all my vacations around sailors and longshoremen, with everything that this could involve—a totally astonishing milieu for a child; an environment that was very educational and, of course, rather dangerous, even though nothing ever happened to me.

Considering the part I eventually played in the French Reformed Church, people may wonder what sort of religious upbringing I had. I would say that in my childhood I really did not have any at all. I had none because my father, a highly intelligent and cultured man, was a complete Voltairian in both senses of the word. In other words, he was extremely critical about anything to do with religion and was convinced that it was nothing but myths, nothing but tall tales and fairy stories for children. Yet at the same time, he was utterly liberal—that is, he felt he had no right to coerce his son in either direction. Consequently, he did not want me to receive religious instruction, but he was not averse to my having some knowledge of the problems of Christianity. His religious background was Greek Orthodox, and, of course, the fact that there were no Greek Orthodox in Bordeaux made it well-nigh impossible for him to have any religious contact.

My mother, however, was a deeply religious Christian. She was Protestant. But out of loyalty to her husband, out of respect for his wishes, she never spoke to me about it; she never told me anything. Indeed, she never even went to church, though she was so very profoundly devout. It was only later on, when I began to ask her a few questions, that she revealed that she was a Christian. Hence, I originally had no religious upbringing. There was simply a Bible in the house, and it was one book among several. I did not live among great numbers of books, because we were poor, and I had no library at my disposal. This lack also deeply marked my childhood and my education, and it has helped me understand the situation of poor students.

There is truly a vast difference—even if one has lived in an intelligent milieu—between the person who had a family library at his or her disposal and the person who has never owned a book. All the books I had, I bought myself. The result, as I have sometimes told my friends ironically, was that, being a good pupil, I knew everything to be learned at the lycée, but I knew nothing else.

For example, in French literature, the curriculum stopped with Leconte de Lisle, and I knew everything about him. But when I heard some of my friends talking about Proust and Gide, I didn’t even know the names; I didn’t know who or what they were. No one had ever spoken of them in my presence, and that is a very important part of a youngster’s education.

However, another family element was fundamental. My mother was an artist, a painter, and this contributed to the modest resources of the family, for she gave drawing and painting lessons. I believe she was a very good painter. If she had had the chance to exhibit her work, she would certainly have been successful. So, I lived in a certain artistic atmosphere—though exclusively one of visual art, which is also significant. I never heard music. I must have been twenty-three or twenty-four the first time I attended a concert. At first, I did not understand anything, because I was untrained. I was educated visually. I was accustomed to forms and colours, and I’ve always understood painting well enough.

Having done brilliantly at the lycée, I went on to higher studies. And here I can point out something that is characteristic of my mother. When I received my baccalaureate upon completing die lycée, well-meaning friends, who ran a large business, called on my mother and said: “Look, we know that your son has just gotten his baccalaureate, and we’d like to offer him a job. It would be a very good thing for him.” My mother replied: “Never. He’s got fine intellectual qualities, and he’s got to go on to a higher education. Why, he’s going to go all the way; we’ll do everything we have to for that.”

They did everything they could, and so did I. As for my choice of studies, I was not very good in mathematics, and literature did not lead anywhere. Law, however, was a subject that seemed to lead to a profession, and the study of it was relatively short. Those were frankly the only reasons I had for choosing it. So I entered the Faculty of Law and began my studies in the history of law and institutions. My doctoral thesis dealt with an ancient Roman institution, the mancipium. This was, essentially, the right of the paterfamilias to sell off his children. I defended my thesis in 1937, and I received my agrégation in 1943.

While attending the Faculty of Law, I encountered the thinking of Marx. This happened quite accidentally. In 1930, one of our professors of political economy was giving some economics courses on Marx. He aroused my interest, and I asked for Das Kapital at the library. I plunged into Marx, and all at once I felt as if I had discovered something totally unexpected and totally stupefying, precisely because it related directly to my practical experience. I also believe, of course, that it explained many subsequent events.

My father was a victim of the crash of 1929; he had lost his job. Hence, my family lived on whatever my mother earned as a drawing instructor and whatever I earned at any job I had then. I learned what unemployment is with no assistance, with no hope whatsoever, with no help from anywhere. I learned what it is to be sick with no government medical care and no money to pay the doctor or the druggist.

I remember my father spending his days looking for work. Given his abilities, I felt that it was an absolutely stupefying, incredible injustice that a man like him was unemployed; that he had to go from company to company, and factory to factory, looking for any job at all and getting turned down everywhere. And it was an injustice that I did not understand.

Then, in 1930, I discovered Marx. I read Das Kapital and I felt I understood everything. I felt that at last I knew why my father was out of work, at last I knew why we were destitute. For a boy of seventeen, perhaps eighteen, it was an astonishing revelation about the society he lived in. It also illuminated the working-class condition I had plunged into and those dealings in the port of Bordeaux, which I have already mentioned. Thus, for me, Marx was an astonishing discovery of the reality of this world, which, at that time, few people condemned as the “capitalist” world. I plunged into Marx’s thinking with an incredible joy: I had finally found the explanation. As I became more and more familiar with Marxist thought, I discovered that his was not only an economic system, not only the profound exposure of the mechanics of capitalism. It was a total vision of the human race, society, and history. And since I did not follow any creed, religion, or philosophy—for I am very unphilosophical—I was bound to find something extremely satisfying in Marx.

We must not forget that at that time, in 1930, major things were happening in politics. Fascism was developing powerfully in Italy, and Nazism was beginning in Germany. Of course, being at the Faculty of Law, I was aware of these issues, but I knew them only from the outside, since France was not yet fully immersed in the conflict. However, despite everything, I discovered in Marx the possibility of understanding what was going on. I felt I had a deeper insight into the things I was being taught at the Faculty of Law. I was learning political theories, political science and constitutional law. But it all struck me as a bit shallow next to what I was reading in Marx.

Hence, I naturally made contact with people calling themselves Marxists. They were socialists, the socialists of the SFIO, Section Française de I’lnternationale Ouvrière [French Section of the Proletarian International]. I must say that I was promptly and deeply disappointed, because I felt I was meeting people whose main concern was to “make it” politically. Apart from that, they had no real interest in transforming society.

I also met Communists. At that time, there were simply no Communist students in France. I tried to contact workers who I knew were Communists, and again I was very disappointed with their leaders, but for quite a different reason: whenever I started talking about Marx, they looked at me as if I were talking about something rather boring, and they launched into propaganda. What interested me, however, was Marx’s thinking. I repeatedly tried to discuss it; but I was told: “Marx is not on our level, the important thing is the Party line.” Well, that didn’t suit me at all. Consequently, I never joined the Socialist Party or the Communist Party; I remained on the periphery. This was not yet the era when a number of brilliant French intellectuals entered the Communist Party. At that time, few intellectuals belonged to it. I stayed on the fringes, and I stayed there for a long time, until the period of the so-called “Moscow Trials,” which began in 34/35’ and continued until ‘36/’37.

The Moscow Trials spelled my complete break with the Communists and the Communist Party. I feel that one did not have to be especially intelligent, especially enlightened, or amazingly lucid (as is now always said) to understand what was going on in the Soviet world. I could not accept the charge that men whom I had read—for instance, Nikolai Bukharin, whom I profoundly admired—were traitors, that they wanted to destroy Communism and reinstate capitalism, etc. In other words, because I took Marx seriously, and because a Communisttype revolution had come about in the USSR, I could not believe that the people who had brought about this revolution were traitors to be rejected and condemned. Consequently, I told myself, one side must be lying, one side must be mistaken. Since I could not believe that the comrades of Lenin could have deceived and betrayed one another, then it had to be the Soviet government of Stalin.

On this basis, it was very easy for me to make up my mind. I was, in effect, led to reject Communism openly. I realized it was a totalitarian system. This shows, I believe, that for me Marxist thinking was not only on an intellectual level. That is to say, Marx provided an intellectual formulation of what, for me, had to come from experience, from life, from concrete reality.

I should perhaps explain the concept of dialectics. Dialectics, as a way of thinking and understanding reality, has become quite common, quite current in the Western world. This is due to the influence of Marxian thought and the rediscovery of the importance of Hegelian thought. I would say very simply that, at bottom, dialectics is a procedure that does not exclude contraries, but includes them. We can’t describe this too simplistically by saying that the positive and the negative combine; or that the thesis and the antithesis fuse into a synthesis; dialectics is something infinitely more supple and more profound.

An example that may be easy to understand is as follows. We know very well now that there is no clear and evident opposition between life and death. Ultimately, every living organism has a certain number of forces working to preserve and renew it and a certain number working to destroy it. Hence, there are successive equilibriums between the forces of life and the forces of death. And the person or the organism evolves accordingly. Likewise, we can say that in every historical situation there is an aspect that might be called the positive one, and a contrary, contradictory aspect. But there can be no pure and simple elimination of the positive aspect by the contradiction, or of the contradiction by the positive aspect. That is, no exclusion occurs as it does in a logical process in which one says that white is the opposite of black, and that nothing can be both white and black at once. In a logical thought, the two are mutually exclusive.

In dialectical thinking, the contradiction is viewed as an historical development. Thus, the outcome is neither a confusion (white and black leading to grey, for instance) nor a synthesis in the ordinary meaning of the term. What happens is that a new historical situation emerges, integrating the two preceding factors with one another, so that they are no longer contradictory. Both have vanished, giving birth to a radically new situation.

This process allows us to understand an entire historical evolution, for example with Hegel or with Marx. But what strikes me as important is that Hegel and Marx did not invent dialectics. Yes, dialectics did exist among the Greeks. But for them, it was not a process of resolved contradiction, but something altogether different.

There is, however, another type of dialectical thinking, which inspired Hegel. This is Biblical thinking, both in the Old Testament and in Saint Paul. Here, we constantly see two contradictory, apparently irreconcilable things affirmed, and we are told that they always meet to wind up in a new situation. One example is Saint Paul’s assertion: ’You are saved by grace; therefore work for your salvation by your works.” This sounds perfectly contradictory. Either one is saved already and saved by the grace of God; in that case, one need not bother working. Or one is called upon to work toward salvation with works, which means that one is not already saved and that one is not saved by the grace of God. Now Saint Paul says both things in the same sentence. This is dialectical thinking: once you are saved, you are integrated into history, into a process leading to your salvation, which is given to you in advance, but which you have to implement, which you have to achieve, which you have to somehow take in hand and utilize. But this cannot be done on an intellectual and schematic level. It will be done in the course of your life. That is why we are dealing with something contradictory, yet it is not contradictory when we live it. I can do the works necessary for salvation because I am saved. If I were not saved, if I were damned (assuming a notion that is not Biblical), I could not possibly do the works for my salvation. Hence, in the process of life, this is perfectly resolved.

In the same way, the Bible shows us, for instance in the Exodus, that God’s people are set free only to be placed under God’s control.

Are these two themes contradictory? Does God liberate in order to capture and reduce to slavery again? In other words, did the Jews leave one bondage only to enter another? Absolutely not. The Bible says that at this point, God, having liberated His people, controls them and guides them, but with the initiative and independence of this people. The people must constantly take up the conditions of their liberation again; and that is what the Israelites do. If we have been set free by God, then this means for our future. Hence, we must accept control and management from God at the same time as we accept this access to freedom.

Obviously, this is hard to grasp intellectually; and at the same time, it is something that can be lived concretely. Intellectually, it is the great problem posed by Karl Barth. Barth said that, on the one hand, there is the freedom of God and, on the other hand, the freedom that God gives to human beings. The goal is to live the human freedom within the freedom of God.

Thus, logically, the two cannot be reconciled. But dialectically, one can live them.

What turned me against the Communist Party was the difference between what I understood and what I then saw among the Communists. I believe that for me there had to be a coherence, a continuity between Marx’s thought and one’s life in terms of that thought. This was something I had not found in the Communist Party. The experience of the events in the Soviet Union alienated me completely from Communism, and my rejection of the Party, my total break, was confirmed when I saw what it did in the Spanish Civil War. One could say that the Communist Party was Franco’s best support. Franco won the war because the Communists destroyed the resistance of the anarchists; their hatred of anarchism surpassed their hatred of Franco. And the same thing happened in the French Resistance during World War II. Many Frenchmen have said that the Communist Party was the chief party in the Resistance. But I saw the Communist Party wipe out Resistance centres for not being Communists. In our region, in March of 1944 I saw a Communist underground group destroy and kill all the members of a Gaullist group simply for being Gaullists.

Because of such experiences, I felt that the Communists no longer had the right to be heard, received, or believed. They really had nothing to do with Marx. And I feel that my experiences could have been those of anyone involved in the political conflict. As for the intellectuals who were Communists until 1968 and who now apologize and try to understand why they were Communists, I would simply say that they did not want to see what was happening.

I thus came back to Marx. I broke totally with the Communists but I drew close to the thinking of Marx, who unquestionably instilled a revolutionary tendency in me. I understood that the revolution would not be achieved by the Communists, and I was sure that the Nazis would not do it either. But I realized that the world I lived in was a world that could not go on as it was indefinitely. The issue of revolution was central in my youth, and it has remained central to me throughout my life. It was Marx who convinced me that people in the various historical situations they find themselves, have a revolutionary function in regard to their society. But one must understand exactly which revolution it is; and in each historical period one must change, one must rediscover. This was an element that Marx planted in my life and that has never changed.

Another element, certainly, was the importance of reality. (I am not speaking of materialism.) Marx assigns major importance to the concrete material reality that surrounds us. Both the intellectual and the spiritual minds tend to forget this reality, to disguise it, as though it could ultimately be masked. But because of Marx’s influence, whenever I speak, I instantly ask myself in terms of what economic situation I am speaking, what my interests are. This too was something that deeply marked me in regard to myself and, obviously, in regard to everything around me.

A third element of Marx’s influence, of course, was my decision to side with the poor. But here, one must be careful. Marx was extremely precise about the poor. For him, the proletarian was not just one who is poor in money. This is shown, for example, by his lack of interest in peasants, who are poor in money. For Marx, the proletarian is the person who is alienated by all the modern conditions of life. The proletarian, the true pauper, is subjugated to the imperative of the machine and lives in the city, uprooted, in an unacceptable urban condition. Proletarians cannot have families because their economic conditions prevent them from living a family life. Contrary to a statement in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and contrary to what is normally believed, Marx was not opposed to the family. He himself started a family and was a good father who married off his daughters and so on. Hence, Marx was not hostile to the family per se. He was hostile to the fact that the bourgeoisie has turned the family into a privilege. In other words, the unacceptable element of capitalism is not the existence of families, but that certain people can have a normal, happy family, while others, a majority, cannot. Marx’s ideal, however, is that a person should have a family and that the parents should be a happy, balanced couple with happy, balanced children.

Consequently, the poor person is the person who cannot have this family. For Marx, there is a complete analysis of the psychological, sociological and economic situation of human beings, and the poor person is the person deprived in all these areas. Hence, when I say that Marx oriented me toward always siding with the poor, I am not necessarily siding with those who have no money. I am siding with people who are alienated on all levels, including culturally and sociologically—and this is variable. I will not claim that qualified French workers in the highest category are poor, even though they are subject to the capitalist system. They have considerable advantages, and not just material ones. On the other hand, I would say that very often old people, even those with sufficient resources, are poor, because in a society like ours they are utterly excluded. That is why I have sided with the excluded, sided with the unfit, sided with those on the fringes. That is why I keep discovering tho...