Raúl Proença was one of the most active and influential Portuguese intellectuals of the early decades of the 20^th century. He was always possessed of an unshakeable democratic spirit, but was simultaneously deeply critical of the shortcomings of the Republican regime and of the generalised corruption to which it proved incapable of putting an end.

The central theme of all Proença’s work, which is scattered among hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and large numbers of letters and manifests, is primarily ethico-political in nature. Its raison d’être is to be found in the efforts he made to confront what he considered to be the moral weakness of the Portuguese of the day – an issue that led him to feel deeply concerned at and dramatically aware of the decadence from which the country was suffering. The underlying principle that lends coherence to all his work is thus democratic socialism, together with a criticism of both bourgeois morals and all dictatorial solutions. His main targets, which he vigorously attacked, were Lusitanian integralism and the emergence of fascism in Europe – a force that he felt would drag the continent towards a nihilist totalitarianism and would destroy the wealth that creates life, all in the name of exclusivism.

Against this interventionist and reforming background, he was an active member first of the Portuguese Renaissance, and then, after the split which followed Pascoais’ imposition of ‘saudosismo’ as the essence of the movement’s spirit, of Seara Nova, of which he was one of the founders. As he wrote during the early years of his career, he was tormented by an atmosphere and feeling of unease that was the basis for the existence of the "movement" and for the desire for "something". He felt that the cause of the malaise had already been diagnosed by the members of the ‘1870’s Generation’: three centuries of Jesuit education had killed off the living energies and the intimate forces which centuries earlier had placed us well and truly at the level of world civilisation.

To his mind, this was the reason for our state at the beginning of the 20^th century and was reflected in an almost complete absence of breadth of soul and solidary spirit. It stifled at birth our ability to realise our potential as a people, inasmuch as by renouncing freedom, we had lost our dignity, nation and motherland.

In philosophical terms he defined himself as an idealist and a realist. He saw no contradiction between the two terms, because he was not so much concerned with the metaphysical or gnosiological side of the issue as with its practical aspect, as expressed in ethical and political instances. He saw realism as the requirement for a full knowledge of the realities that man faces, and believed that it was inadmissible to define solutions and action plans that fell "outside the scope of that realist and objective knowledge" and were far "from the true nature of man and the facts of society". He rejected communism, anarchism and integralism because he did not judge them to be realist in this sense, to the extent that they did not emanate from an analysis of social facts and were an assault on the nature and dignity of man.

In turn, idealism was the guarantor that one would maintain a distance in the face of "materialist realism", as expressed in determinist formulae that were repugnant to Proença’s understanding of progress, liberty and a morality that characterised creators. The key thing was never to look on ways of being and forms of social life as unchangeable and set forever, as Action Française in France and

 its followers here, the integralists, purported. Despite their much vaunted attachment to Catholic spiritual values, the latter believed in the fatalism of heredity and history – forms of "materialism" that made them adhere to the doctrine of selection and social Darwinism, which denied human dignity. This perspective on his part also explains Proença’s crusade against the concept of tradition, which he saw as a factor that favoured stagnation. He fought against the spectres that stubbornly attempted to chain us to a mentality which looked to the past and possessed no sense of future or creation. He accepted nothing just because it had once existed.

Idealist realism because that which best defines reality is progress, which represents the "continuing creation" of new, meaningful worlds, the denial of established Fact, and the affirmation that evil is not without remedy. Realism that is idealist because it does not kill hope, the hope not of those who hope and wait, but of those who hope and act, and moreover, of those who act guided by sublime ideals, because to act without noble ideals is to reduce man to the level of an animal and to deny him as a cultural being. People act in accordance with objectives that the mind idealises as achievable, and thus – to quote Proença himself – "reality as a basis, idealism

 as improvement and the attempt to achieve a higher and better reality" defined the concept of an ethical and social philosophy.

This was also why he concerned himself with the doctrine of eternal return, which he studied with great care. He was not interested in espousing it, but rather in repudiating what he felt to be its pernicious consequences. He looked on it as the logical outcome of all determinisms, which he saw as the enemy of the concept of man as a free being, capable of establishing goals that the mind then freely pursues (and if those goals might perhaps seem to us to be utopian, we should not forget that one of the clearest proofs of ingenuousness was thought to be the absence of enough common sense to believe in the efficacy of utopias).

The work of reason was thus progressive and slow, unfolding at each step into its natural consequences, the most important of which was the triumph of right over strength and of justice over privilege. It was also because he saw the world as a work of reason that he did not accept the primacy of the intuitionalism and the anti-intellectualism that were gaining the upper hand among the Portuguese Bergsonians with a saudosista bent. He was careful to point out that his rationalism did not advocate any form of divorce between reason and sentiment, but that it understood reason to be the instance that made it possible to choose, order and value sentiments, and that if any conflict did exist, it was therefore not between reason and sentiment, but at most between sentiment and sentiment.

He was thus a humanist and one who looked on humanism not as a subject, but rather as an attitude, and although he praised atheism for being the rewardless moral that demands the greatest heroism, and believed in definitive death because that means that life becomes our eternity, he nonetheless did not cease to consider himself to be the child of Christian personalism, albeit one who saw God not as a transcendent being who punishes and rewards, but as the affirmation of the sublime values of awareness. While respecting individual liberty and refusing to accept that there was a "religious issue" – something that to him sounded like an echo of intolerance – in Portugal, he believed that Christ himself had existed, but that that which had never truly materialised, because it had never been put into practise, was Christianity in its truly solidary form.

Proença’s democratic socialism also made him a critic of bourgeois

 morals – the moral of pleasure and the absence of the pain that raises up and purifies, the moral of the mediocrity in which the egotistical ferocity of the powerful and the desire for stability of their politicians flow together, withering education and schools by setting the criteria of a practical education as its guidelines and forgetting that the most practical educational system or model of all is that which proves most capable of improving men’s souls, teaching them not to "eat life for dinner", but to "live life". The morality for which he fought was not an ascetic lesson of contempt for life that would turn living into something sad and empty of charm.

If we look at his political programme, we find that after rehabilitating the value of the "politician" by distinguishing him from a "technician" – inasmuch as to the former accrues the nobility conferred by the ability to synthesise and co-ordinate, and because one does not govern a country "in the same way as one manages a company or an estate" – he argued for a socialism that would come about within the rule of order and democratic methods, particularly parliamentarianism, and he never accepted that the state possessed any type of absolute power over the individual. It was for this reason that he rejected Rousseau’s concept of a general will that would impose itself on each person’s individual judgement. His form of socialism stood for a progressive, rather than an abrupt and violent intervention by the state in the regulation of people’s activities, and one that would put an end to economic anarchy and establish greater justice in the distribution of resources. He did not see property as an absolute right, because it was a right that needed to be regulated in a way that would do away with its sovereign and irresponsible nature and prevent it from coming into conflict, as it so often did, with the ethical value of personality and consequently with the greater good of the community.

ACTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

· «O determinismo e a apatia nacional», Alma Nacional, nº 8, 1910

· «O orgulho e a utopia», Alma Nacional, nº 18, 1910

· «A Arte é Social?», A Águia, Series 1, n^os 2 and 3, 1910-1911

· «A educação moral em Portugal», Alma Nacional, nº 6, 1910

· «Ao Povo - A «Renascença Portuguesa», A Vida Portuguesa, nº 22, 1914

· «A situação política», A Águia, nº 2, Series 2, February 1912

· «Da Ditadura à suspensão dos direitos políticos», A Águia, nº 43, Series 2, July 1915

· «O fascismo e as suas repercussões em Portugal», Seara Nova, nº 77, March 1926

· «A Ditadura - História e análise de um crime» Panfletos I, Lisbon, 1926

· «Do Estado Absoluto e do Estado Liberal» Seara Nova, nº 231

· «Palavras dum vencido» Alma Nacional, nº 23, 1910

· «A filosofia de Epicuro e a concepção heróica da vida», Anais das Bibliotecas e Arquivos, nº 4, Oct./Dec. 1920

· «O problema religioso», Seara Nova, nº19, 3-11-1926

· «Sobre a existência de Deus e a lealdade da consciência», Seara Nova, nº 40, 1925

· «O Evangelho contra o Evangelho e o Mundo Cristão contra o Cristianismo», Seara Nova, nº 648, 1940

· «O progresso e as doutrinas científicas», Seara Nova, nº 10, 1922

· «Da defesa da Democracia (1ª parte)», Seara Nova, nº 182, 1929

· «Os Letrados e a Democracia», Seara Nova, nº 126, 1928

· «Sobre a teoria do eterno retorno», Seara Nova, nº 555, 1938

· Antologia, 2 volumes, organised by António Reis, Lisbon, 1985.

Although there are very few works about Raúl Proença, the following are the most important:

· Sant'Anna Dionísio, O Pensamento Especulativo e Agente de Raúl Proença, Lisbon, 1949

· Joel Serrão, «Aproximação do pensamento de Raúl Proença» Seara Nova, nº 1512, 1971

· Sottomayor Cardia, «Raúl Proença e a responsabilidade do intelectual», Seara Nova, nº 1428, 1964

· António Reis, «O pensamento filosófico de Raúl Proença», Prelo, nº13, 1986

· Jacinto Baptista, Jaime Cortesão, Raúl Proença: Idealistas no Mundo Real, Lisbon, 1990.

© Instituto Camões, 1998-2001