Action (1893)

Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice

Maurice Blondel, Oliva Blanchette

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1984
• Print ISBN: 9780268021771
• eBook ISBN: 9780268158958
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Action was once a prominent theme in philosophical reflection. It figured prominently in Aristotelian philosophy, and the medieval Scholastics built some of their key adages around it. But by the time Maurice Blondel came to focus on it for his own philosophical reflection, it had all but disappeared from the philosophical vocabulary. It is no longer possible or legitimate to ignore action in philosophy as it was in France when Blondel appeared on the scene in 1882, when at the age of 21 he first began to focus on action as a dissertation subject, and in 1893, when he defended and published the dissertation now presented here for the English reader.

Part I

Is There a Problem of Action?

CHAPTER 1
How We Claim the Moral Problem Does Not Exist

There are no problems more insoluble than those that do not exist. Would that be the case with the problem of action, and would not the surest means of resolving it, the only one, be to suppress it? To unburden consciences and to give life back its grace, its buoyancy and cheerfulness, wouldn’t it be good to unload human acts of their incomprehensible seriousness and their mysterious reality? The question of our destiny is terrifying, even painful, when we have the naïveté of believing in it, of looking for an answer to it, whatever it may be, Epicurean, Buddhist or Christian. We should not raise it at all.

Granted, it is not all as simple as we imagine it to be at first; for abstention or negation is still a solution; and nimble minds have long since recognized the trickery of neutral or free thought.–To pronounce oneself for or against is equally to let oneself get caught in the gears and be crushed in them completely. It matters little what one is, what one thinks and what one does, if one is, if one thinks and if one acts; one has not made the weighty illusion vanish. There remains a subject before an object; the idol may have changed, but the cult and the adorer remain.–To avoid taking a stand, believing one can succeed in doing so, is another shortsighted illusion. We must in effect reckon with this constraint which, as a matter of experience, perpetually forces us to act. There is no hope of escaping it, even by fighting against it, even through inertia; for a prodigious energy is spent in asceticism, more than in the violent movements of passion; and activity takes advantage of all oversights and abdications as well as all efforts made to reduce it. Inaction is a difficult craft: otium (idleness)! How much delicacy and skillfulness it requires; and can one ever arrive at it completely?

Will there really be a wisdom refined enough to disentangle the subtleties of nature and give in to it in appearance, since we have to give in, while at the same time liberating itself from its cunning lies?

To be duped without knowing it, that is the ludicrous misfortune of the earnest, the passionate, the barbaric. But to be duped knowing that one is, while lending oneself to the illusion, while enjoying everything as a vain and amusing farce; to act, as it is necessary to do so, but all the while killing action with the dryness of science, and science through the fecundity of dreaming, without ever finding contentment even in the shadow of a shadow; to annihilate oneself with erudition and delight, will that not be the salvation known and possessed by the better and the more informed minds, the only ones who will have the right to say they have resolved the great problem, because they will have seen that there is none?

What an enticing tour de force and a useful tactic! It is good to have a close look at it and appreciate its end. For to suppress everything, it is important and apparently sufficient to be all science, all sensation and all action. In making one’s thought and one’s life equal to the universal vanity, one seems to fill oneself only to become more empty. And if in effect there is no problem and no destiny, is not the simplest and the surest way of finding out, to abandon oneself to the free flow of nature by stepping out of the fictions and the confining prejudices in order to rejoin the movement of universal life and to attain, through all the powers of reflexion, the fruitful peace of unconsciousness?¹

I

To begin with, let us gather from the fine flower of thought all the subtle and deadly essence it distills.

There is no error, it is said, that does not have a soul of truth; there is no truth, it seems, that does not carry a weight of error. To stop at any particular judgment and hold fast to it would be pedantry and naïveté. To maintain a clear and fixed attitude, to believe that “it has happened,” to dirty one’s hands, to tangle with men, to contend for position, to do that nasty thing expressed by that nasty phrase: assert oneself, conscientiously to introduce a rigid unity into the organism of one’s thought or the conduct of one’s life, bah! What a ridiculous narrowness, how enormously boorish! All the philosophical systems, even those most opposed to one another, have been caught in the same trap: they have always looked for the relation between being and knowing, between the real and the ideal, and they thought they could define it. The ontological argument is found at the heart of every dogmatism, even the one that is sceptical: about the Unknown it is known that it cannot be known. About Pessimism one can say that it is still an optimism since it has a doctrine and offers a goal. To affirm that nothingness is, what a pleasant joke, and how happy one must be when one knows that being is not, and that not to be is the supreme good! Blessed hopeless people who have met their ideal, without seeing that, if it is, it is no longer and that, by rushing toward it, they play the game of that ironic nature which they boast they have confounded. Not only is every monism an error, that is, every doctrine that claims to reduce the principle of intelligibility and the principle of existence to a unity, but so too is every system, by the simple fact that it is a system, just as every action inspired by a fixed conviction is an illusion.

Hence there is truth only in contradiction, and opinions are certain only if we change them. But one must not make of contradiction itself and of indifference a new idol. In openmindedness, one will even practice intolerance in order to savor the charms of narrowness of mind. At one time, one will be enchanted with the acrobatics of a transcendental dialectic, at another, disdaining the weight of even a light armor, one will mock those clods who, with their helmets on, do battle according to the book in hand to hand combat with the wind. Through history, to belong to all times and to all races; through science, to be in all space and to be the equal of the universe; through philosophy, to become the field for the interminable battle of systems, to bear in oneself idealism and positivism, criticism and evolutionism, and to feast on the carnage of ideas; through art, to be initiated to the divine grace of serious frivolities, to the fetichism of advanced civilizations; what pleasant efforts to give oneself to everything without giving anything, to hold in reserve this inexhaustible power of a spirit now sympathetic now destructive, to weave and to unravel without cease, like Penelope, the living garment of a God who will never be! One kneels before all altars, and one gets up smiling to run off to new loves; for a moment one subjects oneself to the letter in order to penetrate into the sanctuary of the spirit. If, before the grandeur of the mystery that covers everything, one feels something like a chill of religious dread, quickly one runs for cover behind the thick certitudes of the senses. One uses brute certitudes to dissipate dreams, dreams to sublimate science, and all becomes nothing more than figures drawn in air. One knows that there are inevitable reactions against any abuse of the positive, and one lends oneself to it devoutly, neither more nor less disposed to venerate the retort of the chemist than to prostrate oneself before the ineffable splendor of the nothingness disclosed to the soul. Some take pleasure in mixing the extremes and in bringing together in one single state of consciousness eroticism and mystical asceticism; some, by means of sealed compartments, develop along parallel lines the double role of alcoholic and idealist. One after the other, or at one and the same time, one tastes, one loves, one practices different religions and one savors all the conceptions of heaven through a dilettantism of the future life.

At times even this undulating and diverse wisdom feigns to overlook itself in order better to dispel the odious appearance of a system, in order to keep, through its incurable nimbleness, the pleasure of anxiety or risk. One flatters oneself, but without contention and blithely hopeful, for having avoided forever the troubling questions, the tormenting answers, the menacing sanctions. One does not assert nothingness to be more certain of not encountering being, and one lives in the phenomenon which is and is not. Don’t try to tell these clever people that underneath their free play and the suppleness of their fleeting attitudes is hidden a prejudice, an original method, an answer to the problem of destiny, and certain involuntary preoccupations: that’s false, one does not run away from what is not. Don’t repeat for them the banal objection that the absence of a solution is still a solution: that’s false. Do not question them, do not press them: no question makes sense, because every response is false, if one does not sense in it the inevitable lie. What shade is a pigeon’s neck? The thought expressed is already a deceit. If they entertain all curiosities it is to be freer to steer clear of any indiscrete questioning; long since have they seen through the vanity of discussions, and have learned always to agree with whoever contradicts: to refute anyone or anything whatsoever is a Philistinism of the worst kind. To be neither offensive nor defensive, for one playing at loser-wins that is the art of being unbeatable.

And that is the true panacea. It counterbalances the rigor of the positive sciences with mystical effusion and, mixing into one and the same crucible the old idol of clear ideas and the fresher beauty of the noumenon, the unconscious and the unknowable, it anoints the classical spirit with the oil of suppleness. To arid minds, it provides a varied abundance; to the narrow, breadth; to the doctrinaire, doubt; to the fanatics, irony; to cold impiety, an aroma of incense; to materialism, an ideal. Thanks to this panacea, admire how our time, after having kissed one cheek of centuries past, slaps them on the other. Give it credit for treating with proper contempt some of those inanely witty objections that charmed Voltaire, for accepting and surpassing all the reversals of opinion, for wearing out its cults so fast that some now revert to those of India and, before the end of the century, some will claim to turn even Catholicism itself into a new and fashionable adornment, for expecting a kind of perpetual renaissance, and for making the need for a flexible and firm rule grow out of the taste for anarchy. Take pleasure in seeing rise, as once in Alexandria, amidst the confusion of ideas and bazaars and from under the oppression of material pleasures and sufferings, an intense breath of mysticism and a passion for the marvelous. Be proud of your brow, enlarged to comprehend more than one beauty, to embrace all the infinite variety of thoughts, the logic of contraries, the new geometry, nature conquered. But behind this glitter, this generosity, this display, you will take pleasure in considering the vanity of a science that enjoys vanity, you will be amused at the ridiculous spectacle of ambitions, of business, of systems. And in the midst of all the entertaining follies of the world, you will exult as you feel in your heart, as you size up with your eye the infinite emptiness of what is called living and acting.

Thus thought, through the double weapon of universal sympathy and pitiless analysis, manages to play with nature as it plays with us. Beati qui ludunt (blessed are those who play): a game, that is the wisdom of life; a game, but a noble and poignant one, which is sometimes to be taken seriously so that it may be a better game, and more, of an illusion winning against all illusions. You, Poor Nature with the thousand faces, you seem to cast about ingeniously to vary the bait for all credulities through a perpetual generation of contraries; it is enough to nibble at every lure and give ourselves over to all your Protean caprices for you to be poisoned by your own tricks and vanquished in your triumph. The more we embrace you, the better we escape you; by becoming all that you are, we place a gnawing worm at the heart of everything; we volatilize ourselves along with all the rest, squeezing between heaven and hell in a crisscross of contradictions. With the same respect and the same disdain for the yes and for the no, it is good to lodge them together and let them devour one another; irony and goodwill, it is all the same, the universal master-key, the universal solvent. One cannot know and affirm everything without denying everything; and the perfect science of the aesthete vanishes of itself in the absolute vanity of all.

The speculative problem of action seems well eliminated. Will the practical problem be equally suppressed?

II

By itself the dilettantism of art and science does not suffice for long; it is soon complemented by the dilettantism of sensation and action. For it is generally not enough anymore for the head to reveal to the imagination the universe of sentimental experience; indeed, there is nothing like a man devoted to the ideal for paving the way for the practitioner of the senses and to end up envying him and following him. But is there not in calculated depravity the principle of an art and even of a science that no speculative fiction could equal? And if a desire for unknown emotions seems to be the common law of literary intoxication, there is, on the other hand, also hidden in practical dissoluteness, a source of dissolving discoveries and thoughts. Is not the best way of making the mind flexible and emancipating it from the narrow prejudices that limit its horizon on life to go beyond them and, in order to understand everything, to come to feel everything? One less depraved is thought to be less intelligent.

Not that one should ruin the superstition of shame or even of piety. The damage would be great because the fun and the love of evil are perfect only thanks to the tang of internal contradiction and to the savor of the forbidden fruit, as for those courtesans who preserve the spice of a prie-Dieu. It enlivens enjoyment when we make of it a synthesis of opposed feelings and experience therein, through the variety of contacts and contrasts, something like the multiple caress of a fine and voluminous hair. “His soul elevated to the seventh heaven, his body more humble under the table,” the mystical libertine, “a Christian poet with the flanks of a faun,” he it is who will discover how purifying adultery can be, or savor all the voluptuousness there is in corrupting a virgin soul.

But these learned contrasts of sensation serve not only to refine it; they decompose it and kindle it only to consume it. By insinuating the most exquisite delicacy and the most impure ardor at one and the same time into the same heart, they hasten the dispersion and, so to speak, the agony of the moral person. No more simple and sincere feelings: nothing real, indeed nothing either good or bad. If to know everything annihilates in one blow the object and the subject of knowledge, to feel everything brings this marvelous work of science to completion in practice.

How, then, vary and multiply our sensations enough to escape the disappointing truth of simple impressions and the deceiving lucidity of life? A less well advised wisdom no doubt would recommend the ataraxy of the universal dreamer, who does not engage in action in order to scoff while renewing himself more freely, and who enjoys the world like a grain of opium whence he draws the smoke of his dreams, and life like the shimmering shadow of mist by moonlight. If he had to choose between irony and fanaticism according to the abundance of pleasure he can expect from one or the other, he would perhaps listen to the call of that voluptuous laziness that dreads the stains and the transports of action. A false wisdom that, still too timid, and outmoded! See how today, with infinitely powerful gifts for analysis, the more delicate aspire to action, as if they sought “to reconcile the practices of interior life with the necessities of active life”; see even how, without renouncing the supreme irony of criticism, people applaud whoever seems to be daring enough to have a trenchant opinion and gives the impression of one about to penetrate minds like a sharp wedge through a rigorous clarity and a vigor of conviction!

The fact is that there is in practice an inexhaustible source of new sensations, contradictions, and disappointments; the most generous action can be a deprivation, one more destruction. The essential then is to “mechanize” one’s soul so that it will produce at will all known emotions, to be relentlessly agitated with the most interesting and passing enthusiasms, and to light up each night with new universes like happy circuses where one performs for oneself decked out in high style: a superior form of vagabondage where one takes pride in feeling a whole life going to waste in contemptible occupations, a science of self-liquidation that one is happy to possess by finding it admirable and shameful.

To tell the truth, to act this way is less to act than to set up experiences of practical scepticism and, through this “essayism in action,”¹ to become drunk on the powerful poison that kills, not individual life, since it is not real, but the illusion of life. Sensual egoism keeps everything for itself, it is the last word of a past that is dying; fanaticism, on the other hand, represents the first word of the future. It is this double state that the voluptuous ascetic sums up in his present: for him, action as a whole is the end of a world and the beginning of a new world. In all his palinodes, he is always dying only to rise again, and rises only to die again, to destroy better the variety of his own artistic emotions and to construct more different worlds, to feel more how everything is unrealizable, everything is unreal, and to adore, in these very chimera, the eternity of what is forever dying in him and through him. Always ready to reverse his judgment, always busy at moving and fragmenting himself, all routes are equally good and certain to him, even the ill-famed roads that lead to Damascus; all meetings are to him equally attractive and instructive. He sinks deeper into his dream without fearing that little by little a regular sequence of images or a sudden impulse born of the dream itself will wake him up. What does he have to fear, since the more he collides with the real and learns from it, the more he experiences its nullity?

Also, immediately after the aesthete seemed, with a sort of sensual irritation, to want to hold his dear idols tight in his arms, to preserve them from destruction and “to enjoy with a sensation stronger than the centuries what is in the process of dying,” he looks for a new formula through new experiences; and when he appears “raised on high to that total of emotions that is his self, that is his God,” when he succeeds “in living all his being, all past, present and future Being, by grasping it as Eternal,” then, no longer able, no longer willing to aspire to the absolute alone, he comes back down to those violent movements which are what he likes, because one thing remains which alone he cares about, that is to be fortified against disgust and atony, to still have needs, “to be carried off, through the divine Unconscious, by the gentle tug of desires which, propagated from an unlimited past toward an unlimited future, indiscriminately animates all those moving forms characterized as errors or tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maurice Blondel’s Philosophy of Action
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Translation
• Introduction
• Part I: Is There a Problem of Action?
• Part II: Is the Solution to the Problem of Action Negative?
• Part III: The Phenomenon of Action: How we try to define action through science alone and to restrict it to the natural order
• Part IV: The Necessary Being of Action: How the terms of the problem of human destiny are inevitably and voluntarily posited
• Part V: The Completion of Action: The end of human destiny
• Conclusion