Notes on Bergson and Descartes

Philosophy, Christianity, and Modernity in Contestation

Charles Péguy, Bruce K. Ward

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532650734, 9781532650741
• eBook ISBN: 9781532650758
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

Charles Peguy (1873-1914) was a French religious poet, philosophical essayist, publisher, social activist, Dreyfusard, and Catholic convert. There has recently been a renewed recognition of Peguy in France as a thinker of unique significance, a reconsideration inspired in large part by Gilles Deleuze's Difference et repetition, which ranked him with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In the English-speaking world, however, access to Peguy has been hindered by a scarcity of translations of his work. This first complete translation of one of his most important prose works, with accompanying interpretive introduction and notes, will introduce English-speaking readers to a new voice, which speaks in a powerful and original way to a modern West in a condition of cultural and spiritual crisis. The immediate circumstance of the writing of this last prose essay, unfinished at the time of Peguy's early death, was the placing of Henri Bergson's philosophical works on the Catholic Index, and Peguy's undertaking to defend his former teacher from his critics, both Catholic and secular. But the subject of Bergson is also a springboard for the exploration of the perennial themes--philosophical, theological, and literary--most central to Peguy's thought.

1

Introduction

In truth . . . it’s really a scandal; and so it’s a mystery; and it’s really the greatest mystery of the temporal creation: that the greatest works of genius are thus handed over to foolishness (our messieurs and dear fellow citizens); that for their temporal eternity they are . . . perpetually passed on, dropped, . . . delivered, abandoned into such hands, such poor hands: ours . . . . It is dreadful . . . to think that we have every license, that we have the exorbitant right, that we have the right to make a bad reading of Homer, to dethrone a work of genius, that the greatest work of genius is delivered into our hands. . . . And above all, that letting it fall from our hands . . . we can bring about its death through forgetfulness. What a dreadful risk, . . . what a dreadful adventure; and above all, what a dreadful responsibility.1

Charles Péguy was acutely aware of the responsibility and the risk inherent in the requirement, due to the historicity of human temporal existence, that all aspects of life—material, political, cultural, spiritual—depend on a continual handing on and renewal. Though he might not have been thinking of his own fate, his observation about the vulnerability of works of genius to being mishandled, badly read, or simply forgotten is certainly illustrated in his case. In his native France, Péguy’s oeuvre early fell victim to the left versus right, secular versus religious polemics that have so characterized French intellectual life in the twentieth century, and have tended to marginalize also other thinkers, such as Albert Camus and Simone Weil, who do not fit comfortably into the conventional categories of the progressives or conservatives. Péguy was not forgotten in France after his death in 1914 so much as he was dismissed by convenient association—with the Action Française and its brand of conservative nationalism. This dismissal is comparable to the early dismissal of Nietzsche as a prophet of German national socialism or of Dostoevsky as a reactionary Orthodox apologist for Russian imperialism. Much more profound readings of Nietszche and Dostoevsky have long been in practice, and there are definite signs that a more adequate reading of Péguy is underway in France. In addition to scholarly commentaries that might be cited, one could point to the widely discussed recent novel by Michel Houellebecq, Submission, in which Péguy’s poem Ève is declaimed at length by one of the characters (to whom the author is clearly not unsympathetic), and Péguy’s Christian vision is upheld as a possible, if unlikely, option for the reanimation of a France torn between nihilistic secularism and growing Islamization.2

The reception of Péguy in the English-speaking world has not been so markedly characterized by bad reading, or even by forgetfulness, since his work has been little known at all. This betokens the potential for a fresh reading, unencumbered by the ideological baggage associated with his work in his native France. Péguy’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual itinerary renders him an outsider: a peasant who attended the elite École Normale in Paris, a Dreyfusard and socialist who converted to Catholicism, a poet and philosopher, essayist, polemicist, and publisher, a patriotic Republican and an admirer of the medieval saint Joan of Arc—and staunchly fervent in all of these commitments. To those who saw contradiction and inconsistency, especially between his Christianity and his socialism, he responded that his position came, rather, out of a steady approfondissement of what was given in both traditions. Péguy defies any easy conventional categorization, remaining now, as he was for his contemporaries, a mécontemporain. But as Charles Taylor has remarked, it is Péguy’s unique kind of spiritual itinerary that is most significant for our age, beset as it is by a universal “fragilization” of belief: “Charles Péguy is a paradigm example of a modern who has found his own path, a new path. . . . We can see how Péguy confused his contemporaries, and was almost impossible to place. This left socialist Dreyfusard, a believer in revolution and in the Republic, passionately insisted on the need to root one’s action in the millennial, including Catholic, past of France. So is he a reactionary? But he also passionately denounced the clerical anti-Dreyfusard party, precisely for their desire to re-impose old forms: monarchy, clerical dominance, in their outmoded form, without ever considering how the tradition had grown and changed.”3 The very qualities that have rendered Péguy’s work so vulnerable to mis-readings render it at the same valuable to a Western modernity in a state of cultural and spiritual crisis that goes far beyond the conventional polemics of left versus right, progressive versus conservative. Perhaps above all, he offers us a way to come to terms with the past that neither rejects it outright nor attempts to reproduce it mechanically, but rather points to a creative appropriation of tradition. This, however, is not the place to make a case for Péguy. That case can only be made convincingly by his work itself. Always admiring of those with the courage to measure their ideas against the best of others’, this is how he would want it.

Péguy’s writing is so little known in the English-speaking world largely because it has been so little translated. Some of his major poetry is available in excellent translations,4 but with one notable exception, none of his considerable body of prose essays has had anything like a complete translation.5 For those unable to read Péguy in French, the essay offered here will signal a new voice in regard to questions of politics, literature, philosophy, and religion—some specific to his time, but most, perennial. The voice will be fresh, but also sometimes disconcerting, and not always easily accessible. One reason that Péguy has been so little translated is the extremely challenging style of his original French. The French writer, François Mauriac, on being told of a projected English translation of one of Péguy’s works, remarked that he wished someone would first translate it into French, a remark aimed not at the quality but at the unique difficulty of the writing, and a remark that can only inspire a certain trepidation in the would-be translator. Some of the difficulty is obviated by keeping in mind that Péguy was first and foremost naturally a poet, who thought and wrote like a poet, even when writing prose, and even prose about philosophy. Awareness of the poetics integral to Péguy’s thought and style must be brought to bear on that constant challenge facing any translator: achieving a just balance between readability and fidelity to the text. Péguy’s prose, with its tendency, as in his poetry, towards continual repetition-with-variations, presents the translator with a strong temptation to prune, reduce, or smooth out for the sake of readability. I have resisted this temptation precisely because, in Péguy’s case, the style is not merely a subjective quirk, but an integral expression of ideas about time, human freedom, and creation that are central to his thought. In this regard, it seems only right that the English-speaking reader of his prose should share the experience of the French reader. My decision for fidelity to the text and therefore to the author’s thought, entails a translation that attempts as much as possible to imitate rather than re-package the original. This might mean that more effort is required of the reader, but together with this effort, the assurance of closer proximity to Péguy’s original work and his intentions for this work. While in an endeavor so fraught with pitfalls as translation, “success” must be a relative term, I would consider this translation a success if the reader comes away from it with the sense that she has heard Péguy’s voice rather than the translator’s, a sense that might well be induced by those jolts sometimes occasioned by the strangeness of a style and thought that are anything but “ready-made.”

As the French philosopher Pierre Manent has noted, access for non-French readers to the thinking of Péguy can be especially challenging because “nearly everything he wrote about is buried deep in French history . . . linked to an explicitly French perspective.”6 However, the ostensible subjects of this particular essay, Bergson and Descartes, are well-known outside France; furthermore, Péguy’s concern with questions of philosophy and religion that transcend the particularities of time and place will quickly become evident to the reader. Yet the incarnational (or as he would put it, “temporally eternal/eternally temporal”) nature of his thought itself means that he comes at the eternal or universal through the particularities of the temporal7—and these particularities are for him primarily those of his native France. Therefore, the non-French reader will be in need of some explanatory notes. I have tried to keep these notes to the minimum required for understanding Péguy’s argument, striving to avoid as much as possible the interposition of excessive scholarly apparatus between the thoughtful reader and the actual text. The notes are thus limited to translation of Péguy’s citations, which are frequent, from other languages, primarily Latin and Greek, and the identification where appropriate of their source; to the identification of people, places, and events alluded to in the text, both contemporary with Péguy and from earlier history, where these might not be already familiar to the reader; and to some miscellaneous items of information for which the reader might be grateful. On occasion, too, I will note Péguy’s use of a French term, if it is unusual (or invented); but, with very few exceptions, I have refrained from pointing out the many plays on words, unfortunately almost always untranslatable, with which the text abounds.

The French edition of Péguy used for this translation of his last major prose work, the “Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne” and “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne,” is the Oeuvres en prose complètes III (1992), the third volume of the magisterial Gallimard Pléiade edition of his prose writings, which contains all the scholarly apparatus of notes, variants, index, chronology, and bibliography indispensable to those who might wish to pursue the detailed study of Péguy’s entire oeuvre. My own explanatory footnotes owe much to the notes of the third volume’s editor, Robert Burac.

Background

Péguy’s last major prose essay arose most immediately out of his concern to defend the philosopher Henri Bergson, who was about to be placed on the Catholic Index. The issue of the Index was, however, merely the most publicly visible culminating point of a deeper well of criticism that had been developing for years, indeed, virtually in tandem with Bergson’s growing fame and influence in France and beyond, which reached its high point from 1907 to 1914. This criticism came from both the left and the right in France. On the more or less “official” left were the academic intellectuals, especially the historians, sociologists, and scientists of the Sorbonne...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword: Charles Péguy and the Betrayal of Time
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Note on Bergson and the Bergsonian Philosophy
• Chapter 3: Conjoined Note on Descartes and the Cartesian Philosophy
• Appendix: “The Secret of the Man of Forty”
• Bibliography