Part 14
For the fact is that the sciences, important to us as they are and indeed indispensable for our life and thought, are in a certain sense more extraneous to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end, that is to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are, at bottom, a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called theoretical, is like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine, the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing that is useful for something. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she, what is she useful to us for? A man takes an electric tram to go to hear an opera and asks himself: Which is in this case more useful, the tram or the opera?
Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to an activity. But in fact this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or of not understanding the world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And this, like everything affective, has subconscious, perhaps unconscious, roots.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
Man, they say, is a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps the crab also resolves equations of the second degree inwardly.
And thus in a philosopher what must most concern us is the man.
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Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to each man, to each “I.” What is this idol--call it Humanity or call it what you will--to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those who come after them, and so on in a never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this sacrifice?
Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live. And what is this right to live? They tell me that I have come into the world to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.
Yes, yes, I see it all--an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, an accumulation of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, with museums, with libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will endure--for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
“Why!”--the reader will exclaim--“we are getting back to what the Catechism says: ‘Q. For whom did God create the world? A. For man’?” Precisely--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it took account of these matters and were a person, conscious of itself, would reply: “For the ant,” and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness, for each consciousness.
A human soul is worth all the universe, someone has said--I know not who, but it was excellently well said. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life. Not this life. And it is a fact that the less a man believes in the soul, that is to say, in his conscious immortality, personal and concrete, the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory life. Hence arises the effeminate sentimental feeling against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but it is the other, the eternal death, that he ought not to wish. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say “whosoever will save his soul,” the immortal soul--the soul that we believe and wish to be immortal.
And all those definers of objectism do not realize, or rather do not wish to realize, that a man, in affirming his “I,” his personal consciousness, affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have consciousness is that of man.
The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling is born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are the same thing fundamentally.
If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light and joy in giving them light and so live. And it would think well.
And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap[7] of which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.
It is possible that someone will discover that everything that I am saying rests upon a contradiction, since sometimes I express a longing for immortality and at other times I say that this life does not possess the value that is attributed to it. Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes and of my head that says No. Of course there is contradiction. Who does not recollect those words of the Gospel: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”? Contradiction? Of course! For we only live upon contradictions and by them; life is tragedy, and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the hope of victory; life is contradiction.
It is a question, as you see, of an affective value, and against affective values reasons do not avail. For reasons are nothing more than reasons, that is to say, they are not even truths. There are definition-mongers--pedants by nature and by grace--who produce an effect upon me like that of a man who consoles a father for the loss of a son, dead in the prime of his life, by saying: “Patience, friend, we all must die.” Would you think it strange if this father were irritated by such an ineptitude? For it is an ineptitude. How often may it not be said--
_para penser cual tú, sólo es preciso_ _no tener nada más que inteligencia?_[8]
There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain or with whatever other organ may be the specific organ for thinking; while others think with the whole body and with the whole soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain become definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you know what a professional is....
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything rather than a philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is to say, a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any science--of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology--may be, though within very narrow limits and restrictions, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy, like poetry, is either a work of integration and harmony or else it is mere philosophism, pseudo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowing for the sake of knowing is, say what you will, nothing but a solemn begging of the question. We learn a thing either for an immediate practical end, or in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the ideas that appear to us most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answer to an intellectual necessity, which is also a real necessity, to a principle of unity and continuity of consciousness. But just as scientific knowledge has its finality in the rest of our knowledge, the philosophy which we may be forced to choose has another extrinsic finality--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude towards life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy is that of reconciling intellectual necessities of the heart and the will. For it is just here that every philosophy that claims to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction that is the very basis of our existence breaks down. But do all men confront this contradiction?
Little can be hoped for from a ruler, for example, who has not been preoccupied at some time or other, even if only in some dim way, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and, above all, of men, with their first “why” and their ultimate “wherefore.”
And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must be affective. It is not enough to think about our destiny, it must be felt. And the would-be leader of men who says and proclaims that he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, does not deserve to lead them. Which does not mean, of course, that any determinate solution is to be required of him. Solution? Is there, indeed, any?
For my part, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who has not a real conviction that the leader of a people is a leader of men--men of flesh and bone; men who are born, suffer, and, although they may not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who have to be themselves and not others; men, in short, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation following when there is no regard for the destiny of those sacrificed--not merely for their memory, for their names, but for themselves.
All this idea that a man lives in his children, or in his works, or in the universe, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity and who may, for the rest, be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess a great talent or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as far as the feelings are concerned, and even morally imbecile. There have been instances.
Those who are mentally talented and affectively stupid usually say that it is useless to seek to delve into the unknowable or to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has been amputated that it is useless to think about it. And we all lack something; only some of us feel it and others do not. Or they pretend not to feel it, and then they are hypocrites.
There is something which, for want of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy, more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this sense does not flow from ideas but rather determines them, although afterwards, of course, these ideas react upon the sense and confirm it. Sometimes this sense may proceed from a casual illness--from dyspepsia, for example--but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak of men who are healthy and men who are unhealthy. Apart from there being no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And, further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, when compared with the ass or the crab, already a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess the tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René_, _Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men laden with wisdom rather than with knowledge.
And there are, I believe, also peoples who possess this tragic sense of life.
THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his essay “On the Immortality of the Soul” with these decisive words: “It appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and immortality.” Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal.
Kant, who took Hume as the starting-point for his criticism, attempted to establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief that it imports, and that is the real origin, the inward origin, of his “Critique of Practical Reason” and of his categorical imperative and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume remains unshaken. There is no way of rationally proving the immortality of the soul. There are, on the other hand, ways of rationally proving its mortality.
It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to explain here at length how far the individual human consciousness depends upon the organization of the body, how it comes gradually to birth according as the brain receives impressions from without, how it is temporally interrupted during sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that death carries with it loss of consciousness. And just as before our birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after our death we shall no longer be. This is the rational position.
Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not idealists be scandalized thereby.
The truth is--it is necessary to state it clearly--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the persistence of personal consciousness after death.
In another sense it may be said that, since we know what spirit is, and since matter is for us no more than an idea, materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or everything energy, or what you please. Every monist system will always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is something substantially distinct and different from other manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of understanding and explaining our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary.
All the attempts to substantivate consciousness, making it independent of extension--it will be remembered that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but sophistical subtleties intended to establish the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective reality to that which does not possess it, to that of which the reality exists only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal reality, it is a continuation of this life.
From whatever side we look at it, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And in strict truth, reason is the enemy of life. All that is vital is anti-rational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical.
Rationalists persist in endeavouring to convince men that there are motives for living and that there is a consolation for having been born, even though there must come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, illustrate the amazing affectional and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy that is resolved to sacrifice sincerity to veracity and not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power.
Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this idea of creating culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, divorced from all preoccupation with the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last end of everything, in four days or in four million centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this culture, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?
Many and various have been the rationalist devices--more or less rational--from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics, by means of which it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men--though the convincers were themselves unconvinced--that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined ultimately to disappear.
The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” or the Horatian _carpe diem_, which may be rendered by “Live for the day,” is not radically different from the Stoic attitude with its “Do what your conscience tells you, and afterward let it be as it may be.” Both attitudes have a common base, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake comes to the same thing as duty for duty’s sake.
It is true that there are people who assert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us not to seek to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in eternal personal life in order to find incentives to living and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from birth may also assure us that he feels no great desire to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing can be willed that is not previously known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or at some other point of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And this kind of blindness from birth is scarcely possible among men, except by a strange aberration. And the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration.
I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed once again the bankruptcy of science. For science, in so far as it is a substitute for religion, and reason, in so far as it is a substitute for faith, have always foundered. Science will be able to satisfy in an increasing measure, and in fact does satisfy, our increasing logical and intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, our hunger for immortality--far from satisfying it, it contradicts it. Rational life and truth stand in opposition to one another. And can it be that there is any other truth than rational truth?
It must remain established, therefore, that reason, human reason, within its limits not only does not prove rationally that the soul is immortal and that the human consciousness is through all the ages indestructible, but that it proves rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what we know by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which is all the same whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the _certum est, quia impossible est_. And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute incertitude.
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The vital longing for human immortality, therefore, finds no rational confirmation, nor does reason give us any incentive or consolation for living or give to life itself any real finality. But here, in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and the will and the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace fraternally. And it will be from this embrace, a tragic, that is to say a profoundly loving, embrace, that the fountain of life will flow, a life earnest and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the ultimate position at which reason arrives by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity--is the foundation upon which the despair of the vital sense must build its hope.
Disillusioned, we have had to abandon the position of those who seek to convert rational and logical truth into consolation, pretending to prove the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation; and we have had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to convert consolation and motives for living into rational truth. Neither of these positions satisfies us. The one is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. Peace between these two powers is impossible and we must live by their war. We must make of this war, of war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.
Faith in immortality is irrational. And nevertheless, faith, life and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not properly a problem, cannot be formulated in propositions capable of rational discussion; but it announces itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that throws itself upon its prey to devour it or upon the she-wolf to fecundate her, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies neither of which can maintain itself without the other. The irrational demands to be rationalized and reason alone can operate on the irrational. They are compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in conflict, for conflict is a mode of association.
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There is no possible permanent position of agreement and harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion. And the tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and making it resign itself to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its vital desires. And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion.