Part 12

I must repeat that throughout this work I am considering the teaching of Nietzsche (and Hegel’s too) insofar as it has become the pretext for a great moral preaching, though I know perfectly well that in reality this teaching is something far more complex. I shall quote the following judicious observation, in connection with the fact that certain philosophers have only themselves to blame for ‘the misunderstanding of their true thought’:

‘Nietzscheism has been subjected to the same test as Hegelianism. And no doubt here and there philosophical themes have served especially as pretexts to cover up a new offensive on the part of barbarism. _But the fact that they have been utilized, the manner in which they have been utilized, have a significance which must not be overlooked._ Is it not the criterion of a philosophy which may be called rational without reserve and equivocation, that it should remain incorruptibly faithful to itself? On the other hand, _the systems which begin by accepting contradictions, reserving the right to add that they are capable of surmounting them or of “living” them, lodge their enemy in their midst_. Their punishment is that their antithesis still resembles them; and that is what has happened to Nietzsche.’ (L. Brunschvicg, _Le Progrès de la Conscience dans la philosophie occidentale_, p. 431.) This book contains an excellent exposition of ‘Hegelian themes’ and ‘Nietzschean themes’, precisely insofar as they have become political breviaries.

Note L (Page 94)

_Long before the disciples of Taine and Auguste Comte._

When this book appeared in a periodical, certain persons declared that the whole of my attack on the modern ‘clerk’ went astray because I did not give more space to the author of _Origines de la France Contemporaine_. He, they said, was the ‘great realist “clerk” of the past fifty years, while those I attacked were only his small change.’ (This sudden contempt for the thought of Barrès and Maurras of the part of certain people is certainly surprising.)

There is here a manifest abuse of the word _realism_. Taine threw light on the true nature of the real, or rather the political real, and reminded the universalist that this domain is not under his jurisdiction. He never _exalted_ this real at the expense of the universal, which is the realism I am denouncing here. He plainly taught, on the contrary, that the universalist who stays in his own domain (see his admiration for Spinoza and Goethe) is the great human model. Compare this with Maurras for whom the universalist, even when non-political (the infinitist, the pantheist) is profoundly contemptible. It is also difficult for me to see Taine as the godfather of those who glorify the soldier at the expense of the man of justice and the man of study,[182] who exhort the nations to cultivate their prejudices where they are ‘totally foreign to reason’ (Barrès) and who declare that the intelligence which cares nothing about what is social is the activity of a savage. I think Taine would cheerfully say of those who claim to derive from him the same thing that M. Bergson is reported to have said of some of his ‘disciples’: ‘These gentlemen are most original.’

Nevertheless, Taine seems to me to be the initiator of the modern realists in two points. The first is his condemnation of individualism, more exactly, of the moral liberty of the citizen (for this, at bottom, is the meaning of his regret for the old corporations, and, more generally, of his exhortation to form groups, which shape the individual’s soul, instead of allowing it to be autonomous as against the State); and the second, which is far more novel than the first among French teachers, is his condemnation of idealist education. The peroration of the ‘_Régime moderne_’ obviously establishes the whole educational argument of the _Déracines_ and _L’Étape_:--

‘Sometimes when he is with his intimates, as bitter and as overfatigued as he is, the young man is tempted to say to us: “By your education you induced us to believe that the world is made in a certain way. You deceived us. It is much uglier, stupider, dirtier, gloomier and harsher, at least to our sensibility and our imagination. You think they are over-excited and out of gear; well, if they are, it is your fault. That is why we curse and despise the whole of your world, and reject your pretended truths, which for us are lies, including those elementary and primary truths which you say are evident to common sense, and upon which you build your laws, your institutions, your society, your philosophy, your sciences and your arts.” That is what contemporary youth have been telling us aloud for fifteen years by their tastes, their opinions, their inclinations in literature, the arts and life.’

Against this manifesto in favour of a practical education, let me set this protest of a true descendant of Montaigne, Pascal and Montesquieu:

‘In his diatribe for the classical spirit and the primary truths of reason and philosophy which direct literary education of all kinds, Taine comes to use words similar to those of the adversaries of ancient literature,[183] of the general ideas which are inseparable from them, and of disinterested culture even. The only object would then be to prepare persons for an empirical world,[184] people taught to know the world as it is, and trained to make it continue as it now is. However, the school laws are too recent for one to be able decently to blame them for the evils of the age, and make them the cause of the hatred and scorn poured on society by those who are bored, enervate and out of their class. However, even if it were true that the comparison between the general principles of reason, morality and beauty, and empirical life engendered more disgust with the realities than it has done in the past, it would be a sad paradox to ask that this danger should be averted by banishing from education all elevated views and all idealism.’ (Renouvier, _Philosophie analytique de l’Histoire_, tome iv, p. 541.)

Note M (Page 95)

_This cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an acquisition of the nineteenth century._

This silliness of mind assumes another form, i.e. the belief (rigidly formulated by Maurras) that in politics you can find laws of cause and effect as certainly valid as those of weight or electricity. (‘Politics are a _science_.’) This is the superstition of science, held to be competent in all domains, including that of morality; a superstition which, I repeat, is an acquisition of the nineteenth century. It remains to discover whether those who brandish this doctrine believe in it or whether they simply want to give the prestige of a scientific appearance to the passions of their hearts, which they perfectly well know are nothing but passions. It is to be noted that the dogma that history is obedient to scientific laws is preached especially by partisans of arbitrary authority. This is quite natural, since it eliminates the two realities they most hate, i.e. human liberty and the historical action of the individual.

Note N (Page 98)

_Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that the gregarious is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is contemptible._

Note that what is new in this crusade against individualism (the great apostle of which is M. Maurras) is not the recognition that ‘the individual is only an abstraction’, that to a great extent, he is formed by his race, his surroundings, his nation, a thousand things which are not himself. The novelty is the cult for this servitude, the order given to mankind to submit entirely to it, the contempt shown for any attempt to get free from it. Once again this is the cult (so strange in French thinkers) for the _inevitable_ part of the human being, the hatred for its free part.

Note that those who to-day preach obedience of the mind, not only demand it from the uncultured masses but from the men of thought, _especially_ from the men of thought. The anti-individualists of the Dreyfus affair particularly opposed the independence of scientists, writers, and philosophers--‘the mad vanity of a few intellectuals’. Nevertheless, the most curious thing is not that they require this obedience, but that they obtain it. When M. Maritain declares that ‘everyone cannot philosophize and that, for men, the essential thing is to choose a master’, and when M. Maurras asserts that the function of most minds is to be ‘servants’ and to reflect the thought of some leader, these teachers find a number of men of thought to applaud and abdicate their liberty of mind in their favour. The thinkers of the eighteenth century said: ‘A religion is needed for the people.’ Those of our age say: ‘A religion is needed for ourselves.’ What Barrès wrote: ‘The part of the masters is to justify the habits and prejudices of France, so as best to prepare our children to take their place in the national procession,’ he certainly meant that he and his colleagues were to walk in this procession. Here we again come upon that thirst for discipline which I spoke of above and which seemed to me so worthy of remark in the descendants of Montaigne and Renan. The cause, I said, was their desire to belong to a ‘strong group’. In them it also arises from a feeling for the artistic value of regimenting a collection of men in a beautiful ‘procession’, and also from the joy felt by so many souls in being governed, if not having to make the effort to think for themselves--a most curious joy in so-called men of thought.

The cult for the collective soul, with all its violation of human consciousness, seems to me admirably denounced by a passage of Maine de Biran, quoted by M. L. Brunschvicg (op. cit., _La Sociologie de l’ordre_, p. 526):--

‘... According to M. Bonald, it is not the human mind, it is not the individual understanding which is the seat, the true subject of inherence of the nations or (universal) truths under discussion; but it is society, which, gifted with a kind of collective understanding different from that of individuals, was from its origin imbued with them through the gift of speech and by virtue of a miraculous influence exerted on the mass alone, independent of its parts. The individual, the man, is nothing; society alone exists; society is the soul of the moral world, it alone exists, while individual persons are only phenomena. Let those who can, understand this social metaphysics. If the author himself understands it clearly, then I am in the wrong. Then we must cease to talk of philosophy and recognize the nothingness of the science of intellectual and moral man, we must admit that all psychology based on the primitive fact of consciousness is simply false, and we must consider science itself as an illusion which perpetually deceives and misleads us by showing us everything, even our own existence, in a false and fantastic light.’

M. Brunschvicg very rightly adds: ‘The antithesis could not be stated more clearly. Either the primary fact of consciousness, or the primary fact of language; either Socrates or Bonald.’

Either Socrates or Bonald. Barrès and Maurras made their choice.

Note O (Page 118)

_... Péguy who admires philosophies to the extent that ‘they are good fighters.’_[185]

This determination to praise philosophers for their virtues of action rather than for their intellectual virtues is very frequent among men of thought to-day. In his _Souvenirs concernant Lagneau_, Alain, wishing to give as favourable a picture of his master as possible, praises his energy and his resolution at least as much as his intelligence. It is also very remarkable--although here literature only is in question--to see a professor of moral science (M. Jacques Bardoux) setting a special value on those French literary men who were soldiers, i.e. Vauvenargues, Vigny, Péguy. As to the men of letters themselves, I shall content myself with pointing out that one of them who is most applauded by his own colleagues recently declared that he chiefly admired d’Annunzio for his attitude as an officer, and expressed regret that he had returned to literature.[186] The Emperor Julian praised Aristotle for having said that he felt prouder of being the author of his _Treatise on Theology_ than he would have felt if he had destroyed the power of the Persians. One might still find soldiers in France who would agree with this judgment, but very few men of letters. Elsewhere (_Les Sentiments de Critias_, p. 206) I have attempted to give the history and the explanation of this desire (so curious in men of the pen) to exalt a warlike life and to scorn a sedentary life. Note that this characteristic is to be seen in contemporary writers long before the war of 1914, and that those who talk most about a warlike life are not always those who lead it.

The new thing, I repeat, is not that we see men of letters praising an active life and scorning a sedentary life; it is _the absence of naiveté, the dogmatic tone_. When Ronsard exclaims: ‘Good Gods, who would praise those who let life go by bent over books’;[187] when Bertrand de Born wishes that ‘no man of high lineage should have any thought but cutting off heads and arms’; when Froissart sings the glories of chivalry and casts his scorn in the faces of the bourgeois, no one will take these candid lyre-players, who like noble poses and do not even know that the word doctrine exists, for the ancestors of our grave professors of belligerent aesthetics. Moreover, I doubt whether the author of _Scenes and Doctrines of Nationalism_ would have condescended to be a descendant of these simple-minded persons.

I find scorn for the life of the mind clearly professed in a dogmatic tone, in a writer of the seventeenth century who frequently reminds one of certain modern authors by his efforts to humiliate the toga before the sword. (It is true that this writer was a gentleman of the very minor nobility.)

‘Certainly, there is no better way of relaxing the vigour of men’s courage than to occupy their minds with peaceful and sedentary exercises, and idleness cannot enter civilized States in a more subtle or dangerous disguise than that of literature. Lazy and idle persons have in part ruined commerce and agriculture, which are the cause of the weakness of our condition and the cowardice of our age.’ (J. L. de Balzac, _Le Prince_, 1631. He then admits literature and the sciences to the State insofar as ‘they strengthen and embellish the Mother-country’.)

On the other hand, a master from the great period of French literature writes a eulogy of the life of the mind at the expense of the active mind, which I hardly think would be accepted by many of the moderns who venerate that period (I am especially thinking of those who admire the thought of Georges Sorel).

‘In France great strength of character and width of mind are needed if a man is to reject offices and employments and thus consent to remain at home and do nothing. Scarcely anyone possesses sufficient merit to play this part with dignity, nor sufficient resources to fill up the void of time without what the vulgar call “business”. But the wise man’s idleness needs only a better name, and we ought to say that one who meditates, talks, reads and is calm, is working.’ (La Bruyère, _Du Mérite personnel_.)

Note P (Page 122)

_The ‘Manifesto of the Party of Intelligence’ (Figaro, 19th July, 1919)._

This manifesto, signed by fifty-four French writers, several of whom are among the teachers most respected by their fellow-citizens, is of the greatest importance to the present inquiry. In addition to the strange passage on the Church’s mission which I quoted above, it contains things like this:--

‘Nationalism, which the conceptions of the intelligence impose on political conduct as well as on the order of the world, is a reasonable, humane system, and French in addition.’

And further on:--

‘When a literature becomes national does it not acquire a more universal significance, a more humanly general interest?’

And again:--

‘We believe--and the world believes with us--that it is part of the destiny of our race to defend the spiritual interests of humanity.... We are solicitous for Europe and all the humanity remaining in the world. French humanity is the sovereign protector of this.’

And above all:--

‘Victorious France means to take her place again in the order of the mind, the only order whereby a legitimate domination may be exercised.’

Hence the desire to found (the manifesto itself underlines the words): ‘_The intellectual Federation of Europe and the world under the aegis of victorious France, the guardian of civilization._’

Victory under arms conferring the right to command in the intellectual order--that is professed to-day by French thinkers! One remembers the Roman writers, from whom these thinkers claim descent, who took as the leader of their minds Greece, which had been conquered by force of arms; one also remembers the German teachers of 1871 who also claimed intellectual hegemony for their ‘victorious’ nation, which they too claimed as ‘the guardian of civilization’.[188]

When this manifesto was published, somewhat similar reflections seem to have occurred to the mind of one of our great writers. In a letter concerning this document,[189] Marcel Proust deplores the proclamation of ‘a kind of “Frankreich ueber alles”, the policeman of the literature of all nations.’ As a true priest of the mind, he goes on: ‘Why take this peremptory attitude towards other countries in such matters as literature, where a man only reigns by persuasion?’ I am happy to take this opportunity to do homage to this true ‘clerk’, and to say that I know that there are still other writers in France beside those who only believe in the virtue of cold steel.

Note Q (Page 138)

_Those who base their judgments on their artistic sensibilities._

This artistic origin of the political attitudes of so many men of letters has been pointed out with great ability by M. Daniel Halévy in the case of M. Maurras. In an old article (_La Grande France_, 1902) M. Halévy quotes this beautiful passage from M. Maurras’s _Anthinéa_ on the walk of women carrying a clay pot balanced on their heads:--

‘The bosom swells and is modelled like a vase, it opens like a flower. The neck settles, the loins strain nervously. Their walk becomes graver and more supple, is measured with an inestimable sobriety; it unrolls in the mind like a piece of music. This living pillar moves, glides, advances, without being interrupted by any sudden jerk or any break. It follows the undulations of the ground, adapts itself to the slightest rises, and thus resembles the stem of a beautiful young tree set free from its roots, moving over the ground without leaving it for a fraction of an inch. An infinite multitude of half-pauses make the jerks imperceptible, or one is only conscious of their succession, a continual harmony which leaves its curves in the air....’

M. Daniel Halévy adds:--

‘I quote the whole passage because it gives the very idea of Charles Maurras. For his classical way of thought, things are beautiful, not from the shocks of feeling and passion, but from the form and rhythm which give them continuity, or rather existence in the human sense of the word. M. Charles Maurras applies this taste for form to the study of history, and that is the whole of his “sociology”.’

There could be no better definition of the type of man for whom things are good insofar as they satisfy his artistic sensibility. Let me place in opposition to him the exactly contrary type, leaving the reader to judge which of the two may claim to belong to ‘the intelligence’:--

‘... For the perfection of things should be measured by their nature alone, and things are not more or less perfect because they flatter or wound our senses.’ (Spinoza.)

_Footnotes_

[1] See Note A at the end of this book.

[2] It is to be noted that a little more than a century ago French working-men from different provinces frequently engaged in desperate fights among themselves. (See Martin Nadaud, _Mémoires de Léonard_, p. 93.)

[3] See Petit de Julleville, _La Comédie et les Moeurs en France au moyen age_, and André Le Breton, _Le Roman au XVIIe Siècle_.

[4] The great novelty is that to-day people accept the position that everything should be political, that they should proclaim it and take a pride in it. Otherwise it is perfectly obvious that men, shopkeepers, or poets, have not waited for the present time to try to get rid of a rival by political means. Remember how La Fontaine’s rivals kept him out of the Académie for ten years.

[5] As de Tocqueville profoundly remarks, these only occurred when a first improvement in his condition encouraged the man of the people to want more; i.e. towards the end of the eighteenth century.

[6] I am here speaking of Western Jews of the bourgeois class. The Jewish proletariat did not await our time to plunge into the feeling of its racial peculiarity. However, it does so without giving provocation.

[7] This was the notion expressed by Benedict XV when he told the poor ‘to take delight in the prosperity of elevated persons and to expect confidently their assistance’.

[8] For example, M. Paul Bourget’s _La Barricade_, where the author, a disciple of Georges Sorel, exhorts the bourgeoise not to leave to the proletariat the monopoly of class passion and violence. See also André Beaunier, _Les Devoirs de la Violence_ (quoted by Halperine-Kaminski in the preface to Tolstoi’s book, _The Law of Love and the Law of Violence_).

[9] ‘The phrase, _the sublime bourgeois_, which would have caused so much laughter twenty years ago, has now acquired for the French bourgeoisie a mystic plenitude owing to its fusion with the highest social and national values.’ (_Eloge du Bourgeois Français_, p. 284.)

[10] Let me define more precisely what is new here. In the seventeenth century the citizen already had the notion of national honour; Racine’s Letters would be sufficient to prove it (see a significant page in the _Mémoires_ of de Pontis, Book XIV); but he left it to the King to decide what this honour demanded; indignation like Vauban’s against the peace of Ryswick ‘which dishonours the King and the whole nation’, is a very exceptional emotion under the old _régime_. The modern citizen claims to feel for himself what is demanded by the national honour, and he is ready to rise up against his leaders if they have a different conception of it. This new development is not peculiar to the nations living under democratic systems; in 1911 the citizens of the German monarchy thought that the concessions made to their country by France in exchange for German abstention in Morocco were insufficient, and they were extremely angry with their Sovereign who had accepted these conditions which, in their opinion, were an insult to German honour. It may be asserted that the same thing would be true of France if she ever became a monarchy again and if the King took it upon himself to feel the interest of national honour in a different manner to his subjects. Moreover, this actually happened throughout the reign of Louis-Philippe.

[11] For example, the humiliation of Olmüts in 1805. It may be asserted that no democracy would have endured it, at least with the philosophy displayed by the King of Prussia and his government. On the other hand, is it necessary to stress the other dangers to peace which existed under the Kings? It is sufficient to quote Montesquieu’s remark: ‘The spirit of the Monarchy is war and aggrandisement.’