The Superstition OF LIFE
Among the many things that Westerners often blame the Eastern civilizations for are their fixity and stability; these characteristics amount in their eyes to a denial of progress, which indeed they are, as we readily admit; but to see a fault in this, one must believe in progress. For us, these characteristics show that these civilizations partake of the immutability of the principles upon which they are based, and that is one of the essential aspects of the idea of tradition. It is because the modern civilization is lacking in principle that it is eminently unstable. Besides, one should not imagine that the stability we speak of goes to the length of excluding all change; what it does is to reduce the change to being never more than an adaptation to circumstances, by which the principles are not in the least affected, and which may on the contrary be strictly deduced from them, if they are resorted to, not for themselves, but in view of a definite application; and that is the point of all the 'traditional sciences', apart from metaphysics which, as knowledge of the principles, is self-sufficing, for these sciences cover the range of all that may happen to proceed from the principles, including social institutions. It would also be wrong to confuse immutability with immobility; such misunderstandings are common among Westerners because they are generally incapable of separating conception from imagination, and because their minds are inextricably bound up with representations dictated by the senses; this is very obvious in such philosophers as Kant, who cannot however be ranked among the 'sensualists'. The immutable is not what is contrary to change, but what is above it; just as the 'supra-rational' is not the
'irrational'. There is every reason for distrusting the tendency to arrange things in artificial oppositions and antitheses, by an interpretation which is both systematic and falsely simple, arising chiefly from the inability to go further and resolve the apparent contrasts in the harmonious unity of a true synthesis. It is nonetheless true that there is very real opposition, from the point of view that we have in mind here as well as from many others, between East and West, at least as things are at present: there is divergence, but it should not be forgotten that this divergence is one-sided and not symmetrical, being like that of a branch which grows away from the trunk; it is the civilization of the West alone which, by going in the direction that it has followed throughout the last centuries, has become so remote from the civilizations of the East that between it and them there seems to be, as it were, no longer any common element, any term of comparison, or any meeting-ground for agreement and reconciliation.
The Westerner, or rather the modern Westerner (it is always the latter that we mean), shows himself to be essentially changeable and inconstant, as if vowed to ceaseless movement and agitation, and, what is more, to have no ambition to emerge from it; in a word, his plight is that of a being who is unable to find his balance, but who, in his inability to do so, will not admit that the thing is possible in itself or even desirable, going so far as to make his own impotence something to boast of. These changes which he is subject to and which he takes delight in without requiring that they should lead him to any end, because he has come to like them for their own sake, constitute in fact what he calls 'progress', as if it were enough simply to walk, quite regardless of direction, to be sure of advancing. As for the goal of his advance, he does not even dream of asking himself what it is; and the scattering of his forces amid the multiplicity which is the inevitable consequence of these changes without principle and without aim, and indeed the only consequence whose reality cannot be contested, he calls 'being enriched': that is yet another word which, in the gross materialism of the image that it calls up, is altogether typical and representative of the modern mentality. The need for outward activity carried to such a pitch, together with the love of effort for effort's sake, independent of the results
that can be got by it, is not at all natural to man, at least not to the normal man, according to the idea which has always and everywhere been accepted of him; but it has become in a sense natural to the Westerner, perhaps as a result of habit, which Aristotle says is like a second nature, but above all through the atrophy of the being's higher faculties, which goes necessarily with the intensive development of the lower elements. A man without means of extricating himself from agitation has nothing left but to be satisfied with it, just as a man whose intelligence stops short at rational activity finds such activity admirable and sublime; to be fully at ease in a limited sphere, whatever it may be, one must be blind to the possibility of there being anything beyond. The aspirations of the Westerner, alone of all mankind (we are not considering the savages, about whom it is, moreover, very difficult to know what to think), are as a rule strictly confined to the sensible world and to its dependencies, among which we include the whole order of feeling and a good part of the order of reason; no doubt there are praiseworthy exceptions, but we can only consider here the general and common mentality, such as is truly characteristic of the place and the period.
Another strange phenomenon may be noted in the intellectual domain itself, or rather in what is left of it, and this, which is only a particular case of the state of mind that we have just described, is the passion for research taken as an end in itself, quite regardless of seeing it terminate in any solution. While the rest of mankind seeks for the sake of finding and of knowing, the Westerner of today seeks for the sake of seeking; the Gospel saying, 'Seek and ye shall find,' is a dead letter for him, in the full force of this phrase, since he calls 'death' anything and everything that constitutes a definite finality, just as he gives the name 'life' to what is no more than fruitless agitation. This unhealthy taste for research, real 'mental restlessness' without end and without issue, shows itself at its very plainest in modern philosophy, the greater part of which represents no more than a series of quite artificial problems, which only exist because they are badly propounded, owing their origin and survival to nothing but carefully kept up verbal confusions; they are problems which, considering how they are formulated, are truly insoluble, but, on the other hand, no one is in the least anxious to solve them,
and they were created simply that they might go on indefinitely feeding controversies and discussions which lead nowhere, and which are not meant to lead anywhere. This substituting research for knowledge (and closely bound up with it is the remarkable abuse which consists in 'theories of knowledge' to which we have already called attention) is simply giving up the proper object of intelligence, and it is scarcely strange that in these conditions some people have come ultimately to suppress the very idea of truth, for the truth can only be conceived of as the end to be reached, and these people want no end to their research. It follows that there can be nothing intellectual in their efforts, even taking intelligence in its widest, not in its highest and purest sense; and if we have been able to speak of a 'passion for research', it is in fact because sentiment has intruded into domains where it ought never to have set foot. Of course we are not protesting against the actual existence of sentiment, which is a natural fact, but only against its abnormal and illegitimate extension; one must know how to put each thing in its place and leave it there, but this calls for an understanding of the universal order, which is beyond the reach of the modern world, where disorder is law. To denounce sentimentalism is not to deny sentiment any more than to denounce rationalism amounts to denying reason; sentimentalism and rationalism are both nothing more than the results of abuses, although the modern West sees them as the two extremes of an alternative from which it cannot escape.
We have already said that sentiment is quite close to the material world; it is not for nothing that the sensible and the sentimental are so closely linked by language, and, although they are not to be altogether confused with one another, they are only two modes of one and the same order of things. The modern mind faces almost exclusively outward, toward the world of the senses; sentiment seems inward to it, and it often seeks, in virtue of this, to oppose sentiment to sensation; but that is all very relative; and the truth is that the psychologist's 'introspection' itself grasps nothing but phenomena, or, in other words, outward and superficial modifications of the being; there is nothing truly inward and deep except the higher part of the intelligence. This will seem surprising to those who, like the
intuitionists of today, only know intelligence in its lower part, represented by the sensible faculties and by reason insofar as it turns its attention to the objects of sense, and believe it to be more outward than sentiment; but, in relation to the transcendent intellectuality of the Easterners, rationalism and intuitionism go closely together upon one and the same plane, and both stop short at the being's 'exterior', despite the illusions by which either conception believes that it grasps something of the being's interior nature. But when all is said and done, in neither of them is there ever any question of going beyond sensible things; they disagree simply on the methods to be put into practice for reaching these things, on how they are to be considered, and on which of their diverse aspects should come most to the fore: we might say that the ones prefer to insist on the 'matter' side, the others on the 'life' side. These are, in fact, the limitations which Western thought cannot throw off: the Greeks were unable to free themselves from form; modern Westerners seem above all powerless to extricate themselves from matter, and, when they try to do so, they cannot in any case get away from the domain of life. All these, life just as much as matter and even more so than form, are merely conditions of existence particular to the sensible world, so that they are all on one same plane, as we have just been saying. The modern West, save for exceptional cases, takes the sensible world as the sole object of knowledge; whether it prefers to attach itself to one or to the other of this world's conditions, or whether it studies it from this or that point of view, scouring it in no matter what direction, the domain in which its mind works continues nonetheless to be always the same. If this domain appears to become at all enlarged, it never does so to any real extent, even supposing that the appearance is not altogether illusory. There are moreover, bordering on the sensible world, various prolongations which also belong to the same degree of universal existence. According to whether a man has in mind this or that condition, among those which define this world, he may at times reach one or another of these prolongations, but he will remain nonetheless shut up in a special and determined domain. When Bergson says that the natural object of intelligence is matter, he is wrong in giving the name intelligence to what he means, and he does so through his ignorance
of what is truly intellectual; but he is substantially right if, by this faulty designation, he means no more than the lowest part of the intelligence, or, to be more precise, the use that is commonly made of it in the West of today. As for him, it is clearly and essentially to life that he attaches himself: the part played by 'élan vital' in his theories is well known, is also the meaning he gives to what he calls 'pure duration'; but life, whatever 'value' be attributed to it, is nonetheless inextricably bound up with matter, and it is always the same world that is being considered here, whether it is looked at with the eyes of an 'organicist' or 'vitalist' or, on the other hand, with those of a 'mechanist'. Only, when, of the elements which make up this world, the vital element is held to be more important than the material one, it is natural that sentiment should take precedence over so-called intelligence; the intuitionists with their 'mental contortions', the pragmatists with their 'inner experience', simply address themselves to the dark powers of instinct and sentiment, which they take for the being's very depth, and, when they follow their thought or rather their tendency to its conclusion, they end, like William James, in proclaiming the supremacy of the 'subconscious', by the most incredible subversion of the natural order ever chronicled in the history of ideas.
Life, considered in itself, is always full of change and ceaseless modification; it is, then, understandable that it should hold such fascinating sway over the outlook of the modern civilization, whose changefulness is also its most striking characteristic, obvious at first sight, even if one stops short at an altogether superficial examination. When a man is imprisoned like this in life and in the conceptions directly connected with it, he can know nothing about what escapes change, about the transcendent and immutable order, which is that of the universal principles; in this case there can no longer be any possibility of metaphysical knowledge, and we are always brought round again to this same conclusive statement of fact, which is the inevitable consequence of each of the modern West's characteristics. We say here change rather than movement, because the former word is wider in scope than the latter: movement is only the physical or rather the mechanical modality of
change, and there are conceptions which have in view other modalities that cannot be brought under the heading of movement, and which even hold these modalities to be more strictly 'vital' in character to the exclusion of movement in its ordinary sense, that is, as meaning just a change of position. There again, it would be wrong to exaggerate certain oppositions, since they only appear as such from a more or less limited point of view: for example, a mechanistic theory is, by definition, a theory that claims to explain everything by matter and movement; but if the idea of life were given its widest possible extension, movement itself could be made to fit into it, and it would be seen that the so-called opposed or antagonistic theories are, at bottom, much more equivalent than their respective partisans will admit; [1] there is scarcely any difference between the two except for a little more or a little less narrowness of outlook. In any case, a conception that gives itself out as a 'philosophy of life' is necessarily, then and there, a 'philosophy of becoming'; we mean that it is confined to this state, and cannot escape from it (to become and to change being synonymous), which leads it to situate all reality therein and to deny anything whatever outside or beyond it, since the systematic mind is so framed as to imagine that it comprises within its formulas the whole of the Universe; that is yet another formal negation of metaphysics. One such, among others, is evolutionism in all its forms, from the most mechanistic conceptions, including gross 'transformism', to theories like Bergson's; there is no room to be found there for anything except the state of becoming, and even then, strictly speaking, it is only a more or less limited part of this state that is kept in view. Evolution, all told, is nothing but change, backed up by an illusion with regard to the direction and quality of this change; evolution and progress are one and the same thing, to all intents and purposes, but the former term is often preferred today because it seems to give the impression of being more 'scientific'. Evolutionism is, as it were, a product of those two great modern superstitions, that of science and that of life, and its success
is made for the very reason that both rationalism and sentimentalism find full satisfaction in it; the variable proportions in which these two tendencies are combined account very largely for the diversity of forms in which this theory is clothed. The evolutionists see change everywhere, even in God himself when they admit him: Bergson is no exception when he imagines God as 'a center from which worlds shoot out, and which is not a thing but a continuity of shooting out'; and he added expressly: 'God thus defined has nothing of the already made; he is unceasing life, action, freedom.' [2] It is, then, nothing more nor less than these ideas of life and of action which our contemporaries are literally obsessed with, and which, as in the above case, intrude themselves into a domain that seeks to be speculative; in other words they suppress speculation in the interests of action, which encroaches everywhere and absorbs everything. This conception of a God in a state of becoming, who is only immanent and not transcendent, together with that (which amounts to the same) of a truth in the making, which is nothing more than a sort of ideal limit, devoid of all present reality, is by no means exceptional in modern thought; the pragmatists, who have adopted the idea of a limited God for chiefly 'moralist' motives, are not its original inventors, since what is held to develop must necessarily be conceived of as limited. Pragmatism, by its very name, poses above all as a 'philosophy of action'; its more or less avowed assumption is that man only has needs of a practical order, material ones and, together with these, sentimental ones. It means, then, the doing away with intellectuality; but, if this is so, why go on wanting to evolve theories? That is rather hard to understand; and if pragmatism, like skepticism, which it only differs from with regard to action, wished to conform to its own standards, it would have to limit itself to a mere mental attitude, which it cannot even seek to justify logically without giving itself the lie; but there is no doubt that it is very difficult to keep strictly within such bounds. However degraded a man may be intellectually, he cannot at least help reasoning, if only in order to deny reason; moreover the pragmatists do not deny it as the skeptics do, but they seek to reduce it to serving purely practical