The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

33 Contemporary Intuitionism

In the domain of philosophy and psychology, the tendencies corresponding to the second phase of anti-traditional action are naturally marked by the importance assigned to the ‘subconscious’ in all its forms, in other words to the most inferior psychic elements of the human being, something particularly apparent so far as philosophy properly so called is concerned in the theories of William James as well as in the ‘intuitionism’ of Bergson. The work of Bergson has been considered in an earlier chapter, in relation to the justifiable criticisms of rationalism and its consequences formulated therein, though never very clearly and often in equivocal terms; but the characteristic feature of what may be called (if the term be admissible) the ‘positive’ part of his philosophy is that, instead of seeking above reason for something that might remedy its insufficiencies, he takes the opposite course and seeks beneath it; thus, instead of turning toward true intellectual intuition, of which he is as completely ignorant as are the rationalists, he appeals to an imagined ‘intuition’ of an exclusively sensitive and ‘vital’ order, and in the very confused notions that emerge the intuition of the senses properly so called is mingled with the most obscure forces of instinct and sentiment. So it is not as a result of a more or less ‘fortuitous’ encounter that Bergson’s ‘intuitionism’ has manifest affinities, particularly marked in what may be called its ‘final state’ (and this applies equally to the philosophy of William James), with ‘neo-spiritualism’, but it is as a result of the fact that both are expressions of the same tendencies: the attitude of the one in relation to rationalism is more or less parallel to that of the other in relation to materialism, the one leaning toward the ‘sub-rational’ just as the other leans toward the ‘sub-corporeal’ (doubtless no less unconsciously), so that the direction followed in both cases is undoubtedly toward the ‘infra-human’.

This is not the place for a detailed examination of these theories, but attention must at least be called to certain features closely connected with the subject of this book. The first is their ‘evolutionism’, which remains unbroken and is carried to an extreme, for all reality is placed exclusively within ‘becoming’, involving the formal denial of all immutable principle, and consequently of all metaphysics; hence their ‘fleeting’ and inconsistent quality, which really affords, in contrast with the rationalist and materialist ‘solidification’, something like a prefiguration of the dissolution of all things in the final chaos. A significant example is found in Bergson’s view of religion, which is set out appropriately enough in a work of his exemplifying the ‘final state’ mentioned above.[133] Not that there is really anything new in that work, for the origins of the thesis maintained are in fact very simple: in this field all modern theories have as a common feature the desire to bring religion down to a purely human level, which amounts to denying it, consciously or otherwise, since it really represents a refusal to take account of what is its very essence; and Bergson’s conception does not differ from the others in that respect.

These theories of religion, taken as a whole, can be grouped into two main types: one is ‘psychological’ and claims to explain religion by the nature of the human individual, and the other is ‘sociological’ and tries to see in religion a fact of an exclusively social kind, the product of a sort of ‘collective consciousness’ imagined as dominating individuals and imposing itself on them. Bergson’s originality consists only in having tried to combine these two sorts of explanation, and he does so in rather a curious way: instead of considering them as more or less mutually exclusive, as do most of the partisans of one or the other, he accepts both explanations, but relates them to two different things, each called by the same name of ‘religion’, the ‘two sources’ of religion postulated by him really amounting to that and nothing more.[134] For him therefore there are two sorts of religion, one ‘static’ and the other ‘dynamic’, alternatively and somewhat oddly called by him ‘closed religion’ and ‘open religion’; the first is social in its nature and the second psychological; and naturally his preference is for the second, which he regards as the superior form of religion — we say ‘naturally’ because it is very evident that it could not be otherwise in a ‘philosophy of becoming’ such as his, since from that point of view whatever does not change does not correspond to anything real, and even prevents man from grasping the real such as it is imagined to be. But someone will say that a philosophy of this kind, since it admits of no ‘eternal truths’,[135] must logically refuse all value not only to metaphysics but also to religion; and that is exactly what happens, for religion in the true sense of the word is just what Bergson calls ‘static religion’, in which he chooses to see nothing but a wholly imaginary ‘story-telling’; as for his ‘dynamic religion’, the truth is that it is not religion at all.

His so-called ‘dynamic religion’ in fact contains none of the characteristic elements that go to make up the definition of religion: there are no dogmas, since they are immutable or, as Bergson says, ‘fixed’; no more, of course, are there any rites, for the same reason and because of their social character, dogmas and rites necessarily being left to ‘static religion’; and as for morality, Bergson starts by setting it aside as something quite outside religion as he understands it. So there is nothing left, or at least nothing is left but a vague ‘religiosity’, a sort of confused aspiration toward an ‘ideal’ of some description, rather near to the aspirations of modernists and liberal Protestants, and reminiscent in many respects of the ‘religious experience’ of William James, for all these things are obviously very closely connected. This ‘religiosity’ is taken by Bergson to be a superior kind of religion, for he thinks, like all those who follow the same tendencies, that he is ‘sublimating’ religion, whereas all he is doing is to empty it of all positive content, since there is nothing in religion compatible with his conceptions. Such notions are no doubt all that can be extracted from a psychological theory, for experience has failed to show that any such theory can get beyond ‘religious feeling’ — and that, once more, is not religion. In Bergson’s eyes ‘dynamic religion’ finds its highest expression in ‘mysticism’, which however he does not understand and sees on its worst side, for he only praises it for whatever in it is ‘individual’, that is to say, vague, inconsistent, and in a sense ‘anarchic’; and the best examples of this kind of mysticism, though he does not quote them, could be found in certain teachings of occultist and Theosophist inspiration. What really pleases him about the mystics, it must be stated categorically, is their tendency to ‘divagation’ in the etymological sense of the word, which they show only too readily when left to themselves. As for that which is the very foundation of true mysticism, leaving aside its more or less abnormal or ‘eccentric’ deviations (which may or may not strike one’s fancy), its attachment to a ‘static religion’ he evidently regards as negligible; nevertheless one feels that there is something here that worries him, for his explanations concerning it are somewhat embarrassed; but a fuller examination of this question would lead too far away from what for present purposes are its essentials.

To return to ‘static religion’: so far as its supposed origins are concerned, it will be seen that Bergson trustfully accepts all the tales of the all too well known ‘sociological school’, including those that are most worthy of suspicion: ‘magic’, ‘totemism’, ‘taboo’, ‘mana’, ‘animal worship’, ‘spirit worship’, and ‘primitive mentality’, nothing being missing of the conventional jargon or of the accustomed trivialities, if such expressions may be allowed (as indeed they must be when discussing matters so grotesque in character). The only thing for which he is perhaps really responsible is the place he assigns to a so-called ‘fable-making function’, which seems to be much more fabulous than that which it seeks to explain: but he had to invent some sort of theory to allow of the comprehensive denial of the existence of any real foundation of those things that are commonly treated as ‘superstitions’, a ‘civilized’ philosophy, and more than that, a ‘twentieth-century’ philosophy, evidently considering that any other attitude would be unworthy of itself. In all this there is only one point of present interest, that concerning ‘magic’; magic is a great resource for certain theorists, who clearly have no idea of what it really is, but who try to find in it the origin both of religion and of science. Bergson’s position is not precisely that: he seeks for a ‘psychological origin’ in magic, and turns it into ‘the exteriorization of a desire that fills the heart,’ and he makes out that ‘if one reconstitutes by an effort of introspection the natural reaction of man to his perception of things, one finds that magic and religion are connected, and that there is nothing in common between magic and science.’ It is true that later on he wavers: if one adopts a certain point of view, ‘magic evidently forms part of religion,’ but from another point of view ‘religion is opposed to magic’; he is clearer when he asserts that ‘magic is the opposite of science’ and that ‘far from preparing for the coming of science, as has been supposed, magic has been the great obstacle against which methodical learning has had to contend.’ All that is almost exactly the reverse of the truth, for magic has absolutely nothing to do with religion, and, while admittedly not the origin of all the sciences, it is simply a single science among the others; but Bergson is no doubt quite convinced that no sciences can exist other than those enumerated in modern ‘classifications’, established from the most narrowly profane point of view imaginable. Speaking of ‘magical operations’ with the imperturbable self-assurance of one who has never seen any,[136] he writes this remarkable sentence: ‘If primitive intelligence had begun its dealings with such matters by conceiving principles, it would soon have had to give way to experience, which would have demonstrated their falsity.’ One can admire the intrepidity of this philosopher, shut into his private room, and well protected against the attacks of certain influences that undoubtedly would not hesitate to take advantage of him as an auxiliary no less valuable than unwitting, when he denies a priori everything that does not fit into the framework of his theories. How can he think that men were stupid enough to have repeated indefinitely, even without ‘principles’, ‘operations’ that were never successful, and what would he say if it should be found, on the contrary, that experience ‘demonstrates the falsity’ of his own assertions? Obviously he does not even imagine the possibility of anything of that kind; such is the strength of the preconceived ideas in him and in those like him that they do not doubt for a single instant that the world is strictly confined within the measure of their conceptions (this in fact being what allows them to construct ‘systems’); and how can a philosopher be expected to understand that he ought to refrain, just like an ordinary mortal, from talking of things he knows nothing about?

Now it is particularly worthy of note, and highly significant as regards the reality of the connection between Bergsonian ‘intuitionism’ and the second phase of anti-traditional action, that magic, by an ironical turn of affairs, is now cruelly avenging the denials of our philosopher. It has reappeared in our days, through the recent ‘fissures’ in our world, in a form that is at once the lowest and the most rudimentary, in the disguise of ‘psychic science’ (the very thing that some people prefer to call, rather unfortunately, ‘metapsychics’), and it succeeds in securing admission thereto, while avoiding recognition not only as something very real, but also as destined to play a leading part in the future of Bergson’s ‘dynamic religion’! This is no exaggeration: he speaks of ‘survival’ just like any common spiritist, and he believes in a ‘deepening of the range of experiment’ making it possible to come to a ‘conclusion as to the possibility and even the probability of a survival of the soul’ (what exactly does that mean, and is it not apparent that he is thinking of the phantasmagoria of ‘psychic corpses’?), but without the possibility of knowing whether it will be ‘for a time or for ever.’ But this last annoying limitation does not prevent him from proclaiming in dithyrambic tones: ‘No more than this is needed in order to turn into a living and active reality a belief in a life after death such as is met with in most men, though it is usually verbal, abstract, ineffective.... Indeed, if we were sure, absolutely sure, of survival we could no longer think of anything else.’ The ancient magic was more ‘scientific’ than this, in the true sense of the word, if not in the profane sense, and it had not the same pretensions; but in order that some of its most elementary phenomena should give rise to interpretations of this kind it was necessary to wait for the invention of spiritualism, which could not come to birth until a late stage of the modern deviation had been reached. It is in fact the spiritualist theory concerning such phenomena, that and nothing else, that is finally accepted by Bergson, as it was by William James before him, with ‘a joy’ that makes ‘all pleasures pale’ (this incredible statement, with which his book ends, is quoted word for word). His ‘joy’ establishes for us the degree of discernment of which this philosopher is capable, for as far as his good faith is concerned, that certainly is not in question, and profane philosophers are usually not suited to act otherwise than as dupes in cases of this kind, thus serving as unconscious intermediaries for the hoaxing of many others: but apart from that, talking of ‘superstition’, never before has there been so good an example of it, and it is this fact that gives the best idea of the real worth of all the ‘new philosophy’, as its partisans are pleased to call it!