_Parce unicæ spes totius orbis._--TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Marcionem, 5.
We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no
consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or
consolation in life and life itself without real finality. But here, in
the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and
the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like brothers.
And we shall see it is from this embrace, a tragic--that is to say, an
intimately loving--embrace, that the wellspring of life will flow, a
life serious and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the position to
which reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own
validity, at last arrives--is the foundation upon which the heart's
despair must build up its hope.
Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those who seek to give
consolation the force of rational and logical truth, pretending to prove
the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation;
and we had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to give
rational truth the force of consolation and of a motive for life.
Neither the one nor the other of these positions satisfied us. The one
is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. These two
powers can never conclude peace and we must needs live by their war. We
must make of this war, of war itself, the very condition of our
spiritual life.
Neither does this high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant
expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has
devised and dubbed "a formula of agreement," the property of which is to
render it impossible for either side to claim to be victorious. There
is no place here for a time-serving compromise. Perhaps a degenerate and
cowardly reason might bring itself to propose some such formula of
agreement, for in truth reason lives by formulas; but life, which cannot
be formulated, life which lives and seeks to live for ever, does not
submit to formulas. Its sole formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does
not compound its differences with middle terms.
_Initium sapientiæ timor Domini_, it is said, meaning perhaps _timor
mortis_, or it may be, _timor vitæ_, which is the same thing. Always it
comes about that the beginning of wisdom is a fear.
Is it true to say of this saving scepticism which I am now going to
discuss, that it is doubt? It is doubt, yes, but it is much more than
doubt. Doubt is commonly something very cold, of very little vitalizing
force, and above all something rather artificial, especially since
Descartes degraded it to the function of a method. The conflict between
reason and life is something more than a doubt. For doubt is easily
resolved into a comic element.
The methodical doubt of Descartes is a comic doubt, a doubt purely
theoretical and provisional--that is to say, the doubt of a man who acts
as if he doubted without really doubting. And because it was a
stove-excogitated doubt, the man who deduced that he existed from the
fact that he thought did not approve of "those turbulent
(_brouillonnes_) and restless persons who, being called neither by birth
nor by fortune to the management of public affairs, are perpetually
devising some new reformation," and he was pained by the suspicion that
there might be something of this kind in his own writings. No, he,
Descartes, proposed only to "reform his own thoughts and to build upon
ground that was wholly his." And he resolved not to accept anything as
true when he did not recognize it clearly to be so, and to make a clean
sweep of all prejudices and received ideas, to the end that he might
construct his intellectual habitation anew. But "as it is not enough,
before beginning to rebuild one's dwelling-house, to pull it down and to
furnish materials and architects, or to study architecture oneself ...
but it is also necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge
conveniently while the work is in progress," he framed for himself a
provisional ethic--_une morale de provision_--the first law of which was
to observe the customs of his country and to keep always to the religion
in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy,
governing himself in all things according to the most moderate opinions.
Yes, exactly, a provisional religion and even a provisional God! And he
chose the most moderate opinions "because these are always the most
convenient for practice." But it is best to proceed no further.
This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this philosophical doubt
excogitated in a stove, is not the doubt, is not the scepticism, is not
the incertitude, that I am talking about here. No! This other doubt is a
passionate doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling,
science and life, logic and biotic. For science destroys the concept of
personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to
moment--that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual
and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly against reason.
And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional ethic, but has to
found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, an ethic of
battle, and itself has to serve as the foundation of religion. And it
inhabits a house which is continually being demolished and which
continually it has to rebuild. Without ceasing the will, I mean the will
never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death, labours to build
up the house of life, and without ceasing the keen blasts and stormy
assaults of reason beat it down.
And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that concerns us,
reason takes up no position whatever. In truth, it does something worse
than deny the immortality of the soul--for that at any rate would be one
solution--it refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire
presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the term
problem, there is no such problem. This question of the immortality of
the soul, of the persistence of the individual consciousness, is not
rational, it falls outside reason. As a problem, and whatever solution
it may receive, it is irrational. Rationally even the very propounding
of the problem lacks sense. The immortality of the soul is as
unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its absolute mortality. For the
purpose of explaining the world and existence--and such is the task of
reason--it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is
either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the problem is,
therefore, an irrationality.
Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say. "The danger of
abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of
existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it,
afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it. It explains
immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by
identifying it with eternity--with the eternity which is essentially the
medium of thought. But with the immortality of each individually
existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty lies, abstraction does
not concern itself, is not interested in it. And yet the difficulty of
existence lies just in the interest of the existing being--the man who
exists is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought besteads
immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being
with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in
the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose
medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took away his life at
the same time. An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit
the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that
he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however
accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of
ceasing to be a man. While an effective man, compounded of infinitude
and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of
these two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an abstract
thinker, similarly compounded, is a double being, a fantastical being,
who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and at times presents the
sorry figure of a professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he
lays aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a thinker of
this kind--whose writings may be excellent--one trembles at the thought
of what it is to be a man. And when one reads in his writings that
thinking and being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his life,
that that being, which is identical with thinking, is not precisely the
same thing as being a man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_,
chap. iii.).
What intense passion--that is to say, what truth--there is in this
bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the rationalist!--for the
rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises
us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for
immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a concrete hunger!
It may indeed be said that when once the dog is dead there is an end to
the rabies, and that after I have died I shall no more be tortured by
this rage of not dying, and that the fear of death, or more properly, of
nothingness, is an irrational fear, but ... Yes, but ... _Eppur si
muove!_ And it will go on moving. For it is the source of all movement!
I doubt, however, whether our brother Kierkegaard is altogether in the
right, for this same abstract thinker, or thinker of abstractions,
thinks _in order that_ he may exist, that he may not cease to exist, or
thinks perhaps in order to forget that he will have to cease to exist.
This is the root of the passion for abstract thought. And possibly Hegel
was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete,
individual existence, although the professional decorum of the
state-philosopher compelled him to conceal the fact.
Faith in immortality is irrational. And, notwithstanding, faith, life,
and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not
properly a problem, cannot assume a logical status, cannot be formulated
in propositions susceptible of rational discussion; but it announces
itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that
throws itself with the fury of hunger upon its prey or with the fury of
instinct upon the she-wolf, 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 only can operate on the irrational. They are
compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in
struggle, for struggle is a mode of association.
In the world of living beings the struggle for life establishes an
association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite
together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants
themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than
that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten,
between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is clearly seen in
the struggle between individuals, it is still more evident in the
struggle between peoples. War has always been the most effective factor
of progress, even more than commerce. It is through war that conquerors
and conquered learn to know each other and in consequence to love each
other.
Christianity, the foolishness of the Cross, the irrational faith that
Christ rose from the dead in order to raise us from the dead, was saved
by the rationalistic Hellenic culture, and this in its turn was saved by
Christianity. Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been
impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the peoples who had
traversed the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor
Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a
tradition purely religious. It is frequently disputed whether the
Reformation was born as the child of the Renaissance or as a protest
against it, and both propositions may be said to be true, for the son is
always born as a protest against the father. It is also said that it was
the revived Greek classics that led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul
and to primitive Christianity, which is the most irrational form of
Christianity; but it may be retorted that it was St. Paul, that it was
the Christian irrationality underlying his Catholic theology, that led
them back to the classics. "Christianity is what it has come to be," it
has been said, "only through its alliance with antiquity, while with the
Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery. Islam developed
under the influence of Persian and Greek culture, and under that of the
Turks it has been transformed into a destructive barbarism."[31]
We have emerged from the Middle Ages, from the medieval faith as ardent
as it was at heart despairing, and not without its inward and abysmal
incertitudes, and we have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise
not without its incertitudes. Faith in reason is exposed to the same
rational indefensibility as all other faith. And we may say with Robert
Browning,
All we have gained, then, by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith
For one of faith diversified by doubt.
(_Bishop Blougram's Apology_.)
And if, as I have said, faith, life, can only sustain itself by leaning
upon reason, which renders it transmissible--and above all transmissible
from myself to myself--that is to say, reflective and conscious--it is
none the less true that reason in its turn can only sustain itself by
leaning upon faith, upon life, even if only upon faith in reason, faith
in its availability for something more than mere knowing, faith in its
availability for living. Nevertheless, neither is faith transmissible or
rational, nor is reason vital.
The will and the intelligence have need of one another, and the reverse
of that old aphorism, _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing is
willed but what is previously known, is not so paradoxical as at first
sight it may appear--_nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, nothing is known
but what is previously willed. Vinet, in his study of Cousin's book on
the _Pensées_ of Pascal, says: "The very knowledge of the mind as such
has need of the heart. Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in
a great materialization of life and of thought there is no believing in
the things of the spirit." We shall see presently that to believe is, in
the first instance, to wish to believe.
The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that we may absorb the
world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the
will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence.
Opposite ends?--are they not rather one and the same? No, they are not,
although they may seem to be so. The intelligence is monist or
pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist. The intelligence has no need
of anything outside it to exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation
with ideas themselves, while the will requires matter. To know something
is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it,
to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.
Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they
have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophic
basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. Each lives by its
contrary. The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of
religion. And the attacks which are directed against religion from a
presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks
from another but opposing religious point of view. "The opposition which
professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really
exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the
scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian
view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the
entire world of nature," says Ritschl (_Rechtfertgung und Versöhnung_,
iii. chap. iv. § 28). Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality
itself. And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it
is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason
after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system
of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel
constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant
himself, and this root is an irrational root.
We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in
its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is
to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all,
to wish that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the
immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to
wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under
foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge.
The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or rather of
surviving, come into conflict. In his work on the _Analysis of the
Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical_,[32] Dr.
E. Mach tells us that not even the investigator, the savant, _der
Forscher_, is exempted from taking his part in the struggle for
existence, that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards, and that in
the actual conditions of the society in which we live the pure instinct
of knowing, _der reine Erkenntnisstrieb_, is still no more than an
ideal. And so it always will be. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_,
or perhaps better, _primum supervivere_ or _superesse_.
Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and
life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the
tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle
between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing
it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing
reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires.
And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of
religion.
Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily subjective,
human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against
rationalism; reason will always find itself confronted by will. Hence
the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods
in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with
those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialist forms,
although both of these classes of forms of belief may be disguised by
other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself
vanquished. But we will return to this in the next chapter.
The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts
it very well: "The consequence for existence[33] of pure thought is
suicide.... We do not praise suicide but passion. The thinker, on the
contrary, is a curious animal--for a few spells during the day he is
very intelligent, but, for the rest, he has nothing in common with man"
(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap iii., § 1).
As the thinker, in spite of all, does not cease to be a man, he employs
reason in the interests of life, whether he knows it or not. Life cheats
reason and reason cheats life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy
fabricated in the interest of life a teleologic-evolutionist system,
rational in appearance, which might serve as a support for our vital
longing. This philosophy, the basis of the orthodox Christian
supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, was, in its essence,
merely a trick on the part of life to force reason to lend it its
support. But reason supported it with such pressure that it ended by
pulverizing it.
I have read that the ex-Carmelite, Hyacinthe Loyson, declared that he
could present himself before God with tranquillity, for he was at peace
with his conscience and with his reason. With what conscience? If with
his religious conscience, then I do not understand. For it is a truth
that no man can serve two masters, and least of all when, though they
may sign truces and armistices and compromises, these two are enemies
because of their conflicting interests.
To all this someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself
to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is
unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought,
therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur:
"Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason,
because the end of life is living and not understanding.
Again, there are those who talk of the religious duty of resignation to
mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity.
But someone is sure to oppose the idea of veracity to that of sincerity.
Granted, and yet the two may very well be reconciled. Veracity, the
homage I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what logically we
call truth, moves me to affirm, in this case, that the immortality of
the individual soul is a contradiction in terms, that it is something,
not only irrational, but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to
affirm also my refusal to resign myself to this previous affirmation and
my protest against its validity. What I feel is a truth, at any rate as
much a truth as what I see, touch, hear, or what is demonstrated to
me--nay, I believe it is more of a truth--and sincerity obliges me not
to hide what I feel.
And life, quick to defend itself, searches for the weak point in reason
and finds it in scepticism, which it straightway fastens upon, seeking
to save itself by means of this stranglehold. It needs the weakness of
its adversary.
Nothing is sure. Everything is elusive and in the air. In an outburst of
passion Lamennais exclaims: "But what! Shall we, losing all hope, shut
our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism?
Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not
allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not
convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike
forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as
between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the
extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not
given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which
invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, indomitable
even by his will. Whether he likes it or not, he must believe, because
he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he
listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself
included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would
perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed"
(_Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, iii^e partie, chap.
lxvii.).
Reason, however, does not actually lead us to absolute scepticism. No!
Reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist.
Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly, to
vital negation--not merely to doubt, but to deny, that my consciousness
survives my death. Scepticism is produced by the clash between reason
and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and
scepticism, is born that holy, that sweet, that saving incertitude,
which is our supreme consolation.
The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a
complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness,
a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of
a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the
absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is
prolonged beyond death in these present or in other conditions, and
above all including in itself that strange and adventitious addition of
eternal rewards and punishments--both of these certainties alike would
make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of
him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his
personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him
perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of shadow, of
uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this
life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this
secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!..." He may not
think he hears it, but he hears it nevertheless. And likewise in some
secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the
belief in a future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of
uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit, "Who knows!..."
These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind
roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint
humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it
reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live?
_"Is there?" "Is there not?"_--these are the bases of our inner life.
There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of
the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never
wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only
prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those
who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their
intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great
their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me
that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst
loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their
consciousness. I do not understand those men who tell me that the
prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the
thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do
not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith
and my reason--I wish rather that there should be war between them!
In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark it is related how a
man brought unto Jesus his son who was possessed by a dumb spirit, and
wheresoever the spirit took him it tore him, causing him to foam and
gnash his teeth and pine away, wherefore he sought to bring him to Jesus
that he might cure him. And the Master, impatient of those who sought
only for signs and wonders, exclaimed: "O faithless generation, how long
shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me"
(ver. 19), and they brought him unto him. And when the Master saw him
wallowing on the ground, he asked his father how long it was ago since
this had come unto him and the father replied that it was since he was &
child. And Jesus said unto him: "If thou canst believe, all things are
possible to him that believeth" (ver. 23). And then the father of the
epileptic or demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words: "Lord,
I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"--_Pisteyô, kyrie, boêthei tê
hapistia mou_ (ver. 24).
"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!" A contradiction seemingly,
for if he believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord
to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless, it is this contradiction that
gives to the heart's cry of the father of the demoniac its most profound
human value. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude.
Because he believes--that is to say, because he wishes to believe,
because he has need that his son should be cured--he beseeches the Lord
to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of
such kind is human faith; of such kind was the heroic faith that Sancho
Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think
I have shown in my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_; a faith based upon
incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a
true man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he
have believed, without a shadow of doubt, in the follies of his master.
And his master himself did not believe in them without a shadow of
doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was at heart
a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my above-mentioned book.
And because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero of that inward
and resigned despair, he stands as the eternal exemplar of every man
whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord
Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon
uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts
his own reason.
Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call
upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he
believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him,
upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really existed.[34] And
from a similar state of mind came the inspiration of the sonnet entitled
"The Atheist's Prayer," which is included in my _Rosario de Sonetos
Líricos_, and closes with these lines:
_Sufro yo a tu costa,
Dios no existiente, pues si tú existieras
existiería yo también de veras._[35]
Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then
should we ourselves really exist. And if He exists not, neither do we
exist.
That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which, translated into the
language of theology, is known as predestination, that idea which
dictated to Luther his _servum arbitrium_, and which gives to Calvinism
its tragic sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence
nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied with despair,
forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say, consists in not thinking
about it, in surrendering ourselves trustingly to the arms of God, the
secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. Yes, but infidelity also
consists in not thinking about it. This absurd faith, this faith that
knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of the stupid coalheaver,
joins hands with an absurd incredulity, the incredulity that knows no
shadow of uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are
afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may not think
about it.
And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss,
that terrible _gouffre_, before which Pascal trembled? And it was that
which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, _il faut
s'abêtir_--need is that we become fools!
All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same
impress. Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbé de
Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Iñigo de Loyola and as he who
writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious
despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also slew his reason in
obedience.
Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we
abstain from affirming and denying. Note the greater part of our
atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage,
rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are the
personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance
and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.
And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God
it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the
expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look
upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is
that in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their
worldly interests in this life. This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is
worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed.
No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do. It has nothing
to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order--and
what an order!--upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal
rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs to a lower
plane--that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics.
The vital sense has to do with living.
But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of
the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest
foundation. This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most
intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty
effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that
the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains
for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal
life of the soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and
absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the
conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less
terrible is its immortality.
But when we have overcome the first, the only real difficulty, when we
have overcome the impediment of reason, when we have achieved the faith,
however painful and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal
consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty, what
impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to ourselves this
persistence of self in harmony with our desire? Yes, we can imagine it
as an eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as
a journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness, without
ever an arrival, we can imagine it as ... But who shall put fetters upon
the imagination, once it has broken the chain of the rational?
I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it
is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to
do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God
into a great Judge or Policeman--that is to say, we are not concerned
with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor
earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or
personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is
involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but
one, but all men are I's.
Do you remember the end of that _Song of the Wild Cock_ which Leopardi
wrote in prose?--the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who
never succeeded in achieving belief. "A time will come," he says, "when
this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the
grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things
achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory
remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the
vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not
a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will
fill the immensity of space. And so before ever it has been uttered or
understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence
will be obliterated and lost." And this they now describe by a
scientific and very rationalistic term--namely, _entropia_. Very pretty,
is it not? Spencer invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from
which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could
originate. Well now, this _entropia_ is a kind of ultimate homogeneity,
a state of perfect equilibrium. For a soul avid of life, it is the most
like nothingness that the mind can conceive.
* * * * *
To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections, I have brought
the reader who has had the patience to follow me, endeavouring always to
do equal justice to the claims of reason and of feeling. I have not
wished to keep silence on matters about which others are silent; I have
sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but the human soul, be its
nature what it may, its destiny to disappear or not to disappear. And we
have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict
between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived here, I have told
you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by
it. Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of
feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be
the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic,
of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic. But in what follows
there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather,
much more.
I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as philosophy what it may
be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology.
The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in
his dialogue _Phædo_ (an ideal--that is to say, a lying--immortality),
embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other
life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then,
mythologize.
He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments,
technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further.
Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I
am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked,
unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no
one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to
show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and
which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though
more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of
civilized individuals and peoples to-day--that is to say, of those
individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of
intellect or stupidity of feeling.
And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements.
If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms,
brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of
thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived. We are about to
enter--if it be that you wish to accompany me--upon a field of
contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail
ourselves of the one as well as of the other.
That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in
order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after
a fashion. The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or
system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, "I charge
that there be no theory or school founded out of me" (_Myself and
Mine_).
Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am about to set forth.
By no means. They have also been conceived by other men, if not
precisely by other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears,
and who have exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their
life, I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought
inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality.
Does this mean that in all that follows, in the efforts of the
irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of rationality, of
all objective value? No; the absolutely, the irrevocably irrational, is
inexpressible, is intransmissible. But not the contra-rational. Perhaps
there is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a way of
rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by trying to explain it.
Since only the rational is intelligible, really intelligible, and since
the absurd, being devoid of sense, is condemned to be incommunicable,
you will find that whenever we succeed in giving expression and
intelligibility to anything apparently irrational or absurd we
invariably resolve it into something rational, even though it be into
the negation of that which we affirm.
The maddest dreams of the fancy have some ground of reason, and who
knows if everything that the imagination of man can conceive either has
not already happened, or is not now happening or will not happen some
time, in some world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps
infinite. It only remains to know whether all that is imaginable is
possible.
It may also be said, and with justice, that much of what I am about to
set forth is merely a repetition of ideas which have been expressed a
hundred times before and a hundred times refuted; but the repetition of
an idea really implies that its refutation has not been final. And as I
do not pretend that the majority of these fancies are new, so neither do
I pretend, obviously, that other voices before mine have not spoken to
the winds the same laments. But when yet another voice echoes the same
eternal lament it can only be inferred that the same grief still dwells
in the heart.
And it comes not amiss to repeat yet once again the same eternal
lamentations that were already old in the days of Job and Ecclesiastes,
and even to repeat them in the same words, to the end that the devotees
of progress may see that there is something that never dies. Whosoever
repeats the "Vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes or the lamentations of
Job, even though without changing a letter, having first experienced
them in his soul, performs a work of admonition. Need is to repeat
without ceasing the _memento mori_.
"But to what end?" you will ask. Even though it be only to the end that
some people should be irritated and should see that these things are not
dead and, so long as men exist, cannot die; to the end that they should
be convinced that to-day, in the twentieth century, all the bygone
centuries and all of them alive, are still subsisting. When a supposed
error reappears, it must be, believe me, that it has not ceased to be
true in part, just as when one who was dead reappears, it must be that
he was not wholly dead.
Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and
express; that many others feel it to-day, although they keep silence
about it. Why do I not keep silence about it too? Well, for the very
reason that most of those who feel it are silent about it; and yet,
though they are silent, they obey in silence that inner voice. And I do
not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must
not be spoken, the abomination of abominations--_infandum_--and I
believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must
not be spoken. But if it leads to nothing? Even if it should lead only
to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is
consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and
making them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to
better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I
say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right--and being
right is such a little thing!--but that I feel what I say and I know
what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in
reason than to have too much of it.
And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also see how out of
this abyss of despair hope may arise, and how this critical position may
be the well-spring of human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of
solidarity and even of progress. He will see its pragmatic
justification. And he will see how, in order to work, and to work
efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two
conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how
still less is there any need--this never under any circumstances--to
shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it
idealistically--that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how
this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the
fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for action
and morals.
And in the fact that it serves as a basis for action and morals, this
feeling of uncertainty and the inward struggle between reason on the one
hand and faith and the passionate longing for eternal life on the other,
should find their justification in the eyes of the pragmatist. But it
must be clearly stated that I do not adduce this practical consequence
in order to justify the feeling, but merely because I encounter it in my
inward experience. I neither desire to seek, nor ought I to seek, any
justification for this state of inward struggle and uncertainty and
longing; it is a fact and that suffices. And if anyone finding himself
in this state, in the depth of the abyss, fails to find there motives
for and incentives to life and action, and concludes by committing
bodily or spiritual suicide, whether he kills himself or he abandons all
co-operation with his fellows in human endeavour, it will not be I who
will pass censure upon him. And apart from the fact that the evil
consequences of a doctrine, or rather those which we call evil, only
prove, I repeat, that the doctrine is disastrous for our desires, but
not that it is false in itself, the consequences themselves depend not
so much upon the doctrine as upon him who deduces them. The same
principle may furnish one man with grounds for action and another man
with grounds for abstaining from action, it may lead one man to direct
his effort towards a certain end and another man towards a directly
opposite end. For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the
justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, or else they are our way of
trying to explain that conduct to ourselves.
Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of
his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain
action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would
justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being
unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man--for
since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism--seeks
to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were
endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty
in ascribing their moves to freewill--that is to say, they would claim
for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every
philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of
conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the
author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly
himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause.
Consequently, if my reason, which is in a certain sense a part of the
reason of all my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this
absolute scepticism in respect of what concerns my longing for
never-ending life, I think that I can assume that my feeling of life,
which is the essence of life itself, my vitality, my boundless appetite
for living and my abhorrence of dying, my refusal to submit to
death--that it is this which suggests to me the doctrines with which I
try to counter-check the working of the reason. Have these doctrines an
objective value? someone will ask me, and I shall answer that I do not
understand what this objective value of a doctrine is. I will not say
that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am
about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to
say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires
these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in
strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when
it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work and, above
all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason
or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die
out, I die out altogether, then I shall not have died out of
myself--that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human
destiny will have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my
heart, I will not abdicate from life--life will be wrested from me.
To have recourse to those, ambiguous words, "optimism" and "pessimism,"
does not assist us in any way, for frequently they express the very
contrary of what those who use them mean to express. To ticket a
doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and
the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe,
on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest
of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have
accomplished their mighty works. Apart from this, however, and accepting
in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism,
that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the
begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I
propose to develop in the following part of this treatise.
Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the
partisans of "the central current of contemporary European thought"; but
I cannot bring myself to believe that these individuals do not
voluntarily close their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that,
in endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life, they
themselves are not living a lie.
The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary of the
criticism developed in the first six chapters of this treatise, a kind
of definition of the practical position to which such a criticism is
capable of leading whosoever will not renounce life and will not
renounce reason and who is compelled to live and act between these upper
and nether millstones which grind upon the soul. The reader who follows
me further is now aware that I am about to carry him into the region of
the imagination, of imagination not destitute of reason, for without
reason nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling. And as
regards its truth, the real truth, that which is independent of
ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic and of our heart--of this truth
who knows aught?