THE MYSTERY OF BEING I. REFLECTION & MYSTERY

THE MYSTERY OF BEING

BY

GABRIEL MARCEL

I.

REFLECTION & MYSTERY

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

REFLECTION AND MYSTERY contains the first of the

two series of GIFFORD LECTURES given by Gabriel

Marcel in 1949 and 19^0, at the University of Aberdeen.

The English translation is by G. S. Fraser.

First published in Great Britain

by THE HARVILL PRESS LTD

Printed and made in Great Britain by Hague Gill &, Davey Ltd

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION

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Research has always seemed to me the word which most adequately designates the manner in which philosophic thought moves essentially towards its goal ; I shall not therefore expound my system, but rather retrace the movement of my thought from its outset, but in renewed light, and, so to speak, map out its itinerary.

But how do we set about retracing a road where heretofore there have been nothing but broken trails? Is it not by setting out for a precisely situated goal, with the intention of reaching it? Does not this presuppose a result?

We must distinguish here between:

1 i ) Research of the type where result can be severed from the means by which it is obtained, e.g., a product discovered by a scientist can be purchased at the chemist's by anyone.

This type of research involves furthermore a notion or a pre-notion bearing on a certain working and the certainty that the operations (mental or material) entailed are within the capabilities of anyone.

(2) Research wherein the link with the result cannot be broken without loss of all reality to the result ; the seeker who engages in such in investigation, starts, as it were, at random.

This leads to the question of:

How research without pre-notion is possible.

In reality, to exclude the pre-notion implied in techniques is not to exclude the origin of philosophic research; this origin is a certain disquiet — a certain exigence (a term which will be defined in Chapter III). The research is then the successive moves which enable me to pass from a situation lived as fundamentally discordant to a situation in which a certain expectation is fulfilled.

The 'ego' of the seeker, as well as the 'ego' of those he ad dresses, is here neither the individual at the mercy of his states (of being) nor thought in general.

In philosophical research a literal and simplistic conception of universality cannot be accepted, and a certain order of enquiry- becomes established: there are, as well as questions which can be an swered by ' yes ' or ' no ', other questions which the philosopher cannot elude, and which cannot be answered thus.

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His research — philosophical research — will appear therefore as an effort to put true questions (cf. Chapter IV, on Truth), which implies that he is endowed with the courage of thought inseparable from

liberty.

II. A BROKEN WORLD page iS

Enquiry into one of the conclusions of the foregoing chapter, which dissociates truth and universal validity.

Is not this dissociation dangerous?

If not, how, and from what point does it appear so?

Note that the objection implies a pre-notion or anticipated schema tizing of the relation between the subject and the truth which he will have to recognize.

Truth is indeed conceived as something to be extracted ; this extrac tion is referable on principle to a universal technique, with the result that truth should be transmissible to anyone.

But we are prone to forget that the more intelligence transcends technical activity, the less the reference to anyone as inderterminate is called upon to intervene.

This objection is on the other hand a product, as it were, of a world that ignores exigencies of reflection.

This world of ours is a broken world, which means that in striving after a certain type of unity, it has lost its real unity. (These types of unity in the broken world are :

(i) Increased socialization of life: we are one and all treated as agents, registered, enrolled, and we end by merging into our own identity cards. (2) Extension of the powers of the State, which is like a searching eye on all of us. (3) This world has lost its true unity probably because privacy, brotherhood, creativeness, reflection and imagina tion, are all increasingly discredited in it.

Therefore — it is of the very utmost urgency that we reflect, and reflect upon reflection, in order to bring to light that exigence which animates reflection (cf. Chapter III), and in order to show that this exigence when at work transcends any sort of process whatever, and sweeps beyond the opposition of the empiric ego and the universal ego.

III. THE NEED FOR TRANSCENDENCE page 39

What is the nature of this exigence, lying at the origin of philosophic research (cf. Chapter I), and in danger of being smothered by the broken world of techniques and socialization?

It is essentially an exigence of transcendence, this term being taken in its traditional meaning, as opposed to immanence; its implication

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is that to transcend is not merely to go beyond, spatio-temporally (in space or in time).

This exigence is existentially experienced as a non-satisfaction, but all non-satisfaction does not entail an aspiring towards transcendence, for there are non-satisfactions which crave the possession of a given power, and which disappear, once this power is attained.

Another non-satisfaction occurs, or can occur, within possession; another call comes from my innermost being, a call directed not out wards but inwards. (This may be a call to create, and to create means to create something higher than one's self.)

Transcendence is thus evoked as referring to man; but is not this negating it, absorbing it into experience?

This objection takes for granted the figuration of experience as being a sort of given element, more or less, without form; and it ignores the impossibility of a representation of experience.

With the result that: not only can ' transcendent ' not mean ' trans cendent of experience', but, if we are still to talk sense, we have to admit that there must be an experience of the transcendent ; to experi ence ... is not indeed to enfold into one's self, but to stretch out to wards . . ., consciousness being always consciousness of someone else than one's self. • So that the exigence of transcendence is not the exigence to go

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beyond all experience whatsoever, but to substitute one mode of experience for another, or, more accurately still, to strive towards an increasingly pure mode of experience.

IV. TRUTH AS A VALUE :

THE INTELLIGIBLE BACKGROUND page 57

What do we mean when we state that we are guided by a love of truth, or that someone has sacrificed himself to ' the truth ' ? These assertions are void of meaning if truth be defined as ' veritas est adequatio rei et intellectus ' ; they make sense only if truth is value, for only in this aspect can truth become a stake to be striven for.

Truth and Judgment. Are we to exclude from the problem sensation and feeling, which seem indeed to be what they are on the hither side of all judgment?

Yet a sensation (a taste, for example) is immediately recognizable, which would seem to attest that it has a certain kernel of identity which makes possible a consonance between me and someone else; so the connoisseur does exist, in every domain, and the non-connoisseur, if he recognizes himself as such, is ' in the truth ', because he does not shut himself to a certain light. What is this light? Whence does it come?

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Truth and Fact. There is no meaning in imagining that this light emanates from facts taken in a grossly realistic sense, and that it comes to us from outside.

There is not, indeed, exteriority of the fact as regards the subject; the structure of the latter is an open structure, and the fact is, so to speak, an integral part of it ; this is why the fact can become illumin- ant, on condition that the subject so place himself in relation to the fact that he receive the light radiated by it. So it is all between me and me, the me of desire and the me ' spirit of truth ' (although there are not two me's) and it is only as referred to this source, to this living centre, that facts can be called illuminant.

It is therefore in the light of truth that we succeed in mastering within us the permanent temptation to conceive or represent reality as we would like it to be. Stimulating and purifying power of truth which enables the subject to recognize reality; active recognition, far distant, both from constraint and from pure spontaneity.

Truth cannot therefore be considered as a thing, or an object. A conversation may be taken as an example, in which truth is at one and the same time that towards which the speakers are conscious of moving, and that which spurs them towards this goal.

Idea of a sort of ' intercourse' which takes place in an intelligible medium, to which man perhaps belongs in one of his aspects (the Platonic reminiscence). An idea which demonstrates that it is inad missible to isolate a judgment and then look for the truth in connec tion with this judgment.

V. PRIMARY & SECONDARY REFLECTION: THE EXISTENTIAL FULCRUM .. page 77

Once we have the definition of the intelligible medium in which philosophic thought evolves (unfolds itself), the question of the relation between reflection and life inevitably comes up. It must be said that, contrary to a thesis common amongst the romantic philoso phers, this relation is not an opposition. Reflection occurs when, life coming up against a certain obstacle, or again, being checked by a certain break in the continuity of experience, it becomes necessary to pass from one level to another, and to recover on this higher plane the unity which had been lost on the lower one. Reflection appears in this case as a promoter of life, it is ascendant and recuperatory, in that it is secondary reflection as opposed to a primary reflection which is still only decomposing or analytic.

It is on the question ' what am I? ' that philosophic reflection is called upon to centre. None of the answers that fit under headings (son of ... born at . . .) can be satisfactory here. Reflection discovers that I am not, strictly speaking, someone in particular, but neither am

I purely and simply the negation of someone in particular. We must find out how I can be both at once.

I am led to recognize that the me (ego) which I am, and which is not someone, cannot be set down as either existent or imaginary.

Passage from this ambiguous and undecided situation to the fathom ing of existence considered in its aspect of immediacy, not as the predicate of /, but as an undecomposable totality. The fact of bein^ linked to my body is constitutive of my own existential quality.

Reflection is thus led to concentrate on my body as mine. Whereas primary reflection, being purely analytical, treated this body as pure object, linked with or parallel to another thing, another reality which would be called the soul, secondary reflection recognizes in my body a fundamental act of feeling which cannot amount to mere objective possession nor to an instrumental relation, nor to something which could be treated purely and simply as identity of the subject with the object.

VI. FEELING AS A MODE OF

PARTICIPATION page 103

To recognize my body is to be led to question myself upon the act of feeling; the act of feeling is linked with the fact that this body is mine. What is the meaning of to feel ? How is it possible to feel ? To feel cannot be reduced to an instrumental function, to a function made possible by a given apparatus.

Sensation cannot be interpreted as a message emitted from X, picked up and translated by Y. To feel is not a means by which two stations can communicate with each other.

In fact: Any instrument presupposes my body. Any message pre supposes a basis of sensation ; it cannot therefore give an account of it. A non-mediatizable immediate must be brought in, an immediate that I am.

It is this idea of participation that enables us to explain the act of feeling and it is the act of feeling that is at the basis of the will to partici pate.

Participation: at one extreme we are in the objective (to take my share of a cake, for instance), at the other extreme all trace of objectivity is gone (participation by prayer, sacrifice).

But on the other hand, the will to participate can only act on the basis of a certain consensus, which is of the order of feeling.

Participation-feeling is beyond the traditional opposition of activity and passivity; to feel is not to endure, but to receive (in the sense of receiving into one's self — to receive willingly, to welcome, to embrace), and to receive is an act.

There is, then, a difference between feeling and non-feeling, but

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this difference is probably beyond the grasp of the technician, who is inclined to conceive the passing from the inert to the alive according to the processes of fabrication.

The artist alone, the artist with eyes in his head, really participates in the reality of life. Contemplation thus appears as a mode of partici pation, the highest of all. The act oj feeling is then a mode of participa tion, but participation exceeds the limits of feeling.

VII. BEING IN A SITUATION page 125

Contemplation is a mode of participation in which the oppositions before (in front of) me and within me, outside and inside, are trans cended. This being so, recollection is implicit in participation. Recollection (which is not a mode of abstracting one's self) is an act by means of which I over- pass (go beyond) these oppositions, and in which the " turning inward to myself " and " the stretching outward from myself" meet.

But recollection is not abstraction of one's self (from one's spatio- temporal situation) ; the conditions of recollection are the very conditions of the existence of the being whose circumstantial data cannot appear as contingent.

My situation, my life, are not indeed an ensemble of things existing in themselves, to which I am foreign or exterior, though neither can I merge into them and consider them as a fatality or a destiny. In this order the opposition of contingence and necessity must be over-passed (gone beyond), as is shown in the examples of encounter (which is not the objective intercrossing of casual series and which supposes inferiority ) and vocation (which is not a constraint but a call) ; the circumstantial data therefore only intervenes in connection with free activity — called upon to recognize (know) itself in this free activity, that is to say, open, permeable (without being strictly speaking influenci- ble), and for which the non-contingence of the empirical ' given ' is a call to creative development.

VIII. 'MY LIFE' .. page 148

The question: who am I? remains.

Since it is not possible to count on a friend, a party, or a collectivity to decide it for me, the question becomes an appeal (call), who am I? Shall I not find the answer by enquiring into my own life?

My life can be considered from two standpoints, that of: i . The past. 2. That of the present, the fact that I am still living it.

i. In the past. My life appears to me as something that can, by reason of its very essence, be narrated.

But to narrate is to unfold.

It is also to summarize, i.e., to totalize schematically.

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My life cannot then be reproduced by a narrative ; in as much as it has been actually lived, it lies without the scope of my present con crete thought and can only be recaptured as particles irradiated by flashes of memory.

Nor is my life in the notes jotted down day by day and making up my diary; when I re-read them they have for the most part lost their meaning, and I do not recognize myself in them.

Nor is my work to be identified with my life; what judge could sift from my work that which truly expresses me?

Finally my acts, in as much as they are recorded in objective reality, do not tell of that within me which lies beyond them.

My life, in so far as already lived, is not then an inalterable deposit or a finished whole.

2. In so far as I am still living it, my life appears to me as something I can consecrate or sacrifice, and the more I feel that I am striving towards an end, or serving a cause, the more alive (living) I feel. It is therefore essential to life that it be articulated on a reality which gives it a meaning and a trend, and, as it were, justifies it; this does not signify that life is an available asset.

To give one's life is neither to part with one's self nor to do away with one's self, it is to respond to a certain call. Death can then be life, in the supreme sense.

My life is infinitely beyond the consciousness I have of it at any given moment ; it is essentially unequal in itself, and transcendent of the account that I am led to keep of its elements. Secondary reflection alone can recuperate that which inhabits my life and which my life does not express.

IX. TOGETHERNESS: IDENTITY AND

DEPTH page 1 7 1

My life eludes itself; this being so, should we not say that man is con demned to act a part in a play he has not read, or to improvise without an outline of the plot? Should we not deny that life has a meaning or a trend?

Life is not something found in our path (such as a purse, for example) and of which we decide or not to avail ourselves.

Awareness of one's self as living is indeed to be aware of a former existence, and the role of reflection is here to recognize the prior participation with a reality which consciousness cannot encompass.

This going beyond the consciousness of self is met with particularly in two directions: in relation to others, in relation to one's self.

i . Relation to others. Consciousness of self occurs only in the following behaviours: pretentiousness, aggressiveness, humility, i.e., when the living link connecting me and another is broken by over passing the / and him opposition.

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The ego is the more itself the more it is with the other and not - directed at itself.

2. Relation to one's self. The consciousness of self appears as the breaking of the inner city the ego forms with itself, with its past.

Here again it is intersubjectivity that is first.

My life is then on the far side of the oppositions : I and someone else, unity and plurality.

Abstract identity and historic becoming. It can only be thought from an angle of depth, where the now and the then, the near and the far, meet.

X. PRESENCE AS A MYSTERY

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The link of my life with t\\2 depths of time is an introduction to the mystery of family.

Taken from the angle of depth, my life no longer appears as the terminus of various biological series, but as an endowment; the kinship between father and son therefore implies a mutual recognition, and the impossibility of dissociating the vital from the spiritual, for the spiritual is only such on condition that it be bodied forth.

The articulation of the vital and the spiritual, the common thesis of the lectures of the first series, itself brings in the knowledge of mystery.

This knowledge supposes :

i . The distinction between object and presence. 2. The criticism of the notion of problem.

1. With the object, material communications are maintained without intercommunication : the object is entirely before (in front of) the subject, which thus becomes another object.

The being who is present can on the contrary be neither invoked nor evoked ; it reveals the other to himself at the same time as it reveals itself to him.

2. The object can then supply information, bring solutions to problems put regarding it.

The being who is present transcends all possible enquiry, and in this sense is mysterious.

Philosophical research is articulated on mystery.

We must therefore conclude on the link between reflection, and presence, and mystery in the trans-historic depth of life.

Mystery coincides with this region of depth which, perhaps, opens out on to eternity.

RRATUM : p. 2oo, 1. 4, for to make read to do with

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REFLECTION & MYSTERY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

FIRST of all, and very sincerely and heartily, I would like to thank the University of Aberdeen for my appointment. As Gifford Lecturer here, I am following in the footsteps of many other thinkers, representing various national cultures, all men of honourable note in the history of philosophy ; and as I prepare to make my own contribution, I cannot help being overcome by a feeling almost of awe. Also, of course, I have to get over a certain initial diffidence; is it not a little futile, really, and more than a little rash, to set out to expound one more philosophical doctrine, when there are so many philosophical doctrines already? I fancy that every speculative thinker, however solid he may believe the grounds of his thinking to be, does harbour, somewhere deep down in him, a sceptic — a sceptic to whom the history of philo sophy looks rather like the solemn setting up of rows of ninepins, so that they may be neatly knocked down ! That way of looking at things is tempting, no more ; it is tempting, and for philosophy it is in a sense the temptation — just as for man in general suicide is that. It is a kind of suicide, too.

The fact is, moreover, that something systematic ; something which would be, strictly speaking, mj system; some organic whole of which I could, in successive lectures, anatomize the structural details, pointing out its superiorities, to name only two of my most distinguished forerunners, to the systems of Bergson and Whitehead — all that is just what I do not intend to lay before you. When I called these lectures a search for, or an investigation into, the essence of spiritual reality, I was not choosing words at random. From my point of view such a term as search or investigation — some term implying the notion of a quest — is the most adequate description that can be applied to the essential direction of philosophy. Philosophy will always, to my

way of thinking, be an aid to discovery rather than a matter o£ strict demonstration. And, if pressed, I would expand that ; I think the philosopher who first discovers certain truths and then sets out to expound them in their dialectical or systematic inter connections always runs the risk of profoundly altering the nature of the truths he has discovered.

Furthermore, I will not disguise from you the fact that when I had been nominated by the University of Aberdeen to deliver the Gifford Lectures. in 1949 and 19^0, my first reaction was a feeling of intense inner disturbance. The honour that was being done to me faced me with a serious personal problem. Was I not, in fact, being asked to do something which it had been my con stant determination not to do : namely, to present in a systematic form material which, I repeat, has always remained for me at the stage of a quest ?

All the same, I could not help considering this nomination as a call upon me. And it has always been my conviction that, however unexpected such calls might be, I ought to respond to them with such strength and skill as I possess — always supposing that they are made by somebody who recognizes the validity of the kind of demand that has always seemed valid to me. The principle does not apply, obviously enough, to the appeals that may be made to one by journalists or fashionable hostesses, once one's name has begun to make a certain noise in the world. I am

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thinking, for instance, of somebody who asked me, a few months ago, to squeeze the core of my philosophy into a couple of sen tences. That sort of thing is just silly, and must be answered with a shrug of the shoulders. But on the present occasion, I had the feeling from the first that I could not reject such an offer without becoming guilty of what would be, from my own point of view, an indefensible betrayal.

At the same time, it was clear to me that in answering this call I must continue to respect the specific character of what has always been my own line of development. And, of course, those who made this offer to me would have that line of development in view. Nobody who had any direct knowledge of my writings would dream of expecting from me an exposition in the deductive manner, the logical linking together of a body of essential

propositions. My task, therefore, was to try to satisfy whatever expectations I might have aroused, without, however, straining myself to stretch my thought on the procrustean bed of some kind of systematic dogmatism : without, indeed, taking any account at all of whatever modes may prevail at the moment in certain schools of philosophy, without trying to square myseli with the Hegelian or the Thomist tradition, for instance. If I was able to accept this offer, and if in the end I felt that I ought to accept it, the reason was that what was being asked of me was, at bottom, merely this: that I should be, that I should remain myself. Now to be oneself, to remain oneself is a trickier matter than most people think. There are always gaps in our personal experience and our personal thought, and there exists a permanent temptation to stop these up with ready-made developments borrowed from some body of pre-existing doctrine. It would be very presumptuous of me to assume that, at certain points, this particular weakness will not come to light in the course of these lectures.

Given all this, my task, as I repeat, could not be that of expounding some system which might be described as Marcelism — the word rings in my ears with a mocking parodic note ! — but rather to recapitulate the body of my work under a fresh light, to seize on its joints, its hinges, its articulations, above all to indicate its general direction. And here I would ask your per mission to use a metaphor; I shall need such permission more than once, for I share the belief of Henri Bergson in the philo sophical value of some kinds of metaphor, those which may be described as structural. The image that imposes itself on me is that of a road. It is just, so it seems to me, as if I had so far been following what tracks there were across a country that appeared to me to be largely unexplored, and as if you had asked me to construct a main road in the place of these interrupted paths, or perhaps rather — but it comes to the same thing — to draw up a sort of itinerary.

The metaphor is open to objections of two sorts.

It might be said in the first place that a road implies space ; and that the notion of space is something from which a meta physical investigation, as such, must abstract. One must make the

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simple answer that if my metaphor must be rejected on this count, so must every kind of discursive thinking; for it is all too evident that the notion of discursiveness implies, and rests on, a simple physical image like that of walking along a road. Moreover, we shall later on have occasion to recognize the existence and

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philosophical rights of a sort of spatiality which might be called the spatiality of inner experience ; and it may be that this spatiality of inner experience is coextensive with the whole spiritual life.

But the objection may be put in another way, which has a dangerous look of being much more genuinely awkward. To lay down a road in a place where at first there were only tracks, is that not equivalent to fixing in advance a certain destination at which one intends to arrive, and must not that destination, itself, be very exactly located? The underlying image would be that of a grotto, a mine, or a sanctuary whose whereabouts one knew in advance. It would be a matter of showing the way there to those who for one reason or another wanted to have a look at the place, no doubt in order to profit from its riches. But does not this presuppose that the result we are working for has already been achieved, even before we start working for it : does it not pre suppose a preliminary or original discovery of the grotto or the sanctuary? Well, looking at the matter in my own way, I must ask whether, in the realm of philosophy, we can really talk about results? Is not all such talk based on a misunderstanding; of the specific character of a philosophical investigation, as such? The question raised here at least obliges us to come to much closer grips \vith the very notion of a result.

Let us take the case of a chemist who has invented and set going some process for obtaining or extracting a substance which, before his time, could only be got hold of in a much more costly and complicated fashion. It is obvious, in this case, that the result of the invention will hav e a sort of separate existence, or, at all events, that we shall be quite within our rights in treating it as if it had. If I need the substance — let us say it is some pharmaceutical product — I will go to the shop, and I will not need to know that it is thanks to the invention of the chemist in question that I am able to procure it easily. In my purely practical role as customer and consumer, I may have no occasion even to learn that there

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has been such an invention unless for some out-of-the-way reason ; let us say, because a factory has been destroyed and the invention has temporarily ceased to be put into operation. The pharmacist may then tell me that the product is out of stock, or is not to be had at its usual price and quality, but let us get it quite clear that in the ordinary run of affairs the existence of this chemical process will be known only to specialists or to those who are moving in the direction of specialization. Here wre have a very simple example indeed of what sort of life a result may lead, cut apart from the methods by which it was achieved. And one could go on to mention many other examples ; it is not necessary that a result should always embody itself, as in the instance I have given, as a material commodity. Think of some astronomical forecast, say of a coming eclipse. We welcome that, we make it our own, without bothering ourselves much about the extremely compli cated calculations on which it is founded, and knowing quite well that our own mathematical equipment is not sufficient to allow us to do these sums over again in our own heads.

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One might note here, in passing, that in our modern world, because of its extreme technical complication, we are, in fact, condemned to take for granted a great many results achieved through long research and laborious calculations, research and calculations of which the details are bound to escape us.

One might postulate it as a principle, on the other hand, that in an investigation of the type on which we are now engaged, a philosophical investigation, there can be no place at all for results of this sort. Let us expand that: between a philosophical investigation and its final outcome, there exists a link which can not be broken without the summing up itself immediately losing all reality. And of course we must also ask ourselves here just what we mean, in this context, by reality.

We can come to the same conclusions starting from the other end. We can attempt to elucidate the notion of philoso phical investigation directly. Where a technician, like the chemist, starts off with some very general notion, a notion given in advance of what he is looking for, what is peculiar to a philosophical investigation is that the man who undertakes it cannot possess anything equivalent to that notion given in advance of what he is

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looking for. It would not, perhaps, be imprecise to say that he starts off at random ; I am taking care not to forget that this has been sometimes the case with scientists themselves, but a scientific result achieved, so to say, by a happy accident acquires a kind of purpose when it is viewed retrospectively ; it looks as if it had tended towards some strictly specific aim. As we go on we shall gradually see more and more clearly that this can never be the case with philosophic investigation.

On the other hand, when we think of it, we realize that our mental image of the technician — of the scientist, too, for at this level the distinction between the two of them reaches vanishing point — is that of a man perpetually carrying out operations, in his own mind or with physical objects, which anybody could carry out in his place. The sequence of these operations, for that reason, can be schematized in universal terms. I am abstracting here from the mental gropings which are inseparable, in the individual scientist's history, from all periods of discovery. These gropings are like the useless roundabout routes taken by a raw tourist in a country with which he has not yet made himself familiar. Both are destined to be dropped and forgotten, for good and all, once the traveller knows the lie of the land.

The greatness and the limitation of scientific discovery consist precisely in the fact that it is bound by its nature to be lost in anonymity. Once a result has been achieved, it is bound to appear, if not a matter of chance, at least a matter of contin- gence, that it should have been this man and not that man who discovered such and such a process. This retrospective view of the matter is probably in some degree an illusion, but the illusion is itself inseparable from the general pattern of scientific research. From the point of view of technical progress, there is no point in considering the concrete conditions in which some discovery was actually able to be made, the personal, the perhaps tragic back ground from which the discovery, as such, detaches itself; from the strictly technical point of view all that background is, obviously and inevitably, something to be abstracted from.

But this is not and cannot be true in the same way for the kind of investigation that will be presented in the course of these

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lectures ; and it is essential to see exactly why not. How can we start out on a search without having somehow anticipated what we are searching for? Here, again, it is necessary to make certain distinctions. The notion given in advance, the scientist's or technician's notion, which in a philosophical investigation we must exclude, has to do, in fact, with a certain way of acting: the problem is how to set about it so that some mode of action which is at the moment impracticable, or at least can only be carried out in unsatisfactory and precarious conditions, should become practicable according to certain pre-established standards of practicability (standards of simplicity, of economy, and so on). Let us add, in addition, as a development of what has previously been said, that this mode of action should be of a sort that can be carried out by anybody, at least by anybody within a certain determinable set of conditions, anybody, for instance, equipped with certain indispensable tools.

It is probably not sufficient for my purpose merely to say that, where a metaphysical investigation is being undertaken, a result of this sort, the arrival at a practicable mode of action within certain determinable conditions, cannot be calculated on in advance, and that in fact the very idea of a metaphysical investigation necessarily excludes the possibility of this kind of practical result. For I might also add that the inaptitude of the run of men for metaphysics, particularly in our own period, is certainly bound up with the fact that they find it impossible to conceive of a purpose which lies outside the order of the practical, \vhich cannot be translated into the language of action.

To get a clearer insight into the matter we must make a real effort to get a more exact definition of the point of departure of this other type of investigation — our own type. I have written somewhere that metaphysical unease is like the bodily state of a man in a fever who will not lie still but keeps shifting around in his bed looking for the right position. But how does this really apply? What does the word 'position' signify here? We should not let ourselves be too much hampered by the spatial character of the metaphor; or, if we are, it can be helped out by another — that of discords in music, with which the ear cannot rest satisfied,

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but which must be resolved by being transcended in a wider harmony. Let us see if this notion of resolution can be of some use to us here.

Interpreting it in the most general way, we can say that this idea of resolution, of the resolving of discords or contradictions, is that of the passage from a situation in which we are ill at ease to one in which we feel ourselves almost melting away with relief. The general notion of a situation is one which is destined to play a great part in my lectures, and I have my reasons for first bringing it to your notice at this point. It will be only much later on that we shall grasp its full significance. For the moment, let us be content to say that a situation is something in which I find myself involved ; but that however we interpret the notion of the involved self, the situation is not something which presses on the self merely from the outside, but something which colours its interior states ; or rather we shall have to ask ourselves whether, at this level of discourse, the usual antithesis between inner and outer is not beginning to lose a good deal of its point. The only point that I want, however, to emphasize at this moment is that a philo sophical investigation, of the sort in which we are now engaged, can be considered as a gathering together of the processes by which I can pass from a situation which is experienced as basically discordant, a situation in which I can ?o so far as to sav that I am

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at war with myself, to a different situation in which some kind of expectation is satisfied.

This is still all pretty vague, but already, I am afraid, it begins to raise awkward questions, all centering round this indetermin ate notion of the involved self, of my involved self, which I have been forced to take as my reference-point. The really important question that is raised may be framed in the following terms : is there not a risk of the investigation that is being undertaken here reducing itself to an account of the succession of stages by which I, I as this particular person, Gabriel Marcel, attempt, starting off from some state of being which implies a certain suffering, to reach another state of being which not only does not imply suffering but may be accompanied by a certain joy? But what guarantee can I have that this personal progress of mine has any thing more than a subjective value? Nevertheless, in the end is it

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not the case that something more than subjective value is needed to confer on any chain of thoughts what I may describe as a proper philosophic dignity? In other words, are there any means at all of assuring ourselves whether this indeterminate involved self, which I have been forced to take as my reference-point, is or is not, for instance, immortal?

In this connection, some remarks which I have previously made might be of a kind to arouse a certain uneasiness. Have I not seemed to reserve the privilege of universality in thinking to scientists or technicians whose method is that of a series of operations which can be carried out by anybody else in the world who is placed in the same setting and can make use of similar tools?

The answer to this very important question will only clarify itself very gradually, as our thoughts about it work back upon themselves. I think it necessary, nevertheless, to indicate even at this moment — partly to allay a very understandable nervousness — in what direction the answer ought to be sought for.

Let us say, to put it very roughly, that the dilemma in which this question leaves us — that of choice between the actual indi vidual man, delivered over to his own states of being and incapable of transcending them, and a kind of generalized thinking as such, what the Germans call Denken uberhaupt, which would be opera tive in a sort of Absolute and so claim universal validity for its operations — let us say that this dilemma is a false one, and must be rejected. Between these two antithetic terms, we must intercalate an intermediary type of thinking, wrhich is precisely the type of thinking that the lecture following this will illustrate. The point should at once be made here that, even outside the limits of philosophy properly so called, there are incontestable examples of this type of thinking. We have only to think, for instance, of what we describe, rather vaguely indeed, as the understanding of works of art; it would be better no doubt, in this connection, to talk of their appreciation — so long as we eliminate from that word its root reference to a pretium, a market price. It would be an illusion and even an absurdity to suppose that the Missa Solemnis or some great work of pictorial art is meant for just anybody who comes along; on the contrary, we

[9]

must in honest sincerity accept the fact that there are plenty of people whose attention is not arrested, and who have nothing communicated to them, by such wrorks. It is none the less certain that when a genuine emotion is felt at the impact of a work of art it infinitely transcends the limits of what we call the individual consciousness. Let us try to clarify this in more detail.

When I look at or listen to a masterpiece, I have an exper ience which can be strictly called a revelation. That experience will just not allow itself to be analysed away as a mere state of simple strongly felt satisfaction. One of the secondary purposes, indeed, of these lectures will be to look into the question of how we ought to understand such revelations. On the other hand, it is just as incontestably a fact that, for reasons that remain impene trable to us — if it is right to talk at all about reasons in this connection — such revelations appear not to be granted to other people, people with whom, nevertheless, I have no difficulty at all in communicating on other topics. There would be no point in bringing into play my stores of learning, let me even say my gifts as a teacher ; I would never succeed in exciting, in the other person, the thrill of admiration that the great work of art had excited in me. It is just as if the other person were, in the root sense of the word, refractory — one who repels the particles of light — or as if a kind of grace that is operative for me were not operative for him.

The existence of such absolute disparity has something quite indecent about it in a \vorld where the counting of heads has become not only a legal fact but a moral standard. We have got into the habit of thinking statistically, and to do so, at this level, is at bottom to admit that anything which cannot accumulate enough votes in its favour ought not to be taken into considera tion, does not count. Obviously, in those parts of the world which have not yet come under the totalitarian yoke, this pecu liar logic has not had all its implications worked out. The statis tical method is, as it were, dumped down well outside the gates of the palace of art, but for how long? It is permissible, at least, to ask whether in this realm, as in many others, the totalitarian countries, with their brutal way of freezing out the nonconform- ing artist, have not merely confined themselves to drawing the

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proper conclusions from premises that are, in fact, accepted by everybody for whom statistics provide a sufficient criterion for the administration of human affairs.

Yet if the conclusions are logical, it may be that the role of the free critical thinker in our time is to swim against the current and attack the premises themselves. That is not our task, here and now: but we must state, simply and flatly, that there do exist ranges of human experience where a too literal, an over-simpli fied way of conceiving the criterion of universality just cannot be accepted. And, of course, there are still a good many countries in which the idea of taking a referendum on artistic or religious questions would be greeted with hoots of laughter. Let us under stand each other : for those who want to study taste and opinion, over a set period, in a given country, the existence of such things as Gallup polls is obviously useful ; but there are still a good many people who wrould refuse to postulate it as a principle that current tastes and opinions, for those countries, ought to have the force of law. The step from 'Such is the case, quite generally' to 'Such ought to be the case, universally' is an obvious non sequitur, and that is what matters to us. We ought, in addition, to go on to a very careful analysis of what kind of question is really susceptible of being the subject of a referendum. We would then be led to ask if, apart from questions that can be answered by a simple 'Yes' or 'No', there are not other infinitely more vital questions which are literally incapable of embodying themselves in the general consciousness. Of these questions, the most important are those which present themselves to the philosopher as the first that have to be answered — though first here must not, of course, be understood in a strictly chronological sense. The philosopher, of necessity, has begun by asking himself the ordin ary questions ; and it is only at the cost of an effort of reflective thought, which really constitutes a very painful discipline, that he has raised himself up from the level of the first type of question, the type that everybody asks, to the level of the second, the type proper to philosophy. But I am still drawing the picture with very crude strokes and in very rough outline. A particular example may make it easier to understand what I am getting at.

The question, 'Do you believe in God?' is one of those

which, according to the common belief, can be answered by a simple 'Yes' or 'No'. But a deeper analysis would enable us to lay bare the invariably illusory character of these answers. There is a mass of people who imagine that they believe in God, when in fact they are bowing down to an idol to whom any decent theology whatever would undoubtedly refuse the name of God; and on the other hand there are many others who believe themselves to be atheists because they conceive of God only as an idol to be rejected, and who yet reveal in their acts, which far transcend their professed opinions, a totally inarticulate religious belief. It follows from all this that the answer to a referendum on the question, 'Do you believe in God?' ought to be in the great majority of cases, 'I don't know whether I believe in God or not — and I am not even quite sure that I know wrhat "believing in God" is'. Note, carefully, the contrast between these formulae and those of the agnosticism of the last century: 'I don't know whether there is a God or not'.

Proceeding along these lines we should be brought, undoubt edly, to a definition of the philosopher as the man who asks the true questions. But obviously this formula itself raises a difficulty. The true questions, I have said: true from whose point of view? Or rather, can we give a meaning to the adjective 'true', as it is used here, without bringing in the problem of the point of view of the person to whom the 'true question' is addressed? There is no difficulty, at least in principle, in knowing what the words 'true answer' might mean: 'true questions' are another matter. Perhaps we might bring in Plato's wonderful comparison of the philosophic questioner to the skilful carver. There is a right and a wrong way of carving. But we must take care ; the real carver, to whom the philosophic questioner is compared, is exercising his skill on a given structure, let us say the bones of a fowl. Our own skill, in these lectures, has to be exercised on something much less palpable and solid ; perhaps not on a struc ture at all exactly, except possibly in the sense, itself metaphor ical, in which we refer to the structure of a play or a poem. From this point of view, the comparison loses much of its aptness. Could we say that the philosopher is a kind of locksmith to whom we turn when we want to open some particular door? Even this

[12]

is much too simple. In this case door, keyhole, lock, are not given. The task of philosophy, to my mind, consists precisely in this sort of reciprocal clarification of two unknowns, and it may well be that, in order to pose the true questions, it is actually necessary to have an intuition, in advance, about what the true answers might be. It might be said that the true questions are those which point, not to anything resembling the solution of an enigma, but rather to a line of direction along which we must move. As we

o

move along the line, we get more and more chances of being visited by a sort of spiritual illumination; for wre shall have to acknowledge that Truth can be considered only in this way, as a spirit, as a light.

It goes without saying that we are here touching on a prob lem that is going to take up much of our time during this first series of lectures. It is impossible to say anything about the essence of the spiritual life unless one has first succeeded in making it clear what is to be understood by the term 'truth', or at the very least in ascertaining whether the term is one of those which can

o

be univocally defined: that is, defined as having one, and only one, proper meaning, indifferently applicable at all levels of discourse.

So far, it does not seem that all these preliminary points we have been making yet allow us to discern very clearly on whose behalf our investigations are being pursued. I have spoken of an audience that would act as an intermediary between the enclosed subjective self, at one pole of an antithesis, and the generalized thinking of science, with its claims to quite universal validity, at another. I illustrated this middle position from the fine arts, and the way in which they are really understood by some and not understood at all by others ; but that illustration does not yet let me see very clearly what set of people this audience might be ; and the references to religious belief with which I followed up

O i

that illustration may seem to plunge us into even deeper obscurity. What! must I make my appeal, at this point, to an audience of connoisseurs'? I am using the word in the same sense in which it is used in artistic circles. Let us stop for a moment, and think about it. The notion of being a connoisseur seems inseparable from that of having a kind of tact or, more exactly, a sensory refinement —

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a very clear example, for instance, is the really discriminating diner : I am thinking of the kind of expert who can distinguish not only between two very similar wines from neighbouring vineyards, but between two successive years' bottlings from the same vineyard, by means of subleties that escape the untrained palate. It should be all too clear that the point of view of a connoisseur of this sort is not that at which we should place ourselves if \ve wish to understand, that is, to take upon ourselves or more accurately to develop within ourselves, the philosophical investigations that will be the subject of these lectures. I would be inclined to say that the audience I am looking for must be dis tinguished less by a certain kind of aptitude (like, for instance, the discriminating diner's aptitude) than by the level at which they make their demands on life and set their standards.

We shall have to ask ourselves many questions about the nature of reflective thought and about its metaphysical scope. But from the very start we should note how necessary it will be to be suspicious, I will not say of words themselves, but of the images that words call up in us. I cannot enter here into the terribly difficult problem of the nature of language; but, from the very beginning of our investigations, we should bear in mind how often it seems to get tied up in knots — or I would rather say in clots, like clots in the bloodstream, which impede the free motion of thought: for that motion, if it is allowed its natural flow, is also a circulation. We get these clots because words become charged with passion and so acquire a taboo-value. The thinking which dares to infringe such taboos is considered, if not exactly as sacrilegious, at least as a kind of cheating, or even as something worse. Obviously, it is particularly today in the political realm that this sort of thing is noticeable. The term 'democracy', for instance, is one which does block our thinking in a lamentable way. A concrete example of this tendency is the fact that anybody who wants to examine the notion of democracy from a detached point of view is liable to be called a fascist— as if fascism itself were not just Jem^cra^y^vvTiIcriTiad taken the wrong turning. But the man who stopped short in his thinking for fear of having such labels as 'fascist' stuck on him would be inexcusable; and if we are really inspired by that philosophical intention, whose

nature I have been trying to make clear, it is certain that we shall be no longer able to feel such fears, or at least we shall be no longer able to take them into consideration. At a first glance, then, it seems that one thing we need for our task is a certain

o

courage, a courage in following out the course of our thoughts where it leads us, a mental courage, about which common experience allows us to say definitely that it is infinitely less widely diffused than physical courage is ; and it will be of the utmost importance to ask ourselves why this should be so. For it ought to be a matter of total indifference to me to hear myself

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called 'fascist' if I know that this accusation rests on an obvious misunderstanding, and even that, at bottom, my antagonist's readiness to make such accusations implies the existence in his mind of some attitudes which are really rather close to that fascist spirit which he pretends to discern in me.

Obviously, this is only an illustration : but it is of set purpose, in this first lecture, that I am multiplying references to various levels of human interest, the technical, the scientific, the artistic, the religious, the political; I want to underline the extremely general scope of the investigations to which all these remarks are leading on.

Now, what exactly lies behind this claim of ours, this refusal, at any price, to have the free movement of our thinking blocked? What lies behind it is, I think, the philosophical intention seized in its purity; that intention is quite certainly inseparable from what we are accustomed to call freedom. But, as we shall see, freedom is one of these words which need to have their meanings very carefully elucidated; there can be no doubt that, in our own period, the common uses of the word are often very unconsidered and very indiscreet. Let us say simply that if philosophic thought is free thought, it is free first of all in the sense that it does not want to let itself be influenced by any prejudging of any issue. But this notion of prejudice must be here taken in its widest range of application. It is not only from social, political, and religious prejudice that philosophical thinking must be enfran chised, but also from a group of prejudices which seem to make one body with itself, and which, one might say, it has a natural tendency to secrete. I would not hesitate to say, for instance,

that philosophical idealism, as that doctrine has long been ex pounded, first in Germany, then in England and France, rests very largely on prejudices of this sort, and it is obvious that our thinking finds great difficulty in detaching itself from such prejudices. To employ a rather trivial comparison, I would readily admit that philosophy, when she engages in this struggle with the prejudices that are, in a sense, natural to her, must at moments have the impression that she is beginning to tear off her own skin and to immolate herself in a kind of bleeding and unprotected fleshy covering. That metaphor, like so many of the metaphors I have used, is inadequate. Might one not say that in ridding herself of her natural idealistic prejudices, philosophy must, if she looks at the matter from a high moral point of view, fear that she is betraying her own nature, showing herself unfaith ful to her proper standards, and assuming in their place the impure, contradictory, vile standards of a renegade, and all this without there being, at a first glance, any visible counterbalancing advan tages ? I remember very \vell the periods of anguish through which I passed, more than thirty years ago now, when I was waging, in utter obscurity, this sort of war against myself, in the name of something which I felt sticking in me as sharply as a needle, but upon which I could not yet see any recognizable face.

We shall have to return to this mysterious need, and to expatiate upon it, since it is this need which I am attempting to satisfy in some degree in the course of these lectures, and since it is in danger of appearing completely meaningless to anyone who does not feel it in the depths of his own nature. But at the moment, I would say just this: at bottom, this need is not very different from aood will, as that phrase is understood in the Gospels.

It would be folly to seek to disguise the fact that in our own day the notion of 'the man of good will' has lost much of its old richness of content, one might even say of its old harmonic reverberations. But there is not any notion that is more in need of reinstatement in our modern world. Let the Gospel formula mean 'Peace to men of good will', or 'Peace through men of good will', as one might often be tempted to think it did, in either case it affirms the existence of a necessary connection between

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good will and peace, and that necessary connection cannot be too much underlined. Perhaps it is only in peace or, what amounts to the same thing, in the conditions which permit peace to be assured, that it is possible to find that content in the will which allows us to describe it as specifically a good will. 'Content', however, is not quite the word I want here. I think, rather, that the goodness is a matter of a certain wray of asserting the will, and on the other hand everything leads us to believe that a will which, in asserting itself, contributes towards war, whether that is war in men's hearts or what we would call 'real war', must be regard ed as intrinsically evil. We can speak then of men of good wrill or peacemakers, indifferently. Of course, as we go on, these notions will have to be made more exact and worked out in more detail, and I dare to harbour the hope that our investigations will not be without their usefulness if they allow us to make some contribution towards such a clarifying process.

Thus, in seeking to determine for what set of people this work of ours can be intended, we have arrived at a distinction between those who feel a certain inner intellectual need, not unrelated to the more widespread inner moral need, felt by men of good will, to seek peace and ensue it, and those who do not; this distinction needs to be g;one into more deeply. And it is a distinction, as we shall see in the next lecture, that has to be defined in relation to a certain general way of looking at the world.

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CHAPTER II

A BROKEN WORLD

BEFORE pressing further forward, I feel it necessary to go back a little, to consider certain objections that will have undoubtedly occurred to many of my listeners.

I assert that an investigation of the sort in which we are engaged, an investigation of an eminently theoretical kind, can appeal only to minds of a certain sort, to minds that have already a special bias. Is there not something strange and almost shocking in such an assertion? Does it not imply a perversion of the very notion of truth? The ordinary idea of truth, the normal idea 01 truth, surely involves a universal reference — what is true, that is to say, is true for anybody and everybody. Are we not risking a great deal in wrenching apart, in this way, the two notions of the true and the universally valid? Or more exactly, in making this distinction, are we not substituting for the notion of truth some other notion — some value which may have its place in the prac tical, the moral, or the aesthetic order, but for which truth is not the proper term?

Later in this course of lectures we shall have to look very deeply into the meaning, or meanings, of the word 'truth', but we have not yet reached a stage where such an investigation would have practical use. We must at this stage simply attempt to disentangle, to lay bare the presupposition which is implied in this objection, and to ask ourselves what this presupposition, as a postulate, is really worth. What the objection implies, in fact, is that we know in advance, and perhaps even know in a quite schematic fashion, what the relation between the self and the truth it recognizes must be.

In the last two or three centuries, and indeed since much more remote periods, there has been a great deal of critical reflection on the subject of truth. Nevertheless, there is every

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reason to suppose that, in our everyday thinking, we remain dominated by an image of truth as something extracted — extrac ted, or smelted out, exactly as a pure metal is extracted from a mixed ore. It seems obvious to us that there are universally effective smelting processes : or, more fundamentally, that there are established, legitimate ways of arriving at truth ; and we have a confused feeling that the man who steps aside from these ways, or even from the idea of these ways, is in danger of losing himself in a sort of no man's land where the difference between truth and error — even between reality and dream — tends to vanish away. It is, however, this very image of truth as something smelted out that we must encounter critically if we want to grasp clearly the gross error on which it rests. What we must above all reject is the idea that we are forced to make a choice between a genuine truth (so to call it) which has been extracted, and a false, a lying truth which has been fabricated. Both horns of this dilemma, it should be noted, are metaphorically modelled on physical processes; and there is, on the face of it, every reason to suppose that the subtle labour involved in the search for truth cannot ever be properly assimilated to such physical manipula tions of physical objects. But truth is not a thing-, whatever definition we may in the end be induced to give to the notion of

J o

truth, we can affirm even now that truth is not a physical object, that the search for truth is not a physical process, that no general izations that apply to physical objects and processes can apply also to truth.

Teaching, or rather certain traditional inadequate ways of conceiving the teacher's function, have encouraged the general acceptance of such gross images of truth. In Dickens 's novel, Hard Times, there is a character called Mr. Gradgrind, for whom anybody and everybody can be treated as a vessel capable of containing truths (such as, 'The horse is a graminivorous quad ruped') extracted from the crude ore of experience, divided, and evenly dealt out. Mr. Gradgrind is aware, certainly, that one vessel is not so sound as another; some are leaky, some are fragile, and so on ... I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that the educational system, even in countries that think of themselves as rather advanced, has still something in common with the coarse-

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ness and absurdity of Dickens 's satirical picture of it. The inter esting question is, under what conditions does this illusory image of truth as a physical substance, even as the stuff contained in a vessel, present itself naturally to the mind? It is obvious that the use of fixed forms of words in teaching plays a prominent part in fostering the illusion. A history teacher, for instance, has to din dates into his pupils. They have to give back just what they have been given, unchanged by any mental process, and they have to memorize the dates in a quite mechanical way. It is very natural in this case to think of the pupil as a vessel, into which a certain measure of liquid is poured, so that it may be poured out again ; an even apter metaphor would be that of the gramophone record. Such metaphors, however, cease to apply in the case where, having explained some idea to a pupil, I ask him to explain it back to me in his own words and if possible with his own illustrations ; the idea certainly may still be thought of as a content, but it is a content that has to be grasped by the intelli gence; it cannot be reduced, like the history master's dates, to some exact, particular formula. It is this irreducibility that we must keep a grip on if we want to get beyond the illusory image of truth as a physical object, a substance, the contents of a vessel, a mere thing, and to recognize the impossibility of adequately representing by material images those processes by which I can both conceive a true proposition and affirm it to be true.

But perhaps there is a principle that wre can already postulate (though reserving our right to expatiate more largely on this important topic at a later stage). The principle is this. On the one hand, everything that can be properly called technique is comparable to a kind of manipulation, if not always necessarily of physical objects, at least of mental elements (mathematical symbols would be an example) comparable in some respects to physical objects; and I suggest on the other hand, that the validity for anybody and everybody, which has been claimed for truth, is certainly deeply implied (though even here, subject to certain provisos) in the very notion of technique, as wre have conceived that notion here. Subject to certain provisos, I say, since every technical manipulation, even the simplest, implies the possession by the manipulator of certain minimal aptitudes, without which

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it is not practicable. There is a story, for instance, that I often tell, of how I had to pass an examination in physics which in cluded, as a practical test, an experiment to determine one of the simpler electrical formulae — I forget which now, let us say the laws of electrolysis — and I found myself quite incapable of joining up my wires properly; so no current came through. All I could do was write on my paper, 'I cannot join up my wires, so there is no current; if there were a current, it would produce such and such a phenomenon, and I would deduce . . .' My own clumsi ness appeared to me, and it must have appeared to the examiner, as a purely contingent fact. It remains true in principle that any body and everybody can join up the wires, enable the current to pass through, and so on.

Conversely, we must say that the further the intelligence passes beyond the limits of a purely technical activity, the less the reference to the 'no matter whom', the 'anybody at all', is applicable ; and that in the extreme case there will be no sense at all in saying that such and such a task of lofty reflection could have been carried out by anybody whatsoever. One might even say, as I indicated in my first chapter, that the philosopher's task involves not only unusual mental aptitudes but an unusual sense of inner urgent need; and as I have already suggested, towards the end of that chapter, we shall have to face the fact that in such a world as we live in urgent inner needs of this type are almost systematically misunderstood, are even deliberately discredited. Our world today really gathers itself together against these needs, it tugs in the other direction like, as it were, a sort of counter weight; it does so, also, to the very extent to which technical processes have emancipated themselves today from the ends to which they ought normally to remain subordinate, and have staked a claim to an autonomous reality, or an autonomous value.

'Don't you feel sometimes that we are living ... if you can 'call it living ... in a broken world? Yes, broken like a broken 'watch. The mainspring has stopped working. Just to look at 'it, nothing has changed. Everything is in place. But put the 'watch to your ear, and you don't hear any ticking. You know 'what I'm talking about, the world, what we call the world,

'the world of human creatures ... it seems to me it must have 'had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had 'stopped beating'.

That is a speech by the heroine of one of my plays, and from time to time I shall be quoting from my own plays in this way. For it is in these imaginative works of mine that my thought is to be found in its virgin state, in, as it were, its first gushings from the source. I shall try later on to explain why this is so and how the drama, as a mode of expression, has forced itself upon me, and become intimately linked with my properly philosophical work. The young woman wrho makes this speech is not intended to rank among what we usually call intellectuals . She is a fashion able lady, smart, witty, flattered by her friends, but the busy, rush ing life that she seems so much at home in obviously masks an inner grief, an anguish, and it is that anguish which breaks through to the surface in the speech I have just quoted.

A broken world? Can we really endorse these words? And are we being the dupes of a myth when we imagine that there was a time when the world had a heart? We must be careful here. Certainly, it would be rash to attempt to put one's finger on some epoch in history when the unity of the world was something directly felt by men in general. But could we feel the division of the world today, or could some of us at least feel it so strongly, if we had not within us, I will not say the memory of such a united world, but at least the nostalgia of it. What is even more import ant is to grasp the fact that this feeling of a world divided grows stronger and stronger at a time when the surface unification of the world (I mean of the earth, of this planet) appears to be proceed ing apace. Some people make a great deal of this unification; they think they see in it something like the quickening in the womb of a higher conscience, they would say a planetary con science. Much later in these lectures we shall have to face that possibility, and finally to make a judgment on the real worth of such hopes. But for the moment we have only to ask ourselves about the particular, personal anguish felt today by people like Christiane in my Le Monde Casse. What is the substance of that anguish? And, in the first place, have we any grounds for attribut-

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ing a general relevance to such personal experience?

There is one preliminary point that must occur to all of us ; we live today in a world at war with itself, and this state of world- war is being pushed so far that it runs the risk of ending in some thing that could properly be described as world-suicide. This is something one cannot be over-emphatic about. Suicide, until our own times, was an individual possibility, it seemed to apply only to the individual case. It seems now to apply to the case of the whole human world. Of course, one may be tempted to say that this new possibility is only part of the price we pay for the amazing progress of our times. The world today is, in a sense, at once whole and single in a way which, even quite recently, it was not. It is from this very unity and totality that it draws its sinister new power of self-destruction. The connection between the new unity and the new power is something we ought to concentrate on very carefully. Let us postpone, for the time being, a consideration of the conditions that make world-suicide possible and their significance; we are still forced to recognize that the existence of the new power implies something vicious in the new unity. It is not enough, I think, to say that the new unity is still mixed with diversity, or at least 'mixed' is a weak and inadequate word for what we mean. Mixture is in itself a certain mode of unity, but we must recognize that it is a mode which in a certain sense betrays the very need that has called it into exis tence. And this suffices to show, as we shall see by and by much more clearly, that unity is a profoundly ambiguous idea, and that it is certainly not correct to take the scholastic line and to regard unity and goodness as purely and simply convertible terms. There is every reason to suppose that the kind of unity which makes the self-destruction of our world possible (and by possible, I mean perfectly conceivable) cannot be other than bad in itself, and it is easy to perceive where the badness lies. It is linked to the existence of a will to power which occurs under aspects that cannot be reconciled with each other, and which assume opposite ideological characters. On this topic, I cannot do better than recommend to you Raymond Aron's book, The Great Schism.* But it is clear also that from a strictly philosophical point of view

*Le Grand Schisme, Paris, 1947.

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we must ask certain questions which fall outside the field of the political writer as such.

From the philosophical point of view, the fundamental question is whether it is a mere contingent fact that the will to power always presents this character of discordance, or whether there is a necessary connection between this discordance and the essential notion of the will to power itself. It should also be our business, indeed, not to content ourselves with a mere analysis of the notion of the will to power, comparing that with the notion of discordance, but to reflect in the light of history, whose lessons, in this instance, have a strict coherence, on the inevitable destiny of alliances, which, when they are instituted for purposes of conquest, are inevitably fated to dissolve and to transform themselves into enmities. It is, alas, true that one can imagine the possibility of a single conqueror's gaining possession, today, of the technical equipment that would render both rebellion and opposition futile; and, in principle at least, it seems that a government based on slavery and terror might last for an indefinite period. But it is all too clear that such a government would be only another form of the state of war, and indeed perhaps the most odious form of that state that we can imagine. Besides, if one refuses to let oneself be deceived bv mere fictitious abstrac tions, one soon sees that the \ictor, far from himself being an indissoluble unity, is always in fact a certain group of men in the midst of whom there must always arise the same sort of rupture which, as we have seen, always menaces alliances; so that at the end of the day, it is still to war, and to war in a more obvious form than that of a perpetual despotism, that the triumphant will to power is likely to lead. It could only be otherwise — and yet this is a real possibility, and should not be passed over in silence- in a mechanized world, a world deprived of passion, a world in which the slave ceased to feel himself a slave, and perhaps even ceased to feel anything, and where the masters themselves became perfectly apathetic : I mean, where they no longer felt the greed and the ambition which are today the mainsprings of every conquest, whatever it may be. It is very important to notice that this hypothesis is by no means entirely a fantastic one ; it is, at bottom, the hypothesis of those who imagine human

[H]

society as transformed into a sort of ant-hill. I would even be tempted to say that the possibility of such a society is implicit in, and that its coming into existence would be a logical develop ment of, certain given factors in our own society. There are sectors of human life in the present world where the process of automatization applies not only, for instance, to certain definite techniques, but to wrhat one wrould have formerly called the inner life, a life which today, on the contrary, is becoming as outer as possible. Only, it must be noticed that in a world of this sort (supposing, which is not proved, that it would really come into existence) it would no longer be proper to speak of the will to powrer; or rather that expression would tend to lose its precise psychological significance and would in the end stand merely, as in Nietzsche, for some indistinct metaphysical something. Our thinking tends to get lost, in fact, at this point, in the more or less fictitious notion of a Nature considered as the expression of pure Energy. I will quote, on this topic, a very characteristic passage from Nietzsche's great work, The Will to Power — a great work which is, in fact, nothing more than a heap of fragments.

'And', says Nietzsche, 'do you know what the world is for me? 'Would you like me to show you it in my mirror? This world, 'a monster of energy, without beginning or end: a fixed sum 'of energy, hard as bronze, which is never either augmented 'or diminished, \vhich does not use itself up but merely 'changes its shape; as a whole it has always the same invariable 'bulk, it is an exchequer in which there are no expenses and 'no losses, but similarly no gains through interest or new 'deposits ; shut up in the nothingness that acts as its limit, with 'nothing vaguely floating, with nothing squandered, it has no 'quality of infinite extension, but is gripped like a definite 'quantum of energy in a limited space, a space that has no room 'for voids. An energy present everywhere, one and multiple 'like the play offerees and waves offeree within a kinetic field 'that gather at one point if they slacken at another; a sea of 'energies in stormy perpetual flux, eternally in motion, with 'gigantic years of regular return, an ebb and a flowing in again 'of all its forces, going from the more simple to the more

'complex, from the more calm, the more fixed, the more 'frigid, to the more ardent, the more violent, the more con- 'tradictory, but only to return in due course from multiplicity 'to simplicity, from the play of contrasts to the assuagement of 'harmony, perpetually affirming its essence in the regularity of 'cycles and of years, and glorying in the sanctity of its eternal 'return as a becoming which knows neither satiety, nor 'lassitude, nor disgust . . . Do you \vant a name for this universe, 'an answer to all these urgent riddles, a light even for your- ' selves, you of the fellest darkness, you the most secret, the 'strongest, the most intrepid of all human spirits? This world 'is the world of the Will to Power and no other, and you 'yourselves, you are also the Will to Power, and nothing else.'

To whom is Nietzsche addressing himself here, if not to the Masters whose advent he is announcing? Certainly, these mas ters, as he conceived them, are far from resembling the dictators we have known, or know still. The case really is, as Gustave Thibon has shown beautifully in the fine book on Nietzsche he brought out a few months ago, that a confusion tended to arise in Nietzsche's thinking between two categories which cannot really be reduced to each other.* Let us put it this way, that he was hypnotized by a role, a purely lyrical role, which he wished however to assume as his own role in real life, but with which he was incapable of effectively identifying his actual self. This ^purely personal yearning was enough to vitiate his philosophy of history ; nevertheless there is something, in the sort of glimpse of an imaginary cosmos which I have just quoted, that does retain its worth and its weight. Otherwise, I would not have quoted that page. It does remain true that, in the 'broken world' we live in, it is difficult indeed for the mind to withdraw itself from the dizzying edge of these gulfs ; there is a fascination in that absolute dynamism. One would be tempted to call Nietzsche's picture of the world 'self-contained', in the sense that his 'monster of energy' does not refer outwards to anything else that sustains or dominates it ; except that for Nietzsche this 'self-contained' world is essentially a mode of escape from the real self, in its pure * Nietzsche, Lyons, 1949.

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ungraspability. Let us note also in passing that if our world really were such a world as Nietzsche here has described it to be, one has no notion at all of how it could give birth to the thinker, or the thought, which would conceive it as a whole and delineate its characteristics. It always seems to happen so; when a 'realis tic' attitude of this sort is pushed to the very limit with brutal, unbridled logic, the 'idealistic' impulse rises to the surface again and reduces the whole structure to dust. But let us notice that, at the level of dialectics, it is this very process which makes mani fest the disruption of the world. The world of the Will to Power, as Nietzsche describes it — and it would be easy to show that this world today provides the obscure and still indistinct background of everything in contemporary thought that rejects God and particularly the God of Christianity — that world cannot be reconciled with the fundamental direction of the will that under lies every investigation bearing upon what is intelligible and what is true. Or rather, when, like Nietzsche, one does attempt to reconcile the intention of the philosopher and that picture of the world, one can only succeed in doing so by a systematic discrediting and devaluation of intelligibility and truth as such ; but in discrediting these, one is undermining oneself, for, after all, every philosophy, in so far as it can be properly called a philosophy at all, must claim to be true.

These general remarks may help us to see in what sense the world we live in today really is a broken world. Yet they are not enough to enable us to recognize and acknowledge how deep and how wide the break really goes. The truth of the matter is that, by a strange paradox and one which will not cease to exercise us during the course of these lectures, in the more and more collectivized world that we are now living in, the idea of any real community becomes more and more inconceivable. Gustave Thibon, to whom I referred just now in connection with Nietzsche, had very good grounds indeed for saying that the two processes of atomization and collectivization, far from excluding each other as a superficial logic might be led to suppose, go hand in hand, and are two essentially inseparable aspects of the same process of devitalization.

To put it in quite general terms, and in simpler language

1*7]

than Thibon's, I would say that we are living in a world in which the preposition 'with' — and I might also mention Whitehead's noun, 'togetherness' — seems more and more to be losing its meaning; one might put the same idea in another way by saying that the very idea of a close human relationship (the intimate relationship of large families, of old friends, of old neighbours, for instance) is becoming increasingly hard to put into practice, and is even being rather disparaged. And no doubt it is what lies behind this disparagement that we ought to bring out. Here I come to one of the central themes of these lectures ; but I shall confine myself, for the moment, to treating the matter merely in terms of a superficial description of the known facts.

It is, or so it seems to me, by starting from the fact of the growringly complex and unified social organization of human life today, that one can see most clearly what lies behind the loss, for individuals, of life's old intimate quality. In what does this gro\vingly complex organization — this socialization of life, as we may call it — really consist? Primarily, in the fact that each one of us is being treated today more and more as an agent, whose behaviour ought to contribute towards the progress of a certain social whole, a something rather distant, rather oppressive, let us even frankly say rather tyrannical. This presupposes a registra tion, an enrolment, not once and for all, like that of the new-born child in the registrar's office, but again and again, repeatedly, while life lasts. In countries like ours, where totalitarianism so far is merely a threat, there are many gaps in this continuous enrolment ; but there is nothing more easy than to imagine it as coextensive with the whole span of the individual life. That is what happens in states governed by a police dictatorship; in passing, I should like to make the point that a police dictatorship is (for many reasons, there is not time to go into them now) merely the extreme limit towards which a bureaucracy that has attained a certain degree of power inevitably tends. But the essential point to grasp now, is that in the end I am in some danger of confusing myself, my real personality, with the State's official record of my activities ; and we ought to be really frightened of what is implied in such an identification. This is all exemplified in a book called The Twenty-Fifth Hour by a young Rumanian called

[28]

C. Virgil Gheorgiu. In this extraordinary novel, we see a youn^ man who has been falsely denounced to the Germans by his father- in-law and is sent to a deportation camp as being a Jew ; he has no means of proving that he is not a Jew. He is labelled as such. Later on, in another camp in Germany he attracts the attention of a prominent Nazi leader, who discovers in him the pure Aryan type; he is taken out of the camp and has to join the S.S. He is now docketed as 'Pure Aryan, member of the S.S'. He contrives to escape from this other sort of camp with a few French prisoners and joins the Americans; he is at first hailed as a friend, and stuffed with rich food ; but a few days later he is put into prison ; according to his passport, he is a Rumanian subject. Rumanians are enemies; ergo . . .Not the least account is taken of what the young man himself thinks and feels. This is all simply and funda mentally discounted. At the end of the book, he has managed to get back to his wife, who has meanwhile been raped by the Russians; there is a child, not his, of course; still, the family hope to enjoy a happy reunion. Then the curtain rises for the Third World War, and husband, wife, and child are all put into a camp again by the Americans, as belonging to a nation beyond the Iron Curtain. But the small family group appeals to American sentimentality, and a photograph is taken. 'Keep smiling', in fact, are the last words of this interesting novel,* which sum marizes graphically almost everything I have tried to explain in this lecture.*

The point, here, is not only to recognize that the human, all too human, powers that make up my life no longer sustain any practical distinction between myself and the abstract individual all of whose 'particulars' can be contained on the few sheets of an official dossier, but that this strange reduction of a personality to an official identity must have an inevitable repercussion on the way I am forced to grasp myself; what is going to become of this inner life, on which we have been concentrating so much of our attention? What does a creature who is thus pushed about from

* La Vingt-cinquieme Heure, Paris, 1949.

*George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, which I read only a few months ago,

is of course another illuctration, even more striking than The Twenty-jifth

Hour of this set of ideas.

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pillar to post, ticketed, docketed, labelled, become, for himself and in himself? One might almost speak, in this connection, of a social nudity, a social stripping, and one might ask oneself what sort of shame this exposure is likely to excite among those who see themselves condemned to undergo it?

To be honest, it does not seem to me that there is any real deep analogy between this social nakedness and actual physical nakedness, with the sense of slight shame which normally accom panies such nakedness in man — a sense of shame on which the Russian thinker, Soloviev, has some deep and original observa tions. On the other hand, it is, I think, highly significant to com pare the state of a man in his social nakedness — stripped, by society, of all his protections — to that in which a man finds him self who believes himself exposed to the observation of an omnipresent and omniscient God. This comparison is all the more necessary and important because the Moloch State of totalitarian countries does tend to confer on itself a sort of burlesque analogue of the Divine prerogatives. Only the essential is lacking (that is to say, the State is not in fact God, or a God), and this fundamental lack lies at the basis of the evils from which any society must suffer that seeks to enchain itself by submitting to the yoke of the Moloch State. The common factor in the two types of nakedness — nakedness under the eyes of the State, nakedness under the eyes of God — is, most assuredly, fear. But in the presence of a real God, I mean a God who is not reduced to the status of a mere savage idol, this fear has a note of reverence, it is linked to our feeling for the sacred, and the sacred only is such in and through our adoration of it. In the case of nakedness under the eyes of the State, it is clear, on the other hand, that an adoration, worthy properly to be called adoration, is impossible, unless it attaches itself to the person of a Leader ; it is then pure fanaticism, and it is enough to recall the hysterical cult of which Hitler was the object to understand what fanaticism means, and what great gulfs of temptation are masked by that word. But between the Moloch State and such figures as Hitler the relation ships that can be established are uncertain, unstable, threatening either to the Leader or the State — if only because of the envy and hate that Leaders must arouse in others who either would

covet their position for themselves or at any rate could not think of somebody other than themselves enjoying it without impatience and rage. It is all too clear that the state of universal continuous registration and enrolment, from birth to death, to which I have already alluded, can only be brought into being in the bosom of an anonymous bureaucracy ; now, such a bureaucracy cannot hope to inspire any other sentiment than a vague fear — the same feeling that takes possession of me personally every time I have to deal in a government office with some impersonal official who identifies himself with his job. One cannot avoid, at this point, bringing in the familiar metaphor of the administrative machine : but it is important to notice that the workings of this machine are not something I can contemplate, its presence is simply something I feel: if I could contemplate its workings, I might be forced to feel a certain reluctant admiration for it — as it is, as a person who is being governed, who is being taxed, for instance, my sentiments when the machine has been in contact with me must be purely negative. To make them positive I would need a chance to get to the other side of the counter and become myself one of those privileged beings who contain a morsel of this mysterious power. Thus it is quite natural that, in countries where a bureaucratic system prevails, there should be a tendency towards the general bureaucratization of life; that is to say, really, towards the abandonment of concrete and creative activities in favour of abstract, depersonalized, uncreative tasks and even — one could illustrate this point easily — an active opposition to all kinds of creativity.

Let us take it, though it is by no means certain, that in such a bureaucratized world a certain social equality would prevail. It would be an equality obtained by levelling down, down to the very level where the creative impulse fails. But this kind of equality — and perhaps every kind of equality — is (though in my own country the opposite has for long been thought to be the case) in the last analysis rigorously incompatible with any sort of fraternity; it appeals to a different need, at a different level of human nature. One could prove this point in various ways. In particular, it is easy to see that the very idea of fraternity implies the idea of a father, and is not really separable, indeed, from the

[3-]

idea of a transcendent Being who has created me but has also

o

created you. It is exactly at this point that we see the yawning central gap, which I mentioned earlier, in the claims of the Moloch State to be treated as a sort of God. One can see clearly enough that the State can in no case be treated as a creator or a father. Yet almost unconsciously here I have stumbled on an ambiguity. There are different levels at which men understand the word God. It is true that the State in our time, even in countries where it has not reached the totalitarian phase, has become more and more the engrosser and dispenser of all sorts of favours, which must be snatched from it by whatever means are available, including even blackmail. In this respect the State is properly comparable to a God, but to the God of degraded cults on whom the sorcerer claims to exercise his magic powers. From the moment, however, wrhen the ties of fraternity are snapped — and there is nothing that can take their place except a Nietzschean 'resentment' or, at the very best, some working social agreement strictly subordinated to definite materialistic- purposes, as in the social theories, say, of the early English utilitarians — the state of social atomization, of \vhich I spoke earlier, inevitably tends to appear. All this, of course, cannot be taken literally as the expression of a state of affairs which has been, by now, established for once and for all. In different countries, this state of affairs is established to different degrees, and even sometimes in different parts of the same country ; and in any case, wherever there are men, there are certain vital persisting elements. Using the histological simile which always seems to crop up in this sort of discussion, I \vould say that there are some kinds of tissue that have a good resistance to this contagion, or rather to this malignant growth. But the main point is to see that here we have what is really the general prevailing tendency today in most countries that wre usually think of as civilized. I am not talking merely about the states, for instance, that follow in the path of Soviet Communism. We can show, and in fact it has already been shown (I am thinking particularly of the remarkable books by Arnaud Dandieu and Robert Aron*) that

*Arnaud Dandieu, Decadence de la Nation francaise, Paris, 1931. Robert Aron, La Revolution nccessaire, Paris, 1933.

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large-scale capitalism exposes the countries in which it is a con trolling factor to similar risks. In any case, it is not the usual antithesis between the Communists and the enemies of the Communists that is our point here ; no doubt I shall come back to this at the end of these lectures, when I shall try to make clear the conclusions towards which this investigation has led us.

'But', you may feel inclined to say to me at this point, 'we do not see exactly in what sense our world can be called a broken world, since you yourself admit that it is on the way to being unified, though you have added that the unification is probably the pleasing stamp on a coin that rings false.' The answer, it seems to me, is that — even given a degree of atomization of which we have as yet no direct experience, and which can only be con ceived entirely in the abstract — it seems impossible that man should reduce himself to that mere expression of an official dos sier, that passive enrolled agent, with which some seek to confuse his essential nature.

Let us notice this fact : even if, as is certainly the case, there should be a tendency for a sinister alliance to be concluded between the masters of scientific technique and the men who are working for complete state-control, the real conditions under which a human creature appears in the world and develops there remain, in spite of everything, out of reach of this strange coalition — even though certain experiments which are now being carried out in laboratories give us reason to fear that this relative immunity may not be of long duration. But what we can affirm with absolute certainty is that there is within the human creature as we know him something that protests against the sort of rape or violation of which he is the victim ; and this torn, protesting state of the human creature is enough to justify us in asserting that the world in which we live is a broken world. That is not all. Our world is more and more given over to the power of words, and of words that have been in a great measure emptied of their authentic content. Such words as liberty, person, democracy, are being more and more lavishly used, and are becoming slogans, in a world in which they are tending more and more to lose their authentic significance. It is even hard to resist the impression that just because the realities for which these words stand are dwindling

D [33]

away, the words themselves are suffering an inflation, which is just like the inflation of money when goods are scarce. It may be, indeed, that between the development of tokens of meaning, and that of tokens of purchasing power, there is some obscure connection, easier to feel in a general and indistinct way than to work out in detail. But certainly that break in the world which I have been trying, all through this lecture, to make you feel, is broad and gaping here. The depreciation, today, both of words and of currency corresponds to a general failure of trust, of con fidence, of (both in the banker's sense of the word and in the strongest general sense) credit.

There is, however, one more question which we must examine, and which might be put from a strictly religious point of view. If anybody accepts the dogma of the Fall, is there not implicit in that acceptance an admission that the world is, in fact, broken? In other words, is it not the case that the world is essentially broken . . . not merely historically broken, as we have seemed to be saying, basing ourselves, as we have done, on a certain number of facts about the contemporary world? Does not our talk about a broken world imply that there have been periods when the world was intact, though this implication contradicts both the teachings of the Church and all the showings of history?

For my own part, I would certainly answer, without any hesitation, that this break in the world cannot be considered as something that has come about in recent years, or even during recent centuries, in a world originally unbroken. To say so would not only be contrary, I repeat, to all historical likelihood but even metaphysically indefensible. For we should be forced in that case to admit that some incomprehensible external action or other has been brought to bear on the world ; but it is all too clear that the world itself must have already contained the possi bility of being broken. But what we can say, without contradict ing either the recorded facts of history or the more obvious principles of metaphysics, is that in our time the broken state of the world has become a much more obvious thing than it would have been for, say, a seventeenth-century philosopher. In general,

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such a philosopher would have recognized that broken state only on a theological plane; a man like Pascal, who came to such a recognition through a long process of psychological and moral analysis, anticipating the thought of a much later day, was an exception. In the eighteenth century, the optimism which was common among non-Christian philosophers suffices to show that this feeling of living in a broken world was not, on the whole, widely diffused; even those who, like Rousseau, insisted that the time was out of joint, felt that a certain combination of rationality and sensibility might set them right. It is clear enough that this belief in the possibility of benevolently readjusting human affairs persisted throughout the nineteenth century among various schools of rationalists, and that it has not entirely disap peared even today. Marxism itself might be considered, in its beginnings, as an optimistic philosophy, though today the general darkening of the historical horizon makes that element of opti mism in it less and less perceptible. Besides, it is becoming more and more clear that there is nothing in Marxism that would serve to dissipate that deep sense of inner disquiet that lies at the very roots of metaphysics. At the most, the Marxist can hope to numb that, as one numbs a pain. There is nothing easier than to imagine an analgesic technique for this purpose ; metaphysical uneasiness would be considered as a psychosomatic malady and would be treated according to the appropriate medical rules. Thus, for Marxists in general, the problem of death as such must no longer be faced, or rather they consider that the problem will cease to have its present agonizing character for an individual who is fully integrated with his community. But integration conceived after this fashion runs the risk, as we shall see later on when we discuss the nature of liberty, of reducing itself to mere automatization. Why, it may be well asked at this point, have we lingered so long, in this lecture, over topics which at a first glance seem quite foreign to the proper themes of a metaphysical investigation? Simply because it was necessary to describe those conditions, in our life today, which are the conditions most unpropitious to such an investigation; so unpropitious, indeed, that in countries where these conditions are fully operative, metaphysical thinking

[35]

loses its meaning and even ceases to be a practicable possibility. Perhaps it may not be wholly useless to enlarge a little on this point.

The world which I have just been sketching for you, and which is tending to become the world we live in, which is already indeed the world we live in, in so far as that world is exposed to the possibility of self-destruction, rests wholly on an immense refusal, into whose nature we shall have to search much more deeply, but which seems to be above all the refusal to reflect and at the same time the refusal to imagine — for there is a much closer connection between reflecting and imagining than is usually admitted. If the unimaginable evils which a new world war would bring upon us were genuinely imagined, to any extent at all, that new world war would become impossible. But do not let us be led into supposing that this failure to reflect and to imagine is merely the fault of a comparatively few individuals in positions of power and responsibility; these few individuals are nothing at all without the millions of others who place a blind trust in them. But this failure to reflect and imagine is bound up, also, with a radical incapacity to draw conclusions from the sort of thing that has been happening for at least fifty years. Was it not already incredible, in 1939, that men should be found ready to launch another war when the ruins piled up by the previous war had not yet been wholly rebuilt, and when events themselves had demonstrated in the most peremptory fashion that war does not pay? Possibly somebody may feel that such remarks smack of journalism and are hardly worthy of a qualified philosopher. But I fear that any such criticism would merely be an expression of a gravely erroneous conception of philosophy, a conception which for too long has weighed heavily on philosophy itself, and has helped to strike it with barrenness ; this erroneous conception consists in imagining that the philosopher as such ought not to concern himself with passing events, that his job on the contrary is to give laws in a timeless realm, and to consider contemporary occurrences with the same indifference with which a stroller through a wood considers the bustlings of an ant-hill. One might be tempted, indeed, to suppose that both Hegelianism and Marx ism have considerably modified this traditional way of looking at

[36]

philosophy ; but that is true only up to a certain point, at least in the case of present-day representatives of these doctrines. An orthodox Marxist accepts without any real criticism the daring extrapolation by which Marx treated as quite universal those conditions which had been revealed to him by an analysis of the social situation of his own time in those countries which had just been transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Let us add that the Marxist sets out to criticize existing societies using as his yardstick the indeterminate and psychologically empty idea of a classless society. In this respect, it would be no exaggeration to say that the Marxist places himself in the worst sort of timeless realm, an historical timeless realm, and that it is his stance on this non-existent point of vantage that enables him to decide so confidently whether such and such an event, or such and such an institution, is or is not in keeping with 'the meaning of history'. I, for my part, think on the contrary that a philosophy worthy of the name ought to attach itself to a given concrete situation in order to grasp what that situation implies; and I think it should not fail to acknowledge the almost inconceivable multiplicity of combinations of events that may arise from the factors it has laid bare by its analysis.

In a very general way, one may say that the refusal to reflect, which lies at the root of a great many contemporary evils, is linked to the grip which desire and especially fear have on men. On this topic, of the baleful effect of the passions if the reasonable will does not control them, it is all too sadly clear that the great intellectualist doctrines of philosophy (those, above all, of Spinoza) are being grimly borne out. To desire and fear we ought, certainly, to add vanity, above all the vanity of specialists, of those who set themselves up as experts. This is true, for instance, in the educational world; in France to my own knowledge, but not only in France. I have often said that if one were rash enough to ask what will remain, under any form at all, in the minds of children, of all that has been painfully taught them, what will be the final positive result of the effort that is demanded from them, the whole system would fall to bits, for it is absolutely certain that as regards most of the subjects taught this final positive result will be precisely nothing. Those who are responsible for

[37]

our educational programmes have not the elementary shrewdness of the industrialist who, before undertaking a new enterprise, ascertains what will be the initial outlay, what are the probable yearly profits, and whether the proportion between these two figures makes the whole thing worth his while. One is careful not to ask such a question of educational experts ; would one not be insulting a noble profession? Yet fine words butter no parsnips. They are simply taking advantage of the fact that in teaching the outlay is less visible, less easily definable than in the case of an industrial enterprise ; hence a waste of time and strength whose remoter consequences are beyond all calculation.

We shall be starting off, in the lectures that are to follow, from the double observation that nothing is more necessary than that one should reflect; but that on the other hand reflection is not a task like other tasks ; in reality it is not a task at all, since it is reflection that enables us to set about any task whatsoever, in an orderly fashion. We should be quite clear about the very nature of reflection; or, to express myself in more exact terms, it is necessary that reflection, by its own efforts, should make itself transparent to itself. It may be, nevertheless, that this process of reflective self-clarification cannot be pushed to the last extreme ; it may be, as we shall see, that reflection, interrogating itself about its own essential nature, will be led to acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself, something from which it has to draw its strength. And, as I said above, it may be that an intuition, given in advance, of supra-reflective unity is at the root of the criticism reflection is able to exert upon itself.

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CHAPTER III

THE NEED FOR TRANSCENDENCE*

THIS sort of circular panorama of our subject has not yet made very clear to us the real significance and nature of this investigation. We have found out what it is not; also, what conditions are likely to freeze its growth. We must now seek to grasp more directly what such an investigation is : and first of all we must ask ourselves what is the nature of that urgent inner need, of which I have spoken so often as being, in a way, the mainspring of such investigations.

I should like to call it a need for transcendence. Unfortun ately, that word has been lately much abused both by contem porary German philosophers and some of their French pupils. I should like to lay it down in principle that 'transcendence' cannot merely mean 'going beyond'. There are various ways of 'going beyond', for instance, for which 'transcendence' is an inappro priate word. There is going beyond in space : encroaching, as the explorer does, on some surface that lies beyond a commonly accepted limit. But there is also going beyond in time: I am thinking particularly of the notion of the 'project', the sort of moral claim upon the future, which plays such an important part in Sartre's thinking. If we call these 'transcendence', we are extending the meaning of the word in a way which may be

O O J J

grammatically permissible, but which is philosophically confusing. I would rather cling to the traditional antithesis between the immanent and the transcendent as it is presented to us in text books of metaphysics and theology. And, though I know there will be objections to this, I should even like to make a distinction between a horizontal and a vertical 'going beyond', the latter of which is more truly transcendence. We have already met with

*The word ' need ' does not convey the meaning of the French word exigence ; the German equivalent would be Fordcrung.

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the main objections; they have to do with the use in an abstract metaphysical argument of categories that seem to belong exclusively to our individual perception of space. But really our way of evaluating certain experiences as 'high' and others as 'low' appears in a sense to be a fundamental thing, linked, as it were, to our very mode of existence as incarnate beings. I should like to mention in passing the important researches on such spatial metaphors that have been carried out separately by Dr. Minkowski and M. Robert Desoille. Their level of approach is rather differ ent; both are psychiatrists, but Dr. Minkowski has the advantage of being specially trained in philosophy and the phenomenologic method, as M. Desoille is not.*

I think, however, that these objections should not simply be thrust aside, but rather taken up, and transformed into an argument on our own behalf. The argument might also be illustrated by an analysis bearing on the inevitable ambiguity which attaches, today, to the notion of 'the heavens above'. In France, we have known rationalists who have expended a great deal of exuberant irony in lucid demonstrations of the pre- ccpernican character of the theological idea of heaven : they

*m his extremely interesting book, Vers une Cosmologie, (Paris, Fernand Aubier, 1936), Dr. Minkowski speaks of a primitive space of experience in which our thoughts and ideas, as well as our bodies, can be said to move. The nature of this primitive space varies according to exactly what is moving through it ; thus Dr. Minkowski suggests that we can contrast our inner with our outer, our mental with our physical space. He gives an example that perhaps may make his drift clearer. I am saying goodbye on a station platform to someone I care for deeply; the train moves off, my friend is still leaning out of the window, and instinctively I run after the train, stretching out my hands towards him. At the end of the platform, as the train disappears from sight, I do actually stop running, but nevertheless, in my inner space, I am still pursuing it; my thought follows the train and participates, so to speak, in the movement which is carrying away part of my being. Dr. Minkowski observes that, according to our usual way of thinking, the only real motion is bodily motion ; but this, he says, is a false way of thinking, for thought moves, too. And possibly, on my way out of the station, lost in the thought that is still following my friend as he is carried away from me, I may bump into somebody. 'I am sorry,' I shall say, 'I didn't notice where I was going, my thoughts were somewhere else . . .' This is a striking illustration of what inner space, lived space, the space of experience, means; and later in this series of lectures we shall have, I fancy, to remember this notion and to make use of it.

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have insisted at length, and in a rather laborious way, on the absurdity of clinging to the traditional notions of an absolute * height' and an absolute 'depths', a real 'up' and a real 'down', in a world that has been enlightened by mathematical physics. But strangely enough, it is the rationalists who in the end seem simple-minded; they fail, it seems, to grasp that there are cate gories of lived experience that cannot be transformed by any scientific discoveries, even those of an Einstein. We feel the earth below us, we see the sky above; the ways of expressing ourselves that derive from that situation could be changed only if the actual mode of our insertion into the universe could be changed; and there is no chance at present of that. When we are dealing, indeed, with such a simple matter as the correspondence of certain postures of the human body to certain contrasting emotions, we have to clench our minds to grasp what the problem is. I am using the rather vague word 'correspondence' on purpose in order not to bring in the questionable idea of a strictly causal relationship. When we think, for instance, of the quite precise and concrete emotional realities that translate themselves in French into a noun like 'abattement' and in English into a

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phrase like 'feeling cast down', is it not by an unnatural and, indeed, by a barren effort that we try to separate the facts them selves from the metaphor, rooted in language and hardly any longer felt as a metaphor, that fits them like a glove? I may add that the whole drift of such remarks will become clear only when we have got further on our way.

Therefore, we have now to ask ourselves what this urgent inner need for transcendence exactly consists of. I think we must first of all try to map it out in relation to life as it is concretely lived, and not to outline its shape in the high void of 'pure thought' ; for my method of advance does invariably consist, as the reader will have noticed already, in working my way up from life to thought and then down from thought to life again, so that I may try to throw more light upon life. But it would be a hopeless undertaking, I think, to attempt to ensconce oneself, once and for all, in the realm of pure thought. Or rather such an attempt is not legitimate except in one or two quite specialized disciplines, above all, of course, in the mathematical sciences; even so, it

is a moot and rather troublesome question whether the mathe matician can develop his speculations in a world quite totally cut off from experience, that is to say, fundamentally, from life. We shall have, later on, to go in more detail into the exact relations between these two important notions of 'experience' and of 'life' and to dissipate a confusion about these relations which prevails in certain realms of philosophic thought.

Let us notice in the first place that the need for transcendence presents itself above all, is deeply experienced above all, as a kind of dissatisfaction. But the converse does not seem to be true, it does not seem that one would be in the right in saying that every kind of dissatisfaction implies an aspiration towards transcen dence. It is important, I think, at this point to be as concrete as possible, that is to say to dramatize, that is, to imagine, as precisely as possible, the situation, the sort of situation in which I may find myself involved. The personal pronoun T should, in addition, be taken here in its widest sense. For it is not a matter only of that finite individuality that I myself am, but of every individuality with which I can sympathize in a lively enough way to represent its inner attitudes to myself. I have no difficulty for instance in putting myself in the place of somebody who suffers from having to lead a narrow life, a life whose development is embarrassed because all its expenses have to be kept at the lowest level, and who dreams of an easier and larger existence; let us imagine the case for instance of a young girl who, so that she may obtain the satisfactions of which she feels herself deprived, marries for money. Let us notice clearly that she perhaps frees herself from certain religious and moral prejudices, and in this sense one might, it seems, properly speak of a 'going beyond'. On the other hand, we have a very clear sense indeed that the need to which the girl has yielded cannot properly be called a need for transcendence. That is enough to justify the distinction which I made at the beginning of the lecture.

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We can now imagine a quite different case : the dissatisfac tion of somebody who is on the contrary leading an easy life, full of material satisfactions, but who wants to break with this existence in order to commit himself to some spiritual adventure. We should have to go on to an analysis of these two types of

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dissatisfaction. The first, the girl's, is linked to the idea or, more exactly, to the image of a certain number of goods to which it seems to me that I have the right, or of which I feel myself deprived. Yet it is not, as it seems to me, the idea of possession as such which one should here chiefly stress. I would say, roughly and generally, that the person who suffers from poverty aspires above all to a liberty of movement which is denied to him. Whatever he wants to do, he is brought up short by the question of what it costs, and always he sees himself forced to renounce his purpose. It would be quite unjust to suppose that the girl who marries for money is necessarily inspired by cupidity, that she loves money for its own sake. Perhaps she is even a generous being who suffers particularly from not being able to help those she loves. In this connection, it is thus possible to conceive an hierarchy of satisfactions, some low and vulgar, others on the contrary highly spiritual. Let us note in passing that at this point the antithesis between the 'high' and the 'low' has cropped up again. These satisfactions, though hierarchically arranged, have, however, a common characteristic. They are all organically linked with the fact of possessing a certain power which does not fundamentally belong to me, a power which is not, strictly speaking, myself. The dissatisfaction has to do with the absence of something which is properly speaking external to me, though I can assimilate it to myself and in consequence make it mine. Let us not, at this point, bring in any moral judgments ; we have not to ask ourselves whether marrying for money is in fact equivalent to selling oneself, or if it ought to be considered as blameworthy. We are moving at the level of description, and at that level only.

It seems to me then that the first type of dissatisfaction ceases at the moment when I have obtained the external help that assures for me that freedom of movement that I need. But the strange thing is, or so it seems, that the other type of dissatis faction is directed precisely against satisfactions of this first type. It is just as if — and we shall have to remember this point later on — this libertv of movement which has been granted to us were

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to reveal itself as meaningless or quite worthless. Perhaps meaningless or worthless, just because its principle lies not in

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the self, but outside the self. From that moment, it is as if another sort of yearning arose in me, directed not outwards, but inwards. Naturally, the first example of this sort of yearning that presents itself to our minds is the yearning for sanctity ; but it is not the only example, and we can also think, at this point, of the case of the creative artist. We can reflect upon the weariness that grips the man who has read too many books, heard too many concerts, visited too many galleries. If there is still enough life left in him, that weariness will tend to transform itself into a desire to create. Certainly, there is no guarantee that this new yearning will be satisfied. It does not lie within my own choice to be a creator, even if I genuinely aspire to creation. In other words, one would be guilty of an indefensible simplification if one asserted that the first kind of dissatisfaction is linked to the absence of something that does not depend on me — such as wealth — but that in the case of the second kind of dissatisfaction, it is up to myself to put an end to it. The truth is infinitely more subtle and complicated, and we cannot fall back here on the famous Stoic distinction — between things that lie within our power, and things that fall outside it — at least in its simple original form.

We shall have to come back to this point later on when we shall be trying to discern in what sense man is in the right in considering himself as a free a^ent, but even now wre can see that the fact of a man's managing to fulfil his vocation, however high (and this is even truer, the higher his vocation is) could not be explained away as being the result of a simple decree of his will. There is, on the contrary, every reason to suppose that this fulfilment of a high vocation involves a kind of co-operation from a whole swarm of conditions over which the person with the vocation has no direct control. This is a point of the greatest importance and it shows that the problem of the vocation is essentially a metaphysical one, and that its solution transcends the scope of any psychological system whatsoever. It is not by mere chance that the verb 'to transcend' has here intruded itself, quite unexpectedly, into our discussion. We are already caught up, as it were, within the poles of that transcendence which we attempted to define in the first part of this lecture. Might it not

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be said that to create is always to create at a level above oneself? And is it not exactly, also, in this sort of connection that the word 'above' assumes its specific value?

It is true that the great Swiss novelist, Ramuz, in whom we must salute a thinker of profound power, seems, in his memories of Stravinsky, to say precisely the contrary. 'I do not know why,' he says, 'but I was reminded of that sentence of Nietzsche: "I love the man who wants to create something higher than himself and so perishes." But what I loved at that time in you was the man who, on the contrary, creates something lower than himself and does not perish.' But there is, it seems to me, a confusion here, a confusion of which Jean Wahl is also perhaps guilty in attempting to distinguish, in one of his essays, between transcend ence and transdescendence. What Ramuz is trying to say here, and what he has asserted many times, for instance in his book Salutation Pqysanne* is that one can only make poetry with the antipoetic, that art must be grafted on a wild stock, or rather that the artist must start off from the rawest and most familiar reality, contemplated in all its thickness, its primitive density. It is extremely probable that Ramuz is right in saying this. But there is no reason at all for denying a certain character of trans cendence to this raw, familiar reality, always allowing that we insist on one point, which is as follows, and which is very import ant. There would be no meaning in treating transcendence as a sort of predicate which could belong to one determinate reality and not to another. On the contrary, the reference of the idea to the general human condition is fundamental; but it must be added that it is not a reference arrived at by way of abstract thought, but rather one that is grasped through intimate- lived experience — experience, in the sort of case I am talking about, intimately lived in the inner awareness of the poet or the artist. We should notice, however, that we have now raised a difficulty which we must not evade. From the moment when the idea of transcendence is evoked in relation to the human condition in general, is it not negated as transcendence and in some sense absorbed back into experience, that is to say, in a word, brought back to the status of immanence? But in that case what becomes * Paris, 1929.

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of the urgent inner need for transcendence, properly so called?

Let us proceed in this case as we always ought to in cases of this sort ; that is to say, reflectively, asking ourselves whether the objection does not presuppose a postulate or rather an implicit image which ought to be erased? What is in question here is the very idea that we form of experience ; have we not an unjusti fiable tendency to think of experience as a sort of given, more or less shapeless substance, something like a sea whose shores are hidden by a thick fog, and we have just been speaking as if the transcendent was a sort of misty cloud which would by and by melt away; but we have only to reflect upon what experience really is, to realize that this metaphor is grossly inadequate. But we must, I think, go further still, and this remark will apply, in a certain sense, to all our future investigations. One cannot protest too energetically not only against this particular way of representing the idea of experience, but against the claim that experience can possibly be represented, in any way at all. Experience is not an object, and I am here taking the word 'object', as I shall always be taking it, in its strictly etymological sense, which is also the sense of the German word gegenstand, of some thing flung in my way, something placed before me, facing me, in my path. We must ask ourselves if some confused representa tion of experience as an object is not really involved when, in the manner of the Kantian philosophy if that is taken quite liter ally, one speaks of what lies outside, what lies beyond the limits of, experience. That, in the last analysis, can mean nothing, since the judging of something to be outside experience is itself empirical, that is to say it is a judgment made from within exper ience.

These very simple remarks lead us to an important con clusion, one of which we must never lose sight, especially during the second series of these lectures, when we shall be touching on more strictly metaphysical questions. Not only does the word 'transcendent' not mean 'transcending experience', but on the contrary there must exist a possibility of having an experience of the transcendent as such, and unless that possibility exists the word can have no meaning. One must not shirk the admission that, at a first glance, such an assertion runs the risk of appearing

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to contradict itself. But may not this be due to the fact that we tend, without realizing it, to form far too restrictive an idea of experience? A typical example of experience, taking the idea of experience in a narrow sense, would be a sensation of taste; in that case, experience appears to be linked to the presence of something for me, and in me, and we interpret it as part of the act of ingesting something. But it is obvious that this act of ingestion is not part of the essence of experience as such, and that in other cases, experience is not so much an absorbing into oneself of something as a straining oneself towards something, as when, for instance, during the night, we attempt to get a distinct percep tion of some far-off noise. I am still confining myself to examples belonging to the field of sensation. But we know very well that experience goes far beyond the domain of the external senses ; and it is also very obvious that in what we call the 'inner life' experience can express itself through attitudes that may be diametrically opposed to each other.

Moreover, I am not allowing myself to forget that in the language of contemporary phenomenology the word 'transcen dence' is understood in a much wider sense than that in which, up to the present, I have been understanding it; every object, as such, being considered, in that system, as a transcendent object. However, as I have already said, I prefer to stick to the traditional sense of the word, probing into it, however, more deeply than it has been usual to do. Let us admit, for that matter, that for a topic of this kind it is always very difficult to find an adequate vocabulary. To say that the transcendent is still immanent in experience, is to persist in objectifying experience and in imagining it as a sort of space of which the transcendent would be, so to say, one dimension. One can avoid such confusions only by keeping continually present to one's thought the spiritual meaning which one is stressing. Naturally, there is no possibility of doing without symbols; nevertheless, symbols should always be recognized as such and should never encroach on the ideas that one is straining to elucidate through their use.

Thus, I repeat, the urgent inner need for transcendence should never be interpreted as a need to pass beyond all exper ience whatsoever; for beyond all experience, there is nothing;

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I do not say merely nothing that can be thought, but nothing that can be felt. It would be much more true to say that what is our problem here is how to substitute a certain mode of exper ience for other modes. Here again we have to battle against a distorting symbolization which would represent these modes of experiences as physical spaces separated by some kind of partition. But it is sufficient, if we want to get rid of this misleading picture, to turn to a concrete and precise example : let us think, if you are willing, of the kind of inner transformation that can take place within a personal relationship. Here, for instance, is a husband who has begun by considering his wife in relation to himself, in relation to the sensual enjoyments she can give him, or even simply in relation to her services as an unpaid cook and char woman. Let us suppose that he is gradually led into discovering that this woman has a reality, a value of her own, and that, with out realizing it, he gradually comes to treat her as a creature existing in her own right ; it may be that he will finally become capable of sacrificing for her sake a taste or a purpose which he would formerly have regarded as having an unconditional im portance. In this case, we are witnesses of a change in the mode of experience which provides a direct illustration of my argument. This change revolves upon the centre of an experiencing self; or, to speak more exactly, let us say that the progress of the husband's thought gradually substitutes one centre for another; and of course the word 'thought' is not quite exactly the right word here, for we are dealing with a change in the attitude of a human being considered as a whole, and with that change, also, in so far as it embodies itself in that human being's acts. I hope this example gives us a glimpse, at least, of the direction in which we must set ourselves to move if we want to give a meaning to these words that are certainly obscure in themselves : urgent inner needjbr transcendence.

It will be objected, nevertheless, that the term 'transcen dence' taken in its full metaphysical sense seems essentially to denote an otherness, and even an absolute otherness, and people will ask how an experience of otherness as such can even be conceived. Does not the other, qua other, fall by definition out side my experience? Again, in this case, we must ask ourselves

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whether the objection does not mask a preconceived idea which we must bring to the surface before we can expose it to criticism. Here again it is our conception, or again I would rather say our image, of experience that is in question. The point is so import ant at this juncture that we must be allowed to insist on it.

It may be said that the philosophy of the last century was in a very large measure dominated by a prejudice which tried to assume the dignity of a principle. The prejudice consisted in admitting that all experience in the end comes down to a self's experience of its own internal states. Let us notice, in passing, that what we have here is a paradoxical conjunction, or osmosis, of two contrasting elements — on the one hand a philosophy which had originally been based purely on the reality of sensation, and on the other hand an idealism whose nature was essentially different. The first of these philosophies, so long as it remained faithful to its first roots, was forced, for that matter, to deny to the self all autonomous reality; one can even say, it seems to me, that from this point of view (the point of view of Hume, for instance) the self is built up out of its own states, or out of some thing which is only an abstract and uncertain outcome of these states. It was quite another matter for idealism (and Des cartes is the obvious name to mention in this connection), for which, on the contrary, the thinking self possesses an indubitable existence, and even a real priority. I mean that for idealism the thinking self stands as the necessary postulate without which any kind of experience at all is inconceivable. One might be tempted to say that for idealism it was rather the self's states of conscious ness that had a wavering and doubtful metaphysical status. More over, in this connection, one recalls, of course, the difficulties that arise in Kant's doctrine about the relation between transcen dental awareness and ordinary, everyday psychological awareness. How can the Ich denke become an Ich flihle or an Ich erlebel It could not be a matter, in this case, of course, of postulating a separ- ateness, like the separateness of physical objects, between the thinking self and the feeling self, that is, of claiming that the one was not the same thing as the other. Such an affirmation would result in the end in idealism's once more thingifying the self. To avoid that impasse, idealism will be forced to speak of

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functional differences between the self that thinks and the self that feels. But by this sort of schematism does one not risk dis torting the nature of experience as a single lived reality? This is a serious problem, to which we shall have to come back. Can feeling be properly considered as a function of the self? Or is it not rather the case that every function presupposes feeling as anterior to it and other than it?

This mass of difficulties is bound to make us reflect, and to force us to call in question the whole notion of 'a state of con sciousness'. But we must get a clear grasp of the meaning of this problem.

The notion of a state, taken in its most general sense, is one that we cannot do without when we are thinking of bodies sub mitted to all sorts of modifications that appertain to their physical nature. I am not at this moment seeking to raise the difficult

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metaphysical problem of just what the relations between a body, considered in itself, and its modifications are, or more exactly whether the phrase 'considered in itself can in such an instance have a precise meaning. That question, for the moment, is not relevant. What is beyond doubt is that we cannot afford to dis pense with the idea of a state, if we want to describe the modifi cations suffered by any body whatsoever under the influence of external agencies. But then, when we speak of states of conscious ness, is it not the case that, without being aware of it, we are treating consciousness as a sort of bodiless body which is capable of suffering an analogous series of modifications ? Let us understand each other ; in so far as I am myself a body — later, we shall have to consider at length the implications of this equivocal assertion — it is all too clear that I pass through an infinity of successive states. In so far as I am a body: but not at all in so far as I am a consciousness. For, in a word, whatever the ultimate nature of consciousness may be, it obviously cannot be considered as a body, even a bodiless one. On this point, Descartes was right and with him all the forms of idealism that are derived from his thinking. Consciousness is essentially something that is the contrary of a body, of a thing, of whatever thing one likes to imagine, and given that fact it is permissible to think that the

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expression 'state of consciousness' involves a contradiction in terms.

One might be tempted to resolve the contradiction, as Spinoza resolved it, by formulating the following observations : might not one say that what we call a state of consciousness is the state of a body at a given moment in so far as it is represented? Represented, in this technical sense, means something like seen in a mirror. Consciousness, on this theory, would be nothing else than the fashion in which a body looks at itself. But this solution raises innumerable difficulties and insoluble difficulties, too. The most serious of these have to do with the word 'con sciousness' itself. The word implies something permanent which can only exist ideally, and it does not seem that one can attribute this permanence to body as such. What seems to be proper to a body, by reason of its very mutability, is to have no self. It is selfless by definition. But that is not all : we must be wary of the tendency that leads us to place ourselves as it were outside con sciousness in order to represent it to ourselves (here, as a mirror), for all this can only be an illusory advance, since it is an intrinsic quality of consciousness that it cannot be detached, contemplated, and considered in this way. What we believe we are looking at

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from the outside is no longer consciousness, and perhaps it is not even anything at all. It is necessary then to reject at this point the conception according to which the so-called states of conscious ness would be simply bodily states looking at themselves or becoming objects for themselves. But this refusal entails import ant consequences ; it is not difficult to see, for instance, that it must lead us to reject the theory of psycho-physical parallelism. I do not think, for that matter, that Bergson's criticism of that theory has ever been refuted.

We are led, then, to this negative but very important con- " elusion that it is not possible to treat all experience as coming down in the end to a self's experience of its own states. The path that we should follow here is rather that first explored and mapped out by phenomenologists of the school of Husserl. I shall therefore lay it down as a principle, to be accepted in the whole of my subsequent argument, that, before it is anything else,

consciousness is above all consciousness of something which is other than itself, what we call self-consciousness being on the contrary a derivative act whose essential nature is, indeed, rather uncertain; for we shall see in the sequel how difficult it is to succeed in getting a direct glimpse of whatever it is that wre mean by self. Even at this point, let us notice that I can not know myself or even make an effort to know myself without passing beyond this given self which I claim to know, and this 'passing beyond' appears to be characteristic of con sciousness, which is enough in itself to dispose of the idea of consciousness as a mere mirror. Perhaps there are reasons for supposing that epiphenomenalism, that is, the idea of conscious ness as a mere surface encrustation on matter, has penetrated today far beyond the bounds of materialism properly so called, and that all modern minds need to make a painful effort if they are to free themselves of this theory. Science and technique in general have, after all, stressed very strongly in our time the idea of a purely objective reality, a reality to which we all tend to attribute, though falsely, an internal coherence.

But from the moment when one has understood that con sciousness is consciousness of something other than itself, we can easily overcome the temptation of epiphenomenalism, and at the same time the objection against which the idea of transcendence was hammering loses all its massive strength. It is necessary also, at this point, to notice how much we must be on our guard against all these metaphors which have been incorporated into the very flesh of language and which consist in assimilating the fact of being conscious to modes of physically gathering or taking. Such verbs as 'seize' and 'grasp' are very revealing from this point of view. Of course, it is not merely an unlucky chance if, even in an investigation of this sort, we find ourselves making a spontaneous use of them ; we can hardly prevent ourselves from practising this sort of transposition of elusive notions into familiar, palpable terms, but it is important that we should not be deceived by the habit, and that we should be able to recognize within what limits this kind of transposition can be properly and legitimately exercised — limits outside of which it becomes illegitimate and degenerates into something meaningless.

I should be inclined to say in a very general fashion that the closer we get to the topic of intellection properly so called, the more these metaphors centred on the acts of plucking, taking, or grasping become really useless. One might admit that they are suitable enough for all those acts of the mind which still partake of habit. To form a habit is really to take, or seize, or grasp some thing, for it is an acquisition; but to discover an intelligible relation, for example some mathematical relation whose eternal validity one suddenly recognizes, that is not in any sense to grasp something; it is to be illuminated, or rather, to have a sudden access to some reality's revelation of itself to us. What we should notice here, however, is the impossibility of making a radical distinction between acquisition and illumination ; for if illumin ation is to be communicated it must inevitably become language, and from the moment it has passed into a sentence it runs, in some degree, the risk of blinding itself and of sharing in the sad destiny of the sentence itself, which in the end will be repeated mechanically, without the person who repeats it any longer recognizing its meaning. Let us observe, moreover, that this danger is not only one which attends a communication from my self to another person, but that it also attends, if I may be allowed to put it in this way, a communication from me to myself. There is always the risk of the hardened, transmissible expression of the illumination growing over the illumination like a sort of shell and gradually taking its place. This is true at all levels, true wherever anything has been revealed, for instance about a work of art, a landscape, and so on ... It is just as if the initial, living experience could survive only on condition of degrading itself to a certain extent, or rather of shutting itself up in its own simulacrum; but this simulacrum, which should only be there on sufferance, as a kind of locum tenens, is always threatening to free itself from its proper subordinate position and to claim a kind of independence to which it has no right ; and the serious danger to which thought itself is exposed is that of starting off from the simulacrum, as an existing basis, instead of referring itself perpetually to that invisible and gradu ally less and less palpable presence, to indicate which (and to recall it to our memories) is the sole justification of the simula-

crum's existence. This is a very general observation and it opens out in all sorts of diverse directions. For the moment, I will illustrate it by a single example which anticipates a good deal that we shall see more clearly later on.

Here is a person of whom we have a detailed knowledge, with whom we have lived, whom we have seen in many different situations. But it may happen that we are asked to say something about him, to answer questions about him, to offer a necessarily simplified opinion of his character; we offer a few adjectives, ready-made, rather than made to measure. This summary, inexact judgment of our friend then, within ourselves, begins to form what I have called a simulacrum. For it may paradoxically happen that this simulacrum obstructs or dims the fundamentally far more concrete idea we have formed of this person, an idea fundament ally incommunicable, an idea which we cannot even communicate in its pure essence to ourselves. And it is quite possible for the simulacrum we have formed of our friend to change our attitude

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to him, and even our behaviour towards him, for the worse. Though it may be, of course, that some circumstance wrill arise which will enable us to thrust aside this obstacle we have placed in the path of a true human relationship, without realizing we have done so.

There is, unfortunately, all too much reason to think that many a philosophy of the past — before Bergson's time, who in this field was a liberator whose beneficent activities can never be too highly celebrated — has been built up not on experience but on a waste product of experience that had taken experience's name. For a philosopher worthy of the name there is no more important undertaking than that of reinstating experience in the place of such bad substitutes for it.

But, it will be asked, what is the relationship — or is there even a relationship? — between the urgent inner need for trans cendence and such a preoccupation? On a first impulse, one would be tempted to answer in the negative: but why? Because one would like to imagine, in accordance with a vicious fashion of philosophizing, that transcendence is fundamentally the direc tion in which we move away from experience. But the views that have been put forward in the first part of this lecture have pre-

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pared us to understand that this is false and that it presupposes an idea of experience which robs experience of its true nature.

Here, it seems to me, is the anatomy of this error. One cannot insist too strongly that what traditional empiricism failed to see was that experience is not, in any sense, something which resembles an impermeable mass. I would rather say that exper ience is receptive to very different degrees of saturation ; I employ this expression from chemistry (where one talks, for instance, of a saturated solution, meaning one into which no new substance can be dissolved) with regret, and I shall seek for other expres sions, so that our thought may not become fixed on a necessarily inadequate simile. One might, say, for example, that experience has varying degrees of purity, that in certain cases, for example, it is distilled, and it is now of water that I am thinking. What I ask myself, at this point, is whether the urgent inner need for trans cendence might not, in its most fundamental nature, coincide with an aspiration towards a purer and purer mode of experience. I can quite see, of course, that the two metaphors of which I have made use appear to be contradictory — the metaphors of satura tion and purity. But it is just this kind of opposition, linked to the material world, that tends to disappear at the spiritual level. We have only, if I may put it so, to dematerialize the initial com parison to see how it can fit in with the second. Let us think, for instance, not of a heavy body like salt, saturating a solution, but of radiations ; one can imagine some liquid at once very pure and very radioactive; and, of course, even the notion of radioactivity is still borrowed from the physical world. Let us now imagine in an even vaguer fashion whatever sort of thing an intelligible essence might be, and we can easily conceive that the experience most fully charged with these imponderable elements, intelligible essences, might at the same time be the purest. We shall have to bear in mind the connection between plenitude and purity when we attempt to throw light, later on, upon how we ought, and above all upon how we ought not, to conceive an essence.

But even if we cling to the notion of saturation, we should have no difficulty in understanding that two completely opposite kinds of saturation of experience can be imagined. An experience can be saturated with prejudices : but this means that the prejudice

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which obstructs it at the same time prevents it from being fully an experience. Often, for instance, when we are travelling in a strange country, it is precisely so ; we are unable to free ourselves from a certain number of preconceived ideas which we have brought with us without being distinctly awareV)f having done so ; they are like distorting spectacles through which we look at everything that is presented to us. The other type of saturation is the opposite ; one might say, to recall an old notion of the Greeks, that the eye must become light in order to comport itself properly in the face of light, and that this is not true only of the eye ; the intelligence must become at once pure ardour and pure recept ivity. It is necessary to put these two words together, the process I am imagining is a simultaneous one. If we put the stress exclus ively on ardour, we cease to see how the intelligence is able to un derstand things ; it seems that it is no longer properly intelligence, but merely enthusiasm ; but if we insist only on receptivity, we are already the dupes of that material image which I have already taken note of; we persuade ourselves falsely that to understand, for the mind, is like, for a vessel, being filled with a certain content. But the intelligence can never be properly compared to a content, and it is of this that we shall convince ourselves in our next lecture when we attempt to sound the depths of what is to be understood by the notion of truth.

CHAPTER IV

TRUTH ASA VALUE: THE INTELLIGIBLE BACKGROUND

IN this lecture, which will be taken up entirely with an inves tigation bearing upon the question of what we have in mind when we talk about truth, I shall have to refer to the essay by Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. I shall only do so, however, in a rather wary fashion. The largely novel vocabulary of this German philosopher cannot fail to arouse, in many of his readers, a grave uneasiness. In passing, I would like on this topic to remark that when he coins new words, a philosopher is often the victim of an illusion. The strange and surprising impression produced on him by his new word often prevents him from seeing that there is nothing strange or surprising about the thought it expresses. What lies behind the creation of such words is often the shock which the philosopher has felt in rediscovering, on his own account, something that was already discovered long before him. This rediscovery is not discovery, in the proper sense of the word .

It is my own intention, on the other hand, to use, with one or two exceptions, the simplest words I can find. But it will be hard for my listeners, I know, to determine, without a wide mar gin of uncertainty, the relation between the comparatively every day language which I shall be using and that of the German philosopher; though the Belgian philosopher, Alphonse de Waehlens, did a great deal to elucidate Heidegger's terminology in his French translation of Heidegger's* essay which appeared at Louvain in 1948.

One of my pupils observed to me the other day that there is more material in my plays than in my speculative writings that could be used for the working out of a doctrine of truth. And

o

when I had thought it over carefully, I thought his remark *De V Essence de la Veritc, par M. Heidegger, Louvain, 1948.

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basically sound. But if this is so, is it mere chance that it is so? Obviously not. The fact is simply the indirect confirmation of the more general fact that when we set out to speak about truth, as when we set out to speak about God, we are in danger of speaking about something which is not truth, but is merely its simulacrum ; here again is that word which played such an import ant part in our last lecture. We must ask ourselves, then, whether truth is something which can only be alluded to, in a glancing way. The role of the drama, at a certain level, seems to be to place us at a point of vantage at which truth is made concrete to us, far above any level of abstract definitions. Let us see whether this reflection serves, or does not serve, to confirm our preliminary assumptions.

In order to throw more light on the direction of our quest, I should like to insist strongly that what matters for us is to elucidate our own meaning when we say, for instance, that we are guided by the love of truth, or that somebody has sacrificed himself for the truth. Let us ask ourselves what condition, even and perhaps above all what negative condition, such assertions must satisfy if they are to have a meaning. It is obvious at a first glance that a traditional formula, such as 'truth is the adequation of the thing and the intellect', whatever its theoretic value may be, is by no means suited to throw light on such assertions. There would be no meaning in saying that somebody had died for the adequation of the thing and the intellect. This in itself serves to show that the idea of truth has a fundamental ambiguity. Let us take it for the present that we are applying ourselves to the consideration of truth in so far as truth is a value ; it is only under this aspect that truth can become 'something at stake' .

I shall start off with a very simple example, and from my point of view a very instructive one. We have all been taught from our earliest years that we must not confuse what we should like to be the case and what is the truth. A great Doctor of the

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Church has even declared that this confusion is a perversion of the understanding. But, first of all, is there any difference at all here between what is the truth and what simply is? Is it not obvious that what is true is nothing other than what is, what exists, what is the case ; from a certain point of view, the difference between

them is non-existent. But only from a certain point of view, and more precisely from the perspective of a kind of thinking turned at once towards the object and towards possible action on the object, that is to say, a thinking along the lines of technique. What, then, is the other perspective, within which a distinction between what is true, and what is, must in spite of everything be maintained? On what will it lay its stress? I will quote here an important passage from Bradley in his Essays on Truth and Reality. We shall have to ask ourselves if it throws some light on our problem :

1 Truth is the whole Universe realizing itself in one aspect. This 'way of realization is one-sided, and it is a way not in the end 'satisfying even its own demands, but felt by itself to be incom- 'plete. On the other hand the completion of Truth itself is 'seen to lead to an all-inclusive Reality, which Reality is not 'outside Truth. For it is the whole Universe which, immanent 'throughout, realizes and seeks itself in Truth. This is the end 'to which Truth leads and points, and without which it is not 'satisfied. And those aspects in which Truth for itself is defec- 'tive, are precisely those which make the difference between 'Truth and Reality.'

In other words, Truth distinguishes itself from Reality in the measure in which it is only a single aspect among others, or is unilateral, while Reality is in essence omni-comprehensive.

But, for reasons which will appear more clearly in the sequel, I shall refrain from bringing in, as a solution of this problem that is occupying us, the notion of an omni-comprehensive reality; for though the latter idea dominates all Bradley's thinking, I am afraid it is by no means invulnerable to all criticism. What we should notice here is that the operation of including (and Bradley builds up his Absolute by an hierarchy of inclusions) is one which can only be carried out within the bosom of a relatively, not absolutely, complete system or totality which is then stretched out to gather in the new element that has to be included; more precisely, I would say this method of inclusion is suitable only for a pattern of philosophical thought which is in motion, which is in the process of completing itself. It is obvious that such an inclusive

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system of thought can only, at any time, be provisionally rounded off; there is always a tension between the system in itself, con sidered as a whole, and the elements of experience that have still to be absorbed in it. It remains to be shown, and most probably it cannot be shown, that we have the right to pass the ideal limiting case, where nothing more need be absorbed; and that the act of inclusion remains possible or conceivable where the level of thought on the move, let us say of discursive thought, has been transcended, and where we profess to have established ourselves at a point beyond all development.

It seems to me that it would be better to set out on a more modest path, that is to say that of the phenomenologists, and to ask ourselves just what we have in mind when we talk about the difference between being and being true.

One solution presents itself naturally to the mind, which has been adopted by numerous philosophers : it consists of saying that truth has to do exclusively with judgments. A judgment is true or false, but one cannot talk of truth or falsity in the case of a sensation or a sentiment. Sensations and sentiments, in all the judgments we make about them, appear to be merely themselves.

This distinction, however, must be treated with more caution than is commonly thought necessary. For in affirming the self-identity of sensations and sentiments, in saying that within all judgments and for all judgments they are simply what they are, am I not forgetting their real nature ? Or rather — for if they had a real nature, it would not be necessary to assert that self-identity — am I not mistaken in supposing that they have a nature in this sense? They are fugitive, they are elusive it may be said, thought cannot fix them, and it is only where thought can fix something that we can properly talk of its having a nature. Obviously, at this point, we are getting rather close to a certain aspect of Platonism : the notion that the world of the senses and feelings is somehow unreal unless it is transformed into a higher world cf concepts. However, before we can accept such a position, we have to face a serious difficulty. After all, to take a quite elementary example, a flavour, for instance, does appear to bear witness to the presence of something that has a nature, a self- identity. There must be something there, after all, if there is

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something that I can talk about. I can say, for instance: I like, or I do not like, the taste of raspberries, the smell of tar. And what testifies to the self-identity of that taste or that smell is that I have only to experience them afresh, after a gap of years, to be carried back into a distant past which is essentially 7717 past. The most we can say is that there is a sense in which I can confidently affirm that my companion and I are talking about the same sen sation when we discuss the taste of raspberries, I saying I like it, he that he does not. What, however, makes the question really obscure is that it is almost impossible to distinguish sharply between the kernel of the sensation and the kind of array of emotional overtones that encloses it, and that inevitably varies with each individual because the background of experience as a whole, for each individual, is different. Thus the taste of raspberries may be linked in my case with walks in the Vosges woodlands with people I love, and for somebody else with a house and a garden in the Paris suburbs where he spent his childhood holidays under the care of a bad-tempered grandfather. Yet in principle the distinction between the kernel and its shell remains valid, and the notion of the kernel of sensation retains its theoretic validity. Thus, after all, it does not seem to be quite that sensations and sentiments are always too fugitive to be fixed by thought; or that thought cannot refer to them without transforming them into something other than themselves, something essentially, as sensations and sentiments are not, objective.

But on the other hand we ought to notice that as soon as we admit the existence of this kernel, we admit also the possibility of a certain congruousness between my own grasp of it and another person's; this congruousness cannot be accidental, but it is by no means guaranteed. For instance, I once knew a man who thought raspberries had no taste ; there can be a sort of taste- blindness, and the same sort of thing is true over the whole range of possible sensations. There are many people who cannot tell the difference between the great vintages and very ordinary wines. It would be a fallacy to draw negative or even relativist conclusions from such facts. In every realm of sense-experience there are connoisseurs ; their gifts are real and cannot be denied without absurdity. Let us add, to round off this argument, that

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the non-connoisseur is in no position to deny the connoisseur's status; in fact the non-connoisseur ought to recognize his own condition, which is that of being shut off from certain realities. Realities, I say. Could I not say truths? After what seemed a digression, we have come back to our original problem.

It may be objected, indeed, that whether we talk of truths or realities here depends on how we choose to define our terms. But there is an important point that hangs on that 'how we choose' : whether we seize on this word, or on that word, to fix a real distinction which we have perceived, the distinction must be, as it were, in the long run accepted and sustained by the common idiom of language. The non-connoisseur is keeping within the bounds of truth when he recognizes that he is a non-connoisseur ; he is falling outside these bounds when he fails to recognize that fact. But it would be absurd to say that he is falling outside the bounds of reality. Whatever truths he fails to recognize, he him self remains perfectly real. And if he is a conceited man, for instance, his refusal to recognize his deficiency may reflect his real nature excellently well, unless indeed we are using 'real nature' in a non-psychological sense — a point which leads us back to a path we have trodden before. What we are aiming at, in fact, when we grope for the idea of truth, is not the kind of rounded and complete positive experience that we might be aiming at if we were groping for the idea of reality. On the con trary, one can be within the bounds of truth and one's reality can be suffering from a denudation, a lack ; I am thinking, for instance, of the case of a deaf man who wishes at all costs to take a part in social life, that is, to refuse to adopt the kind of behaviour that seems to go with being deaf, to refuse to draw the usual con clusions from the premise of his infirmity. In a word, this deaf man refuses to shut himself in — he refuses to draw the blinds against a certain kind of light. But what is this light? And where does it come from? . . . May not this metaphor of light help us to grasp the very essence of what we mean by truth ? But I will empha size, in the first place, that it is more than a metaphor; or if it is one, it is a metaphor woven' into the texture of my argument, part of the pattern of the argument, not a mere incidental

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illustration of a point, as the other metaphors have been which I have used so far, but of which I soon had to rid myself, since, after easing its path for a moment, they soon obstructed the progress of pure thought. Truth can dazzle and wound us as a bright light does when we turn our eyes full on it ; and in ordin ary language, we speak of men making themselves deliberately blind to the truth, and so on. ...

It is nevertheless clear that we should pause at this point to analyse just what we have in mind when we think of truth as light. There would naturally be no sense in imagining, in a grossly realistic fashion, that facts as such throw out a kind of light which is the light of truth. The chief error of the philosophers of the empiricist tradition has been, in fact, a failure to recognize what a confused notion that of a fact is ; we may at any moment be forced to treat as a fact, as we have seen only a short time ago, something which is pure absence, like the fact of the non- connoisseur's being shut off from certain realities. But it is time to seek for another illustration of that idea, since the illustration to which one clings too long tends to prow stale.

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Let us think of somebody who has decided to enter a religious community, to become a monk. But he has never been clear in his own mind about what causes have led him to this decision. He is on the eve of taking his final vows, there is still time for him to renounce his purpose. It would be essential at such a time that he should ask himself whether his vocation is in fact an authentic one, whether he has really the sense of being called by God to be God's servant. But in fact he dare not ask that question directly, since he is afraid of the answer. In reality, his decision has been taken after a long succession of purely worldly disappointments — perhaps because a woman he loved had deceived him, or because he had failed in a difficult examina tion; perhaps also because he sees the obscure chance of obtaining, as a monk, the respect of his family, who have so far always thought him incapable of carrying through any design successfully. But all this has obviously nothing to do with a vocation ; and before taking an irrevocable step, he ought to open himself to the light. But we are back to our problem: what is this light? Where

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does it come from? Of the data which I have just enumerated, not one can be regarded as being in itself a source of light. But under what conditions might such a datum become one ?

Let us note well, before going further, that the great majority of human beings grope about during their whole lives among these data of their own existence rather as one gropes one's way between heavy chairs and tables in a darkened room. And what is tragic about their condition is that perhaps only because their lives are passed in this shadowy gloom can they bear to live at all. It is just as if their seeing apparatus had become finally adapted to this twilight state : it is not a question of what Ibsen in The Wild Duck calls the 'life-lie', it is a state of non-vision which is not, however, a state of quite complete non-awareness. It can also be said that the attention of such people is not directed towards the data of their own existence, that they even make a point of directing it elsewhere, and, indeed, this 'making a point' is as it were the hidden spring that makes their lives tick on reasonably bearably. One might express this in another way: all of us tend to secrete and exude a sort of protective covering within which our

1 O

life goes on.

But to express oneself thus is still to postulate the existence of a light which comes from outside and which it would be pos sible to intercept. And yet we have seen distinctly that this idea is absurd. It is necessary, however, to see just where its absurdity lies.

It seems to me to consist in the first place in treating what we call fact, whatever that may really be, as if it were something placed outside me, in the sense in which some material body is, in its case, outside my body, and placed, indeed, at a measurable distance from that. It is against this idea of the fact as external to

o

me that we must direct our polemic. We must not hesitate to affirm that the coherence of a fact, of any fact, is conferred on it by the mind that grasps it, by the understanding self. There is therefore every reason to suppose that if this fact, or this collec tion of data, should possess the strange power of irradiation of which I have spoken, it would be from the understanding self that it had borrowed the power, rather than possessing such a power intrinsically itself: the latter supposition, I repeat, is

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absurd. But at this point it seems that we are falling into an inextricable confusion. How can I, as an understanding self, shut myself against a light which, as we have just seen, does not come strictly speaking from the facts themselves, but from myself who have conferred upon them this strange power of radiation ? If this is the case, we must acknowledge that what we call a fact is only an inert, neutral element, and that everything that really seems to be a relation between my understanding and the facts is really a relation between me and myself. Only at this point we are once more forced to recognize the ambiguity of the term 'self, its profound lack, in fact, of self-identity; the self which confers what I shall henceforth call a reverberatory power on facts does not seem to be identical with the self which refuses to let itself be penetrated by that power. But they are both my self.

Yet again, at this juncture, let us beware of being deceived by language. When I speak of a non-coincidence between the self which confers a power and the self which refuses to be penetrated by the power, I do not really mean that I have two selves. As I have already observed, that would be the case only if we were dealing with objects, and in consequence could treat what we are discussing here as a matter of elements that could be labelled and numbered off: this self, that self. But that is just what is obviously impossible. We are forced once more to make a distinction here between the notions of difference and duality, and to protest against everyday language, which, having to do above all with physical objects, inevitably contributes to the confusion of difference with duality. This is not all ; we must also beware of interpreting what has been said about the reverberatory power of facts and its source in causal terms. All that I have said needs to be written out again with more care or, if you like, transposed into a key that will leave no room for any misunderstanding.

It might be interesting to go back, for the sake of clarity, to the case of the religious novice which I brought up a short time ago. If we wanted to treat that example adequately, it would have to be in the manner of a novelist; for it would be the novelist's business to make concrete, and to give their proper respective weight to, the various data which I presented in a schematic fashion. But to achieve this the novelist would have to present

F [6J]

the surroundings in which such a character has lived, and make clear the exact kind of pressure these surroundings have exercised on him ; that is how we would be enabled to understand how in this case a failure or a romantic disappointment, which in some body else's case might have been incidents hardly worth men tioning, have in this case assumed a tragic importance. How can we apply this with precision to what I have said earlier on in a more abstract fashion about the fact's not being external? It is quite clear that the fact only acquires its value as a fact because it is referred to that living centre, the character in our imaginary novel. Referred, I say: the term 'represented', which is generally current in idealist philosophy, is inadequate. It may be that the would-be monk in our story suffered because of realities which he had not managed to represent to himself; these realities had nevertheless become digested into the tissue of his life. Only it is a question here of what I may call a dematerialized digestion, comparable to the allusions to or reminiscences from other poems which a poet may introduce into an original work : a good example is Mr. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

A question, or rather an objection, can hardly fail at this moment to spring to the reader's mind. I have turned my novice into a character in a novel : but is it not, in fact, only at the level of the work of imagination, such as the novel is, that the totality of facts is really referred to a sort of living centre and thus appears to be, as it were, interiorized ? But I reply that the proper function of the novelist consists exclusively of enabling us to get a more distinct grip on that unity which, of course, existed in life before it existed in fiction, and which makes fiction possible. The novelist communicates directly to us something which ordinary conditions of life condemn us merely to glance at. But the novelist is in no sense the inventor of this sort of unity ; and the greater a novelist is, the more he gives us the sense that he is not making anything up. I quote Charles Du Bos on Tolstoy's War and Peace : 'Life would speak thus, if life could speak'. I have no hesitation for my own part in saying that it is through the novelist's power of creation that we can get our best glimpse of what lies behind and under the reverberatory power of facts.

Could it not be said that this power implies the existence of

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a certain uncompleted structure — a structure essentially uncom pleted since its foundations are in space and time ? This structure extends on all sides beyond such a direct awareness as the self can have ; and that awareness — a point on which we shall expatiate later — is not and cannot be shut in on itself. The less, in fact, we think of the self as a monad, the more we shall emphasize the importance of this uncompleted structure extending beyond the self. We shall also have to acknowledge the intimate affinities that exist between this structure and the body in the ordinary sense of the word, in so far as for the self the body is this body, my body. It is in connection with this structure that the problem of truth can and must be raised ; I mean that if we were to do something that cannot be done, and sweep the idea of this structure away, the idea of truth would at the same time lose its meaning. We have now reached a central point in our investigation. But per haps it will not be unprofitable to recur here to the traditional notion of the relation between truth and judgment and to see how it looks in the light of the preceding explanations.

Let us first of all notice that from this point of view, what I have called 'fact' can be regarded as a property of our postulated structure; it is in some sense integrated into the structure, and it is for this reason that it can become radiant — always allowing, as we have seen, that the self disposes itself in relation to the radiant fact so as to receive the light that streams from it. I have already had occasion to remark how much we are in danger of being misled by the use of verbs like 'receive' in such a connec tion. The difficulties, indeed, that have accumulated round the notion of truth are in a large part due to the embarrassment we feel when we seek to define this essential act of the 'reception' of truth. Let us say in a very general way that at this level the contrast between activity and passivity — between reception, say, considered as taking, and reception considered as being given something — loses a great deal of its meaning ; in the dimension in which we now find ourselves, we must move beyond such categories.

Once again I shall choose an illustration that will enable us to see exactly what the place of judgment is. Think of a mother and father who, after deceiving themselves for a long time about their

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son, are forced to admit that he is abnormal; so far, in every particular case, they have made an effort to find explanations for his behaviour that would allow them to believe that, fundament ally, he is just 'like other children'. But there comes a moment when they are brought face to face with the painful truth. When

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we say that somebody is forced to 'face' the truth, the expression we use is extraordinarily full of meaning, and it is important to bring out all its implications. It is obvious that the notion of 'facing' the truth implies a kind of activity; we talk, for instance, about people having the courage to face the truth. But nobody will admit that courage can be anything else but active : and this is true, of course, even of the courage which consists of bearing some misfortune patiently. But at the same time — and it is here the paradox lies — the idea of courage is intimately linked to that of 'having no alternative', an idea which, if it were presented in isolation, would be equivalent to an idea of mere and pure con straint. The mother and father, for instance, in the illustration I have just given, 'have no alternative but to . . .' But if the parents, in this case, are obliged to recognize their child's deficiency, do not let us forget that an obligation is always something which can be evaded to some degree. I would recall to you the character Rose Deeprose, in Sheila Kaye-Smith's fine novel of that name, who refuses to the last to admit that her child is an idiot, since, if she did make this admission, she would be obliged to put the child in an institution. In extreme cases, we are forced to ask ourselves — but it is a point on which psychiatrists would be able to enlighten us — whether what we call madness may not be, in some instances, a sort of flight from necessity.

The truth is that an obligation is something that always ought to be recognized, and that this recognition is an act. But on the other hand it does not look as if an act of this sort can ever be what is properly called a spontaneous act. It is necessary, one might say, that the facts should exercise a sort of dumb pressure on the self which will force the self, if I may put it so, to recognize the obligation which lies upon it to recognize the facts them selves. . . .

There is thus an extremely subtle reciprocal interlinking between facts and self that comes into existence every time we

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recognize a mortifying truth. And obviously I am far from claim ing that every truth has necessarily a mortifying character; but for the purposes of this analysis it is interesting to concentrate on truths of this sort, if only because it is in such cases that it is most difficult to understand how truth can be loved.

But there is one obvious point that can be made here ; it is that after I have shirked for a long time the recognition of a pain ful truth, I can find a real consolation in opening my mind to it ; the essential quality of this consolation lies in the fact that, by opening my mind to the truth that hurts me, I have put an end to a long and exhausting inner struggle. But what sort of struggle was it? Let us recall some points we have previously made. We cannot properly talk of a struggle against the facts ; for let me repeat it, the facts have no existence or power that is intrinsic to themselves ; we ought to talk, rather of a struggle against oneself. Here again we find that ambiguity in the notion of the self which I have so often remarked on : the self that is all desire has been fighting against what I shall from now on call the spirit of truth.

But what is it in the self that feels this consolation, this sense of liberation, which is certainly felt when a painful truth has been recognized? Can we think of this spirit of truth as itself capable of feeling joy — or of feeling pain? And on the other hand is it not a contradiction in terms that the desiring self, which has in a sense been conquered in the battle, should feel a strange satisfaction in its own defeat? Must we at this point insert some third, mediating term — shall we speak of a self which is neither the desiring self nor the spirit of truth? But who can fail to recognize that this dissociation within the self is artificial and that we cannot isolate, in order to transform them into distinct entities, the various aspects of a single life, which is, precisely, the life of one self? What we have to grasp — and we can only succeed in doing so by exorcizing every deceptive metaphor — is that, in the light of truth, I succeed in diminishing that permanent temptation that assails me to conceive reality, or to represent it to myself, as I should like it to be. In the light of truth, in the presence of truth ; it is just — however obscure this may seem — as if this truth possessed a stimulating power, as if it were able to purify me, as a sea wind can or the piney tang of the forests. But

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these are only comparisons and they cannot really help us. The essential question remains and it obviously has a dominating part to play in this dark and difficult investigation. It is this : has truth a substance that is proper to it ? Are we in the right in considering it, as our most recent metaphors have suggested, as a distinct power which can be given or lent to us in exchange for the diffi cult and praiseworthy act of opening ourselves to it? It is very clear that if this were the case we should grasp much more clearly than we have so far succeeded in doing, just how it is possible to love truth, and even to sacrifice oneself for truth. But after all, if we conceive truth in this way, are we not falling into a sort of mythology, and in our recent investigations into the idea of a structure have we not prepared ourselves to form a wholly different idea of truth — an idea of truth as strictly immanent?

However, this is just the moment to remind ourselves of what we said earlier about the impossibility of accepting, in these lectures, the opposition between the ideas of the immanent and the transcendent in its elementary form. It follows that there may perhaps be no absolute contradition between the two aspects of truth with which we are here confronted.

Heidegger, in that essay to which I alluded at the beginning of this lecture, has emphasized the importance of the notion of openness for any theory of truth — or the notion perhaps of being opened. His German word is 'Offenstandigkeit', and the French translators have coined 'aperite' as an equivalent. What he is really trying to do is to find a basis in possibility for that adequation of the mind and the thing which constitutes a true judgment as such. Here is a piece of metal : I describe it correctly when I say that such is its shape, such its colour, such its market value, and so on. Allowing that my description is an exact one, the meaning of 'exactness' in this sense is just what Heidegger is out to define. A judgment about a thing, in so far as it is an adequate judgment, establishes in regard to the thino; the particular relation that can be expressed by the formula: such . . . that ... (It is such a thing that it has certain qualities, it is such an X that it is also a Y.) The essence of this relation is what Heidegger calls, not represen tation, but appresentation. To appresent is 'to allow the thing to surge up before us in the guise of this or that object, but in such

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a fashion that the judgment lets itself be led by the thing and expresses it just as it has presented itself. It is a necessary condi tion of all appresentation that the appresentating being should be placed in the middle of a light that will allow something to appear to that being, be to made manifest to it. This "something" must span or traverse a domain open to our encounter'.

The fundamental agreement between these views and those that I have been previously expounding should be obvious. What we have still to discover is whether our explanations meet the whole case, and whether they enable us to make a definitive judgment on the possibility of treating truth as an effective power. We must be wary here, since we are exposed to the old danger of creating fictitious entities out of phrases. It is all too clear on the basis of my assumption that there is something called the love of truth, that I shall be tempted to give it the status of an entity : I may try to link up the love of truth in my mind, for in stance, with the love of God. There is a whole theological back ground there, that is likely to affect our thinking without our wanting it to and without our even being distinctly aware that it is doincr so ; and we should be very wary of its intrusions. I do not say that, after a long divagation, we may not have to redis cover this background in the end. But would it not be very rash, for instance, to attribute to the love of truth, as it exists in the ordinary learned man, a religious character?

On the one hand, it seems pretty certain that the learned man — I am thinking particularly of the scientists, with the pos sible exception of the mathematical scientist — -does postulate the identity of what is and what is true; his task really is, in fact, to discover what is, what is the case, for instance what is the con stitution of matter. But, on the other hand, though truth and being are identical for him from that point of view, is his love of truth really a love of being? Does not the love of be ing always have a note about it of reverence? Is it not a love of what is created in so far as that is the veiled expression, or the token, of the presence of the creator? It would, I think, be quite arbitrary to attribute to scientists and learned men generally a reverent attitude of this sort ; one would have to admit that if this attitude does exist in most scientists, not only are they not aware of it, but, more often

than not, it is in opposition with their professed beliefs, or rather non-beliefs. It seems to me that in the scientist's own eyes his love for truth can be reduced to a passionate interest in research as such, and also, as a rather more remote consideration, an unbounded confidence in the social utility of research. Let us suppose, however — and unfortunately in our world today no supposition is more plausible — that the scientist is called upon by the State or the Party to deny or renounce some conclusion to which his researches have led him; let us suppose that he refuses and risks being sent to a concentration camp ; what exactly will be the mainspring of the heroic stand he is taking? There we have the problem that has been worrying us all along, stated as concretely as can be. The problem is harder to solve in this case because there is something, most probably, in the structure of the scientist's mind (as a non-philosopher's, a non-believer's mind) that prevents him from asking himself this question ; reflection in our sense of the word is something deeply alien to him. As philosophers, or students of philosophy, we are in danger of solving his problem for him by bringing in something which runs against the very grain of his mind.

What he refuses to do is to recant. But what exactly are we to understand by that? A superficial mind will say that this is a mere matter of self-respect, or even of pride, though no doubt proper pride; if he were to recant, he would be humiliating himself. But this is certainly a false interpretation, by which I mean that it is not true to the scientist's own experience. For him, it is not himself that is at stake, but truth : the truth of which he is an interpreter and to which in a certain sense he bears witness. If he were to recant, he would be perjuring himself. But it is just the nature of this treason that he shrinks from, that we must make clear. He would be betraying truth ; but, or so it would seem, we can only betray a person; is truth a person, can it be compared to a person? We do talk indeed of sinning against the light, but has this any meaning outside that world of religious experience, which we wish, as I have said, to exclude for the moment from our discussion?

Ought we not to recur here to one of the deepest notions of the Californian philosopher, Josiah Royce, and to say that the

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man who is engaged in the search for truth enters into an ideal

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community? He becomes a citizen of a city that is not built with stones and that is cemented only with thought. But is it not against this city that the scientist is committing a treason when, out of fear or out of self-interest, he recants the conclusions that he reached in the days when he served truth loyally?

That conclusion cannot be lightly set aside; it will obtain the support of many thinkers who have little taste for metaphysics as such. Nevertheless, I think it takes us only half-way to the truth. The notion of this ideal city is only a halt, or a ledge, on a steep, stony mountain path that must lead us much further on. For we are still left with the problem of how such a city is possible and what are its foundations. Is it not the main note of this city that it has been constructed with truth in mind and for the purposes of truth? But that leaves the whole problem where it was. It may be, however, that if we can once more probe through mere words and images, this notion of an ideal city will help us upwards on the path towards a more distinct conception than we have yet obtained of our destination.

What are we to understand by an ideal city? Let us put aside every characteristic that belongs specifically to a material city. What remains is the idea of a place where people live together and where exchanges of goods and services of all sorts take place. Certainly, when we talk of such exchanges, we evoke once more an image of physical transactions. I bring along some banknotes and I buy an object which has a stated price. But, after all, there are other exchanges of an infinitely more subtle kind. I go into a museum, for instance, and I bring with me a certain number of ideas, or rather a preliminary grounding of experience, which enables me to understand, or rather to appreciate, works of art that might otherwise have left me indifferent. It may be objected that it is improper to speak of an exchange in this instance, since I 'give' nothing to the work of art; but that is only true from a grossly material point of view. There is a deeper sense in which one can say that the work is enriched by the admiration it inspires and that it undergoes, in a sense, a real growth and development. This mysterious phenomenon — which cannot, of course, leave any palpable traces — belongs, in a way, to the ideal city. Let us

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notice, in passing, that a town, when it deserves the name of a town, and is not a mere juxtaposition of buildings, has itself something of the function of the museum; it offers spiritual nourishment to those who live in it, and they in their turn help on the growth of what one might call its spiritual substance.

Let us see how these very simple remarks can throw some light on the notion of the ideal city itself and on its connections with the notion of truth.

As always, we have been tempted to cling to a physical representation. Just as the city of stone or wood is laid out to get the best light available, so we have imagined the ideal city as constructed in such a fashion that it can be illuminated by a truth that is external to it. But the relationship is not the same in both cases ; where the city of stone or wood seems to have a prior existence in itself without the light being a necessary constituent part of that existence, the ideal city, as we have glimpsed, does draw its verv existence from that other li^ht which is truth. This

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certainly gives us only a very abstract and general grasp of what we are talking about, but it is enough to show how impossible it would be to represent the ideal city in an objective fashion. The best image, indeed, that we can here evoke that city by, is the simple one of a discussion about ideas in which both the conversationalists are so interested in their topic that each forgets about himself, which is to say, really, about the personal impres sion TTeis making on the other; for the tiniest touch of self- complacency would lower the tone of the discussion. The very soul of such discussions is the joy of communicating, not neces sarily the joy of finding that one's views agree with another's; and this distinction between communication and agreement has great importance. It is just as if two climbers were tackling the same hill, up different approaches ; allowing that the climbers can communicate directly with each other, at any moment, through portable radio or television sets.

But there is something paradoxical in this situation, even when our imagination has grasped it properly. Truth is at once what the two conversationalists, or the two climbers, are aware of striving towards — and it is also what pushes them up their hill ; which is to say that it is at once in front of them and behind them,

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or rather that, at this level of discourse, this spatial contrast has no reality.

Has all this brought us nearer to the discovery of what truth is ? My reflections on what I have called the ideal city, or merely on what is involved in the notion of a sincere discussion between two persons, should lead us to acknowledge, it seems to me, that when we talk of truth — just because we are talking of it — we run a grave risk of placing ourselves just at the most unfavourable standpoint for grasping what truth may be. You will notice that in the illustrations which have taken up so much of this lecture I have always been anxious to flow in the direction of a sort of current, without asking myself precisely what the current is, what are its characteristics, for instance whether it is a continuous current — as Bergson seems to have thought, who in this instance does seem to me to have taken a large leap beyond the given facts of experience. And this notion of a 'current', taken in isolation, does not seem to me a completely satisfactory notion. What I mean is that I have been dealing with thought in so far as thought is committed to some task or other, and I have not been asking myself exactly how thought gets such tasks suggested to it. But all this comes down to saying that to me it does not appear per missible to isolate a judgment and to ask what truth is in relation to that judgment. We have been led in this lecture, and we shall be led more and more in subsequent lectures, to give weight to the idea of a sort of Intercourse, which can take place both be tween distinct personalities and within what we call the same personality. This will become clearer later on, when we shall have to define the specific characteristics of intersubjectivity. We have already got a glimpse, however, of the fact that all intercourse takes place against what I would call a kind of intelligible back ground; there would be everything to lose if we were tempted to transform this notion of an intelligible background into the

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image of a material background ; though that temptation is, in our case, with us "all the time. But though this notion of an intelligible background, or setting, is still a misty one, does it not permit us to give a certain body of meaning to the phrase 'within the bounds of truth' which we used earlier in this lecture? Even more, might we not have a basis for supposing that what we call

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the love of truth may be a sort of mysterious joy in moving against this intelligible background, within this intelligible setting? Though the joy certainly is a precarious and threatened one.

For if it is the case that we have access to this region only under rather difficult conditions, and under conditions on which we cannot concentrate our attention too firmly, we can certainly not say that we are 'native to the place', that we naturally belong there. This intelligible region is not our natal soil fit is not so, at least, unless we can conceive a double mode of belonging, or unless, in a quite different fashion, we can think of ourselves, as X \Plato /did, as linked to this region by mysterious threads of reminiscence. But at a first glance we have to admit that this is a strange notion, and that we cannot yet attribute to it anything more than a negative content; we see what it is not, much rather than grasp what it is.

We are thus led to the world we do naturally belong to, the world of our sense experiences, the world that constitutes us as existing creatures. And it is only very much later that we shall be able to return to the difficult notions which, towards the end of this lecture, had begun to beckon us with a distant gleam.

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CHAPTER V

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY REFLECTION THE EXISTENTIAL FULCRUM

TH E questions about the nature of truth that took up our whole attention during the last lecture were certainly difficult and involved, and at a first glance it may seem strange that we should have raised them at all before turning to our

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present topic. But it seemed to me that a first examination of how we ought to understand the notion of truth was a necessary preliminary to everything else. That intelligible background or setting, of which we spoke towards the end of our last lecture, however hard it may be to grasp it in its essential nature^) is nevertheless, (since it is not merely a place of encounter, but, as we shall gradually see more and more clearly, communication and will to communicate,) the setting against which our investigation must spread itself out. It may be objected that it is also the setting for every kind of thought that is worthy of the name of thought. Agreed: but the distinctive note of philosophic thought, at least according to my conception of it and I have many authorities for that conception, is that not only does it move towards the object whose nature it seeks to discover, but at the same time it is alert for a certain music that arises from its own inner nature if it is succeeding in carrying out its task. We have already said that the point about philosophic thought is that it is reflective ; and it is into the nature of reflection, as an activity, that we must now probe more deeply than we have done so far.

As usual, I shall start with the simplest examples I can find, to show how reflection has its roots in the daily flow of life.

I put my hand, let us say, into my pocket to take my watch out. I discover that my watch is not there ; but it ought to be there ; normally my watch is in my pocket. I experience a slight shock.

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There has been a small break in the chain of my everyday habits (between the act of putting my hand in my pocket and that of taking out my watch). The break is felt as something out of the way; it arrests my attention, to a greater or a less degree, accord ing to the importance I attach to my watch; the notion that a valuable object may be lost arises in my mind, and this notion is not a mere notion but also a feeling of disquiet. I call in reflection to help me . . . but let us be careful here not to fall into the errors of an out-of-date psychology which isolated one faculty of the mind from another. It is very clear in the example I have chosen, and in every similar example, that reflection is nothing other than attention, in the case where attention is directed towards this sort of small break in the daily chain of habit. To reflect, in this kind of case, is to ask oneself how such a break can have occurred. But there is no place here for the kind of purely abstract speculation which, of its very nature, can have no practical outcome ; what I have to do is to go back in time until I recall the moment when the watch was last in my possession. I remember, let us say, having looked at the time just after break fast; therefore at that moment everything was still all right. Between then and now something must have happened to the watch. My mental processes are rather like — there is no avoiding the comparison — the actions of a plumber who is trying to trace a leak. Was there perhaps a hole in my pocket? I look at my pocket and discover that there is no hole. I continue with my task of alert recapitulation. Say that I succeed in recalling the fact that there was a moment when I put the watch down on a table; I shall go, of course, to see whether it is still on the table; and there, let us say, the watch still is. Reflection has carried out its task, and the problem is solved. . . . Let us notice, however, even in connection with this almost childishly simple example, that I have made my mental dfort because something real, something valuable, was at stake. [Reflection is never exercised on things that are not worth the trouble of reflecting aboutj And, from another point of view, let us notice that reflection in this case was a personal act, and an act which nobody else would have been able to undertake in my place, or on my behalf. The act of reflection is linked, as bone is linked with bone in the human

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body, to living personal experience; and it is important to understand the nature of this link. To all appearances, it is neces sary that the living personal experience should bump into some sort of obstacle. One is tempted to use the following sort of metaphor. A man who has been travelling on foot arrives at the edge of a river where the bridge has been carried away by a flood. He has no option but to call a ferryman. In an example such as that which I have just cited, reflection does really play the part of the ferryman.

But the same sort of thing can happen, of course, at the level of the inner life. I am talking to a friend, and somehow I let myself be drawn into telling him something which is an actual lie. I am alone with myself again, I get a grip on myself, I face the fact of this lie ; how was it possible for me to tell such a whopper? I am all the more surprised at myself because I have been accustomed to think of myself, up to the present, as a truthful and trustworthy person. But then what importance ought I to attach to this lie? Am I forced to conclude that I am not the man I thought I was ?

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And, from another point of view, what attitude ought I to take up towards this act of mine? Ought I to confess the lie to my friend,

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or on the other hand would I make myself ridiculous by doing so? But perhaps I ought to make myself ridiculous, to let my friend laugh at me, as a sort of punishment for having told him the lie in the first place?

As in the previous example, what we have here is a kind of break ; that is to say, I cannot go on just as if nothing had happened ; there really is something that necessitates an act of readjustment on my part.

But here is a third example that will give us an easier access to the notion of reflection at the properly philosophical level. I have been disappointed by the behaviour of somebody of whom I was fond. So I am forced to revise my opinion of this friend of mine. It seems, indeed, that I am forced to acknowledge that he is not the man I believed him to be. But it may be that the process of reflection does not halt there. A memory comes back to me — a memory of something I myself did long ago, and suddenly I ask myself: 'Was this act of mine really so very different from the act which today I feel inclined to judge so severely? But in

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that case am I in any position to condemn my friend?' Thus my reflections, at this point, call my own position into question. Let us consider this second stage. Here, again, I cannot go on as if nothing had happened. Then, what has happened? There has been this memory and this sort of confrontation that has been forced upon me, of myself and the person I was