Carnal Spirit - Matthew W. Maguire

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scientific discovery by deference to what stands outside its animating imperatives. Ultimately—and most important for Boutroux—our moral responsibilities cannot be justified scientifically or simply by disinterested reason; it is charity, or love, that uniquely fulfills human nature and directs human action toward the good.146

      This emphasis on love—from a neo-Kantian philosopher—was part of a deeper and broader current in French thought in the Belle Époque, very different from the positivist-inflected projects of Durkheim, Ribot, or Maurras.

      The philosopher Félix Ravaisson, who found an appreciative reader in Péguy’s mentor Henri Bergson,147 enjoyed, like Boutroux, a similarly intense affinity with Pascal, and was no less attracted to Pascal’s insistence upon a rigorous respect for different orders of knowledge. Pascal is unique, in Ravaisson’s view, since “no other philosopher, in fact, has had a sharper awareness of the difference of the two orders of things and faculties whose contrast corresponds to that of matter and spirit.”148 Ravaisson appreciatively observes the metaphysical interval that Pascal asserts belongs to knowledge as such, including scientific knowledge: for Pascal, it is “the heart” that gives us our sense of time, space, and number, and these are the nondemonstrable preconditions of scientific knowledge rather than their “proven” and “secure” foundation. Ravaisson is grateful that Pascal “reduces the very knowledge of first principles to the heart.”149 Furthermore, Pascal, along with Plato, argued that “everywhere in the universe the inferior is an image of the superior.”150

      Yet for Ravaission, this vertical ascent is a declaration of allegiance not to hierarchies of persons or peoples but to the exalted possibilities of being human, against those who would make a metaphysical desert and call it peace. Ravaisson’s Philosophical Testament was quite forthright about the contemporary effort, “much in favor today,” to become fascinated by the neurophysiological research that Dastre promoted, including “reflex movements, which would be absolutely machine-like responses of bodies fixed to impressions and solicitations from the outside … in such a way, everything in this world, except perhaps purely intellectual determinations, would be subject to an irresistible fatality, and there would be no point in invoking the mind.”151

      The ambitions of this movement involved nothing less than the death of philosophy: “The idea that philosophy, bound within ever-narrower limits, will disappear one day is becoming a majority view.”152 Ravaisson, like Boutroux, found the distinction between intellect and matter indispensable, but this independence found its end above all in service of a transcendence without equal, for “the will … [has] its most intimate root in what in us has the most force and efficacy, namely love.”153 For “we are in the world for no other reason than to love, Pascal said.”154

      Read within the rhetorical pathos of meticulous, secure scholarly distances, these enquiries into metaphysics and charity can easily seem rather like ungrounded Schwärmerei (passionate, undiscerning enthusiasm). But for Ravaisson, these questions are open: the secure, objective ground his opponents assume for their own views is not in evidence. In a clear allusion to Poincaré and others, he says, “The particular sciences prove with more or less convincing force, according to the nature of their objects: but of them it is true to say that they rest on hypotheses, or as the mathematicians often say today, on unprovable conventions.”155

      Bergson and the Freedom of Time

      Above all, Péguy and many others owed the opening of their intellectual horizons to Henri Bergson. For Péguy, Bergson’s philosophy had liberated his generation, or as he put it, Bergson exposed a “universal laziness”156 and “broke our chains.”157

      At first blush, Bergson’s philosophy appears to be another modern brief for the exaltation of becoming over being—and in some ways it is. But Bergson was not Renan or his diverse legatees. First, Bergson saw a vital absolute working through history, rather than upholding a purely immanent, linear historical becoming discoverable by the inexorable progress of “science.” As he put it in an important letter to the American philosopher Horace Kallen, “It is the ‘eternity’ of ancient philosophers that I have attempted to bring down from the heights where it resided in order to relate it to the duration, that is, to something that swells, grows richer, and builds itself up indefinitely.”158

      Through this—at least in this stage in his thought—immanent “eternity,” Bergson introduced into late modern philosophy a Neoplatonic strain totally foreign to Renan, Comte, Durkheim, and many others. It is in a certain sense cumulative but not “progressive”; rather, it integrated a continuous multiplicity of the past into the present. It was one dimension of Bergson’s effort to transform the understanding of time among his students, including Péguy and Proust. By 1900, when Bergson held a chair at the Collège de France, his lectures had become public events for many intellectually curious Parisians; he became an internationally famous philosopher and a regular, friendly correspondent with luminaries in France, Europe, and beyond, including William James.

      For Bergson, the decisive error in human experience was to confuse time with space. The two are distinct, even though intellect cannot resist conflating them, and in fact this conflation is a practical necessity, drawn from the demands of action.

      Bergson’s reading of evolutionary science took the opposite direction from the one taken by many of Bergson’s contemporaries (and ours). It was not that Charles Darwin had shown that a “disenchanted” rationality, devoted to the documentation of processes in linear time, could reliably disclose natural laws divorced from metaphysical speculation. If one took evolutionary theory seriously, it meant that our intellects evolved for practical purposes, involving our own well-being and survival—in particular in order to act upon our environment. To this end, time would be transposed and plotted, measured, divided, and assembled as space. In practical terms, these operations were entirely legitimate. But they did not come to be in order to afford us an encounter with the multiple plenitude of reality, and they did not give anything but a very incomplete and often distorted access to that plenitude.

      Many well-established movements in European intellectual life that identified themselves as scientific were hence not really the terminus of “sober reason” at last “set free” from theology, putatively archaic effusions about love, and, above all, “metaphysics.” They were actually the latest iteration of a traditional, even primal misunderstanding of time, connected to the imperatives of practical action, which received its first philosophical expressions with Parmenides and Zeno of Elea.159 For Bergson, “the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, banal act of our understanding.”160

      As long as the relation between objects remained the same in space, for the making of scientific laws, it would not matter if time drastically accelerated or slowed; it was as if time were not real at all. An encounter with time as time—that is, as durée, or duration—required a concentrated effort of intuition.

      Bergsonian durée is an authentic temporality that does not involve measurement, juxtaposition, or stark separations. Rather, time is continuous and indivisible; it is necessarily mobile, and with it come both unity and qualitative (rather than quantitative) multiplicity, neither of which is prior to the other.161

      Durée is difficult for Bergson to define, since spatial metaphors are irresistible to minds that have evolved to seek the fixed, homogenous, and manipulable (but not vital). He compares durée to the experience of hearing a melody: the melody can be experienced or understood neither as individual notes, nor as a succession of notes regardless of their temporal duration; its power and its reality as a melody depend upon its duration as a whole, its inescapably temporal flow, in which the past must be distinct yet continuous with the present for the melody to act upon us.162

      Qualitative multiplicity in particular manifests itself in duration, as our experiences—and the different motifs, timbre, and tones of those experiences—relate to one another simultaneously, prompted by the same perception in the same moment, and are yet distinct.

      Our emotions, for example, may be prompted by a certain kind of event—say, falling in love—simultaneously

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