ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Carnal Spirit. Matthew W. Maguire
Читать онлайн.Название Carnal Spirit
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812296105
Автор произведения Matthew W. Maguire
Издательство Ingram
For Bergson, a classical education “attaches no value to knowledge passively received.” It “dishabituates one from a certain excessively abstract matter of judging.”202 For Bergson, classical education has an almost Aristotelian capacity to adjudicate between different kinds of judgment, allowing a discriminating bon sens to determine the sort of reasoning and degree of precision appropriate to it. It requires an attentive, free mind, analytically at work and yet also engaged by feeling, including and above all “the passion for justice.”203
Bergson’s emphasis on the unity of learning and feeling through classical education—and significantly, a passion for justice—was what had worried Thomas Hobbes earlier in the modern age: an emphasis on classical and sacred learning was likely to produce a desire for heroism, goodness, or sanctity that would lead to civil conflict and pervasive instability. But for Bergson, a classical liberal-arts humanism was an education in what Bergson would elsewhere call qualitative multiplicity, compatible with flourishing living and thinking—and, as he mentions with reference to France, “tolerance.”204 A hard-earned sense of the real (that is, not “ready-made ideas”) joined to “generous passions” is not a threat to peaceful coexistence but in fact its spring.205
It is anything but a coincidence that the opposite sides in the debate about educational reform were also on opposite sides of contemporary debates about the nature of time, including historical time. Whatever the possibilities offered by the study of ultimate origins, Durkheim, Simiand, Mauss, Lavisse, and others who favored “modernizing” educational reforms were happy to think of time as a linear, homogenous kind of space in which theoretical, “scientific” explanations account for events and change, in which the past was neatly differentiated from the present, which bore responsibility for the ultimate stop on the temporal line—“the” future.
Those unpersuaded by proposals to “rationalize” education and to make it “relevant” thought much more carefully about time. Henri Poincaré’s argument that there was no such thing as absolute time, and that history could never be a science, left the question of “relevance” far more open than many of his opponents assumed it to be. For a linear account of history and supersessionist progressivism, on the one hand, and backward-looking reaction, on the other, Bergsonian durée posed distinct but related problems. If our experience of time has been gravely damaged by confusing it with space, Bergson was more than willing to have deep, continuous, and distinct linguistic and temporal origins open up our durée, the fullness of time, and with it what he called “the free flow of thought,” in pursuit of a freedom that integrated different pasts with a present instantaneity. It could offer different possibilities for diverse futures. In various ways, Poincaré and Bergson—and Péguy—understood that different accounts of time produced different kinds of history, education, and culture.
Telling the Truth in Time
For all of Péguy’s acknowledged debts to scholars like Duhem, Poincaré, and above all Bergson—Péguy was a singular composite of philosopher, poet, and journalist. His was very different work from that of established institutional figures. Why did he devote his life to the Cahiers?
To understand Péguy’s ambition takes some mental effort for an educated person of the twenty-first century—it requires entering into the variety and intensities of temporal experience in the early twentieth century. Our experiences of time, or at least the ones most easily discussed in our culture, are often resolutely linear and intensely contextual historically (often subdivided by decades as one approaches the present).
This was not the case in the two decades before the outbreak of the Great War. As the possibilities, experience, and understanding of time underwent rapid change in the Belle Époque, many of the characteristic ways in which human experience had created a distinctively modern order in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries were beginning to be the subject of intense questioning among educated persons and intellectual subcultures. What was learning for, and to what end? How should we know the world, and ourselves? What was the relation between historically rooted communities and universal humanity? Were notions of personal or communal honor an integral part of being human, or archaic excrescences? What place was there for universal love, or for religious belief in an allegedly “mature” modern culture? In short, what did it mean to be modern, or antimodern, and was it possible to be something else altogether? The future appeared to many to be unsettled and therefore open to decisive human thinking and action.
It is not that Péguy would simply “choose” this or that position in the cultural, political, and philosophical worlds in which he worked; rather, he would try—in Bergsonian fashion—to integrate freely, to synthesize, to create, to draw upon distant and different pasts in order to open up futures different from the ones expected by the eminences of immanent becoming and from reactionaries. That attempt would in turn open up possibilities that others could fashion in their present toward still other futures.
Something indispensable can be grasped of that historical moment if we attend to a single thinker in Paris—one of the most energetic and vital points on earth for so many changes associated with the early twentieth century—engaged simultaneously with changes in culture, literature, daily politics, theology, and philosophy. As a way of thinking through and with these possibilities, Péguy would come to insist upon founding his own journal to give form to his thought.
In France, an ambition of this kind was made especially plausible by social and material circumstances at the turn of the last century. In the Belle Époque, the vast majority of the French population could read, an unprecedented situation in the history of the country. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, a profusion of newspapers became available in Paris and elswhere, as advances in printing and typography (and the Third Republic’s relaxed censorship and lower taxes on newspapers and journals) made possible the daily purchase of newspapers of diverse opinion even by very modestly compensated laborers.206 Paris in particular was soon flooded with newspapers: by the autumn of 1910, more than sixty daily newspapers were published in Paris, a startling increase from just thirty years before.207
Yet the hope that Péguy would live out through a journal had long been a venerable dream in France (and in Europe: the Viennese Karl Kraus was Péguy’s contemporary). For example, In Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert’s great historical novel of the 1848 Revolution, the friends of the protagonist hope to found a journal that would allow them to speak the truth hidden by established powers and secure for France a fully just and free regime. The dream foundered quickly because it had to work within the corruption of the present to tell the truth about the corruption of the present. In Flaubert, the hoped-for journal required a great deal of money, and honest wealth was not easy to find; what is more, those who dreamed of the journal were unwilling to make the daily sacrifices necessary to tell the truth. The time and treasure the journal would require to be something more than a dream were spent upon the social whirl of Paris and would-be lovers, squandered in the pursuit of more selfish ambitions, until the merest hope of the truth-telling journal was dead. At the end of the novel, the protagonist and his best friend are adrift in middle age, fondly reminiscing about an abortive early adolescent visit to a brothel.208
The dream remained in the 1897 novel The Uprooted by Maurice Barrès. There the protagonists leave their native Nancy (in Lorraine), and several of them ultimately work for a journal in Paris that they believe can transform France and realize their ambitions, fittingly bearing the title La Vraie République. Their ambitions meet with disaster as politics, love affairs, and persistent poverty lead several of them astray, even into crime. Amid Barrès’s anti-Semitism and denunciations of both Kant and Parisian corruption (in contrast to the “purity” of a traditionally “rooted” life in Lorraine), the “true” republican newspaper can barely be mentioned without references to the sums of money required to keep it going.209 But in a novel aspiring to express the dilemmas of a