1893 action critique essay life practice science
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Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice
By Maurice Blondel. Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny? I act, but without even knowing what action is, without having wished to live, without knowing exactly either who I am or even if I am. This appearance of being which flutters about within me, these light and evanescent actions of a shadow, bear in them, I am told, an eternally weighty responsibility, and that, even at the price of blood, I cannot buy nothingness because for me it is no longer.
Supposedly, then, I am condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity! Why and by what right, if I did not know it and did not will it?
I shall make a clean breast of it. If there is something to be seen, I need to see it. Perhaps I will learn whether or not this phantom I am to myself, with this universe I bear in my gaze, with science and its magic, with the strange dream of consciousness, has any solidity.
I shall no doubt discover what is hidden in my acts, at that very depth where, without myself, in spite of myself, I undergo being and become attached to it. I will know whether I have a sufficient knowledge and will concerning the present and the future never to sense any tyranny in them, whatever they may be.
The problem is inevitable; man resolves it inevitably; and this solution, true or false, but voluntary at the same time as necessary, each one bears it in his actions.
That is why we must study action : the very meaning of the word and the richness of its contents will unfold little by little. It is good to propose to man all the exigencies of life, all the hidden fulness of his works, to strengthen within him, along with the force to affirm and to believe, the courage to act.
To take stock of the immediate evidence, action, in my life, is a fact, the most general and the most constant of all, the expression within me of a universal determinism; it is produced even without me.
More than a fact, it is a necessity, which no doctrine denies since such a denial would require a supreme effort, which no man avoids since suicide is still an act; action is produced even in spite of me. More than a necessity, action often appears to me as an obligation; it has to be produced by me, even when it requires of me a painful choice, a sacrifice, a death.
Not only do I use up my bodily life in action, but I am forever putting down feelings and desires that would lay claim to everything, each for itself. We do not go forward, we do not learn, we do not enrich ourselves except by closing off for ourselves all roads but one and by impoverishing ourselves of all that we might have known or gained otherwise. Is there a more subtle regret than that of the adolescent obliged, on entering life, to limit his curiosity as if with blinders?
Each determination cuts off an infinity of possible acts. No one escapes this natural mortification. Will I at least have the power to stop? No, we have to go forward. To suspend my decision in order to renounce nothing? No, I must commit myself under pain of losing everything; I must compromise myself. I have no right to wait or else I no longer have the power to choose.
If I do not act out of my own movement, there is something in me or outside of me that acts without me; and what acts without me ordinarily acts against me.
Peace is a defeat; action leaves no more room for delay than death. Head, heart and hands, I must therefore give them over willingly or else they are taken from me. If I withhold my free dedication, I fall into slavery; no one gets along without idols: neither pious folk nor even the most libertine. A scholastic or partisan prejudice, a watch-word, a worldly compromise, a sensual delight, and it is enough for all repose to be lost, all freedom to be sacrificed.
And that is often the reason why we live and why we die! Will I be left the hope of guiding myself, if I will to, in the fulness of light, and of governing myself only according to my ideas? Practice, which tolerates no delay, never entails a perfect clarity; the complete analysis of it is not possible for a finite mind. Any rule of life that would be grounded only on a philosophical theory and abstract principles would be temerarious.
I cannot put off acting until all the evidence has appeared, and all evidence that shines before the mind is partial. Pure knowledge is never enough to move us because it does not take hold of us in our entirety. In every act, there is an act of faith. Will I at least be able to accomplish what I have resolved, whatever it be, as I have resolved it? Between what I know, what I will and what I do there is always an inexplicable and disconcerting disproportion.
My decisions often go beyond my thoughts, and my acts beyond my intentions. Sometimes I do not do all that I will; sometimes I do, almost without knowing, what I do not will. And these actions that I did not completely foresee, that I did not entirely order, once they are accomplished, weigh on all of my life and act upon me, seemingly, more than I acted upon them.
I find I am like their prisoner; they sometimes turn against me, like an insubordinate son before his father. They have fixed the past, they encroach on the future. Impossibility of abstaining and of holding myself in reserve, inability to satisfy myself, to be self-sufficient and to cut myself loose, that is what a first look at my condition reveals to me.
That there is constraint and a kind of oppression in my life is not an illusion, then, nor a dialectical game, it is a brute fact of daily experience. At the principle of my acts, in the use and after the exercise of what I call my freedom, I seem to feel all the weight of necessity. Nothing in me escapes it. If I try to evade decisive initiatives, I am enslaved for not having acted. If I go ahead, I am subjugated to what I have done. In practice, no one eludes the problem of practice; and not only does each one raise it, but each, in his own way, inevitably resolves it.
It is this very necessity that has to be justified. And what would it mean to justify it, if not to show that it is in conformity with the most intimate aspiration of man? For I am conscious of my servitude only in conceiving, in wishing for a complete emancipation. The terms of the problem, then, are sharply opposed. On one side, all that dominates and oppresses the will; on the other, the will to dominate all or to be able to ratify all, for there is no being where there is only constraint.
How then resolve the conflict? Of the two terms of the problem, which is the unknown to start from? Is it goodwill that will show trust, as if it were betting on something sure and infinite, without being able to find out before the end whether, in seeming to sacrifice everything to this something, it has really given up nothing to acquire it?
Or must we consider first only what is inevitable and forced, by refusing to make any concession, by repelling all that can be repelled, in order to find out, with the necessity of science, where this necessity of action leads in the end, except to show simply, in the name of determinism itself, that good will is right? The first way is unavoidable and can suffice for all. It is the practical way.
We must define it first, if only to set aside the part of those, the majority and often the better ones, who can only act without discussing action. Besides, as we shall show, no one is exempt from entering on this direct route. But it will be good to prove how another method becomes legitimate to confirm the first and to anticipate the final revelations of life, and how it is necessary for a scientific solution of the problem.
The object of this work must be this very science of practice. Before discussing the exigencies of life, even in order to discuss them, we must have submitted to them. Can this first verification suffice to justify them, and will it be possible, without any effort of thought, through experience alone, for all equally, to find the certain solution that will absolve life of all tyranny and satisfy every conscience?
I am and I act, even in spite of myself; I find myself bound, it seems, to answer for all that I am and do. I will submit without rebellion then to this constraint which I cannot suppress because this effective docility is the only direct method of verification. Whatever apparent resistance I may offer in opposition to it, nothing, in fact, can exempt me from obeying it.
Hence, I have no other recourse but to have confidence; every attempt at insubordination, while failing to rescue me from the necessity of action, would be a lack of consistency as contrary to science as to conscience.
It can never be said too often: no factual difficulty, no speculative doubt, can legitimately dispense anyone whatsoever from this practical method which I am forced and resolved to apply first. I am asked for head and heart and hands: I am ready; let us experiment. Action is a necessity; I will act. Action often appears as an obligation; I will obey. So much the worse if it is an illusion, a hereditary prejudice, a residue of Christian education.
I need a personal verification, and I will verify at whatever cost. No one else can exercise this control for me and in my place. The issue concerns me and my all; it is myself and my all that I put into the experiment. One has only oneself; and the true proofs, the true certitudes are those that cannot be communicated. One lives alone as one dies alone; others have nothing to do with it. Amusing people, all these theoreticians of practice who observe, deduce, discuss, legislate on what they do not do.
The chemist makes no claim to produce water without hydrogen and oxygen. I will not claim to know myself and to test myself, to acquire certitude or to appreciate the destiny of man, without having thrown into the crucible all the man I bear in myself. The organism of flesh, of appetites, of desires, of thoughts whose obscure workings I feel perpetually is a living laboratory.
That is where my science of life must first be performed. All the deductions of moralists based on the most complete facts, on mores and social life, are ordinarily artificial, narrow, meagre.
Let us act, and leave aside their alchemy. But there is doubt, darkness, difficulty. Again, so much the worse; we have to go ahead just the same if we are to know what is at issue. The true reproach that is addressed to conscience is not that it does not say enough; it is that it demands too much.
Besides, for each step there is enough room; there is enough light, enough of a faint call for me to go where I have anticipated something of what I am looking for, a sense of fulness, an illumination on the role I have to play, a confirmation of my conscience. One does not stop at midnight in an open field. Were I to use the darkness in which practical necessities and obligations seem wrapped as a pretext for not trusting them or not making any sacrifice, I would be failing in my method and, instead of finding an excuse for myself, I would be condemning myself if I dared to blame what this obscurity conceals or to cloak myself rashly with it in order to abandon the experiment.
He does not know in advance what he is looking for, and yet he looks for it. It is by anticipating the facts that he reaches them and discovers them.
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1893 action critique essay life practice science
Action was once a prominent theme in philosophical reflection. It figured prominently in Aristotelian philosophy, and the medieval Scholastics built some of their key adages around it. But by the time Maurice Blondel came to focus on it for his own philosophical reflection, it had all but disappeared from the philosophical vocabulary. It is no longer possible or legitimate to ignore action in philosophy as it was in France when Blondel appeared on the scene in , when at the age of 21 he first began to focus on action as a dissertation subject, and in , when he defended and published the dissertation now presented here for the English reader. Copyright for most content is held by The University of Notre Dame. Reproduction of all or any portion of content constitutes a violation of copyright.
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By Maurice Blondel. Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?
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