VI. In the Depths of the Abyss
Parce unicae spei totius orbis.
Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 5
AND SO, NEITHER the vital longing for human immortality can count on any rational confirmation nor can reason supply us with any incentive or consolation in life or any true end purpose for it. And yet, here in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the will and of the heart meets rational scepticism and in the encounter they embrace like brothers. And from this embrace, this tragic embrace, that is, this intimately loving embrace, will surge a wellspring of life, a life both true and terrible. It is scepticism, uncertainty, the final position reached by reason in its exercise of self-analysis, the analysis of its own validity, that provides a foundation upon which the heart’s despair must build its hope.
We had to abandon in disillusionment the position of those who seek to turn consolation into rational and logical truth by attempting to prove its rationality or at least its non-irrationality, and we had also to abandon the position of those who seek to turn rational truth into consolation and endow it with a reason for life. Neither the one nor the other of these positions could satisfy us. The first is at odds with our reason, the other with our senses. Any peace between these two powers is impossible, and we must live from their warfare. And we must make this warfare, make war itself, the condition of our spiritual life.
There is no room in this connection for that repugnant and vulgar makeshift, the expedient of politicians—more or less parliamentary politicians—known as a “working agreement,” in which there are neither victors nor vanquished. There is no room here for compromise. A degenerate and cowardly reason might perhaps concoct some formula for an arrangement—after all, reason lives on formulas. But life, which does not submit to formulas, life, which lives and seeks always to live, does not accept formulas. Its only formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does not compromise with middle terms.
Initium sapientiae timor Domini was perhaps meant to mean timor mortis, or perhaps timor vitae, which is the same. It is always true that the beginning of wisdom lies in some fear or other.
And, as for this saving scepticism of which I shall now speak, can it be said to be doubt? Yes, it is doubt, and it is much more than doubt. Doubt is often very cold, a not very vitalizing force, and, above all, rather artificial, especially ever since Descartes degraded it to the function of method. The conflict between reason and life is something more than doubt. For doubt is easily reduced to a comic element.
Descartes’s methodical doubt is a comic doubt, a purely theoretic and provisional doubt; that is, it is the doubt of a man who plays at doubting without really being in doubt. It is a hothouse doubt, and so the man who concluded that he existed because he thought, this man did not approve of “those turbulent [brouillonnes] and restless persons who, being called neither by birth nor by fortune to the management of public affairs, are perpetually devising some new reforms,” and he was pained to think that there might be some of this element in his own writing. No, this man, Descartes, proposed only to reform his own thoughts and to build upon ground that was wholly his. And he resolved not to accept anything as true which he did not manifestly know to be such, and to destroy all prejudices and received ideas so that he might construct for himself anew an intellectual habitation. But “as it is not enough, before beginning to rebuild one’s dwelling-house, to pull it down and to furnish the materials and architects, or to study architecture oneself . . . but it is also necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge conveniently while the work is in progress,” he framed for himself a provisional ethic—une morale de provision—whose first law was to follow the customs of his country and keep the religion in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed since childhood, guiding himself in all matters in accordance with the most moderate opinion. In other words, a provisional religion and even a provisional God! And he chose the most moderate opinion, as being “the most convenient in practice.” But it will be best not to follow him further.
This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this philosophico-hothouse doubt, is not the doubt, the scepticism, the uncertainty of which I speak, and nothing like it. The doubt I mean is a passionate doubt, the eternal conflict between reason and feeling, between science and life, between the logical and the biotic. For science destroys the concept of personality, reducing it to a complex in continual state of momentary flux, that is, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual and emotional life, which, since it never gives up, turns against reason.
And this kind of doubt can not avail itself of any provisional ethic, but must establish its own ethic, as we shall see, on conflict itself, so that it becomes a battle ethic, and upon this ethic it will build the foundation of religion. And it inhabits a house in process of continuous demolition and in continuous need of rebuilding. The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down.
Moreover, as regards the concrete life-problem in question, reason takes no position whatever. The truth is that reason goes even further than to deny the immortality of the soul, which would be one solution, for it refuses to recognize the problem in the form in which our life’s desire presents it. In the rational and logical sense of the term “problem,” there is no such problem. The question of the immortality of the soul, of the persistence of individual consciousness, is not a rational concern, it falls outside the scope of reason. As a problem—whatever solution is assumed—it is irrational. Rationally, even the stating of the problem lacks sense. The immortality of the soul is as inconceivable as, strictly speaking, its absolute mortality would be. For purposes of explaining the world and existence—and such is the task of reason—there is no need to suppose that our soul is either mortal or immortal. The very statement of the supposed problem, then, is irrational.
Let us listen to brother Kierkegaard, who tells us:
This questionable character of abstract thought becomes apparent especially in connection with all existential problems, where abstract thought gets rid of the difficulty by leaving it out, and then proceeds to boast of having explained everything. It explains immortality in general, and all goes quite smoothly, in that immortality is identified with eternity, with the eternity which is essentially the medium of all thought. But whether an existing individual human being is immortal, which is the difficulty, abstract thought does not trouble to inquire. It is disinterested; but the difficulty inherent in existence constitutes the interest of the existing individual, who is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought thus helps me with respect to my immortality by first annihilating me as a particular existing individual and then making me immortal, about as when the doctor in Holberg killed the patient with his medicine—but also expelled the fever. Such an abstract thinker, one who neglects to take into account the relationship between his abstract thought and his own existence as an individual, not careful to clarify this relationship to himself, makes a comical impression upon the mind even if he is ever so distinguished, because he is in process of ceasing to be a human being. While a genuine human being, as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, finds his reality in holding these two factors together, infinitely interested in existing—such an abstract thinker is a duplex being: a fantastic creature who moves in the pure being of abstract thought, and on the other hand, a sometimes pitiful professorial figure which the former deposits, about as when one sets down a walking stick. When one reads the story of such a thinker’s life (for his writings are perhaps excellent), one trembles to think of what it means to be a man. And when you read in his writings that thought and being are one, it is impossible not to think, in view of his own life and mode of existence, that the being which is thus identical with thought can scarcely be the being of a man.
What intense passion, that is, what truth, lies in this bitter invective directed against Hegel, the prototype of the rationalist, who relieves us of our fever by relieving us of our life and promises us, in place of concrete immortality an abstract immortality—as if our ravening hunger for immortality were abstract and not concrete!
It can of course be said that “once the dog is dead there’s an end to the rabies,” and that once I’m dead I’ll no longer be tormented by this rage to live beyond death, and that the fear of death, or more properly, of nothingness, is an irrational fear, but . . . yes, but . . . Eppur si muovel And it will go on moving. For it is the source of all movement!
And yet, I do not believe that brother Kierkegaard is altogether in the right, for that very same abstract thinker, or thinker in abstractions, Hegel, thinks so that he may exist, so as not to cease existing, or perhaps so as to forget that he will have to cease existing. Such is the basis for the passion toward abstract thought. And it may be that Hegel was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete singular existence, even if the professional decorum incumbent on an official State-philosopher compelled him to conceal the fact: such are the demands of office.
Faith in immortality is irrational. Nevertheless, faith and life and reason are mutually in need of each other. This vital longing is not properly speaking a problem, it can not be given any logical status, it can not be formulated in propositions rationally disputable; but it poses itself as a problem the way hunger poses itself as a problem. Likewise the wolf, when it hurls itself upon its prey to devour it or upon a shewolf to impregnate it, can not state rationally, or logically pose, the “problem” of its impulse. Reason and faith are enemies of each other and can not either of them maintain itself without the other. The irrational seeks to be made rational, and reason can operate only on the basis of the irrational. They must rely on each other and associate—but associate in battle, for battle is a form of association.
In the world of the living the struggle for life establishes an association, an association of the closest kind, not merely of the type that unites allies in combating a foe, but an association between those that combat each other. Could any association be more intimate than that between a beast of prey and its prey, between the devourer and the devoured? And if this relationship is clear in the struggle for survival among individuals, it is even clearer among nations. War has ever been the most effective factor in progress, more so even than commerce. It is through war that victors and vanquished learn to know each other and, in consequence, to love each other.
Christianity, “the madness of the Cross,” the irrational faith that Christ rose from the dead in order to raise us also, was saved by rationalistic Hellenic culture just as the latter was saved by Christianity. Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the nations who had lived through the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a purely religious tradition. It is frequently debated whether the Reformation was a child born of the Renaissance or in protest against it, and it would be possible to say that it was both, for a child is always born in protest against the father. It is also said that the revival of the Greek classics led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul and to primitive Christianity, its most irrational form. But it may be retorted that it was St. Paul, that it was the Christian irrationality underlying his Catholic theology, that led them back to the classics. “Christianity is what it has come to be,” it is said, “only through its alliance with antiquity, while among the Copts and the Ethiopians it is merely a kind of buffoonery. Islam evolved under the influence of Persian and Greek culture; under the influence of the Turks it has been transformed into destructive barbarism.”
We emerge from the Middle Ages and its faith, a faith as ardent as it is basically despairing and not without deep-seated uncertainties, and we enter the age of rationalism, also not free of uncertainty. Faith in reason is prone to the same rational indefensibility as any other faith. And we may well say with Robert Browning
All we have gained, then, by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith
For one of faith diversified by doubt.
And if, as I have said, faith—life—can sustain itself only by depending upon reason, which will make it transmissible—transmissible, especially, from me to myself; that is, reflective and conscious—then, by the same token, reason can sustain itself only upon faith, upon life, even if it is merely upon faith in reason, upon faith which is good for something more than knowledge, upon faith which is good for living. And yet, faith is not transmissible or rational, and neither is reason vital.
Will and intelligence have need of one another, and that old aphorism nihil volitum quin praecognitum, nothing is willed but what is previously known, can be inverted without being as paradoxical as may seem at first sight: nihil cognitum quin praevolitum, nothing is known but what is previously willed. Vinet, in considering Cousin’s book on Pascal’s Pensées, writes: “Spiritual knowledge itself has need of the heart. Without a desire to see, there is no seeing. When life and thought are altogether materialized, there is no believing in the things of the spirit.” We shall see that believing is, in the first instance, wanting to believe.
Will and intelligence seek opposite ends. Our will seeks to absorb the world to ourselves, to appropriate it; our intelligence wants us to be absorbed in the world. Are these opposite ends? Are they not rather one and the same? No, they are not, although they may seem to be. Intelligence is monist or pantheist; will is monotheist or egoist. Intelligence has no need to act upon anything outside itself, it is fused with ideas themselves; while will requires matter. To know something is to make myself into the thing I know; but in order for me to make use of it, for me to dominate it, it must remain distinct from me.
Philosophy and religion are enemies, and, because they are enemies, they need each other. There is no religion without some philosophic basis, nor is there any philosophy without religious roots: each lives off its opposite. Strictly speaking, the history of religion is the history of philosophy. And the attacks directed against religion from a presumably scientific or philosophic point of view are merely attacks from another, opposite, but religious point of view. “Thus the opposition which professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the entire world of nature,” says Ritschl (Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, III, Ch. IV, para. 28). Now this instinct is the very same as the instinct toward rationality. And Kant’s critical idealism has a religious origin; it was to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason after having first in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system of antithesis, contradictions, and antimonies, upon which Hegel constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant himself, and this root is an irrational root.
Further on we shall see, as we consider faith, that faith is in essence no more than a matter of will, not one of reason, just as to believe is to want to believe, and that to believe in God is to wish, above all and before all, that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the immortality of the soul is to want the soul to be immortal, and to want it so strongly that the wish rides roughshod over reason. But reason will have its revenge.
The instinct to know and the instinct to live (or rather, to survive) come into conflict with each other. In his work on The Analysis of Sensations, and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, Dr. Ernst Mach tells us that the scientific investigator, too, the research worker, der Forscher, fights in the battle for existence; that the ways of science still lead to the mouth; and that the pure instinct to know, der reine Erkenntnisstrieb, is still merely an ideal, given our present social conditions. And thus it will always be. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari, or perhaps better, primum supervivere, or superesse.
Every position of permanent accord and harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion, is rendered impossible. And the tragic history of human thought is simply one of struggle between reason and life—reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires. This is the history of philosophy, and it is inseparable from the history of religion.
Our sense of the world, of objective reality, is necessarily subjective, human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up to assert itself in the face of rationalism, reason always be confronted by will. Hence the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods in which life imposes itself and gives birth to spiritual forms, with periods in which reason imposes itself and gives birth to materialist forms, though both classes of belief, both forms, be disguised under other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges its own defeat. We will return to this matter in the next chapter.
The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts it very well: “For suicide is the only tolerable existential consequence of pure thought. . . . This is not to praise the suicide, but to respect the passion. Nowadays a thinker is a curious creature who during certain hours of the day exhibits a very remarkable ingenuity, but has otherwise nothing in common with a human being.”
Inasmuch as the thinker remains, despite everything, a man, he places reason at the service of life, whether or not he knows it. Life deceives reason, and reason deceives life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy forged, in the interests of life, a teleological-evolutionist system of metaphysics, rational in appearance, to serve as support for our vital longing. This philosophy, the basis of orthodox Christian supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, was essentially no more than a bit of cunning on the part of life to oblige reason to lend life its support. But the weight of reason’s support was such that in the end it pulverized life.
I have read that the ex-Carmelite Hyacinthe Loyson declared that he would be able to present himself before God in all tranquillity, for he was at peace with his conscience and with his reason. With what conscience was that? With his religious conscience, was it? In that case I fail to understand him. The truth is that no man can serve two masters, least of all when the two masters, though they may affix their signatures to truces and armistices and compromise-agreements, are enemies because of opposing interests.
Someone will surely object that life ought to submit to reason; to which we will reply that no one should do what he can not do, and that life can not submit to reason. “It ought, therefore it can,” some Kantian or other will retort. And to that we shall counter-retort: “It can not, therefore it ought not.” And life can not because the end purpose of life is to live, and not to understand.
And then there are those who speak of the religious duty of resigning oneself to mortality. This is truly the height of aberration and insincerity. But of course someone is sure to counterpose veracity to our sincerity. So be it; but both concepts may very well be reconciled. Veracity, the respect I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what logically we call truth, moves me in this instance to affirm that the immortality of the individual soul is a contradiction in terms, that it is not only irrational, but even contra-rational; but sincerity also leads me to affirm that I do not resign myself to the previous affirmation and that I protest against its validity. Truth is whatever I feel to be truth, and it is a truth at least as true as what I see, touch, hear, or what is demonstrated to me—even more of a truth, I believe—and sincerity obliges me not to hide what I feel.
And life, quick to defend itself, seeks out the chink in reason’s armor, and finds it in its scepticism, and attacks reason at this weak point, striving to save itself by this tactic. It depends on the weakness of its adversary.
Nothing is secure, everything remains up in the air. And so Lamennais, in an outburst of passion, cries out:
What! Shall we, losing all hope, shut our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of universal scepticism? Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature will not allow us; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both equally beyond us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness, for complete scepticism would mean the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But man is not given to annihilation; there is something in him which invincibly resists destruction, some vital faith, indomitable even by his will. Whether he wants to or not, he must believe, because he must act, he must maintain himself. His reason, which teaches him to doubt everything, even itself, would, if he listened exclusively to it, reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would perish before he had been able even to prove to himself that he existed at all.
Reason does not, strictly speaking, lead us to absolute scepticism. No! Reason does not lead me nor can it lead me to doubt that I exist. Reason leads me, more precisely, to vital scepticism, or better still, to vital negation: leads me, not to doubt, but to deny that my consciousness may survive my death. Vital scepticism is brought about by the clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism, is born uncertainty, holy, sweet, saving uncertainty, our supreme consolation.
The absolute certainty that death is a complete and definitive and irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness, a certainty of the same order as our certainty that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, contrariwise, the absolute certainty that our personal consciousness continues beyond death in whatever condition (including in such a concept the strange and adventitious additional notion of eternal reward or punishment)—either of these certainties would make our life equally impossible. In the most secret recess of the spirit of the man who believes that death will put an end to his personal consciousness and even to his memory forever, in that inner recess, even without his knowing it perhaps, a shadow hovers, a vague shadow lurks, a shadow of the shadow of uncertainty, and, while he tells himself: “There’s nothing for it but to live this passing life, for there is no other!” at the same time he hears, in this most secret recess, his own doubt murmur: “Who knows? . . .” He is not sure he hears aright, but he hears. Likewise, in some recess of the soul of the true believer who has faith in a future life, a muffled voice, the voice of uncertainty, murmurs in his spirit’s ear: “Who knows? . . .” Perhaps these voices are no louder than the buzzing of mosquitoes when the wind roars through the trees in the woods; we scarcely make out the humming, and yet, mingled in the uproar of the storm, it can be heard. How, without this uncertainty, could we ever live?
The foundations of our inner life are formed by these very questions: “And suppose there is . . . ?” “Suppose there is not . . . ?” Some rationalist may exist who has never wavered in his conviction that the soul is mortal, and some vitalist who has not faltered in his faith in immortality; but that would only prove that, just as there are monsters in nature, so there are people defective in feeling, whatever their intelligence may be, and people defective in intellect, whatever their other virtues. But, in normal people, I can not believe anyone who says that he has never, not even for the briefest moment, not even in moments of intense loneliness or tribulation, felt the breath of the voice of uncertainty. I do not understand a man who tells me that he has never been tormented by the prospect beyond the grave nor disturbed by the thought of his own annihilation. For my part I do not want to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason; I prefer that they be at war.
In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark, we are told of a man who brought his son before Jesus, for the boy was possessed of “a dumb spirit; And wheresoever he taketh him, he teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away” (9:17-18), and so he wanted to present him to Jesus, so that he might be cured. And the Master, impatient with men who looked only for miracles and signs, exclaimed: “O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me” (9:19). And they brought the lad. And when the Master saw him wallowing and foaming on the ground, He asked the father how long the son had been in that condition, and the father answered that ever since he was a child. And Jesus said: “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth” (9:23). And then the father of the epileptic or possessed boy uttered those supremely meaningful, immortal words: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief”: 
Lord, I believe; succor me from unbelief! An apparent contradiction, it would seem, for if he believes, if he has faith, why does he ask the Lord to succor him from his lack of trust? And yet, this contradiction is precisely what lends the profoundest human value to the cry from the heart of the possessed boy’s father. His faith is a faith based on uncertainty. Because he believes—that is, because he wants to believe, because he wants his son to be cured—he asks the Lord to help his unbelief, to succor him from his doubt that such a cure will be effected. Such is human faith; such was the heroic faith which Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in my Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, a faith based on uncertainty, on doubt. And the point is that Sancho Panza was a man, a whole man, a true man, and he was no defective, for if he had been a defective he would have believed, without a shadow of a doubt, in the extravagances of his master. And neither did Don Quixote believe in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was he, though a madman, a defective man. He was, at heart, a man in despair, as I believe I have shown in the work just mentioned. And because he was a man of heroic despair, a hero of inner, resigned despair, he stands as the eternal model of every man whose soul is a battlefield between reason and immortal desire. Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is founded on uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts his own reason.
Tortured by the torment of his doubt, August Hermann Francke resolved to call upon God, a God in whom he no longer believed, or rather in whom he believed he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity on him, the poor pietist Francke, if by any chance He actually existed. And a similar state of mind inspired the sonnet titled “The Atheist’s Prayer,” which is included in my Rosary of Lyric Sonnets and which concludes thus:
I suffer because of Thee,
Thou non-existent God, for if Thou didst exist,
I should certainly exist too.
Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then we ourselves should certainly exist. And if not, not!
The terrible secret, the hidden will of God which is translated by the term “predestination,” an idea which led Luther to his servum arbitrium and which gives Calvinism its tragic sense, the doubt in one’s own salvation, all of it is in essence nothing but the same uncertainty, which, in league with despair, forms the basis of faith. Faith, for some people, consists of not thinking of faith, of handing themselves over confidentially into the arms of God, the secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. True enough, but lack of faith, too, consists of not thinking about faith. That absurd faith, that faith without a shadow of a doubt, the faith of the limited charcoal burner, joins hands with an absurd non-belief, a non-belief without the shadow of a doubt, the non-belief of the intellectuals who are prey to defective emotion: both agree not to think about faith.
And what was that abyss, that terrible gouffre before which Pascal trembled, what was it but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason? And it was doubt that led Pascal to pronounce his terrible sentence, il faut s'abêtir: we must stupefy ourselves.
All of Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same stamp. Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Iñigo de Loyola and as the writer of the present lines, always had in its depths the lees of religious despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola, too, drowned his reason in obedience.
Affirmation is reached through despair, negation is reached through despair, and despair also causes us to refrain from either affirming or denying. Observe the majority of atheists and you will notice that they are atheists from rage, rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.
We will have nothing to say concerning that abject and ignoble phrase “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” This sentence is an expression of the obscene scepticism of those conservatives who look upon religion merely as an instrument of government and who hope for a hell into which they may consign whoever opposes their own worldly interests in this life. That repugnant and Sadducean phrase is worthy of the incredulous adulator of the powerful to whom it is attributed.
None of this has anything to do with the profound vital sense. It is not a matter of a transcendental police force, nor of maintaining order—some order!—on earth by means of threats of punishment or the cajolery of offering eternal rewards after death. All this is of a quite base nature; it is no more than politics, or, at best, ethics. The real point is to live.
The surest basis for doubt, what shakes us in our vital desire, what most intensifies the dissolving power of reason, is our attempt to consider the life of the soul after death. For, even if we overcome reason by a powerful effort of faith, even if we overcome that reasoning which tells us and shows us that the soul is only a function of the physical organism, we must still wonder what an immortal and eternal life of the soul may be. Such wondering involves a series of contradictions and absurdities, leading, as it does in Kierkegaard, to the conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrifying, its immortality is no less so.
But once we have overcome the first and only real difficulty, once we have overcome the difficulty posed by reason, once we have achieved faith, however painful and shrouded in uncertainty that faith may be, once we believe that our personal consciousness will survive death, what obstacle or impediment lies in the way of our conceiving such survival in a measure consonant with our desire? Of course we can imagine our survival as a kind of eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth and advance toward God, toward the Universal Consciousness, without ever reaching that goal, and we can imagine it some other way. . . . Once the rational bond is broken, there is no end to our imagining. . . .
I realize the argument is becoming heavy-handed, annoying, perhaps tedious, but there is no help for it. And I must repeat that we are not concerned with some transcendental police system, nor with considering God as Great Judge or Civil Guard, that is, we are not concerned with heaven and hell as devices to shore up our paltry mundane morality, and neither is it a purely egotistic and personal matter. Not only I, but the entire human race is in the balance, as is the ultimate end of all our culture. I am one man, and each man is an I.
Let us recall the final part of the “Song of the Wild Cock” which the despairing poet Leopardi, a victim of reason who never succeeded in achieving belief, set down in prose. “The time will come,” he says, “when this universe, and Nature herself, will be no more. And in the same way as of great kingdoms and empires of mankind, and their wondrous works, farfamed in other ages, there is now no sign nor any name; so of the whole world, and of the infinite vicissitudes and calamities of created things, no vestige will remain; but a bare silence, and a deepest stillness, will pervade the immensity of space. Thus this dread and wondrous mystery of universal life, before it has been declared or understood, will vanish and be lost.”
This eventuality they now label, using a scientific and most rationalist term, “entropy.” That’s a pretty word now, isn’t it? Spencer invented the concept of a primordial homogeneity, from which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could have originated. Very well then, this entropy is a kind of ultimate homogeneity, a state of perfect equilibrium. For a soul avid for life, it is the closest to nothingness that can be imagined.
* * *
So far, then, have we come, the reader and I, the reader who has had the patience to follow me through a series of painful reflections; for my part I have endeavored always to give reason its due and to give feeling its portion also. I have not kept silent on matters where others have done so; I have striven to bare, not only my own soul, but the human soul, whatever its nature may be and whether or not it be destined to disappear. And now we have reached the very depths of the abyss: the irreconcilable conflict between reason and vital feeling. I have already said that this conflict must be accepted for what it is, and that we must live by it. It remains to explain how—according to my way of feeling, and even to my way of thinking—this despair can be the basis of a vigorous life, of an effective activity, of a system of ethics, of aesthetics, of a religion, and even of a logic. But, in what follows, there will be as much imagination as ratiocination, or in point of fact, much more.
I have no wish to deceive, or to offer up as philosophy something which may be but poetry or phantasy, mythology in any case. The divine Plato, after discussing in his Phaedo the immortality of the soul—an ideal immortality, that is to say, a deceptive immortality—embarked on an exposition of the myths concerning the other life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then, mythologize.
The man who looks for reasons, what we call reasons sensu stricto, for scientific theses, for technically logical considerations, is free to cease following my thought. Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense I am going to fish for the attention of the reader with a bare, unbaited hook. Let him who will, bite; I will deceive no one. Not until the end do I plan to gather everything together and maintain that this religious despair I have been talking about and which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself is, though more or less veiled, the very basis of the conscience of civilized individuals and peoples today; that is, of those individuals and peoples who do not suffer from either deficiency of intellect or deficiency of feeling.
And this tragic sense is the wellspring of heroic achievement.
If in what follows you meet with arbitrary apothegms, brusque transitions, inconsequent solutions, with veritable somersaults of thought, do not cry Fraud! We are about to enter, if you care to accompany me, into a field of contradictions, contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we must have recourse to one and the other.
The following thoughts are not the products of reason but of life, although in order to transmit them I must rationalize, after a fashion. Most of my message can not be reduced to a theory or a logical system. Like Walt Whitman, the magnificent Yankee poet,
I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me.
Nor are the phantasies that follow altogether mine. They also belong to other men, if not exactly other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears and have revealed their life to us and given it expression. Their life, I say, not their thought, except insofar as their thought was inspired by life, thought with roots in irrationality.
Does this mean that what we are to examine, the struggle of the irrational to express itself, is totally lacking in rationality, in all objective value? No: the absolutely, irrevocably irrational is inexpressible, intransmissible. But the contra-rational is not inexpressible. Perhaps there is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a way of rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by trying to expound it. Since only the rational is intelligible, truly intelligible, and since the absurd, being devoid of sense, is condemned to incommunicability, it becomes obvious that whenever it is possible to express anything apparently irrational or absurd and give it meaning, it is invariably by resolving it into something rational, even though it be into the negation of what is affirmed.
The maddest dreams of phantasy contain some ground of reason, and who knows if everything the imagination of man may conceive has not already happened some time, or is not now happening, or will not happen some time in the future in this world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps infinite. It only remains to ascertain if everything imaginable is possible.
It may also be said, justifiably, that much of what I am about to set forth is merely a repetition of ideas expounded a hundred times before and already refuted a hundred times; but the repetition of an idea once again indicates that it was never really refuted. I do not pretend that most of these fancies are new, and neither do I pretend—of course not!—that other voices have not before me launched the same lament on the winds. But the fact that the same eternal lament can be voiced yet again means that the sorrow has not been allayed.
And it is right to repeat once again the same eternal lamentations, those that were already old in the days of Job and Ecclesiastes, and even to repeat them in the same words, so that the progressives may see that this is something that never dies. Whoever, making it his own, repeats the “Vanity of vanities” of Ecclesiastes or the complaints of Job, even in the very same words, carries out an admonitory task. One must continually go on repeating memento mori.
“To what end?” you may ask. Even if it be only to irritate certain people and show them that these things are not dead, that these things, so long as man exists, can not die, and to convince them that in this the twentieth century all past centuries still live on. Whenever a supposed error reappears, it is because, believe me, it has not ceased to have some truth to it, in the same way that resurrection implies that death was not total.
Yes, I know well enough that others before me have felt what I feel and express, and that many another feels so today, albeit in silence. And why do I not remain silent too? Well, for the very reason that the majority of those who feel as I feel do remain silent; even though silent, however, they heed that visceral voice. I do not keep silent precisely because for many people all this is exactly what must not be stated, the unmentionable abomination—infandum—and I believe that the unmentionable should be mentioned time and again. But suppose it leads to nothing? Even if it only led to irritating the progressives, those who believe that truth is consolation, it would be quite enough for me. It would be no small matter merely to arouse them into saying: “Poor man! If he would only apply his mind to a better purpose!” And somebody might be led to exclaim that I do not know what I am saying, and I will agree that perhaps he is right—to be right is such a trifling matter!—but I will add that I feel what I say and know what I feel, and that’s enough for me. It is better to be short on reason than to be long on it.
Whoever perseveres and reads on will see how, out of this abyss of despair, hope may emanate, and how this crucial point may serve as source for human, profoundly human, effort and action, may serve the cause of solidarity and even of progress. The reader who perseveres and reads on will discover a pragmatic justification. And he will see that to work and be morally effective there is no need to count on either of the two opposed certitudes, no need to depend on the certainty of faith or the certainty of reason, and even less need to evade—ever—the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it idealistically, that is, hypocritically. The reader will see that this uncertainty, the suffering, and the fruitless struggle to escape uncertainty, can be and are a basis for action and a foundation for morals.
And the fact that the sense of uncertainty, and the inner struggle of reason against both faith and the passionate longing for eternal life, together serve as a basis for action and a foundation for morals, this fact would, in the eyes of a pragmatist, justify the sense of uncertainty. But I must make clear that I do not seek out such a practical consequence in order to justify this uncertainty; it is simply that I encounter it in my inner experience. Nor do I wish nor would I wish to seek any justification for this state of inner struggle and uncertainty and longing: it is a fact, and that suffices. And if any man, finding himself in the depths of the abyss, fails to find there motives and incentives for life and action, and thereupon commits bodily or spiritual suicide, either by self-destruction or by renouncing any effort at human solidarity, I will not be the one to cast the first stone. And apart from the fact that the evil consequences, or those we call evil, of any doctrine merely go to prove, I repeat, that the doctrine is evil vis-à-vis our desires, but not that it is false, the consequences themselves depend not so much upon the doctrine as upon the one who deduces them. One and the same principle provides one man with grounds for action and another with grounds for abstaining from action; the same principle may lead this man to act in one way and that man to act in a contrary manner. The truth is that our doctrines tend to be no more than a justification a posteriori of our conduct, or else they are the manner in which we attempt to explain that conduct to ourselves.
Man is unwilling, in effect, to remain in ignorance of the motives for his own conduct. And, just as a man who has been mesmerized into a certain course of action will later invent reasons to justify it and make it appear logical in his own eyes and those of others, unaware the while of the true cause of his action, so will everyman, too—for every man is mesmerized, in the sense that “life is a dream”—look for suitable reasons for his conduct. And if chess pieces possessed consciousness, they might well ascribe their moves to free will, that is, claim for them a finalist rationality. And thus it is that every philosophic system serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of conduct, which in reality has its origin in the inner moral sense of the author of the theoretical system. But the real reason or cause of this sense may not be clearly present in the consciousness of its possessor.
Consequently I believe I may assume that if my reason, which in a certain sense forms part of the reason of my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this absolute scepticism as regards the longing for never-ending life, then my sense of life, the very essence of life itself, my own vitality, my unbounded appetite for life and abhorrence of death, my refusal to resign myself to dying, are the very things that suggest to me the doctrines with which I attempt to counteract the effect of reason. “Have these doctrines any objective value?” someone may ask. And I will reply that I do not understand what is meant by the “objective value” of a doctrine. I will not claim that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines I am intent on expounding are the ones which give me life. But I will venture to say that my longing to live, and to live forever, inspires these doctrines in me. And if these doctrines strengthen and sustain the same longing in another, when perhaps it was languishing, I will have accomplished something of human worth, and, above all, I shall have lived. In a word: with reason, without reason, or against reason, I do not want to die. And when at last I do die, if I die altogether, it will not be I who will have died, that is, I will not have let myself die, but will have been killed by man’s fate. Unless I lose my mind, or rather my heart, I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.
Nothing is to be gained by bringing forth those ambiguous words “optimism” or “pessimism,” words which often come to mean the opposite of what their user intends. To label a doctrine as “pessimistic” does not denigrate its validity, and neither are “optimistic” doctrines more effective for action. I believe, on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the very greatest, have been despairing men and that they carried out their feats from desperation. These considerations apart, and accepting the terms—ambiguous and all as they are—of optimism and pessimism, there is a certain transcendent pessimism which engenders a temporal and earthly optimism, and I propose to develop this theme in the following part of this treatise.
Very different, and well I know it, is the position of our progressives, the partisans of “the central current of contemporary European thought”; but I can not bring myself to accept the way in which these fellows deliberately close their eyes to the great problem, and essentially live a lie by attempting to stifle the tragic sense of life.
These last considerations are in the nature of a practical résumé of the critical matter developed in the first six chapters of this book, a manner of establishing the practical position to which such criticism may lead anyone who does not care to renounce life and who does not care to renounce reason either and who must, consequently, live and act between these two facing millstones which grind our souls; the reader who follows me further will know that I am leading on into a region of phantasy, but phantasy not devoid of reason—for nothing subsists without reason—phantasy founded on sensibility. And as regards the truth of it all, true truth, truth independent of ourselves, beyond our logical and cardiacal truth, as regards that truth—¿quién sabe?