As it is not the purpose of this book to enter into the details of certain ‘anticipations’, which would be only too easy to formulate and too quickly overtaken by events, this subject will now be left. It must suffice to have indicated summarily both the state at which things have now arrived and the tendency they must inevitably continue to follow, at least for a certain time yet. The hatred of secrecy is basically nothing but one of the forms of the hatred for anything that surpasses the level of the ‘average’, as well as for everything that holds aloof from the uniformity which it is sought to impose on everyone. Nevertheless, there is, within the modern world itself, a secret that is better kept than any other: it is that of the formidable enterprise of suggestion that has produced and that maintains the existing mentality, that has constituted it and as it were ‘manufactured’ it in such a way that it can only deny the existence and even the possibility of any such enterprise; and this is doubtless the best conceivable means, and a means of truly ‘diabolical’ cleverness, for ensuring that the secret shall never be discovered.
13
The Postulates of Rationalism
It has just been said that the moderns claim to exclude all ‘mystery’ from the world as they see it, in the name of a science and a philosophy characterized as ‘rational’, and it might well be said in addition that the more narrowly limited a conception becomes the more it is looked upon as strictly ‘rational’; moreover it is well enough known that, since the time of encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century, the most fanatical deniers of all supra-sensible reality have been particularly fond of invoking ‘reason’ on all occasions, and of proclaiming themselves to be ‘rationalists’. Whatever difference there may be between this popular ‘rationalism’ and a real philosophic ‘rationalism’, it is at any rate only a difference of degree, both the one and the other corresponding fully to the same tendencies, which have become more and more exaggerated and at the same time more ‘popular’ throughout the course of modern times. ‘Rationalism’ has so frequently been spoken of in the author’s earlier works, and its main characteristics have been so fully defined, that it might well suffice to refer the reader to those works;[42] nevertheless, it is so closely bound up with the very conception of a quantitative science that a few more words here and now cannot well be dispensed with.
Let it be recalled, then, that rationalism properly so called goes back to the time of Descartes, and it is worthy of note that it can thus be seen to be directly associated right from its beginnings with the idea of a ‘mechanistic’ physics; Protestantism had prepared the way for this, by introducing into religion, together with ‘free enquiry’, a sort of rationalism, although the word itself was not then in existence, but was only invented when the same tendency asserted itself more explicitly in the domain of philosophy. Rationalism in all its forms is essentially defined by a belief in the supremacy of reason, proclaimed as a veritable ‘dogma’, and implying the denial of everything that is of a supra-individual order, notably of pure intellectual intuition, and this carries with it logically the exclusion of all true metaphysical knowledge. This same denial has also as a consequence, in another field, the rejection of all spiritual authority, which is necessarily derived from a ‘supra-human’ source; rationalism and individualism are thus so closely linked together that they are usually confused, except in the case of certain recent philosophical theories which though not rationalistic are nonetheless exclusively individualistic. It may be noted at this point how well rationalism fits in with the modern tendency to simplification: the latter naturally always operates by the reduction of things to their most inferior elements, and so asserts itself chiefly by the suppression of the entire supra-individual domain, in anticipation of being able later on to bring everything that is left, that is to say everything in the individual order, down to the sensible or corporeal modality alone, and finally that modality itself to a mere aggregation of quantitative determinations. It is easy to see how rigorously these steps are linked together, so as to constitute as it were so many necessary stages in a continuous ‘degradation’ of the conceptions that man forms of himself and of the world.
There is yet another kind of simplification inherent in Cartesian rationalism, and it is manifested in the first place by the reduction of the whole nature of the spirit to ‘thought’ and that of the body to ‘extension’; this reduction of bodies to extension is, as pointed out earlier, the very foundation of ‘mechanistic’ physics, and it can be regarded as the starting-point of a fully quantitative science.[43] But this is not alclass="underline" in relation to ‘thought’ another mischievous simplification arises from the way in which Descartes actually conceives of reason, which he also calls ‘good sense’ (and if one thinks of the meaning currently assigned to that expression, it suggests something situated at a singularly mediocre level); he declares too that reason is ‘the most widely shared thing in the world,’ which at once suggests some sort of ‘egalitarian’ idea, besides being quite obviously wrong; in all this he is only confusing completely reason ‘in act’ with ‘rationality’, insofar as the latter is in itself a character specific to the human being as such.[44] Human nature is of course present in its entirety in every individual, but it is manifested there in very diverse ways, according to the inherent qualities belonging to each individual; in each the inherent qualities are united with the specific nature so as to constitute the integrality of their essence; to think otherwise would be to think that human individuals are all alike and scarcely differ among themselves otherwise than solo numero. Yet from thinking of that kind all those notions about the ‘unity of the human spirit’ are directly derived: they are continually invoked to explain all sorts of things, some of which in no way belong to the ‘psychological’ order, as for example the fact that the same traditional symbols are met with at all times and in all places. Apart from the fact that these notions do not really concern the ‘spirit’ but simply the ‘mind’, the alleged unity must be false, for true unity cannot belong to the individual domain, which alone is within the purview of people who talk in this way, as it is also, and more generally, of those who think it legitimate to speak of the ‘human spirit’, as if the spirit could be modified by any specific character. In any case, the community of nature of the individuals within the species can only produce manifestations of a very generalized kind, and is quite inadequate to account for concordances in matters that are, on the contrary, of a very detailed precision; but how could these moderns be brought to understand that the fundamental unity of all the traditions is explained solely by the fact that there is in them something ‘supra-human’? On the other hand, to return to things that actually are purely human, Locke, the founder of modern psychology, was evidently inspired by the Cartesian conception when he thought fit to announce that, in order to know what the Greeks and Romans thought in days gone by (for his horizon did not extend beyond Western ‘classical’ antiquity) it is enough to find out what Englishmen and Frenchmen are thinking today, for ‘man is everywhere and always the same.’ Nothing could possibly be more false, yet the psychologists have never got beyond that point, for, while they imagine that they are talking of man in general, the greater part of what they say really only applies to the modern European; does it not look as if they believe that the uniformity that is being imposed gradually on all human individuals has already been realized? It is true that, by reason of the efforts that are being made to that end, differences are becoming fewer and fewer, and therefore that the psychological hypothesis is less completely false today than it was in the time of Locke (always on condition that any attempt to apply it, as he did, to past times is carefully guarded against); but nonetheless the limit can never be reached, as was explained earlier, and for as long as the world endures there will always be irreducible differences. Finally, to crown all this, how can a true knowledge of human nature possibly be gained by taking as typical of it an ‘ideal’ that in all strictness can only be described as ‘infra-human’?
43
As for Descartes’ own conception of science, it should be noted that he claims that it is possible to reach the stage of having ‘clear and distinct’ ideas about everything, that is, ideas like those of mathematics, thus obtaining the sort of ‘evidence’ that can actually be obtained in mathematics alone.
44
In the classical definition of the human being as a ‘reasonable animal’, ‘rationality’ represents the ‘specific difference’ by which man is distinguished from all other species in the animal kingdom; it is not applicable outside that kingdom, or in other words, is properly speaking only what the scholastics called a