ACTION, PHILOSOPHY OF. — Under the name of the philosophy of action are sometimes grouped various and differing trends and systems (pragmatism, certain forms of voluntarism). Here, however, we refer to the philosophy of Maurice Blondel, known as the “philosopher of action,” though his thought might more accurately be described as a “philosophy of integral realism.” The historical antecedents of Blondel’s method and philosophy are both remote and near: St. Augustine and Pascal among the earliest; Maine de Biran, Newman, Deschamps, Gratry among others; and directly Ollé-Laprune, under whom Blondel studied (as well as under Boutroux).
M. Blondel (b. in Dijon on 2 Nov. 1861) taught at the University of Aix-en-Provence from 1897 to 1926, when he retired due to a severe eye ailment. His activity, however, continued unabated and fruitfully. His influence has been profound and far-reaching in contemporary philosophy, as well as in theological and religious thought, particularly in France. He stands among the greatest Catholic thinkers of our century.
He began with the work *L’Action* (Paris, 1893), his celebrated doctoral thesis, which at its defense at the Sorbonne aroused both interest and sharply divided judgments; later, it sparked passionate controversies, further intensified by the Modernist controversy. Blondel clarified and defended his thought (his writings were translated into Italian under the title *Storia e Dogma*, Florence, 1924) both against criticisms from Catholic writers and against the intemperate distortions and gratuitous appropriations of the Modernists (e.g., Laberthonnière). More than fifty years of intense reflection were required for Blondel to unfold his thought fully, to clarify certain suspect formulations, and to demonstrate that his was a philosophy, not merely an apologetics. The intermediate stages are marked by the following works: *Le procès de l’intelligence* (Paris, 1921), *Qu’est-ce que la mystique?* (ibid., 1925), *Le problème de la philos. catholique* (ibid., 1932), *L. Ollé-Laprune* (ibid., 1932), as well as the volume *Une énigme historique «Le vinculum substantiae», d’après Leibniz* (reissued in 1930); while the complete and definitive systematization is provided by the trilogy: *La Pensée* (2 vols., Paris, 1934), *L’Etre et les êtres* (ibid., 1935), *L’Action* (2 vols., ibid., 1936–37), of which the first is entirely new and the second a reworking of the 1893 *Action*. The trilogy is crowned by the three volumes of *La philosophie et l’esprit chrétien*, of which only two have appeared to date (Paris, 1944 and 1946). Among his many other writings we may also recall *La lutte pour la civilisation et la philosophie de la paix* (Paris, 1939; 2nd ed., ibid., 1947).
The first *Action* reacted against a particular and widespread philosophical and cultural milieu—namely, the subjectivist dilettantism of Renan and the positivism of Taine, as well as a kind of neo-Christianity that was the precursor of the Modernist crisis. It was in this milieu that the problem of action matured. Merely theoretical or “notional” speculation seemed to Blondel inadequate to the essentials of life and to the immense content of what action can achieve. *Action* is one of the decisive episodes in Blondel’s critique (which he later continued) of scientific determinism, positivism, the so-called positivist idealism, and idealism in general. Blondel’s entire effort was to deepen the integral dynamism of the spirit, which is inwardly stirred and stimulated to transcend itself—not toward some indeterminate object, but toward a fullness of spiritual reality that is both intimate and transcendent, so that it is not an external thing but the life of its spiritual life and yet transcends II.
Every rational being, Blondel says, aspires to constitute a certain inner unity. Spiritual unity is “dynamic,” not static; “concrete,” not abstract; it is not a given but a goal. Philosophy proceeds from the premonition of this unity, but its path is arduous. The task is to realize it while preserving the nuances of experience: to found diversity within unity, coherence within heterogeneity. It is the total problem of a total philosophy, inasmuch as it engages outer experience, the order of the universe, intellectual, moral, and religious life. Can the solution be found within the realm of pure logic? Blondel answers no: the spirit encounters resistances within itself, latent contradictions that are real and tenacious, which no merely logical mediation can reconcile and which are therefore irreducible to any dialectical contrivance. This task belongs to action, which directs the infinite power of freedom toward a precise end, subjects the will to “the strict simplicity of a single outcome.” The transition from intention to execution demands an effort to overcome difficulties and deeply engages the intention itself. The dynamism of action resolves, if only momentarily, the antagonism of tendencies in a synthesis that integrates the most diverse elements, reconciles the incompatible, and refashions energies to harmonize them anew. “Action is a systematic concentration of the life diffused within us” (*L’Action*, II, p. 226). It is thus constructive and creative, something new: it kneads and shapes divergences and antitheses. By contrast, “formal logic excludes, without retaining anything, what it contradicts” (ibid., p. 478). Thus the dynamism of action builds the structure of the self, organizes the synthesis of the living energies of its complex life, and converges the divergent forces toward a single outcome.
Does this mean abolishing the “logic of concepts”? No; it simply means that there is a more comprehensive logic—the logic of moral life. The logic of exclusion is a functional moment of the logic of integration. On the purely logical or abstract plane, the relations between possibles are either one of mutual convenience or mutual exclusion; on the plane of action, which takes account of the logical opposition of contraries, possibles that exclude one another as concepts are integrated in a deeper way in the synthesis that action achieves through its constructive and transformative efficacy.
From this it follows that knowledge is not all of man: “to act is something more than to think” (*L’Action*, I, p. 106). To believe that pure knowing reveals all of man is the illusion of idealism and of that rationalism which confines the whole of the spirit within the abstract concentration of a formula. Man, for Blondel, is truly known only in action, for only in action does he discover himself. Does action therefore abolish thought? No; it includes thought within a higher perspective and, as it were, empowers II. Even knowledge has an essential dynamism, and to think is already to act. Here it is not a matter of denying the value of knowing, but of grasping the spirit in all its dynamism, in its real fecundity as initiative and efficacy.
To what does our integral dynamism tend and where does it lead? To the «universal principle of every good», in the words of St Thomas, the only one that can satisfy the demands and appeals of our dynamism, the supreme end «on which our life will founder and on which the personal destiny of each will be decided» (ibid., II, p. 178). Even when not distinctly known, this aspiration is presented. The agent externalizes itself, realizes itself, individuates itself, becomes a person, a family, a society, a homeland, humanity, but in every particular realization its need to know itself and its moral vocation are driven by a deeper, underlying need: the religious vocation, its transcendent destiny. It is this dynamism that gives rise to the «person» within the «individual». The person is constituted only by assigning itself an extra-personal end, many extra-personal ends, but all aroused by the one truly supreme end, toward which they converge and which transcends them all, whether they be family, society, homeland, or humanity. The absolute end that constitutes the person is God: without Him the person and the ends it realizes are lost.
To philosophize is to follow the integral dynamism of the agent: it is to second our innate tendency to seek God, to discover our essential desire for God, to incarnate it freely in our life, to recognize and obey Him. More than examining what is sensible and psychological in our experience—a task for naturalistic and not yet Christian philosophy—the task of philosophy is to fulfill a higher calling, to analyze the integral dynamism of the spirit, the moral and religious elements of human experience. The principle of interior dynamism is rooted in being, in every being, which, living interiorly by it, grasps in the norm that constitutes it its process of realization, through the moments of natural knowledge, real knowledge, and the agent, until it is fulfilled in God. The spirit or original being is the implicit enveloping whole that always transcends the products of its analysis.
The spirit is constituted by an original dimension, which is the guarantee of its freedom, that is, of its chosen freedom: the incommensurability of the infinite to the finite. But this incommensurability could not be perceived without the idea of the infinite, which no exterior experience or combination of concepts or process of abstraction can ever provide, because the infinite of which we speak is not the naturalistic or formal infinite. The presence of this idea enables the spirit not to identify its destiny with that of things, to measure all things and find them always infinitely shorter than the incommensurable measure. And then it can choose; then from partial determinisms freedom emerges and the option is possible. The living idea of the infinite accompanies the agent and animates thought. To prescind from it is to say no to the constitutive principle of the integral dynamism of our spirit, it is to betray our presentiment of the higher reality, of God.
Thought, agent, being: all spirit, all reality, not static but dynamic with a dynamism oriented by the presence of a transcendent Reality, which is its cause and its end. No being has the power to destroy this presence. It urges, stimulates, presses upon it: it presses upon the will and always forces it to surpass itself, not to rest, to overcome resistances, to realize its incessant rhythm in cooperation with them. But the «willing will» or deep will remains always a thirst for fullness, because it can never by itself be what it wants to be, in the act of consenting to the real perfection that is present to it and yet transcends II. It presses upon thought as «cosmic thought», as «psychic thought», as «thinking thought» in search of that «total coherence» and «universal unity» which unified objects fail to realize; and therefore it is always thought marked by a «congenital deficiency» and at the same time restless with a «beatific fullness». It presses upon beings, every being, insofar as existence is their external aspect, but not their internal aspect, their consistency, which does not reside in what they are at any given moment, but in an internal norm that transcends them and constitutes their «living and secret framework» in search of their true and complete realization. The person is realized by surpassing itself: its «consistency» lies in the living relationship of its whole self with God.
Blondel’s philosophy has an extremely suggestive apologetic aspect: it is a matter of establishing, by way of hypothesis, the harmony that exists between the natural and the supernatural order. It is for philosophy to establish whether this possible harmony exists or not. This does not at all mean that Blondel intends to demonstrate that philosophy must reunite with religion in the sense of a necessary continuity between the natural process of reason and the supernatural, but simply that philosophy can find its fulfillment in the supernatural while remaining philosophy. In other words: does the process of reason contain within itself its own absolute fulfillment, as pure immanentism claims? If so, philosophy is no longer distinct but «separate» from religion, and Revelation is superfluous where reason has nothing to seek or find, because in seeking it has found everything within itself. This is the thesis of self-sufficient rationalism. According to Blondel, however, precisely the most developed and most critical philosophy never closes in on itself in a perfect circle, because its process is never complete, because the interior dynamism of the spirit always drives it to surpass every partial satisfaction, which cannot but be partial. It is precisely the *sens de l’immanence* that «peut et doit nous conduire jusqu’à l’aveu d’une transcendance dont nous ne pouvons ni nous passer ni nous emparer comme s’il ne dépendait que de nous» (Le problème de la philosophie, p. 16). Thus, a «philosophy separate» from religion is not theoretically possible, since philosophy is open from the outset to a completion. Does this mean that this completion must necessarily be given? Not at all: the necessity is on the part of philosophy, not on the part of the supernatural. The fact that philosophy recognizes its need for completion only means that, having become aware of its non-self-sufficiency while remaining faithful to what it is, it finds it «convenient» that there be another order and «opens» itself to the supernatural, which for its part remains absolutely gratuitous, which philosophy cannot demand as necessary, even though it sees in it its fulfillment, as indicated by its own spontaneous movement. In conclusion, the analysis of nature—not only of the agent, but also of thought and being in their «solidarity»—shows that the supernatural is neither superfluous nor impossible nor contrary to nature, and that therefore it is «theoretically» conceivable in its absolute gratuity.
*La philosophie et l’esprit chrétien* is the theological crowning of Blondel’s «integral realism». Philosophy, which is only philosophy, at the end of its process finds itself confronted by enigmas (Aristotle’s «aporias», Kant’s «antinomies») that it cannot resolve. But a «Christian philosophy» (and such Blondel’s intends to be) precisely because it is Christian, does not
It relies not solely on the powers of thought, but on other aids. Such aid, intellectually, is given in the form of mystery, “a revealed truth which the human spirit, left to its own resources, would not have been capable of discovering or defining with certainty; a secret which, even when revealed, remains impenetrable in its depths, though not without useful, illuminating and fruitful meaning for us; a speculative and practical teaching which, in the chiaroscuro where faith and reason must cooperate, allows us to know and to fulfill our true and entire destiny” (La philosophie et l'esprit chrétien, I, p. 14). Now, for Blondel, there is a harmony, a rhythm that governs the two notions of enigma and mystery, opposed yet complementary (the relationship between the natural and the supernatural is one of symbiosis): “an alternating and propulsive rhythm of philosophical enigmas and revealed mysteries” (ibid., p. 30), this being the new form of Christian dogmatics which Blondel proposes and which (save for some imprecision) has been recognized as both new and orthodox. It acknowledges the essential autonomy of the natural (philosophy) and the supernatural (Revelation), while highlighting their collaboration: the analysis of spiritual life leads to “enigmas” which only the “mysteries” of Revelation can illuminate, albeit partially. There is in man an original vocation to supernatural life, which in no way diminishes the gratuity of the latter. In the cyclical movement of the spirit toward its supreme destiny, one always finds facing each other: the philosophical “enigma” and the religious “mystery,” the two culminating poles of that *combat spirituel* in which the character of the person is both concealed and revealed. Precisely, Blondel seeks to highlight the decisive (and only valid) contribution that Christianity makes to philosophy in solving the problem of existence, its meaning and destiny. Yet only an integral philosophy of action can provide the indispensable premise for contact with Christian truth: on the one hand, the artificial barriers of rationalistic pride must be demolished, and on the other, theological extrinsicism must be overcome.
In Vol. I, Blondel highlights the symbiosis of the following enigmas and mysteries: the enigma of God and the mystery of the Trinity; the enigma of contingent existence and the mystery of creation; the enigma of human destiny and the mystery of supernatural vocation; the enigma of the mediating function and the mystery of the Incarnation; the enigma of decline and the mystery of the transnatural state; the enigma of the reparation of faults and the mystery of Redemption. In Vol. II, the mysteries of Glory, of the visible Church, of the Sacraments, of the Beatitudes, and of Eternal Life are treated.
Whatever dissent may exist regarding the manner of conceiving the relationship between nature and the supernatural or Blondel’s philosophy and method of philosophizing, it seems necessary to recognize in his “integral realism” a sincere and valid attempt at a Christian philosophy that takes into account the fundamental exigencies of modern thought. Essentially a concrete philosophy, of “real knowledge” (and not of “notional knowledge”), open to Revelation and Dogma, yet still a philosophy that recognizes the efficacy of reason and intellect within a logic of action that completes and empowers them. It is thus a philosophy of the integral human person, which seems unjust to accuse of fideism, agnosticism, pragmatism, or even outright immanentism.