Philosophy of Action

PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION. - Under the name philosophy of action are sometimes included various currents and systems (pragmatism, certain forms of voluntarism). Here we refer to the philosophy of Maurice Blondel, called the "philosopher of action," even though his thought might better be described as a "philosophy of integral realism." The historical antecedents of Blondel's method and philosophy are both remote and proximate: St. Augustine and Pascal among the former; Maine de Biran, Newman, Deschamps, Gratry among the latter; and directly Ollé-Laprune, whose pupil Blondel was (as well as of Boutroux).

M. Blondel (b. at Dijon on 2 Nov. 1861) taught at the University of Aix-en-Provence from 1897 to 1926, the year in which he retired from teaching because of a serious eye infirmity. His activity nonetheless continued, tireless and fruitful. His influence on contemporary philosophy and also on theological and religious thought, especially in France, has been profound and vast. He is among the greatest Catholic thinkers of our century.

He made his debut with the volume L'Action (Paris 1893), a celebrated doctoral thesis that aroused contrasting interests and judgments already during its defense at the Sorbonne; and subsequently passionate polemics, made more heated 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 the criticisms of Catholic writers and against the intemperate misrepresentations and gratuitous appropriations of the modernists (e.g., Laberthonnière). It took more than fifty years of intense meditation for Blondel to unfold his thought in full, to clarify certain suspect affirmations, and to demonstrate that his is a philosophy and not a mere apologetics. The intermediate stages are marked by the following writings: 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 by the volume Une énigme historique « Le vinculum substantiale », d'après Leibniz (reissued in 1930); while the complete and definitive systematization is given by the trilogy: La Pensée (2 vols., Paris 1934), L'Être 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 Action of 1893. The crowning of the trilogy are the 3 vols. of La philosophie et l'esprit chrétien, of which only two have so far been published (Paris 1944 and 1946). Among the many other writings we recall also the Lutte pour la civilisation et la philosophie de la paix (Paris 1939; 2nd ed. ibid. 1947).

The first Action was a reaction against a specific and widespread philosophical and cultural milieu, and precisely against the subjectivist dilettantism of Renan and the positivism of Taine, as well as against a neo-Christianity, the progenitor of the modernist crisis. It was in that milieu that the problem of action matured. Purely theoretical or "notional" speculation appeared to Blondel inadequate to the essence of life and to the immense content of what action can realize. L'Action is one of the essential episodes of the critique (which Blondel subsequently continued) of scientific determinism, of positivism, of so-called positivist idealism and of idealism. Blondel's whole effort was to deepen the integral dynamism of the spirit, urged and stimulated from within to transcend itself not toward some arbitrary thing, but toward a fullness of spiritual reality that is intimate to it and yet stands above it, so that this fullness is not an outside, but the life of its spiritual life and yet transcendent.

Every rational being, says Blondel, aspires to constitute a certain interior unity. Spiritual unity is "dynamic" and not static, "concrete" and not abstract; it is not a given but a term. Philosophy proceeds from the presentiment of this unity, but its path is arduous. The task is to realize it while preserving the salient features of experience: to ground diversity in unity, coherence in heterogeneity. A total problem of total philosophy, insofar as it invests exterior experience, the order of the universe, and intellectual, moral and religious life. Can the solution of the problem be found in the realm of pure logicality? Blondel says no: the spirit encounters resistances within itself, latent, real and tenacious contradictions, which no purely logical mediation can compose and which are therefore irreducible to any dialectical artifice whatsoever. This task belongs to action, which directs the infinite power of freedom along a precise course, subjecting the will within the "strict simplicity of a single outcome." The passage from intention to execution requires an effort to overcome difficulties and deeply commits the intention itself. The dynamism of action resolves, even if only momentarily, the antagonism of tendencies in a synthesis that integrates the most diverse, reconciles the incompatible, and recasts energies so as to harmonize them differently. Action "is a systematic concentration of the life diffused within us" (L'Action, II, p. 226). It is therefore constructive and creative, it is something new: it kneads and molds divergences and antitheses. On the contrary, "formal logic excludes, retaining nothing of it, whatever 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 the same outcome.

Does this perhaps 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 among possibles are either of compatibility or of mutual exclusion; on the plane of action, which takes account of the logical opposition of contraries, the possibles that exclude one another as concepts are integrated in a deeper manner in the synthesis that action realizes through its constructive and transformative efficacy.

From this it follows that knowledge is not the whole man: "to act is something other still than to think" (ibid., I, p. 106). To believe that pure knowing reveals the whole man is the illusion of idealism and of that rationalism which confines the whole of the spirit within the abstract concentrate of a formula. Man, on the other hand, for Blondel, truly knows himself in action, because only in it does he discover himself. Does action therefore abolish thought? No, it includes it in a higher perspective and, as it were, potentiates it. Knowledge too 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 efficiency.

Toward what does our integral dynamism tend, and where does it lead? Toward the "universal principle of every good," according to an expression of St. Thomas, the only one that can satisfy the demands and appeals of our dynamism, the supreme end "upon which will se heurter our life and the personal destiny of each one is to be decided" (ibid., II, p. 178). Even when it is not distinctly known, this aspiration is present. Action externalizes itself, realizes itself, individualizes itself, becomes person, family, society, 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. And it is this dynamism that gives birth to the "person" within the "individual." The person constitutes itself only by assigning itself an extrapersonal end — many extrapersonal ends, but all aroused by the one truly supreme end, toward which they converge and which transcends them all, whether they be the family, society, the 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 action: it is to second our innate aptitude for seeking God, to discover our essential desire for God, to incarnate it freely in our life, to recognize Him and obey Him. Rather than examining what is sensory and psychological in our experience — the task of a naturalistic and not yet Christian philosophy — philosophy is called to fulfill a higher task: 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 own process of realization, through the moments of noetic knowledge, of real knowledge, and of action, until it is completed in God. The spirit, or original being, is the implicite enveloppement 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 free choice: the incommensurability of the infinite with 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 give it, because the infinite of which we speak is not the naturalistic or formal one. The presence of this idea allows the spirit not to identify its destiny with that of things, to be able to measure everything and find it 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 frees action 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, action, being: the whole spirit, the whole of 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 possibility of destroying this presence. It urges it, stimulates it, presses upon it: it presses upon the will and constantly forces it to go beyond itself, not to halt, to overcome resistances, to actuate its ceaseless rhythm with their cooperation. But the "willing will," or deep will, always remains 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 it. It presses upon thought as "cosmic thought," as "psychic thought," as "thinking thought" in search of that "total coherence" and "universal unity" which all unified objects do not succeed in realizing; and therefore it is always thought endowed with a "congenital deficiency" and at the same time restless for a "beatifying 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 in fact are at a given moment, but in an internal norm that transcends them and constitutes their "living and secret armor" in search of their "true and complete realization." The person realizes itself by going beyond 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 fittingness that subsists between the natural order and the supernatural one. Establishing whether or not this possible harmony exists is the task of philosophy. This does not at all mean that Blondel proposes to demonstrate that philosophy must be reunited 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 completion in the supernatural while remaining philosophy. In other words: does the process of reason have within itself its absolute completion, as pure immanentism claims? If so, philosophy is no longer distinct, but is "separated" from religion, and Revelation is superfluous, since where reason has nothing to seek and to find, because in seeking it has found everything in itself. This is the thesis of self-sufficient rationalism. On the contrary, according to Blondel, it is precisely the most developed and most critical philosophy that never closes upon itself in a perfect circle, because its process is never completed, because the interior dynamism of the spirit always drives it to go beyond 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 philos., p. 16). Therefore, a "philosophy separated" from religion is not theoretically possible, insofar as philosophy itself is open ab intrinseco to a completion. Does this perhaps mean that such a completion must necessarily be given? Not at all: the necessity is on the side of philosophy, not on the side of the supernatural. The fact that philosophy recognizes its need for a completion means only that it, having become conscious of its non-self-sufficient sufficiency, and while remaining faithful to what it is, finds it "fitting" that there should be another order and "opens itself" to the supernatural, which on its part remains absolutely gratuitous, whose necessary intervention philosophy cannot demand, even while seeing in it its completion, as its own spontaneous movement has indicated to it. In conclusion, the analysis of nature — not only of action, but also of thought and of being in their "solidarity" — shows that the supernatural is neither superfluous nor impossible nor in contrast with nature, and that therefore it is "theoretically" conceivable in its absolute gratuitousness.

La philosophie et l'esprit chrétien is the theological crowning of the Blondelian "integral realism." Philosophy, which is only philosophy, at the end of its process finds itself faced with enigmas (the "aporiai" of Aristotle, the "antinomies" of Kant) that it cannot resolve. But a "Christian philosophy" (and such is what Blondel's intends to be), precisely because it is Christian, does not con-

counts only on the powers of thought, but on other aids. Such aid, intellectually, is given in the form of mystery, "a revealed truth that the human spirit, left to its own resources alone, would not have been capable of discovering and of establishing with certainty; a secret which, even when revealed, remains impenetrable in its depths, although it is not without useful, illuminating and fruitful meaning for us; a speculative and practical teaching which, in the half-light in which faith and reason must cooperate, allows us to know and to fulfill our true and entire destiny" (La philos. et l'esprit chrét., I, p. 14). Now, for Blondel, there is a harmony, a rhythm that governs the two notions of enigma and of mystery, opposed and yet inseparable (between the natural and the supernatural the relationship is one of symbiosis): "an alternating and propulsive rhythm of philosophical enigmas and of revealed mysteries" (ibid., p. 30); this is the new formula of Christian dogmatics that Blondel proposes and that (save for some imprecision) has been recognized as new and orthodox. It acknowledges the essential autonomy of the natural (Philosophy) and of the supernatural (Revelation) while bringing out their collaboration: the analysis of the spiritual life concludes in "enigmas" that only the "mysteries" of Revelation illuminate, even if only in part. There is in man an original vocation to the supernatural life, which in no way diminishes the gratuitousness of the latter. In the cycloidal movement of the spirit toward its supreme destiny, the philosophical "enigma" and the religious "mystery" are always found facing one another, the two culminating poles of that combat spirituel in which the character of the person is hidden and revealed. Precisely, Blondel wishes to bring out the decisive contribution (and the only valid one) that Christianity brings to philosophy in the solution of the problem of existence, of its meaning and destiny. But 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 torn down, and on the other theological extrinsicism must be overcome. In vol. I Blondel brings out 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 the supernatural vocation; the enigma of the mediating function and the mystery of the Incarnation; the enigma of the déchéance and the mystery of the transnatural state; the enigma of the reparation of faults and the mystery of the Redemption. In vol. II the mysteries of Glory, of the visible Church, of the Sacraments, of the Beatitudes, of Eternal Life are treated.

Whatever the disagreements may be concerning the way of conceiving the relations of nature and supernature, or Blondel's philosophy itself and his method of philosophizing, it seems that in "integral realism" one must recognize a sincere and valid attempt at a Christian philosophy that takes account of the fundamental demands of modern thought. A philosophy essentially concrete, of "real knowledge" (and not of "notional knowledge"), open to Revelation and to Dogma, but still always a philosophy that acknowledges the efficacy of reason and of the intellect in a logic of action that completes and empowers them. And therefore a philosophy of integral man, which it seems unjust to accuse of fideism or of agnosticism or of pragmatism or even of true and proper immanentism.

Michele Federico Sciacca