Revolution and the Republic
Page 81
276 Quoted in Lukes, Emile Durkheim, 237.
277 Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912).
278 Ibid. 450.
279 Ibid. 3.
280 See Lukes, Emile Durkheim, 450–84.
281 For a selection of Durkheim’s writings on this subject see Leçons de sociologie (1997).
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
381
It was in the world of academic philosophy that the move away from positivism
was most visible and noteworthy.282 The discipline of philosophy was given a
central place in the educational reforms of the Third Republic and it was in these
years that the subject underwent significant professionalization. The Revue philo-
sophique de la France et de l’Étranger was established by Théodule Ribot in 1876 and
this was followed by the creation of Xavier Léon’s Revue de métaphysique et de
morale in 1893. The Société Française de Philosophie was founded in 1901. The
state of the discipline was succinctly summarized when, later that decade, Émile
Boutroux, a key figure in the French philosophical establishment, presented a paper
entitled ‘La Philosophie en France depuis 1867’ to an international philosophy
conference in Heidelberg.283 The oddity of Boutroux’s title is explained by the fact
that it was his intention to update Félix Ravaisson’s La philosophie en France au XIXe
siècle, a work commissioned by the French government to coincide with the
Universal Exhibition of 1867. In his survey of French philosophy since 1800
Ravaisson had painted a picture of a subject which had been dominated by the
rival schools of Comtean Positivism and the Eclecticism of Victor Cousin, although
he had also predicted accurately that the future would see moves towards the
development of a spiritualist ontology. In contrast, Boutroux described a discipline
characterized by increasing specialization and diversification but among the princi-
pal trends he identified was a revival of metaphysics. This took various forms, of
which one of the most influential was a return to Kantianism, but its most original
manifestation by far was the work of Henri Bergson.284
Bergson was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (the historic powerhouse
of French philosophy) and after graduating in 1881 taught at a series of lycées in
both Paris and the provinces before being elected to a chair at the Collège de France
in 1900.285 His weekly lectures there attracted large crowds and created something
of a sensation, and not only among philosophers. Bergson’s influence quickly
spread into the worlds of literature, art, poetry, music, the theatre, and, in due
course, politics.286 His first book, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,
was published in 1889. This was followed, seven years later, by Matière et mémoire
and then, in 1907, L’Évolution créatrice. It was the latter—with the concept of élan
vital at its heart—that secured Bergson’s international reputation,287 even though it
282 See Jean-Louis Fabiani, Les Philosophes de la république (1988); Gary Gutting, French Philosophy
in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2001), 3–25; Bernard Bourgeois, ‘La Société des philosophes en
France en 1900’, in Frédéric Worms, Le Moment 1900 en Philosophie (Villeneuve d’Escq, 2004),
63–79; and François Azouvi, La Gloire de Bergson: Essai sur le magistère philosophique (2007), 19–58.
283 The text was publ. in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 16 (1908), 683–716. It is repr. in
Stéphane Douailler, Roger-Pol Droit, and Patrice Vermeren (eds.), Philosophie, France, XIXe siècle:
Écrits et opuscules (1994), 912–60.
284 See Worms, Le Moment 1900.
285 See Philippe Soulez and Frédéric Worms, Bergson (1997).
286 See Gaston Picard and Gustave-Louis Tautin, ‘Enquête sur M. Henri Bergson et l’influence de
sa pensée sur la sensibilité contemporaine’, La Grande Revue, 83 (1914), 544–60, 744–60; 84 (1914),
110–28, 309–28, 513–28, and A. E. Pilkington, Bergson and his Influence: A Reassessment (Cambridge,
1976). See esp. Azouvi, La Gloire.
287 Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
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was seen by some of his critics as marking a fundamental departure from his early
work.288
Bergson’s central idea was that time is real.289 This argument had many dimen-
sions, but one of the most important was the conclusion that philosophical
arguments frequently rested upon a mistaken equation of the categories of space
and time. Space, Bergson wanted to argue, could be divided into an infinite series of
homogeneous and distinct entities whereas time or, more accurately, real time was
characterized by what he termed la durée or duration: it was heterogeneous and
continuous. ‘The indivisible continuity of change’, Bergson wrote, ‘is precisely
what constitutes true duration.’290 At its simplest, Bergson believed that the
analytical categories of the intellect were incapable of comprehending the reality
of duration and that the only way of doing so, of grasping what he saw as the pure
flow of consciousness, was through intuition. We call intuition, he wrote in 1903,
‘the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to
coincide with what is unique and consequently inexpressible in it’.291 Intuition,
Bergson argued, was capable of ‘following reality in all its winding and of adopting
the very movement of the inward life of things’.292 In short, the intellect was
characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life and therefore we had to
abandon the rigid categories of language in order to comprehend the diversity,
uniqueness, and multiplicity of the phenomena that made up the fluidity of
experience. We had to give up ‘the utilitarian habits of mind of everyday life’.293
L’Évolution créatrice continued this theme but did so by generalizing Bergson’s
attack upon conceptual thinking so as to provide an explanation of the evolution of
life in terms of a vital impulse or life drive that, in his words, ‘carried life, by more
and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies’.294
The criticisms directed at the latter text for the most part focused upon the lack
of explanatory force possessed by the concept of élan vital. For some, it appeared to
be no more than an elaborate biological or occult fantasy. For others, it looked
suspiciously like an attempt to smuggle God back into the evolutionary process
through the back door. More damaging still was the argument that, in postulating
the existence of a vital impulse, Bergson was himself attempting to reduce the rich
complexity of life to one absolute principle and that, in doing so, he was abandon-
ing the very epistemological and methodological pluralism that had drawn people
to his philosophy in the first place. For this had been part of its immense appeal.
288 See François Azouvi, ‘Anatomie d’un succès philosophique: Les Effets de L’Évolution créatrice’,
Le Débat, 140 (2006), 153–71.
289 See A. R. Lacey, Bergson (London, 1989) and Gutting, French Philosophy, 49–83. Those wishing
to pursue this subject further should consult Frédéric Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de l
a vie (2004)
and the Annales Bergsoniennes, publ. from 2002 onwards.
290 ‘The Perception of Change’, in Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York, 1968), 176. This was
first presented as a lecture at the University of Oxford in 1911.
291 ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, in Bergson, The Creative Mind, 190. This essay was first publ. in
the Revue de métaphysique et de morale.
292 The Creative Mind, 224.
293 Ibid. 195.
294 Bergson, Creative Evolution (London, 1911), 107.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
383
Bergsonisme appeared to be the very antithesis of a closed and systematic philoso-
phy. For writers such as Charles Péguy it represented a decisive break with what he
described as an intellectualisme universel.295
Tracing the ways in which Bergson’s work influenced his contemporaries is
outside our compass—there were many forms of bergsonisme appliqué—but one
admirer of Bergson—Georges Sorel296—certainly merits our attention. Sorel was
thoroughly familiar with Bergson’s ideas, attending his Paris lectures every week.297
He made an explicit appeal to Bergsonian epistemology and he self-consciously set
out to transpose Bergson’s ideas onto a social setting. He did not, as is often
supposed, deploy Bergsonian ideas to develop a cult of the irrational nor did he
make use of the concept of élan vital in his most infamous book, Réflexions sur la
violence. In point of fact, Sorel was deeply critical of Bergson’s attempt to provide
explanations of social phenomena in terms of biological concepts.298 Rather, over a
period of many years he worked Bergson’s ideas into the rich pattern of his thought,
producing a highly original synthesis that, in one comprehensive theory, brought
together ideas that had been central to debates about politics, religion, and science
since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
There was nothing in Sorel’s background that gave any indication of his later
radicalism. He was born into a bourgeois family from the Cherbourg peninsula and
educated at the best academic institutions that Paris could offer. The conservative
historian Albert Sorel was one of his cousins. He spent his professional career as a
government engineer, building bridges and roads for the Third Republic. But some
time in the 1880s Sorel’s prodigious intellect began to gnaw its way into a set of
issues that were to remain with him until his death in 1922.
Sorel’s first book, published in 1889, was on the trial of Socrates.299 His
sympathies were with Socrates’s Athenian accusers. His second, published in the
same year, was a work of biblical scholarship in which Sorel primarily focused his
attention upon the question of the authenticity or otherwise of the Gospel accord-
ing to St John. In doing so, Sorel was concerned to refute the claims of a whole
school of thought which he characterized as ‘modern positivism’.300 This school, he
argued, was unable to see religious thought as anything other than a manifestation
of our intellect in its infancy and, accordingly, it saw the development of Christian
thought in terms of ‘a slow and obscure evolution’ away from its primitive origins
towards the creation of a more rational edifice. Biblical scholarship guided by these
principles, Sorel believed, could only succeed in ‘distorting the fundamental
principle behind all religion’,301 and this was so, in his view, because there could
295 ‘Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne’, La Grande Revue, 84 (1914), 618.
See also ‘Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne’ and ‘Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et
la philosophie cartésienne’, in Péguy, Œuvres en prose 1909–1914 (1961), 1313–47, 1357–1554.
296 See my Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of his Thought (London, 1985).
297 See Pierre Andreu, Georges Sorel: Entre le noir et le rouge (1982), 239–68.
298 See Sorel, De l’utilité du pragmatisme (1921).
299 Le Procès de Socrate (1889).
300 Contribution à l’étude profane de la Bible (1889), 1.
301 Ibid.
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Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
be no religious faith without the existence of miracles. ‘Every religion’, he wrote, ‘is
based upon a spontaneous metaphysical creation, a revelation.’302 It is this that explains
why Sorel took the Gospel of John as the most authentic of the four and why he
determined that it had been written prior to the others. ‘If one admits the Fourth
Gospel’, Sorel wrote, ‘there was no evolution: there was a revelation.’ The positivist
school, by contrast, universally assumed the Gospel of John to be bogus, the theme of
the miraculous and of the divinity of Christ which pervaded it not being to its taste.
Such was the conclusion of Sorel’s Contribution à l’étude profane de la Bible and it
was in a similar vein that he was later to write his Système historique de Renan, the
focus now shifting to criticism of Renan’s attempt to provide ‘a completely human
biography of Christ’.303 Sorel’s argument was a long and complex one but, at its
most immediate level, amounted to saying that Renan’s rationalist presuppositions
had simply prevented him from understanding both ‘the true reality of Christianity’
and its ‘fundamental conceptions’.304 For Renan the history of Christianity was
nothing more than a history of ‘illusions and accidents’.305 Crucially, Sorel believed
that the central tenets of Christianity—for example, the resurrection of Jesus—
were immune from historical criticism. The more complex argument dismissed
Renan’s account of Christianity as a mere continuation of the Judaic tradition.
‘One cannot insist too much’, Sorel wrote, ‘upon the newness of Christianity. It
was neither a reform nor a perfecting of Judaism, nor a synthesis of Jewish
monotheism and Greek polytheism: with it a truly new age began.’306 Sorel’s
point here was that early Christianity had possessed something akin to a primitive
ferocity; that it had expressed itself in the language of ‘absolute revolt’; and thus that
it had fostered a deep scission between itself and a degenerate civilization. The
establishment of the Church, on this view, made sense as a means of preserving that
separate identity and of preventing attempts to ‘civilize Christian barbarism’.307
From these conclusions Sorel developed a series of important arguments but two
need to be highlighted. The first was that if the Catholic Church wished to escape
from the crisis within which it found itself—and Sorel did not dispute that, in the
context of the anticlericalism associated with the Dreyfus Affair, the Church was in
crisis308—it should seek to make a return to its noyau fondamental, to the heart of
its original and divinely inspired doctrine. It was through a reorientation of its faith
around the concept of the miraculous that the Church would overcome ‘the spirit
of doubt’. In this Sorel was explicit in his criticism not only of liberal Protestant
theology—about which he had not a good word to say—but also the Catholic
Modernism of Alfred Loisy. Significantly Sorel added that this return to what he also
described as the ‘instinctive, the passionate [
and] the mythological’ would
only occur if resort were made to ‘the most profound of our feelings, to that which
above all is individual, to that which is not yet socialized in man’.309 There was every
302 Contribution à l’étude profane de la Bible (1889), 1.
303 Le Système historique de Renan (1906), 12.
304 Ibid. 66.
305 Ibid. 70.
306 Ibid. 459–60.
307 Ibid. 207.
308 Sorel, ‘La Crise de la pensée catholique’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 10 (1902), 523–51.
309 Ibid. 550.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
385
likelihood, Sorel indicated, that this transition would come not from within the
Church itself but from tendencies inherent in contemporary thought. The reference
to Bergson was oblique but unmistakable.
The second point of interest was that Sorel subsequently transposed the qualities
he ascribed to early Christianity—its austere and heroic morality, its reliance upon
instinct and mystical thought, its separation from society, its very newness and
purity—onto the emerging French syndicalist movement. For Sorel, striking work-
ers engaged in the class struggle were to possess all the qualities of the early
Christian martyrs.
If Sorel was able to adopt this position with regard to the Catholic religion, it was
because over time he had come to espouse a pluralistic conception of our forms of
knowledge. A trained scientist, Sorel had initially accepted a realist conception of
science and it was in this context that he had expressed his approval of the
epistemological positions advanced by both Claude Bernard and Émile Dur-
kheim.310 However, through a reading of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan
philosopher, Gianbattista Vico, Sorel had moved progressively towards a conven-
tionalist reading of science, a position given clearest expression in his essay of 1905,
Les Préoccupations métaphysiques des physiciens modernes.311 This detailed essay
considered the recent writings of Henri Poincaré and, in doing so, allowed Sorel
to argue that experimental science worked upon what he called an ‘artificial nature’
and accordingly that it was a fundamental error to imagine that there existed an
identity between science and what he termed ‘natural nature’. As was the case with