Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life

By Oliva Blanchette

French philosopher Maurice Blondel had a tremendous impact on both philosophy and religion over the first half of the twentieth century. He was at once a postmodern critical philosopher and a devout traditional Catholic, trying not only to reconcile these two seemingly disparate factors in his own mind, but also to prove to others that the two must go together. / In the first critical examination of the philosopher’s life Oliva Blanchette tells the story of Blondel’s stormy life confronting an Academy dismissive of religion and a Religion uncomfortable with rational philosophy. This book not only follows his biographical history, but also presents his systematic philosophy, from the beginning of his journey to the culmination found in Philosophical Exigencies of Christianity, the book for which he signed the publishing contract the day before he died. / Maurice Blondel is part of the Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought series, edited by David L. Schindler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781467433754

Oliva Blanchette

Oliva Blanchette (1929–2021) was professor emeritus of philosophy at Boston College. He was the author and translator of eleven books, including Maurice Blondel’s Philosophical Exigencies of Christian Religion (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).

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PART ONE

The Journey Inward

Maurice Blondel can best be understood as a philosopher, but as a philosopher who sought to expand the scope of philosophy, so that it would include the most authentic religious spirit as it is lived in human thought and action. He was a religious man who had to think his religious life philosophically. But at the same time he was a philosopher for whom religion, even in its supernatural aspect, had to be seen as a necessary part, not only of human life itself, but also of philosophical reflection on that life.

In this resolve Blondel found himself at odds with both sides of the anti-religious atmosphere that ruled in French intellectual life at the end of the nineteenth century, those who attacked religion or relegated it to something insignificant in rational life, and those who defended religion and asserted its right to propagate in secular society. At first he was seen as a defender of religion in philosophy in a University that was resolutely secular, and as a threat to the autonomy of reason. As the defenders of reason feared for their conception of philosophy, the defenders of religion, who were mostly Catholic in France at the time, as was Blondel, rejoiced in having a champion of religion at the University. But this joy soon turned to suspicion on the part of some, when it became clear how Blondel proposed to defend religion, not by cutting reason short, as even many philosophers were quite willing to do in the spirit of neo-Kantianism, but by extending its power of inquiry into the very idea of supernatural religion, thus apparently bringing the very content of such religion, supposedly the exclusive domain of a theology based on revelation, under the domain of critical philosophy. This was not what the established theologians of the time had had in mind as a proper defense of religion, and while philosophers found some reassurance in Blondel’s protestations concerning the philosophical nature of his method, theologians began to fear for the autonomy of their own method in discoursing about religion.

Blondel left neither side complacent about its method in trying to bring them together into the unity of a single method which was essentially philosophical, but which was also no less essentially open to the transcendence of the supernatural in religion. This was clear from the two important publications that appeared under his name in the 1890s, the thesis on Action of 1893 and the so-called Letter on Apologetics of 1896. In the first he took issue with the attitude of the University and philosophy regarding religion. In the second he took issue with certain interpretations of his defense of religion and certain ways of dealing with questions of religion that were not in keeping with the exigencies of modern philosophy, as he claimed his was. In short, it could be said that in breaking into the intellectual scene of his day Blondel was breaking it up as it was established on either side of the controversy over religion, by beginning a new journey inward to the human spirit that was at once philosophical and religious.

I

Breaking into the Intellectual Scene

Anew mode of religious thinking was in the offing, launched as a philosophical dissertation on Action at the Sorbonne. Before we go into this mode of thinking as it appears in L’Action of 1893, it is interesting to note how Blondel first presented himself to the University and how it first reacted to him and his claim to establish supernatural religion as a legitimate and necessary domain for philosophical inquiry.

Blondel first came to Paris in November 1881, at the age of twenty. He had gained admission to the highly touted École Normale Supérieure through a rigorous competitive exam that was carried on in France every year. He came from the provincial city of Dijon. He was from a well-established family of lawyers and notaries, professional people who gave their children a good bourgeois and Christian education, an example of work well done, a concern for doing the right thing, and even a certain taste for discreet but active proselytizing. He had done his studies at the Lycée of Dijon, the regular state-run school, and not at a Catholic school, and had spent his last year in intense preparation for the very competitive national admission examination that was the only way of access to the École Normale, then and still considered a Mecca for intellectuals in France.

At the École Normale, Blondel was to learn to think. Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim had just finished the year before he came there. Victor Delbos and Pierre Duhem, along with many others less well known, were to be his classmates. What he was to learn, however, was not exactly congenial to his way of thinking or to his convictions. Among the faculty he found a deep-seated rationalism that was essentially anti-religious, though two, Émile Boutroux and Léon Ollé-Laprune, were themselves avowed Christians who supported him in his religious interests. Among the student body, he found a general skepticism derived from Renan, and from a waning scientism as well as a loss of confidence in the power of reason to deal with concrete questions of the meaning of life. Philosophy seemed to be fixated on sensations and ideas as if they were realities cut up into pieces and stabilized where, as he was to put it later on, Blondel could not help but see in them something pseudo-concrete, artificially solidified abstractions (1928a, 19).

Blondel tells of an incident on the very first day of his stay at the École Normale that typifies how he was received and how he was to respond. The school was run as a closely regimented fraternity at the time and, at registration, newcomers were put through all sorts of initiation rites by the upper classmen. Among the questions one had to answer was that of religious affiliation, to which Blondel declared that he was a practicing Catholic. This was of some consequence for the discipline of the school, since practicing Catholics were allowed to leave the school at a certain time on Sunday mornings in order to attend mass at a nearby church, whence they got their nickname, les talas, which was short for ils vont à la messe. Blondel, who was just arriving from the province and from his family, was somewhat taken aback by the reaction of one of his classmates upon hearing his declaration: "Well now, how can a boy who seems intelligent still call himself tala (catholic)? But he was not at a loss for an answer. Thank you for the compliment and for the added quip, he said. I have every intention, not just of seeming, but of being intelligent" (1928a, 20-21). It is this intention, as he adds, that he would try to actualize in his life at the school, in keeping with a need to see clearly, even as a tala, according to an aim that is radically philosophical. For Blondel it would become important to think, not just religiously, but also in a philosophical mode, as he was to learn at the École Normale.

In order to bring this intention to fruition Blondel realized that he had not only to push reason further forward into a consideration of the religious question, but also to pull it back to a more concrete consideration of life itself in action. It is thus that, at the beginning of his second year at the École Normale, on November 5, 1882, as he recalled quite precisely (1928a, 34), he began to focus on action as the subject for his dissertation. In doing so he was going back to Aristotle, for, as he also recalled, he was pulling together various texts in the Metaphysics and the Ethics in which action (to ergon) was spoken of as that which unifies in a way that is supra-discursive and charged with the infinite, as well as that which adds precision and perfection to a being (1936, 324-25). But in doing this he was reintroducing into the discourse of philosophy a term or a reality that had long been lost sight of at the end of the nineteenth century in France. In fact, when the classmate sitting next to him in study hall saw his notes, he could only exclaim: "A thesis on Action, great scot! What could that be? The term action does not even appear in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques of Adolphe Franck," the only one available at the time (1928a, 34). Blondel’s readiness to innovate in philosophy was not lost on this classmate.

But this readiness to innovate was not as readily accepted by the University. When Blondel came to register the subject for his thesis, which appeared to him all the more justified by reason of the astonishment it was provoking, he was told by the secretary, after consultation of the competent authorities, that no one saw how there could be in action matter for a philosophical thesis. A more sympathetic observer, Lucien Herr, who was librarian at the École Normale and a specialist in Hegel, would later remark on how few proper names would figure in such a thesis, since it would have to be cut out of whole cloth as an original pattern, which was exactly what Blondel had in mind (1928a, 35). Thanks to the intervention of Boutroux, with whom Blondel had discussed his project and who agreed to serve as patron for the thesis, the subject was finally accepted and Blondel was ready to begin making his point for a philosophy of religion as something supernatural.

He finished his work at the École Normale in November 1884, armed with the Aggrégation, which entitled him to teach at the level of the Lycée. After short stints in different places, he ended up in October 1886 as professor of philosophy at the Lycée of Aix-en-Provence, where he stayed until July 1891. This was a time for working on the dissertation as well as for teaching. But in October 1891 Blondel took time off from teaching in order to devote himself exclusively to work on his dissertation. He retired to an old farmhouse owned by his family in the wine country of Burgundy and began pulling together preliminary notes and drafts in view of what was to be the final draft. This was a time of intense concentration for him in which he drew his inspiration, not just from the philosophy he had learned in school, but also from spiritual authors such as St. Bernard, St. Paul, and Pascal, with whom he was personally familiar. From these as well as from Leibniz, of whom Blondel was especially fond and on whom he was writing his secondary Latin dissertation, he learned not only how to examine his conscience, but also how to reflect on the order of intelligibility and discipline to be found in any genuinely human action and conduct of life.

The Beginning of a Confrontation

Among the notes he wrote early on in this process is one, apparently addressed to his teacher Ollé-Laprune, that is especially revelatory of how he was approaching his subject. It reads as follows:

There is something to be defined, something that seems to be properly Christian; and it is in a way that is very concrete, through an analysis, not of the will, not of activity, but of action, that I would like to try to do this. It is true that in order to act we must think well; it is truer still, and more evangelical, to say that in order to think well we must act well. To this are connected, through a link that I can barely grasp at the moment, different thoughts on passion, on the letter (of a law), and the possibility or the usefulness of a revelation. (Notes Semailles 1886-87)

The movement of the thought is clearly religious in its origin, but the effort is to bring it back to a clearly defined philosophical discourse by a critical reflection on characteristically human action and all that it implies rationally. In the final product of his reflection Blondel hardly mentions this evangelical dimension of his inspiration at the beginning. He chooses rather to call it an Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, which is more in keeping with the philosophical nature of the work. It is only in the end that he argues for a necessity of the kind of supernatural he had in mind from the beginning. But it was this ending that was to pull his readers in the University up short and stiffen them in their fear for reason in the face of this reappearance of religion as a necessary dimension of life in philosophy.

Blondel submitted his dissertation to the Sorbonne in May 1893, not in person but by mail from Dijon. From the distance of the province he could not realize the full extent of the reaction it would provoke in Paris. It was only when he arrived in Paris shortly before the defense, scheduled for Wednesday, June 7, 1893, that he began to feel the opposition he was to encounter. Boutroux had been the only reader of the manuscript, and the one to approve it. He explained to Blondel the bitter criticisms he had drawn upon himself from his colleagues by this approval. These colleagues were so irritated upon reading such an unusual dissertation, that he advised Blondel to try by all means possible to visit the other members of the jury at their homes, before the defense, so that they could vent their anger in private rather than in public.

Blondel had encountered this kind of irritation once before in his academic career, at the time of the final aggregation exams of the École Normale, when he, along with the leader of the class, was refused passage twice, because their dissertations were thought to be too personal and too doctrinal. Blondel in particular was accused of being a voltigeur, one who flits from one question to another too quickly. According to one commentator, the candidates had made the mistake of not sticking close enough to an elementary pedagogy, such as is expected from a teacher at the level of the Lycée. But this time, with his doctoral dissertation, there was more at issue than just style. There was also the question of what he was advancing.

Blondel did make the rounds of the board as suggested by Boutroux. He tells of one member taking umbrage at the fact that this entire thesis had been prepared without his having been apprised of it, and spoke for others when he wondered where Blondel was coming from. Here is what people would like to know: are you all by yourself, coming in from the wild, or are you the spokesman or even the instigator of a concerted campaign against the conception we have here of philosophy and its role? (1928a, 48-49). Blondel was so genuinely surprised by the question or the suspicion, that his interlocutor saw immediately what he was in fact, not a loner coming in from the wild, but simply someone who was candid about what he thought. His ingenuousness earned him another ally on the board, who would later remark that he too, along with Boutroux, was becoming a martyr for Blondel.

What actually happened in private with the other members of the board we do not know. But we do know what happened in the public defense of the thesis, from a long report on the Soutenance published in 1907 under the name of J. Wehrlé, a classmate of Blondel at Normale who had left to enter the seminary and become a priest, but based on notes originally written by Blondel himself on the day after the defense itself. The notes themselves have recently been published alongside the published text of 1907 in the first volume of Blondel’s Oeuvres Complètes (1995, 691-745). Blondel himself wrote the revision for publication as well as the original notes, even though he had it published under his friend’s name, who added only one remark of his own at the end of the conclusion concerning their recently deceased teacher, Ollé-Laprune. Blondel seems to have decided to publish this account of the defense in the heat of the Modernist controversy we shall speak of later, in order to remind his Catholic accusers about what side he was on and where he was coming from.

In this report we learn that the defense lasted from three until seven-fifteen in the evening, somewhat longer than such exercises usually went at the time, and that it was more than usually well attended by an interested public. The discussion itself, though heated at times, was carried on well within the bounds of philosophical civility. Though the report gives no indication of it, Blondel seems to have led off with a few introductory remarks, the tenor of which we can gather from handwritten notes on a neatly folded sheet of paper still to be found at the Archives, in which Blondel explains what he was about in his thesis—remarks that lead spontaneously to the line of questioning with which Boutroux appears to begin rather abruptly in the published account. In the introductory remarks, he goes immediately to the point of the supernatural. My aim has been to constitute a philosophy which, though quite distinct from the supernatural order, would be its natural and necessary underpinning. There has to be one, and there is none. The point is carefully worded in order to take into account the exigencies of both philosophy and theology with regard to the idea of the supernatural.

In order to constitute such a philosophy of the supernatural, Blondel sees himself as having to steer a course between two philosophies very much in vogue in his day, Thomism and Kantianism. While recognizing the force of the Thomistic synthesis, especially for believers, he did not think it met the exigencies of modern thought because it threw too many questions, religious, philosophical, and scientific, into the same pot, without confusing them to be sure, but still without recognizing the reciprocal suspicion that existed among them. At this time Blondel saw Thomism as proposing only a juxtaposition of these three elements, a descriptive anatomy that found its persuasive force in the solidity and the amplitude of its exposition. But it did not meet the preoccupations of modern thought, which had been turned around by Kant’s Critique. Whatever Thomism was responding to in the thirteenth century was no longer the spirit or the approach of thoughtful people in his day and age. What was once a method of proof had become only a method of exposition and confirmation for truths now called into question.

On the other hand, however, Kantianism, with its substitution of moral life for Hellenic intellectualism, which some had thought of as the definitive arrival of the Christian spirit in thought, was even less of an answer to the philosophical question of the supernatural than Thomism. This was not the way for Christian truth to go. For Blondel what had to be found was a way between intellectualism and fideism that would determine a perspective at once absolutely natural and absolutely in conformity with the supernatural order, so that, without minimizing the validity of nature and of reason itself, one could also be brought to see the necessity of the supernatural order within the natural, in such a way that the natural order would then be viewed as subordinated. Between these two orders there is neither a simple juxtaposition, nor an opposition, nor yet a continuity. Independent, the two are in solidarity for man; impossible to get along without them both and impossible to arrive at them. The natural order exists, and yet the supernatural order penetrates it; to refuse to rise to this higher order is not only to renounce a free gift, it is to deprive and to mutilate oneself (1995, 691-745).

This is the relation that Blondel was trying to define with demonstrative precision, first by presenting a synthesis of the entire natural order, in order to show both its solidity and its inevitable shortcoming, and then by elaborating on the idea of the supernatural on the basis of its necessity as part of the determinism of human action. The starting point was a conception of truth, not only as something to be sought intellectually, but also as something giving rise to an alternative for the will, something to be embraced or rejected, where rejection entailed a privation rather than just intellectual neutrality. The effort was not to impose the truth dogmatically, but rather to let the truth speak for itself in whatever state of consciousness there was, even those that seemed most at odds with Blondel’s. The method, then, had to be negative in the first instance, to show how those who seek to evade the truth and its exigencies actually posit it in the act of doing so. But it also had to show inevitability in the total determinism of action, so that one cannot stop at any step along the way as a palliative. The point was to open up the entire realm of the necessary toward which we are drawn as human beings, without mysticism. Finally, the method had to be charitable, because no state of soul could be omitted. Instead of trying to take the place of others, it had to let others take their own place and come to their own judgment in the light of truth. The force of the proof is in them, in what is understood better perhaps by those I am fighting than by those I am defending (1995, 691-745).

The focus of the method then was on the determinism of the act, prescinding from its qualities, since all of these could be included. Everything was to follow from an internal analysis of the act’s content, namely, its organic relations along with its contraries. But the synthesis to which this consideration of the necessary in human action led was not merely intellectual, something merely to be viewed. It was also an alternative to be resolved, a means of action, so that this means, or this mediator, should be constituted objectively, or as the truth itself which grounds the entire determinism as real. Only a divine Mediator can realize this conception of objective truth.

The Philosophical Testing of Religion

With this sweeping affirmation as background, then, Boutroux led off the questioning by likening Blondel to St. Augustine, St. Bernard, or Malebranche, and asking him what sort of a mystic he was: one of the Hellenic sort or one of the ascetic sort. Given what Blondel had just said about Hellenic intellectualism and mysticism, the question was loaded. It went to the heart of Blondel’s method. Though he actually speaks of mysticism in passing in the dissertation, he did not want to admit that he was a mystic of any sort, if by mysticism one understands looking for the end of action beyond the necessity that is part of the determinism of human action. As a philosopher, he was looking for the end of action within action itself, as it is given spontaneously and as we posit it voluntarily. He was situating himself within human action, in other words, not to add a new dimension to it, but only to discover its exigencies and to measure up to all its necessary expansion. For him the true force of philosophy was to fall back on this internal spring of the will in action in order to watch how, slowly but surely, it reaches its effects. The task of philosophy is to bring someone to be true to this inner will in complete good faith. In this sense, philosophy had to be positive rather than mystical, even though in the end it does give rise to a religious expectation.

Satisfied that Blondel was arguing only as a philosopher, or focusing only on what is real rather than on some idea to which reality had to be brought into conformity, Boutroux then turned to the principle of Blondel’s argument. What is, could be understood as either the object proposed to the will by nature, or as the will itself with its aspirations, or else as both at the same time. If there is a conflict between the two, by what principle or method can they be reconciled? Pessimism takes its principal argument from this contradiction to conclude to the nothingness of human action, whereas Blondel uses the same contradiction to arrive at the opposite conclusion, namely, that there is some being in human action. You claim, Boutroux tells Blondel, that the conflict ceases the moment we come to the right idea both of the end truly sought by the will and of the total reality with which this will is in relation. According to you, what we will definitively, whether we know it or not, is the substitution within us of the divine willing for our own willing; and the nature of things is fundamentally nothing more than the series of means that we must will to accomplish our destiny (1907c, 82).

The problem with this, according to Boutroux, is that it appears more as an interpretation than as an observation of reality, an interpretation that proceeds from a presupposition surreptitiously introduced into the heart of the problem to be resolved. In other words, there seems to be some secret postulate that inspires and sustains the entire dialectic, which Boutroux sums up as follows: "to follow your argument, we have to admit that the human will is not content with any finite object and that it is oriented toward a good that it encounters nowhere in the nature of things. Willing the infinite, isn’t that the point of departure and as it were the petitio principii of your inquiry? And, with the infinite in hand, is it any wonder that you then eliminate all the contradictions of the finite?" (1907c, 82).

Blondel admits that willing the infinite was indeed the key issue for him, but not as a postulate or as a point of departure. It was for him the point of arrival for philosophical research. The question for Blondel is indeed to see whether or how willing the infinite is a point of departure and a real principle for the spontaneous activity of human life. In defense of his argument, he says he must not suppose the infinite as either present or absent. When it arises through the interplay of mental determinism as hypothesis, or when it is proposed to conscience through education or history, we have first to oppose ourselves to it, as Blondel claims he does in the beginning of his argument. Hence the negative character of his method, which seemed to be the best way to proceed scientifically, that is, the method of admitting nothing as real, unless one were forced to do so, and admitting only as much as one has to incrementally at each step of the argument, so that in the end one is left with a system of interconnected affirmations, gradually leading up to the point of bringing before reflected thought, and to the option of the will, what was already present at the origin of a movement that was at first evasive.

Blondel likens his method to that of Descartes’s methodical doubt. Just as the latter had sought new reasons for doubting, Blondel sought to bring into philosophy new moral attitudes and still barely determined stances in the face of the problem of human destiny, including aestheticism, dilettantism, and immoralism. His aim was to start from what was furthest removed and lowest in willing of any kind, in order to go further and higher with it than had been done before. Unlike Descartes’s methodical doubt, however, which was the individual attitude of only one mind, Blondel had to take all the diversity of human consciences into account and set them in motion, even if they feigned not to start from the whole. Unlike the methodical doubt, which was restricted to an intellectual difficulty that was partial and artificial, the philosophy of action had to do with the question of life, or the question of the whole. We step out of methodical doubt as from a fiction, Blondel adds, whereas we must dwell in action as we must in reality. Thus, what was only a problem of knowledge becomes at once a problem of the will, of being, and of salvation.

In short, the question raised by Blondel in defining the relation of knowing, doing, and being was no longer just the Cartesian question, nor merely the Kantian question. It was the question of destiny concerning the price of life, the truth of God, the human being’s accord with the universal conditions of experience, science, and existence, and our participation in the transcendent good. Moreover, Blondel insisted, it was the philosophical question itself as a whole, since it was a question of the relation between the natural order and the supernatural as such. Thus, even at this moment of judgment on the philosophical validity of his argument, Blondel was challenging the very idea of what was called separate philosophy, that is, a philosophy that could ignore the question of religion or the supernatural. This is a point he would make even more emphatically later on in discussing his method of immanence in the Letter on Apologetics.

In counterpoint to Blondel’s reply here, Boutroux objects in the name of what might be termed a more rational philosophy. Even if we admit that there is in human willing an aspiration that no finite object could spontaneously satisfy, do we have to ratify this desire and second this movement, which may be unreasonable and chimerical? Do we have to try to leap beyond nature? Is there not another solution suggested by ancient philosophical wisdom, which is neither presumption nor abdication, but simply a regulation of desire according to the object accessible to our will that avoids all hubris, instead of vainly trying to make our willed end equal to the infinite principle of desire?

The idea of equality between willed object and the spontaneous power of willing mentioned here was central to Blondel’s philosophical argument for the necessity of the supernatural. If it is impossible for any willed object in the order of nature to equal the projected infinite power of willing, the argument goes, then we have to admit a necessity of the supernatural to satisfy the principle of projected equality found at the heart of human willing. Blondel’s contention was that this principle of equality was itself rational and that it made the idea of the supernatural appear as something necessary for reason itself. It is this principle that sends the will, so to speak, out of itself in search of an object that will be the equal of its power. In pursuit of this search, it finds various objects that satisfy this principle in part at least, and that the will, therefore, has to will necessarily. But within the natural order it finds none that will satisfy the principle of equality in willing fully. At the limit of the natural order, we are left with the conclusion that it is necessary to go further, but that it is impossible for us to do so on our own. The constant recurrence of superstition in human action is a sign of this necessity, but the falsity or the pretentiousness of idolatry is an indication of the impossibility for human willing, left to its devices to go beyond the natural order, that is, without the added help of something supernatural.

Boutroux’s objection thus touched on the very point of this necessity of something supernatural, while admitting the point of its impossibility for us. If one can confine one’s willing to possible objects, then one does not have to admit any necessity of the supernatural. But Blondel’s reply is that this is precisely what we cannot do, without pretension and without self-contradiction. In the dissertation he explains how, in spite of the strange paradox of the act, it is impossible to will infinitely without willing the infinite. But he also demonstrates the ineluctable consequences of such an abstention or, more exactly, of this systematic rejection of something necessary. Far from being more modest or rational, such a refusal is an act of self-sufficiency in secret contradiction with itself. We do not suppress what we reject. In the logic of life the contraries remain implicated diversely in the conclusion that results from our free choice in the face of having to either will or not will the infinite.

To see how all this works itself out more cogently in Blondel’s argument, we must read the dissertation itself more carefully, as Boutroux shows he had done in raising these objections. Before concluding his part of the examination, he turns to some more specific questions about Blondel’s understanding of action. If action, as Blondel sees it, is a principle of synthesis that develops and enriches being, is it not rather, in the eyes of others, something more negative that determines being, exhausts it, narrows it in a sort of practical mechanism fixed by a literalness that kills the spirit? This was an allusion to the constraints of a literal practice on the human spirit of the sort that Blondel was defending as part of the necessity of the supernatural. In response, Blondel grants something of this negative aspect of action for the human spirit, in the sense of a certain deterioration that can set in, to limit and absorb the one acting. But this is so only because, in order to act in a human way, one must consort with other agents. We know well only what we have done, and we enter into communication with others and ourselves only at the cost of some onerous adaptations. Even in seeming to drain us and pull us out of ourselves, however, action still enriches us, fortifies us, and nourishes our dreams and aspirations by making them better and truer. In reality, what goes out of us brings back to us what is outside of ourselves, as an end to be attained, and makes immanent for us the entire series of the means by which we tend from our principle to our end.

Another difficulty had to do with the way Blondel relates determinism and freedom in his dialectic of action, where he distinguishes between a determinism antecedent to and leading up to the use of our free will and a determinism consequent to this use. The latter determinism is the one Blondel follows in its ascendance from one object of the will to another that is always higher, all the way up to the infinite. In this determinism, Blondel finds what is for him the originality of his method, which frees him from a philosophy merely of the idea and opens him up to a philosophy of action that reintegrates everything within itself, without compromising the use of free will and without misconstruing the absolute oppositions that result from the ultimate moral option before God. Blondel’s phenomenology of action, starting from the central act of willing itself and reaching out to the very confines of the universe, consists precisely in the articulation of this determinism or necessity consequent upon the very act of willing.

Boutroux’s final difficulty has to do with the way Blondel relates this science of the subject with the so-called objective or more positive sciences, where determinism appears to be opposed to freedom. Blondel’s answer takes him to the heart of his phenomenological method, as we shall see in conjunction with his use of the method in L’Action (1893). The point he wishes to make in the defense is that he is trying to describe the universal concrete, including the description itself and the effort of the will each at its proper place in the whole phenomenon. He defends himself against any sort of idealism as well as against any premature realism that tends to reify different aspects of the phenomenon independently of one another.

In the end, Boutroux, who was the only examiner to have read the entire dissertation from beginning to end carefully, finds it rich and solid. Though he still has some reservations about the way Blondel tends to subordinate knowledge to action, he recognizes that on the whole the considerable effort has succeeded, the key word for saying that the thesis was accepted and approved.

Testing the Philosophical Authenticity of a Method

None of the other examiners was to raise as cogent a series of objections as Boutroux did. Paul Janet finds Blondel’s thought obscure and his style even more obscure. He declares having spent one hour on one page and still not having understood it. At this rate, he calculates, he would have needed forty-five days to read the whole thesis. He finds it too personal, lacking in what he calls the value and the objective bearing of ideas. But once he has given up trying to follow the argument, he finds interesting things and sometimes charming reflections on each page, as with the Parerga of Schopenhauer, which far surpass the work as a whole.

Blondel feels deeply bothered by this criticism. He apologizes for the faults he is responsible for. But he answers only to the extent that the criticism reflects on the value of his method. He grants that it has always been the honor of French philosophy, from Descartes on, to be clear. But he adds that not any clarity will do for his purpose. Blondel notes that, even according to Descartes, there is a certain clarity that is often deceiving and dangerous, giving an illusion of understanding to whose who do not understand, by masking the real complexity of things. The complete understanding of Cartesian thought is no less laborious than that of Hegelian thought.

For his own part Blondel did not wish to be understood in any simplistic way. To be sure, style must be an instrument of precision. But it must also convey a complete sense, nothing more nor less, of the inevitable difficulty of things, even to the extent of putting off impatient or presumptuous minds who think they can grasp and penetrate everything without any competence. This was not said as an excuse for his obscurity. If I have rewritten certain parts of my work six or seven times, he says, it was not for the pleasure of remaining obscure (1907c, 88). He had tried to reduce the difficulties of interpretation that depend on imperfections of expression as much as he could. But he had no hope or intention of eliminating every obstacle. Style is not just an opening for others to access one’s thought. It is also a protection against their hasty judgments. To be understood neither too soon nor too late, that would be the just mean (1907c, 88). Hence Blondel regrets the pleasure some might take in running through this book, as some would do later on, looking only for random pious thoughts, after having given up trying to grasp its logic. To run through a book in this way, he says, is to look in it only for what one already knows. Moreover, he adds, confronting Janet as the adversary he knew him to be, I was more concerned to be understood by those I criticize than by those whose beliefs and teachings I share (1907c, 88).

Janet, however, does not take up this challenge of a systematic understanding in Blondel’s work. He goes on only to pick out two or three of the details he had found interesting on one page or another and to raise some question about each, leaving the question of the argument as a whole in the dark, as it had been before Blondel’s attempt to refocus on it in response to Janet’s first criticism. What we find in Blondel’s response, however, is the reason why his work as a philosopher is always difficult to follow, even in its early and more vigorous form. While trying to be clear in his expression, he also wanted to remain true to the complexity of things and of the human subject in action. To do this he had to be systematic or scientific in his method. This is what makes him difficult or impossible to follow, if one is not prepared to understand the development of his argument as a whole. In his way of thinking the structure of the whole is more important than any particular detail brought up along the way.

With Henri Marion we come to a more sympathetic examiner, the one willing to become a martyr among his colleagues, along with Boutroux, for the one defending his dissertation, by speaking of his book as nobly inspired. For Marion what was surprising was that it contained so little moral instruction on how to live well, as one would expect from a science of practice, as its subtitle indicated. Here and there, there are signs that Blondel could have done this quite well. Why did he not do more of it?

Far from making excuses for not doing more of this moralizing on details of our duties or of the learned application that the good man must make of his goodness, Blondel insists that this would have been contrary to his deliberate intention. Your disappointment is explained, therefore, not by omission on my part, but by my aiming to demonstrate the chimerical and superstitious character of any attempt to directly ground a self-sufficient morality and to constitute an absolutely autonomous science (1907c, 90). Blondel’s intention was not to formulate anything like Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, but rather to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to ground such morality in the will alone or in pure practical reason.

In fact, Blondel even apologizes for including any moral appeals to duty, not because he looks down on such instruction, but rather because such appeals tend to distract from his single-minded thought, which was that action cannot be defined, restricted, or organized purely within the natural order, no matter how extended or idealized we suppose it to be. In other words, or in terms of the principle Blondel invokes in his determination of what is at stake in human action, the true meaning of life and the true goodness of action is found only if, implicitly or explicitly, we tend and adhere to the one thing that finally makes our willed will equal to our willing will, which, for Blondel, could only be something supernatural.

In his Introduction to this Science of Practice, Blondel is careful to distinguish it from what he calls Practical Science. Practical Science is what we come to or learn, simply from following our conscience and putting our moral sense into practice, without stopping to raise critical questions as to the validity of our principles. It is the realm where we discover the obligation to follow our conscience and the solid value of duty accomplished for its own sake. If one could be completely sincere and faithful in following the principles of one’s conscience, one would eventually learn what these principles mean ultimately for human destiny. But one is not always certain of being completely sincere or faithful in one’s practice, or one is not always prepared to wait until the end before discovering the ultimate meaning of one’s action. Practical Science needs to be supplemented by a more reflective and critical science of this practice in its actuality. What are the conditions for our doing what we have to do in the world? This is the question for the Science of Practice, as distinct from Practical Science. If our acts are morally valid only by reason of the final and total intention to which they are expressly or confusedly subordinate, then it is incumbent on the Science of Practice to determine how these acts will commune with this will or this life whence they derive their ultimate value and, as it were, their soul.

If Blondel’s conclusions in the Science of Practice appear to be purely negative, in the sense that human action is not sufficient unto itself, or that it does not have within itself alone its ultimate rule and its ultimate end, so that there is no autonomous moral science and no legitimately separate philosophy, it is only because moral science and philosophy are meant to set aside illusions, which, for all their rational nobility, are nevertheless illusions, if they pretend to be self-sufficient. The science of life cannot be grounded as science, or practice cannot be grounded as sufficient, without surpassing the natural order of the will itself, the phenomenon of duty, or even any metaphysical conception of human being. Without reference to something supernatural, Blondel wants to claim, our way of thinking and living remains incoherent and superstitious.

Marion protests that it is unjust to bunch together, under one common reproach of superstition, the devotee of duty and the savage fetishist, as Blondel does in his chapter on superstitious action as well as in his reply to Marion’s question. Blondel, however, comes to the defense of the savage, who, if his will is sincere and straightforward, also serves some good no less than the more enlightened devotee of pure duty. From the beginning, in his defense of Practical Science as distinct from and prior to the Science of Practice, Blondel has scrupulously maintained the rightness of simple folk who can only act according to the light of their conscience, without any critical discussion of their action. They learn from their action itself. What Blondel takes exception to is the sort of middling stance of those who, while profiting from the partial light we have on the end of human life, close themselves off from any new light or any new exigency that might come from something higher than ourselves. In this, he claims, there is usurpation by a thought that is incompetent by itself to define the true end of man, so that the spontaneous efforts of conscience are perverted. If we can admire all those who go forward without sinning against the light, and who devote themselves to a work of personal and social salvation, no matter where they are coming from, we must be severe in our judgment of those who have the superstition of action for the sake of action or of intention for the sake of intention, and who then stop themselves or stop others along the road where we must always go forward without presuming that we have arrived.

The fourth examiner, Victor Brochard, expresses his regrets that he had not had time to study closely and to verify the systematic unity of Blondel’s construction, because the date of the defense had been moved up by three weeks. He recognizes that it is important to keep track of this systematic unity in Blondel’s work. But he focuses on two links in the chain of Blondel’s argument that he has had time to examine, the connection between determinism and freedom and the place of metaphysics in this dialectic, two key points in Blondel’s argument.

With regard to the connection between determinism and freedom, Blondel explains how he understands the generation of the idea of freedom from determinism itself, through the mediation of another idea, the idea of the infinite in consciousness. Brochard brings up two difficulties with regard to this. First, Blondel’s use of the term infinite seems equivocal and, second, since there is nothing in reality that corresponds to what Blondel calls the idea of the infinite, it does not follow that our freedom is real.

In answer, Blondel explains that, at the point where the connection between determinism and freedom is being made, there is no need for the kind of objective realism the objection presupposes. If the claim were that the determinism of facts, on the one hand, and moral freedom, on the other, are absolute realities in themselves, there would be no way of connecting them and the objection would be insoluble. But that is not the claim in Blondel’s phenomenological method, which prescinds from any ontological preoccupation and from any assertion whatsoever, whether realist or idealist. At the point of his argument where freedom is seen as flowing necessarily from determinism, the aim is simply to unfold the sequence of ideas tied to one another in the internal consciousness of action, and to disclose the implicit assertions contained in our explicit assertions. In other words, in his phenomenology Blondel is only describing the solidarity and the generation of ideas that flow from one another, even when they appear as supposedly incompatible realities. Before coming to any examination of the ontological bearing of such implicit assertions, Blondel still has to inventory a whole set of other ideas that also flow from these two intertwined ideas in human consciousness, ideas that we also inevitably affirm in our conscious action. This is how he sees the necessary connection between determinism and freedom. He sums up his case as follows:

I show that action, if we reflect on it at all, concerns the total order of things; that, for us to have the idea of our action, we must have the idea of a transcendent initiative, the idea of an infinite (for the infinite, in scientific language, is no more than the notion of some incommensurability); the consciousness of this very transcendence is tied to the very consciousness of a freedom; and this consciousness of freedom, whatever use we make of it, whether fictitious, apparent, or authentic, marks with its imprint the entire series of conscious states that follow and the entire sequence of the determinism wherein what we call (for we are speaking here of appearances) the creations and the productions of our will take place. (1907c, 93)

Brochard then asks Blondel what degree of consistency or reality he attributes to sense objects, to the truths of the positive sciences, or to any of the successive terms of the universal chain he rolls out. Is Blondel, for example, a monadist? Blondel continues his answer in the same vein as before. Of course, sense objects are. Moreover, the invincible trust we have in the reality of all the objects of scientific knowledge, metaphysics, and morality is well founded. But it is not in isolation, or partially, that we can resolve any properly ontological problem. No single link in the chain can bear the answer to this problem by itself. All the links can be seen as real only if, while marking their irreducible heterogeneity on the one hand, we also take note, on the other hand, of their interdependence and of the necessity to bring them all back to their single and common reason for being. Hence the need to consider the entire chain of objects of consciousness before asking what degree of consistency or reality we can attribute to any one of them in particular, or what variety there is of real and distinct beings or objects. To ask whether Blondel is a monadist is like asking a chemist whether he still believes in phlogiston.

With regard to the point about metaphysics as part of the dialectic of action, Blondel answers that metaphysics too must enter into the series of objects for consciousness to consider in its action. Blondel prescinds from the variety of metaphysical systems one could bring up. He merely shows that any metaphysical system is necessarily the principle of an original dynamism in action, and that it inevitably confers upon our acts a character of transcendence. In the end, however, any metaphysical conception is bound to come back, in a second moment of the dialectic, in connection with the idea of God and proofs for his existence. But even there it does not remain static. Even the idea of God has to enter into the dynamism of action, as it gives rise to an alternative for the will: to be God with God or to be God against God. From this alternative, where the will has to pronounce itself as for or against God, there then follows a metaphysics to the second power, so to speak, a fundamentally realist metaphysics that then presents being, no longer as simply an object constituted by logical contours we can know from the outside and see as equal to the pure idea, but rather as a truth and goodness in which we participate more by conforming ourselves to it interiorly. In saying this, as well as in preparing his introductory remarks for the defense, Blondel was thinking of the final chapter he intended to add to the dissertation he was defending, which was to be on action as the bond between thought and being.

It was for the final examiner, Gabriel Séailles, to raise what must have appeared to him the most delicate question. Not wishing to trample on any sincere convictions of one defending a philosophical dissertation, he still wanted to question what he thought were the theological problems Blondel was raising at the end.

This was indeed a touchy question for Blondel, but not in the sense that Séailles was thinking. Far from fearing to be criticized as a believer in Catholicism, Blondel feared much more to be mistaken for a theologian. The inspiration of my work is in no way theological, he answered immediately. I have made every effort to go as far as reason can and must go, without transgressing into any domain external to philosophy. What is rational must, without any scruple, be subjected to unremitting criticism. Hence the conclusion at which I arrive must not become the occasion for mistaking my intentions, my method, and the very meaning of these conclusions (1907c, 96).

What Blondel wanted above all else was a philosophical discussion of religious questions, something that was singularly lacking in France at the end of the nineteenth century, unlike in Germany or England. This was for him a mutilation of philosophy, calling for reason itself to reclaim an essential part of its domain. What was required for this philosophical reclaiming was also a philosophical method that would follow action in its real and actual development, in a critical and scientific way in order to make explicit what is implicit in human action as a whole and in order to make ourselves equal to ourselves.

Having followed such a method in his dissertation, Blondel now wanted his conclusions to be understood purely as philosophical. By showing that neither man nor nature alone can bring action to its completion, he argues that action which is fully consistent with its secret wish for autonomy must subordinate itself to an action beyond that which it can prescribe for itself, to a higher order than any that thought can construct or justify for itself, and to a religious expectation, a supernatural truth, a literal practice (1907c, 96).

In doing this, however, and in showing how we have the power and the duty to discern the order that would correspond to this religious predisposition within ourselves, or to discern how and at what price we come to adhere to supernatural dogmas and precepts, Blondel made no claim of entering into the supernatural itself as a philosopher, or of discovering what is its content. That would have been to betray both philosophy and theology, the latter of which has articles of faith for its principles, not purely rational truths. In other words, it would have been contradictory to conclude that action can find completion only in accepting a heteronomy, and then do as if one could philosophically deduce or promulgate, on the basis of this conclusion, the data of revelation, which are what they are and which answer our need only in that they are not drawn from ourselves or from philosophy. To define the conditions that render such data discernible, acceptable, and assimilable is in no way to produce, to discover, or to explain them.

In that case, then, Séailles asks, how can we say that the human will and the triumph of freedom come to completion in a literal submission, and how can autonomy convert itself into pure heteronomy without committing suicide? To appreciate this paradox, Blondel answers, we do not even have to consider the properly supernatural order. One simply has to recognize that we cannot sincerely will infinitely without willing the infinite. The question comes down to this: How can we will the infinite? How can we appropriate it to ourselves without first renouncing ourselves, without letting go of ourselves to bring ourselves back to the very source of our being and without abandoning ourselves to this movement which takes us from God to God? We do not acquire the infinite as a thing, as the dissertation had already tried to make clear (1893a, 313). We make room for it in ourselves, through sacrifice and devotion, by liberating ourselves from the exclusive attachment to self and to the finite (1907c, 97).

We can do this, Blondel adds, without having the real and onerous heteronomy of duty and faith contradicting the legitimate autonomy of the will, and without taking away our responsibility for lacking in submission, when we go against the very light of consciousness and conscience.

Séailles grants this up to a certain point, but then brings up the final objection of the afternoon. When Blondel speaks of the death of action and the sanction that follows from it, supposedly something like hell, how can he be so ruthless, as if the heavenly Father were to reject one of his creatures in a way that no earthly father would do for a wayward child? How can we excuse, or even understand, such a suffering inflicted from the outside, as if by an external constraint or a brutal vengeance?

Yes, Blondel agrees, the suffering would be immoral and cruel, as well as in vain, if it were imposed only from the outside. But this hypothesis is the opposite of what Blondel has claimed in his argument. In showing how the will can pervert its own movement directing it to its end, Blondel has indicated in what sense this perversion of the will itself is definitive, and how the sanction is drawn from the will itself, from the internal strength of the movement that was directing it to its true end, so that, as Bossuet had said, hell is sin itself. In this as in everything else, Blondel is only listening from within for the echo of voices from the outside. To be punished, the one who is guilty does not need to be changed or crushed. It is enough for him to see in the depths of himself, to feel his emptiness fully, to suffer the lack of that of which he has deprived himself.

A Grudging Recognition

All this took place on a Wednesday afternoon in June 1893. It was articulated in defense of a thesis that had been elaborated largely in solitude and meditation on the meaning of life itself, in order to open up the scope of philosophy to the fullness of human existence and to a dimension of supernatural transcendence. It was aimed at an audience that had largely and systematically closed itself off from any such dimension through a rationalist and immanentist presupposition illustrated by Séailles’ objection. Most importantly, it was geared to arrive at its own end by strictly philosophical or rational means, so that philosophers themselves as philosophers would have to recognize the rational ground of its conclusions.

In one sense, Blondel’s momentous effort was successful. He did prove, to the satisfaction of his examiners, that his method was indeed philosophical and that he was worthy of being recognized as a philosopher. In spite of their misgivings about his conclusions, the board of examiners was unanimous in officially granting Blondel its seal of approval, the title of Docteur ès Lettres, which he had been seeking as an entry into teaching philosophy on the