East and West

Western Illusions

Modern Western civilization appears in history as a true anomaly: among all the civilizations known to us more or less completely, it alone has developed in a purely material direction. This monstrous development, whose beginning coincides with what is conventionally called the Renaissance, has been accompanied, as it inevitably had to be, by a corresponding intellectual regression; we do not say an equivalent regression, for these are two orders of things between which there can be no common measure. This regression has gone so far that Westerners today no longer know what pure intellectuality can be; they do not even suspect that anything of the kind could exist. Hence their contempt not only for Eastern civilizations but even for the European Middle Ages, whose spirit escapes them scarcely less completely. How can one convey the value of purely speculative knowledge to people for whom intelligence is only a means of acting upon matter and bending it to practical ends, and for whom science, in the restricted sense in which they understand it, is valuable above all insofar as it can lead to industrial applications? We are not exaggerating; one need only look around to see that such is indeed the mentality of the immense majority of our contemporaries, and an examination of philosophy from Bacon and Descartes onward could only further confirm these observations. We will merely recall that Descartes restricted intelligence to reason and assigned to what he believed he could call metaphysics the sole role of serving as a foundation for physics. Physics itself, in his thought, was essentially intended to prepare the establishment of the applied sciences of mechanics, medicine, and morality, the culmination of human knowledge as he conceived it. Are not the tendencies he thus affirmed already the very ones that characterize, at first sight, the whole development of the modern world? To deny or ignore all pure and supra-rational knowledge was to open the way that would logically lead, on the one hand, to positivism and agnosticism, which resign themselves to the narrowest limitations of intelligence and its object, and, on the other, to all the sentimentalist and voluntarist theories that endeavor to find in the infra-rational what reason cannot give them. Indeed, those who today wish to react against rationalism nonetheless accept the identification of intelligence as a whole with reason alone, and believe that reason is merely a wholly practical faculty, incapable of leaving the domain of matter. Bergson wrote in so many words: “Intelligence, considered in what appears to be its original operation, is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools for making tools (sic), and of indefinitely varying their manufacture.” And again: “Intelligence, even when it no longer operates upon raw matter, follows the habits it acquired in that operation: it applies forms that are those of unorganized matter itself. It is made for this kind of work. This kind of work alone fully satisfies it. And this is what it expresses when it says that only in this way does it attain distinctness and clarity.” These latter features readily show that what is at issue is not intelligence itself but simply the Cartesian conception of intelligence, which is quite different; and the “new philosophy,” as its adherents call it, replaces the superstition of reason with another, still grosser in certain respects: the superstition of life. Rationalism, incapable of rising to absolute truth, at least allowed relative truth to subsist; contemporary intuitionism reduces that truth to no more than a representation of sensible reality in all its instability and incessant change. Finally, pragmatism makes the very notion of truth vanish altogether by identifying it with utility, which amounts to abolishing it purely and simply. If we have presented matters somewhat schematically, we have not distorted them in the least, and whatever the intermediate phases may have been, the fundamental tendencies are indeed those we have just described. By carrying things to their conclusion, the pragmatists show themselves to be the most authentic representatives of modern Western thought: what does truth matter in a world whose aspirations, being solely material and sentimental rather than intellectual, find complete satisfaction in industry and morality, two domains in which one can indeed manage very well without conceiving truth? No doubt this extreme has not been reached all at once, and many Europeans will protest that they have not yet come to it; but we are thinking chiefly here of Americans, who have reached a more ‘advanced’ phase, if one may say so, of the same civilization. Mentally as well as geographically, present-day America is truly the ‘Far West’; and Europe will undoubtedly follow if nothing arrests the unfolding of the consequences implicit in the present state of affairs.