19th Century Philosophy — Period of Systems (1800-1850) (3)

To the doctrines which realize historical forces, such as “the spirit of the people”, the nation, the race, humanity, there corresponds a philosophy of nature which sees in nature and natural forces a stable and permanent reality; here again unity is opposed to dispersion, dynamism to mechanism and atomism, but still a dynamism of a particular kind, very different from what is designated under this name in Leibniz, or in Newton, in whom forces are subject to calculation; it is a question of an immense reservoir from which the beings of nature draw what is needed to maintain their eternal youth, soul of the universe or will-to-live, in any case an entity of biological order which makes dynamism a true vitalism, analogous to that of the Renaissance.

Distrust of the thoughtful combinations of human intelligence, confidence in mysterious realities that surpass it, such are the dominant traits of the era. Confidence that does not come without doubt, without the feeling, more or less sincerely painful, of the contrast between human impotence and the height of what must be attained. There are, facing the enthusiasts and the messiahs, the broken hearts, the “children of the century”, the desperate, a Senancour, a Musset, a Vigny, whose thought, constantly brushing against philosophy, must have been to him like a continual warning of the difficulty of his task. Already Senancour found the cause of his perpetual boredom in “the opposition between what one imagines and what one experiences, between the weakness of what is usually offered and the extent of what one will have proposed to oneself”[1]; Senancour’s real evil is the weakness of the will, incapable of firm adhesion. “Has belief ever depended on the will?” he objects to Pascal’s argument; through nonchalance, he lets himself be seduced by opposing systems. “There is no contradiction here,” he writes in response to a reproach; “I give them to you only as hypotheses; not only do I not admit them both, but I positively admit neither one nor the other, and I do not claim to know what man does not know.” He arrives at a sort of stoicism, very close to despair, which except for the accent is close to that of Alfred de Vigny.

If the demands of the thought of the time have as their counterpart despair and renunciation, they also allow the development of illuminism, charlatanism, all false enthusiasm: this era sees in crowds’ sellers of social panacea, unrecognized geniuses, converts who confess their faith very loudly; these are shadows that it is not appropriate to pass over in silence. After Obermann, the weak-willed being, comes Julien Sorel, the ambitious hypocrite, the plebeian with a strong will, who manages to play belief by monitoring even the smallest gestures of his physiognomy.

Everything is connected here: the messianic pride of the inventors of systems, the fervor of the traditionalist, the despair of the man incapable of believing, the demand around new faiths, the will to be always above or below intelligence, in the region of the soul and intuition; It is this set of violent and contrasting feelings, often of suspect sincerity, that we can call Romanticism, a general movement that we would be wrong to take for a literary theory; for it affects all directions of thought and feeling, and the philosophical movement of the time, with its dark and concentrated ardor, with the feeling of its fundamental social importance, with the heaviness of its systems, would be quite inexplicable without it. We see, in the access of Romanticism that raged then, not a morbid phenomenon, but a particularly clear example of this law of oscillation in the evolution of thought that Mr. Cazamian has pointed out with regard to the history of English literature: when reflection, critical analysis have been the dominant faculties of an era, the following era marks its predilection for feeling, immediate intuition, the taste for action and dreams, the aspiration to universal synthesis. Feeling, dream, action, these are the sources where Goethe shows Faust rejuvenating his soul dried up by knowledge; the magic art which makes itself capable, by reaching the supreme powers of nature, the Mothers, of operating all transmutations replaces, in the imagination of the poet, a dead knowledge which remains on the surface; we know how, in his two successive dramas, all the tendencies of the time appear, stylized and stripped of their mediocrity.

To new tendencies, new literary forms; the winged lightness of Diderot, the stripped-down style of Voltaire, the search for conciseness and clarity in so many works intended for a wide audience, all this seems a sign of superficiality. The good writers, Chateaubriand or Goethe, are no longer found, with few exceptions, among philosophers; at this time, philosophy loses this tone of good company, this disdain for apparent technique that it had acquired since the 16th century, especially under French influence. The embarrassment, the effort, the stern and the conventional replaced ease and naturalness.; let us consider the perpetual constraint of Maine de Biran, to whom it seems that his thought will constantly escape, the rhetoric of Victor Cousin resulting, through the teaching of the Imperial University, from revolutionary declamations, and, above all, the prophetic and apocalyptic tone so frequent from Novalis to Auguste Comte in all the authors of social panacea, moral reform or philosophy of history; while Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau have, by their works, created an atmosphere for events which they in no way foresaw, our philosophers on the contrary confidently announce events which never happened, and they exercise in general, with their massive doctrines, only a fairly weak or at least not very extensive immediate influence. This is because, everywhere, the idea of a historical fate, of an imminent law which plays on resistance, has replaced faith in the reasonable and considered initiative of human wills; this fate, everyone, Bonald or Maistre, like Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon or Fourier, believes to have discovered it; all that remains for them is to announce their discovery: thus, unlike the philosophers of the 18th century, they are often speculative rather than men of action, cabinet thinkers rather than publicists or pamphleteers.

[1] Ricatte, Réflexions sur les “Rêveries,” 110.