The awakening of philosophy around 1890

What are the current philosophical opinions around 1880? We see only defenses, negations, reductions that annihilate being and intellectual or moral values; the Spencerian prohibition that stops the mind at the barrier of the unknowable, and which thinks to expel decidedly all metaphysics, the negations of Schopenhauerian pessimism which discovers, under all existence, the vanity of an identical will to live, the reductions of the philosophy of Taine which, reducing all mental facts to sensation and sensation to movement, finally sees all realities, material and spiritual, springing from a sort of infinitesimal pulsation, composing itself indefinitely with itself; opposite at most, except for the exception of the former thought of Lachelier and Boutroux, a meager and attenuated spiritualism where the irreducibility of conscience and freedom continues to assert itself, as if by pia vota, which is always based on immediate inner observation.

It seems that intelligence, the concern for objectivity lead to a vision of the universe where everything that gives its price and value to real and directly experienced life is annihilated and lost; conscience and morality are so many illusions, “vital lies” that Ibsen’s theatre and Nietzsche’s philosophy show how dangerous it is to take away from human weakness, and which, however, philosophy has the mission of denouncing; a situation whose extreme consequence will be the state of mind of Renan who, from the serious respect for the truth that obliges him to denounce these illusions, passes to a higher irony that treats this very obligation as illusory and lets him accept lies out of a conservative spirit or out of simple fear of scandal: it is intelligence devouring itself.

Then we see, at the end of the century and the beginning of the twentieth, reactions that are often violent and disordered, of a vital instinct that pushes to reestablish, by hook or by crook, this balance. Hence the profoundly irrationalist character of many doctrines that emerge then: the resounding declarations of Brunetière on the failure of science and its return to faith, the fideist and modernist movement, the nationalism of Barrés, the favor that Gobineau’s theories on races find in Germany, these are all symptoms of the same spirit; development which is not without analogy with the romantic movement, rich and confused like it, occasion, like it, of works of very great literary beauty, but which, like it also, lends itself too often to insincerity or to charlatanism; one falls too easily into the danger of linking philosophy to the interests of any group, Church, nation or class, and thus transforming the search for truth into a means of defense or attack.

There is also, up to our time, a current of agnosticism which forbids choosing between the demands of feeling and those of intelligence; The Discontents of Philosophical Thought (1905), The Unverifiable (1920), these are the significant titles of the works in which Mr. André Cresson develops the necessity of the alternative which forces each philosopher, according to his temperament, to follow positivism or to find “a way to escape the deterministic suggestions of the sciences because he considers them contrary to the moral needs of the soul”. This agnosticism is however very far from the doctrines that we study in this chapter and the following ones: it is this alternative itself whose necessity is denied by them.

One of the strongest ramparts of the scientistic spirit was the mechanistic theory of life which, after Darwin, seemed to impose itself. The revival of vitalism, which is especially evident in Germany, in Hans Driesch (Philosophie des Organischen, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1909, 2nd ed., 1921) is indicative of a very lively reaction of minds, even in this domain; transplantation, heredity, regeneration, organic action conditioned by the entire past of the individual, are all factual proofs against the theory of the machine organism: the living being is a harmonic “equipotential” system, that is to say a set of cells whose organization remains the same, if parts are arbitrarily removed. The notion of life, taken as an absolute, is the basis of many doctrines of our time, for example that of the Russian philosopher N. Lossky (Intuition, Matter and Life, 1928) who supports an organic conception of the world. But all this research is dominated by the doctrine of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who, by the kind of conversion to which it invites the mind, has transformed the conditions of philosophical thought in our time.