A New Philosophy

by Edouard Le Roy

Juxtaposition and arrangement are the geometrical operations which typify the work of knowledge in such a case; or else we must fall back on metaphors from some mental chemistry, such as proportioning and combination.

In all cases, the method is still that of alignment and blending of pre-existent concepts.

Now the mere fact of proceeding thus is equivalent to setting up the concept as a symbol of an abstract class. That being done, explanation of a thing is no more than showing it in the intersection of several classes, partaking of each of them in definite proportions: which is the same as considering it sufficiently expressed by a list of general frames into which it will go. The unknown is then, on principle, and in virtue of this theory, referred to the already known; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to grasp any true novelty or any irreducible originality.

On principle, once more, we claim to reconstruct nature with pure symbols; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to reach its concrete reality, "the invisible and present soul."

This intuitional coinage in fixed standard concepts, this creation of an easily handled intellectual cash, is no doubt of evident practical utility. For knowledge in the usual sense of the word is not a disinterested operation; it consists in finding out what profit we can draw from an object, how we are to conduct ourselves towards it, what label we can suitably attach to it, under what already known class it comes, to what degree it is deserving of this or that title which determines an attitude we must take up, or a step we must perform. Our end is to place the object in its approximate class, having regard to advantageous employment or to everyday language. Then, and only then, we find our pigeon-holes all ready-made; and the same parcel of reagents meets all cases. A universal catechism is here in existence to meet every research; its different clauses define so many unshifting points of view, from which we regard each object, and our study is subsequently limited to applying a kind of nomenclature to the preconstructed frames.

Once again the philosopher has to proceed in exactly the opposite direction. He has not to confine himself to ready-made business concepts, of the ordinary kind, suits cut to an average model, which fit nobody because they almost fit everybody; but he has to work to measure, incessantly renew his plant, continually recreate his mind, and meet each new problem with a fresh adaptive effort. He must not go from concepts to things, as if each of them were only the cutting-point of several concurrent generalities, an ideal centre of intersecting abstractions; on the contrary, he must go from things to concepts, incessantly creating new thoughts, and incessantly recasting the old.

There could be no solution of the problem in a more or less ingenious mosaic or tessellation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be employed. We need plastic fluid, supple and living concepts, capable of being continually modelled on reality, of delicately following its infinite curves. The philosopher's task is then to create concepts much more than to combine them. And each of the concepts he creates must remain open and adjustable, ready for the necessary renewal and adaptation, like a method or a programme: it must be the arrow pointing to a path which descends from intuition to language, not a boundary marking a terminus. In this way only does philosophy remain what it ought to be: the examination into the consciousness of the human mind, the effort towards enlargement and depth which it attempts unremittingly, in order to advance beyond its present intellectual condition.

Do you want an example? I will take that of human personality. The ego is one; the ego is many: no one contests this double formula. But everything admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what is bound to happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, by the mere fact that we take them for general frames independent of the reality contained, for detached language admitting empty and blank definition, always representable by the same word, no matter what the circumstances: they are no longer living and coloured ideas, but abstract, motionless, and neutral forms, without shades or gradations, without distinction of case, characterising two points of view from which you can observe anything and everything. This being so, how could the application of these forms help us to grasp the original and peculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity of the ego? Still further, how could we, between two such entities, statically defined by their opposition, ever imagine a synthesis? Correctly speaking, the interesting question is not whether there is unity, multiplicity, combination, one with the other, but to see what sort of unity, multiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all, to understand how the living person is at once multiple unity and one multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation are connected, how these two diverging branches of abstraction join at the roots. The interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolical colourless marks indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is the continuity between, with its changing wealth of colouring, and the double progress of shades which resolve it into red and violet.

But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless we begin from direct intuition and descend to the analysing concepts.

Again, the same duty of reversing our familiar attitude, of inverting our customary proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. The conceptual atomism of common thought leads it to place movement in a lower order than rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. According to common thought, movement is added to the atom, as a supplementary accident to a body previously at rest; and, by becoming, the pre-existent terms are strung together like pearls on a necklace. It delights in rest, and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves. Immobility appears to it to be the base of existence. It decomposes and pulverises every change and every phenomenon, until it finds the invariable element in them. It is immobility which it esteems as primary, fundamental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on the contrary, which it seeks to explain as a function of immobility. And so it tends, out of progresses and transitions, to make things. To see distinctly, it appears to need a dead halt. What indeed are concepts but logical look-out stations along the path of becoming? what are they but motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted stream of movement?