A New Philosophy

by Edouard Le Roy

Its revealing virtue is derived from this moving contact with fact, and this living effort of sympathy. This is what we must tend to transpose from the practical to the speculative order.

What, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After taking cognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativity in which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, something which decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such a principle, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its action of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus only be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem of temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate, the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception considered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this will be for us a criterion and departure-point.

Let us specify this point. Immediate data or primitive data or pure data are apprehended by us under forms of disinterested action; I mean that they are first of all lived rather than conceived, that before becoming material for science, they appear as moments of life; in brief, that perception of them precedes their use.

It is at this stage previous to language that we are by these pure data in intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our critical task is to return to them through a regressive analysis, the goal of which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to our primordial intuition. The latter already constitutes a thought, a preconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which is action itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question here of restricting in any degree the part played by thought, but only of distinguishing between the perceptive and theoretic functions of mind.

What is "the image" of which Mr Bergson speaks at the beginning of "Matter and Mind" except, when grasped in its first movement, the flash of conscious existence "in which the act of knowledge coincides with the generating act of reality"? ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", philosophical vocabulary, article "Immediate".)

Let us forget all philosophical controversies about realism and idealism; let us try to reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, a virginal and candid glance, freeing us from the habits contracted in the course of practical life. These then are our "images": not things presented externally, nor states felt internally, not portraits of exterior beings nor projections of internal moods, but appearances, in the etymological sense of the word, appearances lived simply, without our being distinguished from them, as yet neither subjective nor objective, marking a moment of consciousness previous to the work of reflection, from which proceeds the duality of subject and object. And such also, in every order, appear the "immediate feelings"; as action in birth, previous to language. (Cf. "Matter and Memory", Foreword to the 7th edition.)

Why depart from the immediate thus conceived as action and life? Because it is quite impossible to do otherwise, for every initial fact can be only such a pulsation of consciousness in its lived act, and the fundamental and primitive direction of the least word, were it in an enunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only be such a direction of life and action. And we must certainly accord to this immediacy a value of absolute knowledge, since it realises the coincidence of being and knowledge.

But let us not think that the perception of immediacy is simple passive perception, that it is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, today when our utilitarian education is completed and has passed into the state of habit. There is a difference between common experience and the initial action of life; the first is a practical limitation of the second. Hence it follows that a previous criticism is necessary to return from one to the other, a criticism always in activity, always open as a way of progressive investigation, always ready for the reiteration and the renewal of effort.

In this task of purification there is doubtless always to be feared an illusion of remaining in the primitive stage. By what criteria, by what signs can we recognise that we have touched the goal? Pure fact is shown to be such on the one hand because it remains independent of all theoretical symbolism, because the critique of language allows it to exist thus as an indissoluble residue, because we are unable not to "live" it, even when we free ourselves from the anxiety of utility; on the other hand, because it dominates all systems, and imposes itself equally upon them all as the common source from which they derive by diverging analyses, and in which they become reconciled. Assuredly, to attain it, to extricate it, we must appeal to the revelations of science, to the exercise of deliberate thought. But this employment of analysis against analysis does not in any way constitute a circle, for it tends only to destroy prejudices which have become unconscious: it is a simple artifice destined to break off habits and to scatter illusions by changing the points of view. Once set free, once again become capable of direct and simple view, what we accept as fact is what bears no trace of synthetic elaboration. It is true that here a last objection presents itself: how shall we think this limit, purely given, to any degree at all in fact, if it must precede all language?

The answer is easy. Why speak thus of limit? This word has two senses: at one time it designates a last term in a series of approximations, and at another a certain internal character of convergence, a certain quality of progression.