Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

by Remy de Gourmont

[THE ROOTS OF IDEALISM]

I

Since writing, in Physique de l'Amour, the chapter on "The Tyranny of the Nervous System," with its criticism of Lamarck's saying, "the environment creates the organ," I have come to conceive some doubts on the legitimacy of my ideas. I am going to state them without definitely taking sides either against myself or against subjective idealism, to which in the last analysis I remain in large part faithful.

Idealism is to-day the dominant doctrine in philosophy, which was bound to come to it, after a period of raillery, for reasoning leads to it invincibly.

We know that there are two idealisms. It is then prudent, whenever this word is employed in a context not purely philosophic, to define it. There are two idealisms, both qualified by a word which is identical in form, but different in meaning, since one comes from ideal, the other from idea. The former is the expression of a moral or religious state of mind. It is very nearly synonymous with spiritualism, and it is this that M. Brunetière employs when that hard-hearted man becomes sentimental on the subject of the "renaissance of idealism." There is a certain "Revue Idéaliste," marked by a serene religious sentiment, which belongs to the same clan, and in which it would be a mistake to seek any enlightenment on Berkeley's doctrine.

The other idealism, which it would have been better to call ideaism, and which Nietzsche has carried to the point of phenomenalism, is a philosophical conception of the world. Schopenhauer, who was not its inventor, has provided it with its best formula—the world is my representation. That is to say, the world is such as it appears to me. If it has a real existence in itself, it is inaccessible to me. It is that which I see it, or feel it, to be.

Schopenhauer's formula withstands every criticism. It is irrefutable. The doctrine which derives from it, if attacked directly, presents itself as an impregnable fortress. Every reasoning blunts itself impotently against it. It has this remarkable quality, that it is as valid for the sensation, for the sentiment, as for the idea. There may be based upon it equally, at will, a theory of intelligence, like Taine's, or a theory of sensibility—something which has not been yet attempted. Take the hackneyed statement that the same painful event does not affect with the same intensity two persons whom it strikes with the same external force. That is idealism. Take the subject of tastes and of colours (in which Nietzsche found so much amusement). There too, we have idealism. Whenever we study life, facts, intelligences, physiologies, sensibilities for the purpose of finding, not resemblances, but differences, we are practising idealism. While there is life, there is idealism. That is to say, there are, according to the species, or even the individual, different ways of reacting against an external or internal sensation. Everything is merely representation, for a bird as well as for a man, for a crab as for a cuttle-fish. Reality is relative. A woman, a nervous man even, can suffer intensely—perhaps lose consciousness—by imagining the amputation of a leg, the scraping of the bones. Hardened soldiers, on the contrary, have undergone such operations without flinching. A particular taste for cruelty should not be attributed to the civilizations which countenanced torture, and to those which still practise it. The refinements which the Chinese bring to physical punishment are nothing but a very clear indication of insensibility. That which agonizes a European makes a yellow man smile. But there are, among men of the same social group, numerous degrees of sensibility. Pain, like pleasure, is a representation. The formula has been extended to groups. A people is what it believes itself to be, very much more than what it actually is. Most social disorders are merely collective representations.

But it is difficult to explain idealism by an examination of the facts of sensibility. They are too well known, too generally admitted, to support a philosophic construction. A point of departure more extraordinary and less easy to understand is needed. The phenomenon of vision is generally employed in this connection. It seems simple, but, when analyzed, it is exceedingly mysterious.

Seeing is the most natural thing in the world. Yet, what do we see, when we see a tree? A tree, to be sure, but not the tree itself. What enters us, as object perceived, is not the tree as tree, but the tree as image. What is the image worth? Is it exact?

So it may be supposed, since it is sensibly the same for the various persons who perceive it, and since divergences of appreciation begin only when there come into play judgments conditioned by sentiment or interest. This supposed exactitude is, in any case, very relative. An image is an image, a photograph, and it differs from the reality-tree (pure hypothesis) as much as a round, long, branching, leafy object differs from a graphic representation, without thickness. It is true that tactile sensation, or its memory, comes then to our aid, adding to the tenuousness of the visual image the idea of consistence, of resistance, without which we have difficulty in conceiving matter. We can then—and thanks also to our observation of the opposing play of light and shade—give this vain image its true position in space.