INTRODUCTION LETTER TO DANIEL HALEVY My dear Halevy — I should doubtless have left these studies buried in the bound volumes of a review if some friends, whose judgment I value, had not. thought that it would be a good thing to bring them before the notice of a wider public, as they serve to make better known one of the most singular social phenomena that history records. But it seemed to me that it would be necessary to give this public some additional explanations, since I cannot often expect to find judges as indulgent as you have been.
When I published, in the Mouvement Socialiste, the articles which are now collected in this volume, I did not write with the intention of composing a book: I simply wrote down my reflections as they came into my mind. I knew that the subscribers to that review would have no difficulty in following me, since they were already famiHar with the theories, which for some years my friends and I had developed in its pages. But I am con- vinced that the readers of this book, on the contrary, will be very bewildered if I do not submit a kind of defence which will enable them to consider things from my own habitual point of view. In the course of our conversations, you have sometimes made remarks which fitted so well into the system of my own ideas that 2 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE they often led me to investigate certain questions more thoroughly. I am sure that the reflections which I here submit to you, and which you have provoked, will be very useful to those who wish to read this book with profit.
There are perhaps few studies in which the defects of my method of writing are more evident; I have been frequently reproached for not respecting the rules of the art of writing, to which all our contemporaries submit, and for thus inconveniencing my readers by the disorder of my explanations. I have tried to render the text clearer by numerous corrections of detail, but I have not been able to make the disorder disappear. I do not wish to defend myself by pleading the example of great writers who have been blamed for not knowing how to compose. Arthur Chuquet, speaking of J. J. Rousseau, said: '* His writings lack harmony, order, and that connection of the parts which constitutes a unity." ^ The defects of illustrious men do not justify the faults of the obscure, and I think that it is better to explain frankly the origin of this incorrigible vice in my writings.
It is only recently that the rules of the art of writing have imposed themselves in a really imperative way; contemporary authors appear to have accepted them readily, because they wished to please a hurried and often very inattentive public, and one which is desirous above all of avoiding any personal investigation. These rules were first applied by the people who manufacture scholastic books. Since the aim of education has been to make the pupils absorb an enormous amount of information, it has been necessary to put into their hands manuals suitable to this extra rapid instruction; everything has had to be presented in a form so clear, so logically arranged, and so calculated to dispel doubt, that in the end the beginner comes to believe that science is much simpler than our fathers supposed. In this * A. Chuquet, Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. 179.
LETTER TO DANIEL HALEVY j way the mind is very richly furnished in a very Httle time, but it is not furnished with implements which facili- tate individual effort. These methods have been imitated by poHtical publicists and by the people who attempt to popularise knowledge.^ Seeing these rules of the art of writing so widely adopted, people who reflect little have ended by believing that they were based on the nature of things themselves.
I am neither a professor, a populariser of knowledge, nor a candidate for party leadership. I am a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction. That is why the rules of the art of writing have never interested me very much.
During twenty years I worked to deliver myself from what I retained of my education; I read books, not so much to learn as to efface from my memory the ideas which had been thrust upon it. It is only during the last fifteen years that I have really worked for the purpose of learning; but I have never found any one to teach me what I wanted to know. I have had to be my own master, and in a way to educate myself. I make notes in which I formulate my thoughts as they arise; I return three or four times to the same question, adding correc- tions which amplify the original, and sometimes even transform it from top to bottom; I only stop when I have exhausted the reserve of ideas stirred up by recent reading. This work is very difficult for me; that is why I like to take as my subject the discussion of a book by a good author: I can then arrange my thoughts more easily than when I am left to my own unaided efforts.
You will remember what Bergson has written about the impersonal, the socialised, the ready-made, all of which contains a lesson for students who need knowledge 1 I recall here a phrase of Renan: " Reading, in order to be of any use, must be an exercise involving some effort " {Feuilles detachees, 4 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE for practical life. A student has more confidence in the formulas which he is taught, and consequently retains them more easily, when he believes that they are accepted by the great majority; in this way all metaphysical pre- occupations are removed from his mind and he is to feel no need for a personal conception of things; he often comes to look on the absence of any inventive spirit as a superiority.
My own method of work is entirely opposed to this; for I put before my readers the working of a mental effort which is continually endeavouring to break through the bonds of what has been previously constructed for common use, in order to discover that which is truly personal and individual. The only things I find it worth while entering in my notebooks are those which I have not met elsewhere; I readily skip the transitions between these things, because they nearly always come under the heading of commonplaces.
The communication of thought is always very difficult for any one who has strong metaphysical preoccupations; he thinks that speech will spoil the most fimdamental parts of his thought, those which are very near to the motive power of the mind, those which appear so natural to him that he never seeks to express them. A reader has great difficulty in grasping the thought of an inventor, because he can only attain it by finding again the path traversed by the latter. Verbal communication is much easier than written communication, because words act on the feelings in a mysterious way and easily establish a current of sympathy between people; it is for this reason that an orator is able to produce conviction by arguments which do not seem very comprehensible to any one reading the speech later. You know how useful it is to have heard Bergson if one wants to recognise clearly the tendencies of his doctrine and to imderstand his books rightly. When one has followed his courses LETTER TO DANIEL HALEVY J of lectures for some time one becomes familiar with the order of his ideas and gets one's bearings more easily amidst the novelties of his philosophy.
The defects of my manner of writing prevent me getting access to a wide public; but I think that we ought to be content with the place that nature and circumstances have assigned to each of us, without desiring to force our natural talent. There is a necessary division of fimctions in the world; it is a good thing that some are content to work, simply that they may submit their reflections to a few studious people, whilst others love to address the great mass of busy humanity. All things considered, I do not think that mine is the worst lot, for I am not exposed to the danger of becoming my own disciple, as has happened to the greatest philo- sophers when they have endeavoured to give a perfectly symmetrical form to the intuitions they brought into the world. You will certainly not have forgotten the smiUng disdain with which Bergson has spoken of this infirmity of genius. So little am I capable of becoming my own disciple that I am unable to take up an old work of mine again with the idea of stating it better, or even of completing it; it is easy enough for me to add correc- tions and to annotate it, but I have many times vainly tried to think the past over again.
Much more, then, am I prevented from ever becom- ing the founder of a school; ^ but is that really a great 1 I think it may be interesting to quote here some reflections borrowed from an admirable book of Newman's: " It will be our wisdom to avail ourselves of language, as far as it will go, but to aim mainly, by means of it, to stimulate in those to whom we address ourselves, a mode of thinking and trains of thought similar to our own, leading them on by their own independent action, not by any syllogistic compulsion. Hence it is that an intellectual school will always have something of an esoteric character; for it is an assemblage of minds that think, their bond is unity of thought, and their words become a sort of tessera, not expressing thought but symbolising it" {Grammar of Assent, p. 309). As a matter of fact, the schools have hardly ever resembled this ideal sketched out bv Newman.
6 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE misfortune? Disciples have nearly always exercised a pernicious influence on the thought of him they called their master, and who has often believed himself obliged to follow them. There is no doubt that his transformation by young enthusiasts into the leader of a party was a real disaster for Marx; he would have done much more useful work if he had not been the slave of the Marxists.
People have often laughed at Hegel's belief — that humanity, since its origins, had worked to give birth to the Hegelian philosophy, and that with that philosophy Spirit had at last completed its development. Similar illusions are found to a certain extent in all founders of schools; disciples expect their master to close the era of doubt by giving final solutions to all problems. I have no aptitude for a task of that kind. Every time that I have approached a question, I have found that my enquiries ended by giving rise to new problems, and the farther I pushed my investigations the more disquieting these new problems became. But philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists.
It is my ambition to be able occasionally to stir up personal research. There is probably in the mind of every man, hidden under the ashes, a quickening fire, and the greater the number of ready-made doctrines the mind has received blindly the more is this fire threatened with extinction; the awakener is the man who stirs the ashes and thus makes the flames leap up. I do not think that I am praising myself without cause when I say that J have sometimes succeeded in liberating the spirit of invention in my readers; and it is the spirit of invention which it is above all necessary to stir up in the world. It is better to have obtained this result than to have gained the banal approbation of people who LETTER TO DANIEL HA LEVY 7 repeat formulas and enslave their own thought in the disputes of the schools.
My Reflections on Violence have irritated many people on account of the pessimistic conception on which the whole of the study rests; but I know that you do not share this impression; you have brilliantly shown in your Histoire de quatre ans that you despise the deceptive hopes with which the weak solace themselves. We can then talk pessimism freely to each other, and I am happy to have a correspondent who does not revolt against a doctrine without which nothing very great has been accomplished in this world. I have felt for some time that Greek philosophy did not produce any great moral result, simply because it was, as a rule, very optimistic. Socrates was at times optimistic to an almost unbearable degree.
The aversion of most of our contemporaries from every pessimistic conception is doubtless derived, to a great extent, from our system of education. The Jesuits, who created nearly ever5^hing that the University still con- tinues to teach, were optimists because they had to combat the pessimism which dominated Protestant theories, and because they popularised the ideas of the Renaissance; the Renaissance interpreted antiquity by means of the philosophers, and consequently misunderstood the masterpieces of tragic art so completely that our con- temporaries have had considerable difficulty in redis- covering their pessimistic significance.^ 1 " The significant melancholy found in the masterpieces of Hellenic art prove that, even at that time, gifted individuals were able to peer through the illusions of life to which the spirit of their own surrendered itself without the slightest critical reflection " (Hartmann, The Philo- sophy of the Unconscious, Eng. trans., vol. iii. p. 78; ii. p. 436).
I call attention to this view, which sees in the genius of the great Greeks a historical anticipation; few doctrines are more important for an understanding of history than that of anticipations, which Newman used in his researches on the history of dogmas.
B 8 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was such a concert of groaning that pessimism became odious. Poets, who were not, as a matter of fact, much to be pitied, professed to be victims of fate, of human wickedness, and still more of the stupidity of a world which had not been able to distract them; they eagerly assumed the attitudes of a Prometheus called upon to dethrone jealous gods, and with a pride equal to that of the fierce Nimrod of Victor Hugo (whose arrows, hurled at the sky, fell back stained with blood), they imagined that their verses inflicted deadly wounds on the estab- lished powers who dared to refuse to bow down before them. The prophets of the Jews never dreamed of so much destruction to avenge their Jehovah as these literary people dreamed of to satisfy their vanity. When this fashion for imprecations had passed, sensible men began to ask themselves if all this display of pretended pessimism had not been the result of a certain want of mental balance.
The immense successes obtained by industrial civilisa- tion has created the belief that, in the near future, happi- ness will be produced automatically for everybody. '* The present century," writes Hartmann, " has for the last forty years only entered the third period of illusion. In the enthusiasm and enchantment of its hopes, it rushes towards the realisation of the promise of a new age of gold. Providence takes care that the anticipations of the isolated thinker do not disarrange the course of history by prematurely gaining too many adherents." He thinks that for this reason his readers will have some difficulty in accepting his criticism of the illusion of future happiness. The leaders of the contemporary world are pushed towards optimism by economic forces.^ So little are we prepared to imderstand pessimism, that we generally employ the word quite incorrectly: * Hartmann, loc. cit. vol. iii. p. 102.
LETTER TO DANIEL HALEVY g we call pessimists people who axe in reality only dis- illusioned optimists. When we meet a man who, having been unfortunate in his enterprises, deceived in his most legitimate ambitions, humihated in his affections, ex- presses his griefs in the form of a violent revolt against the dupHcity of his associates, the stupidity of society, or the blindness of destiny, we are disposed to look upon him as a pessimist; whereas we ought nearly always to regard him as a disheartened optimist who has not had the courage to start afresh, and who is unable to under- stand why so many misfortunes have befallen him, con- trary to what he supposes to be the general law governing the production of happiness.
The optimist in politics is an inconstant and even i dangerous man, because he takes no accoimt of the great difficulties presented by his projects; these projects seem to him to possess a force of their own, which tends I to bring about their reahsation all the more easily as they | are, in his opinion, destined to produce the happiest results, i He frequently thinks that small reforms in the political constitution, and, above all, in the personnel of the govern- ment, will be sufficient to direct social development in such a way as to mitigate those evils of the contemporary world which seem so harsh to the sensitive mind. As soon as his friends come into power, he declares that it is necessary to let things alone for a Httle, not to hurry too much, and to learn how to be content with whatever their own benevolent intentions prompt them to do. It is not always self-interest that suggests these expressions of satisfaction, as people have often believed; self- interest is strongly aided by vanity and by the illusions of philosophy. The optimist passes with remarkable facility from revolutionary anger to the most ridiculous! social pacificism.
If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds himself armed with great power, permitting him lo REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE to realise the ideal he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is tempted to gi^i rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so dangerous to the happi- ness of all. During the Terror, the men who spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had the most sympathy with human wretched- ness: optimists, idealists, and sensitive men, the greater desire they had for imiversal happiness the more inexor- able they showed themselves.
Pessimism is quite a different thing from the caricatures of it which are usually presented to us; it is a philosophy of conduct rather than a theory of the world; it considers the march towards deliverance as narrowly conditioned, on the one hamd, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired from the obstacles which oppose them- selves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if we like, by the feeling of social determinism), and, on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These two aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although, as a rule, scarcely any attention is paid to their close connection.
I. The conception of pessimism springs from the fact that literary historians have been very much struck with the complaints made by the great poets of antiquity on the subject of the griefs which constantly threaten mankind. There are few people who have not, at one time or another, experienced a piece of good fortime; but we are surrounded by malevolent forces always ready to spring out on us from some ambuscade and overwhelm us. Hence the very real suiferings which arouse the LETTER TO DANIEL HALEVY it sympathy of nearly all men, even of those who have been more favourably treated by fortune; so that the literature of grief has always had a certain success throughout the whole course of history.^ But a study of this kind of literature would give us a very imperfect idea of pessim- ism. It may be laid down as a general rule, that in order to understand a doctrine it is not sufficient to study it in an abstract manner, nor even as it occurs in isolated people: it is necessary to find out how it has been mani- fested in historical groups; it is for this reason that I am here led to add the two elements that were mentioned earlier.
2. The pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system boimd together by an iron law which cannot be evaded, so that the system is given, as it were, in one block, and cannot disappear except in a catastrophe which involves the whole. If this theory is admitted, it then becomes absurd to make certain wicked men re- sponsible for the evils from which society suffers; the pessimist is not subject to the sanguinary follies of the optimist, infatuated by the unexpected obstacles that his projects meet with; he does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughter- ing existing egoists.
3. The most fundamental element of pessimism is its method of conceiving the path towards deliverance. A man would not go very far in the examination either of the laws of his own wretchedness or of fate, which so much shock the ingenuousness of our pride, if he were not borne up by the hope of putting an end to these tyrannies by an effort, to be attempted with the help of a whole band of companions. The Christians would not have discussed original sin so much if they had not felt 1 The sham cries of despair which were heard at the beginning of the nineteenth century owed part of their success to the analogies of form which they presented to the real literature of pessimism.
12 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE the necessity of justifying the dehverance (which was to result from the death of Jesus) by supposing that this sacrifice had been rendered necessary by a frightful crime, which could be imputed to humanity. If the people of the West were much more occupied with original sin than those of the East, it was not solely, as Taine thought, owing to the influence of Roman law,^ but also because the Latins, having a more elevated conception of the imperial majesty than the Greeks, regarded the sacrifice of the Son of God as having realised an extraordinarily marvellous deliverance; from this proceeded the necessity of intensifying human wretchedness and of destiny.
It seems to me that the optimism of the Greek philo- sophers depended to a great extent on economic reasons; it probably arose in the rich and conunercial urban populations who were able to regard the universe as an immense shop full of excellent things with which they could satisfy their greed.^ I imagine that Greek pessimism sprang from poor warlike tribes living in the mountains, who were filled with an enormous aristocratic pride, but whose material conditions were correspondingly poor; their poets charmed them by praising their ancestors and made them look forward to triumphal expeditions con- ducted by superhuman heroes; they explsdned their present wretchedness to them by relating catastrophes in which semi-divine former chiefs had succumbed to fate or the jealousy of the gods; the courage of the warriors might for the moment be imable to accompUsh anything, but it would not always be so; the tribe must remain faithful to the old customs in order to be ready for great and victorious expeditions, which might very well take place in the near future.
1 Taine, Le Regime Moderns, vol. ii. pp. 121-122.
' The Athenian comic poets have several times depicted a land of Cokaigne, where there was no need to work (A. and M. Croiset, Histoire de la litter ature Grecque, vol. iii. pp. 472-474).
LETTER TO DANIEL HA LEVY 13 Oriental asceticism has often been considered the most remarkable manifestation of pessimism; Hartmann is certainly right when he regards it as having only the value of an anticipation, which was useful since it re- minded men how much there is that is illusory in vulgar riches; he was wrong, however, in saying that asceticism taught men that the ** destined end to all their efforts *' was the annihilation of will,* for in the course of history deliverance has taken quite other forms than this.
In primitive Christianity we find a fully developed and completely armed pessimism: man is condemned to slavery from his birth — Satan is the prince of the world — the Christian, already regenerate by baptism, can render himself capable of obtaining the resurrection of the body by means of the Eucharist; * he awaits the glorious second coming of Christ, who will destroy the rule of Satan and call his comrades in the fight to the heavenly Jerusalem. The Christian Hfe of that time was dominated by the necessity of membership in the holy army which was constantly exposed to the ambuscades set by the accom- plices of Satan; this conception produced many heroic acts, engendered a courageous propaganda, and was the cause of considerable moral progress. The deliverance did not take place, but we know by innumerable testimonies from that time what great things the march towards deliverance can bring about.
Sixteenth^ century Calvinism presents a spectacle which is perhaps even more instructive; but we must be careful not to confuse it, as many authors have done, with contemporary Protestantism; these two doctrines * Hartmann, loc cit. p. 130. " Contempt for the world, combined with a transcendent Hfe of the spirit, had, indeed, in India, already found a place in the esoteric doctrine of Buddhism. But this teaching was only within the reach of a narrow circle of celibate adepts; -the outside world had only taken the ' letter which kills,' so that the thought only attained realisation in the eccentric phenomena of hermits and penitents" (p. 81).
« Battifol, £tudes d'histoire et de tfUologie positive, 2nd series, p. 162.
X4 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE are the antipodes of each other. I cannot understand how Hartmann came to say that Protestantism '* is a halting place in the journey of true Christianity," and that it " allied itself with the renaissance of ancient paganism." ^ These judgments only apply to recent Protestantism, which has abandoned its own principles in order to adopt those of the Renaissance. Pessimism, which formed no part of the current of ideas which char- acterised the Renaissance,^ has never been so strongly affirmed as it was by the Reformers. The dogmas of sin and predestination which correspond to the two first aspects of pessimism, the wretchedness of the human species, and social determinism, were pushed to their most extreme consequences. Deliverance was conceived imder a very different form to that which had been given it by primitive Christianity; Protestants organised them- selves into a military force wherever possible; they made expeditions into Catholic countries, expelled the priests, introduced the reformed cult, and promulgated laws of proscription against papists. They no longer borrowed from the apocalypses the idea of a great final catastrophe, of which the brothers-in-arms who had for so long defended themselves against the attacks of Satan would only be spectators; the Protestants, nourished on the reading of the Old Testament, wished to imitate the exploits of the conquerors of the Holy Land; they took the offensive, and wished to establish the kingdom of God by force. In each locality they conquered the Calvinists brought about a real catastrophic revolution, which changed everything from top to bottom.
1 Hartmann, The Religion of the Future, Eng. trans., p. 23.
* " At this epoch commenced the struggle between the Pagan love of life and the Christian hatred of this world and avoidance of it " (Hartmann, op. cit. p. 88). This pagan conception is to be found in liberal protestantism, and this is why Hartmann rightly considers it to be irreligious; but the men of the sixteenth century took a very different view of the matter.
LETTER TO DANIEL HA LEVY is Calvinism was finally conquered by the Renaissance; it was full of theological prejudices derived from medieval traditions, and there came a time when it feared to be thought too far behind the times; it wished to be on the level of modem culture, and it finished by becoming simply a lax Christianity.^ To-day very few people suspect what the reformers of the sixteenth century meant by " free examination "; the Protestants of to-day apply the same method to the Bible that philol- ogists apply to any profane text; Calvin's exegesis has been replaced by the criticisms of the humanists.