Kitabı oku: «Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas», sayfa 12
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.
But however complete and concordant may be the actions of our senses, when it is a question of knowing an object – even when, as in sexual love, the six senses, including the genital sense, come into play simultaneously – it is none the less the fact that the object known remains exterior to ourselves. Besides, this qualification "known" is little appropriate to the object perceived, since it has an interior face, inaccessible at first glance to our senses. If we are dealing with a living being – and all the more if this being be intelligent and complex – we must exercise all sorts of faculties and devote ourselves to minute analyses in order to arrive, even then, at a knowledge that is very nearly illusory.
Knowledge arrives, then, at a certain bankruptcy. It is not very far from this point to that of proclaiming the uselessness of the external world as a means of explaining the nature of knowledge itself. It is only a step from uselessness to reality. The idealistic philosophers who develop their theory to its logical conclusion, can say, without paradox, that everything occurs in vision, for example, as if the object did not exist – as if intelligence, though believing that it receives aid from the eye, in reality created this object just as far as it wishes to know it. The phenomenon of hallucinations gives an appearance of reason to these exasperated idealists. Did not Taine, who was not exasperated, call sensation a true hallucination? But why true? That is a word which, in the circumstances, it is difficult to justify. It would be juster to say that hereditary habit inclines us to regard certain sensations as true, certain others as false. Perhaps utility serves us also as guide, and we imagine, in order to reassure ourselves, an external and fallacious world whose operations correspond to the movements of our psychology.
II
There is another way of knowing, at once more elementary, more intimate, and more uncertain. This is absorption. The elements of our nourishment, in proportion as we "know" them, disintegrate, yield soluble parts to our organism, and reject the rest in a form equally unknowable. If we reject, as we should, the primitive distinction between soul and body, admitting only the body and believing everything to be physical, then this way of knowing should be studied parallel with those ways which spring from each of our different senses, or from their collaboration. It is certain that absorption has taught man in every age. It is through it, and not by virtue of an unknown instinct, that he has succeeded in separating vegetables and animals into good and bad, into useful and harmful or indifferent. Our analytical methods are still unable, save perhaps in particularly expert hands, to distinguish mushrooms as a harmful or favourable form of nourishment. The expert himself must be guided, for this delicate operation, by a direct and real experiment of absorption. Man, devoid of science, took himself as laboratory. None was surer. He acquired, by this means, certain parts of his knowledge which have proved most useful to humanity and to the domestic animals. From time to time medications are rediscovered which figure in ancient pharmacopeias. Thus formate of lime or of soda, recently prescribed as a muscular invigorant, contains scarcely a principle that did not figure in the old "water of magnanimity," obtained by maceration and distillation of a certain quantity of ants. How did our ancestors, who were no doubt shepherds and labourers, come to distinguish the virtue of ants? Evidently by eating them. The foul Arabs and other low forms of humanity who eat their vermin, find in them, perhaps, an analogous tonic. This practice, like all those which resolve themselves into absorption, is assuredly dictated by experience. Neither a man nor an animal can, in principle, become addicted to an act which is harmful to him. Between acts that are harmful, and acts that are salutary, there is a whole series of games, but it is difficult to admit that a daily game is a harmful act.
Why do not peasants eat certain abundant rodents? It is easy to answer by offering taste and disgust as pretexts; but this is reversing the logical order of the terms of the argument.
A food does not disgust by its odour. The odour of a food disgusts because this food is harmful or useless. To understand this, without the necessity of insisting upon it, it is enough to think of all those foods with nauseous odours, which we appreciate much more than those which might be considered pleasant. Such is the fruit of experience, that is to say, of knowledge.
I believe that absorption should be considered one of the best means we have of appreciating the practical value of certain parts of the external world. Agriculture, kitchen-gardening, cooking, pharmacy almost entirely, are born of it. Assuredly men, even the rarest chemists and physiologists, could suck a kola-nut for years, without suspecting those virtues that savages found quite simply by cracking it with their teeth.
They jest who, ignoring not only the importance but the very existence of this sixth or seventh or tenth sense, attribute to taste or to smell a mysterious power of divining the harmfulness of a plant or of its fruit. How can they help seeing immediately that this preservative instinct, if it be hereditary, has had a beginning, and that, at this beginning, there was a fact of knowledge? The traditional notion of instinct must be left in the old theological and spiritualistic repertories. It serves simple people as an easy means of distinguishing man from the animals. Animals have instinct, man has intelligence. There are proofs. Man poisons himself with mushrooms, frugivorous animals never. What man? Not the traditional peasant surely. Only the déraciné or the city-dweller, who has naturally lost an instinct which was useless to him. This proof proves only that it is dangerous for man, as for the other animals, or for plaints themselves, to change their habitat. There is a painful, uncertain transitory phase. It is during this phase that we go into the woods, picknicking, and gather toadstools. But rabbits in cages, when given wet grass or vegetables instinctively unknown to them, allow themselves to be completely poisoned. Free, it would never have occurred to them to crop at dewfall, because their ancestors, dwelling in extremely thick woodlands, were ignorant of the very existence of the dew, and transmitted distrust of wet grass to their offspring.
Man, even in the state of semi-civilization, is burdened with too much knowledge for it all to be transmitted hereditarily; but there is no doubt that the oldest and most useful reaches us in this manner. When we walk in the forest there are berries that tempt us, whortleberries, for example, but never alderberries. Who has taught us (I am supposing a real ignorance), that they are purgative and even dangerous? Instinct? What is instinct? The hereditary transmission of knowledge.
This transmission can, without doubt, occur in the case of abstract ideas, as well as of practical ideas – that is to say, useful for the conservation of life. Some, besides, are really useful, and even primordial. It is as reasonable to believe that they are inherited as to suppose them personally acquired. It might be possible to rehabilitate the theory of innate ideas, by revising it carefully and eliminating from its catalogue all sorts of Platonic or Christian inventions, too recent to have entered our blood.
As to the direct knowledge of ideas, this is gained in a form sensibly analogous to the knowledge of matter by absorption. Once they have entered us, ideas either remain inert, unknown, or else are disintegrated. In the first case, it is not long before they are expelled from the brain, much like an indigestible morsel which has entered the intestines. Their stay may produce a certain irritation, even lesions. That is to say, it may provoke absurd acts, manifestly without logical relation to the normal physiology of the patient. This effect may be observed in all countries, but especially in France, at the time of great political or moral crises. We see people tormented by the presence of a parasitic idea in their brain, like sheep by the residence of a trumpet-fly's egg in their frontal sinus. Man, like the sheep, has the "itch." That ends badly for the sheep – for the man also, very often.
In the second case, the external ideas that have entered the brain are disintegrated there and unite their atoms with the other atomic knowledge already within us. An idea is digested, assimilated. Assimilated, it then becomes very different from what it was when it entered the intelligence. Like intestinal absorption, mental absorption is, therefore, an excellent though indirect way of acquiring knowledge. In both cases, the ideas, like the aliments, will be known, not immediately, but by their effects. Thus men know hereditarily that certain ideas are individual or social poisons, and that others are equally favourable to the welfare of the individual or to the development of a people. But, in this order, notions of utility and of harmfulness are much less precise. We have seen a certain idea, reputed to be very dangerous, contributing to the health of a man, of a family, of a society, of civilization itself. Ideas are extremely workable, plastic. They take the shape of the brain. There are perhaps no ideas that are bad for a healthy brain whose form is normal. There are perhaps no good ones for a brain that is sick and warped.
III
But let us come back to our tree or our ox. This ox can enter us in one of two ways. First, partly, but really, in the form of food. What we absorb of it in that way cannot, evidently, be known as ox. It reaches our knowledge only through its effects – strength, health, gaiety, activity, depression. Even were this absorption total in the case of a small animal, digestible in all its parts, the result, from the point of view of immediate knowledge, would be the same, since the object becomes resolved into elements which render its form unknowable.
The other manner – that which brings into play the external senses – will make us know the ox, in appearance as such, in reality as image of an ox. What is the true value of this knowledge? We must here return to this question, in order to enter more easily upon the second part of this essay.
Truth has been very seriously defined as conformity of the representation of an object with this object itself. But that solves nothing. What is the object itself, since we can know it only as representation? It is useless to carry the discussion further. We shall turn indefinitely around the fortress of idealism, without ever finding an opening, or any weak point. We shall enter it never, no argument serving as a bomb against its solid walls.
However, we must consider carefully. Having thoroughly reflected, we shall ask if this fortress be real, or if, on the contrary, it be not, perhaps, a representation without object, a pure phantom, like those sunken cities whose bells still ring for great festivals, but are heard only by those who believe in their mysterious life. This doubt will lead us to re-examine the reasoning of Berkeley and of Kant, and see if it be well constructed. Does it start from the senses to reach the mind? Or may it not, perchance, be one of those mental conceptions which fall back upon the senses like an avalanche, freezing and smothering them?
How have the senses been formed? Such is the question. Has there always been an opposition between the ego and the non-ego? There is nothing in the intelligence that has not first been in the senses. By intelligence, we must in this philosophic dictum, due to Locke, understand the psychologic consciousness. Let us leave aside the consciousness, which can only serve to complicate the problem. Consciousness is a phenomenon of secondary order and of an entirely sentimental utility, if it be restricted to man; commonplace and of pure reflex, if extended to all sensible matter. Let us consider this matter in perhaps its humblest manifestations, taking account only of the actions and reactions, exactly as we might observe the influence of heat, of light, or of cold on milk, wine or water. In living matter there will, however, be something more – the decomposition will be compensated by assimilation, and if the assimilation be abundant, there will be generation. Other forms, resembling the first, will detach themselves from the matrix form. This represents life essentially, a living being, a being limited in duration by the very fact of its growth, which constitutes an effort and a loss. Let us consider a being whose senses are not differentiated, and let us see how it gets on with the rest of the world, how it knows it.
The amoeba has no exterior senses. It is an almost homogeneous mass, and yet it is sensible to almost the same sensorial impressions as the highest mammal. It feeds (smell and taste); it moves (sense of space, touch); it is sensible to light, at least to certain rays (sight); its environment being in perpetual movement, ceaselessly traversed by sonorous waves, it doubtless reacts to these vibrations (hearing). Perhaps, even, it possesses, without special organs, senses which we lack, and which we recover only by study and analysis, such as the chemical sense, which judges the composition of a body, declares it assimilable or counsels its rejection. The exercise of all these senses denotes, first of all, a very long heredity. They have, doubtless, been acquired successively only, unless, the absence of one of them being capable of causing death, their presence is the strict consequence of the life of this humble beast. But it is useless to construct any hypotheses on the subject. It is enough to keep to the fact, and this fact is the existence of a being without differentiated organs, that is to say, a being all of whose parts are equally adapted to react against every external excitation.
Why these reactions? They are one of the conditions of life. But could not life be conceived without them? It is possible. It is a question of environment. If the amoeba's environment were homogeneous and calm, if it were of a constant temperature and luminosity, if it furnished an abundance of proper nourishment, if, in a word, the animal dwelt in an alimentary bath, no reactions would be necessary, and its only movement would be to open its pores for food, to reject the excess of this food, to divide itself, when swollen, into two amoebas. Why, then, does it possess all these senses which, though unorganized, are perfectly real? Because the environment obliges it to have them, because of its instability. The senses, whether differentiated, or spread over the entire surface of a living form, are the creation of the environment which – light, sound, material exteriority, odours, etc. – acts in accordance with different discontinuous manifestations. Constant or continuous, they would be without effect. Discontinuous, they make themselves felt. Discontinuous light has created the eye, just as the drop of water creates a hole in granite.
A being, whatever it may be, whether vague and almost amorphous or clearly defined, is not isolated in the universal vital environment. It is the molecule of a diapason. It vibrates, not of its own accord, but in obedience to a general movement. The living cell, itself in internal movement and subjected to all the reactions of external movement, perceives this movement doubtless as an unique impression only. But when several cells come together and live in permanent contact, the impressions of external movement begin to be perceived as differentiated. Is this then necessary? Do there then already exist luminous vibrations, different from sonorous vibrations? Assuredly, since otherwise the sensorial differentiation would be inexplicable, being useless. The union of several cells permits the animal to divide its work of perception, and to present to each perceptible manifestation an organ or, at least, the sketch of an organ, appropriate to receive it.
It would be possible, it is true, from the idealistic point of view, to suppose that the senses are a creation of the individual, an enhancement of his own life, and that he differentiates, on his own initiative, his cinematic impression. This would be a phenomenon of spontaneous analytic creation, the analyzing instrument existing prior to the matter analyzed, or even, for exasperated idealists, creating this matter according to determinate needs, once and for all, by its own physiology. It would then be a property of organized living matter to fabricate senses for itself, and to diversify, by this means, its own life. This point of view is not easy to admit for several reasons, purely physical.
First, if this sensorial differentiation were a faculty of living matter, it would not be observed to be limited in its powers, as it is. Even admitting certain senses unknown to man, such as the chemical sense, the electric sense, the sense of orientation (extremely doubtful), it is still seen that the number of senses is very limited. But, far more important, the fundamental senses are found to be identical among the majority of the higher species, vertebrates and insects, with very few exceptions. The moment the animal arrives at sensorial differentiation, this differentiation occurs in response to the manifestations of matter.
The senses should, then, correspond to external realities. They have been created, not by the perceiving being, but by the perceptible environment. It is the light that has created the eye, just as, in our houses, it has created the windows. Where there is no light, fish become blind. This is perhaps the direct proof, for if light is the creation of the eye, this creation can occur at the bottom of the sea quite as well as on the surface of the earth. Another proof: these same fish, having become blind, but still requiring a luminous habitat, create for themselves in the night of the abysses, not eyes, but apparatus directly productive of light; and this artificial light creates anew the atrophied eye. The senses are then clearly the product of the environment. That is all they can do, moreover, their utility being nil, if the environment is not perceptible. It might still be objected that it is the nervous system which, having intuition of an environment to be perceived, creates for itself organs adapted to this perception. But this is merely begging the question; for, either the nervous system has knowledge of the external environment, which means that it already has senses, or else it has no senses, and thus can have no knowledge. A more serious objection would be that, sensorial aptitude being a property of the nervous system, it would afterwards create for itself organs in order to perceive more distinctly, and clearly differentiated, the various natural phenomena. This view would explain up to a certain point the creation of sensorial organs, but not the existence of the senses themselves as sensitive power. It is, moreover, certain that the nervous system acts rather by tyrannizing the organs at its disposal, than by seeking to modify these organs or to create new ones. It is a power which evidently exceeds the limits of its capacity. It has, on the contrary, devolved upon the external phenomena which, in acting mechanically on the living matter, produce in it local modifications. The organs of the senses seem to be nothing other than surfaces sensitized by the very agents which, once their work is done, will reflect in them their particular physiognomy. The eye – let us take once more this example, and repeat it – is a creation of light.
Since they are themselves the work of the principal general phenomena, the senses ought then to agree exactly – allowing for approximation – with the very nature which has created them. The luminous environment is not, in this case, a dream, but a reality, and a reality existing prior to the eye which perceives it; and, since the eye is the very product of light, objects situated in this luminous environment should be perceived by it as an exact image, just as the drill which creates a hole, creates it strictly to its size, its form, its image. Bacon said that the senses are holes. Here this is only a metaphor.
