Already, for a long time, science had affirmed the theory of materialism sufficiently for no one in the world to be able to believe in the necessity of a soul directing the human body, or a king directing the social body. It was thought that the life of the whole did not consist of anything but the life of cells, and that no central immaterial point could really exist within that whole. The ancient idea of a mechanical construction grouped around a spiritual core had been abandoned, although that theory had been strongly favored by all primitive civilizations.
It had been decided that the whole was no more than a composite of parts, and all those who thought that that the superior being only existed as a function of its constructive cells—which is to say, human beings—were reassured as to the intentions of the Leviathan.
Furthermore, the notion of that collective being was by no means new. Thomas Hobbes was an admirable man in the sense that he, first of all, dared to write in 1651, at the head of his introduction to the Leviathan, that if nature is the world that God constructed and governs by His divine artistry, then man, for his part, by means of his industry, produces in imitation an artificial animal—and that formidable animal, that Leviathan, is Society, the State.
Hobbes extrapolated this analogy quite extensively. All the habitual maladies of man are found again in the State: for instance, a man who has read libertarian tracts in favor of tyrannicide has contracted hydrophobia; he perpetually desires to drink pure water, but it fills him with horror. Athens and Carthage died of bulimia. The agitation of humble folk is analogous to that of ascarid worms. Leisure and luxury engender lethargy…
This is certainly what was most powerfully and precisely conceived in establishing the materialist theory of the State. For Hobbes, there is nothing in intelligence that does not originate in sensation. Our general ideas are nothing but an addition or a subtraction of bodily images that exist independently, and knowledge cannot be incorporeal. The State, similarly, is nothing but a collection of individuals, but grouped by the social sensations that are egoism and fear. In a state of nature, man is a wolf to man, as Plautus put it,14 for, men being equal, war and anarchy are their normal condition, since nothing limits their appetites and their desires. It is the need for security that makes men renounce their individual strengths to the profit of a unique strength, and that social contract creates absolute sovereignty.
As for religion, it is the daughter of imagination and fear. It is nothing but base superstition when the fearful imagination is individual; it is a useful means of government when that imagination and that fear are collective.
At the time in which Hobbes lived, this materialist analogy between the social body and the human body was little more than a literary image designed to be mentally striking; in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the scientific development of evolutionist theories, it took on a singular importance. It is by its own initiative, it was thought, and by a more complete adaptation to its environment, that matter becomes organized, groups itself into cells, into organisms, and into living beings of ever-increasing complexity and originality. The idea of a creator, as well as that of the old dualism between the soul and the body, no longer made sense. Only the old social contract dreamed up by Hobbes, inspired by dread or the quest for the least effort, sufficed to explain the formation of collectives of living beings, and the most recent arrival among them: the State, the Leviathan.
Far from being reduced to slavery by a superior authority, organic cells, like social cells, group themselves quite willingly and for their greater good. Voluntary servitude is not granted to the advantage of an elite but to that of the sovereign mass, and nothing exists outside the materials which, in combination, compose the edifice.
Furthermore, philosophers themselves had taken care to reassure humankind as to the consequences of the development of the social organism. Spencer had made it understood that within such an organism, the whole lived for the parts and not, as in the human body, the parts for the whole.15 Claude Bernard had brought a reassuring scientific precision to this point; “Vital properties,” he said, “are, in reality, in the living cells; everything else is arrangement and mechanics.”16
What was forgotten only in the 20th century was the question of who had conceived the plan of the edifice or ordained the preliminary harmony of mechanical movements—for, in the end, although adaptation to the environment can explain the simple practical modifications of existing organs, its obscure present instinct seems insufficient to foresee future constructions or combinations of an order so superior that they seem pre-established and arrive at the ultimate terminus of its evolution: that very intelligence that material evolution is claimed to prepare.
How have certain plants demanded that butterflies and the wind ensure their reproduction? What superior council of wild bees has conceived the hive? What were the organs that decided to establish three canals in the ear giving the awareness of three dimensions? And, even supposing that the entire future is potentially contained in matter, how can we explain the maintenance of a unique plan of assembly between the local, often antagonistic, patterns of local progress realized by divided matter?
It is, in truth, a great error that the 20th century made in mistaking the shadow for the prey and limiting its knowledge to relative and fragmentary three-dimensional hypotheses, ignoring the unique and continuous universal soul, released from any prejudice of time and space, which the mind alone can attain in the fourth dimension, and whose thoughts and actions are translated into material appearances, fugitive and unreal because they are three-dimensional.
XVI. The Marquis’ Heirs
Still ignorant of the fourth dimension—which, outside prejudices of time and space, permits us to conceive the universal Idea particularized in every one of us—and entirely resistant to unity, the 20th century was not mistaken when it only saw in the Leviathan the sum of an addition of three-dimensional bodies, a colony of material ideas comprising no central heterogenous element: a body living normally without a soul, in sum.
Where the error became gross, however, was when the 20th century became persuaded, by analogy, that the same theory must apply to man and that thought, properly understood, was merely a phenomenon emanating from organs, having no other origin than the matter composing the aggregate of the human body. What seemed to encourage this error was the observation that thought came into being and disappeared with this aggregate, that its vigor dependent on it, and that no one had ever been able to conceive scientifically of a soul without a body.
When one has raised oneself up to the fourth dimension, this way of thinking seems as puerile as a man would who, looking through a window and seeing thousands of mirrors placed on a plain, reflecting the rays of an invisible Sun towards him, decided that each beam of light was produced by a mirror, and that breaking the mirror would obliterate the radiance. Yes, undoubtedly, every human body is a mirror necessary to the universal consciousness, but one does not put out the Sun—the unique source of all light—by breaking a mirror; nor does the immortal Idea disappear along with a body that has reflected it momentarily.
More than that: the reflection, once emitted, does not die with the mirror and, in the same way that luminous rays once launched into the relative three-dimensional world are brought back to their point of departure by gravity, having followed millennia-long elliptical courses, creating a pure sunlight to replace a vanished Sun, thought too does not die; the purified idea shines eternally when the fugitive body that reflected it in a flash of genius is no longer but a distant memory. Thus, the action of the dead is greater than that of the living, because it is redeemed from matter.
Unfortunately, the considerable progress of science since the end of the 18th century had impassioned minds to the point of forgetting this in the 20th century, and of misunderstanding these fundamental ideas—which, suggested by the fourth dimension of the mind and completing the givens of the three-dimensional senses, had until then been the only thing allowing human intelligence to
brave, by a thousand means, the odious simulacra of death.
Since the beginnings of civilization, in fact, man had been able to create a spiritual life, of which he remained the absolute master, and which set him far above other animals. Thanks to the laws, mores, social constitutions and principles of every sort that he gave himself, his mentality elevated itself further every day, and his immortal ideal seemed bound to escape natural laws forever.
It was, therefore, as we have said, these permanent and continuous moral rules that had to be destroyed at any price to create the Leviathan, and it was science that was charged with that heavy task.
In developing the study of natural phenomena, the philosophers of the 18th century gradually accustomed the human mind only to hold as true the immediate testimony of the senses and, as a consequence of examining matter, it was believed that it was three-dimensional. Nothing was any longer admitted but laws of nature, and every social edifice seemed to be a vain scaffolding, hypocritical and outdated.
There was one man of that time who dared to push the new theories to their ultimate consequences: the Marquis de Sade. With implacable logic, and in a form sometimes worthy of the Encyclopedists, without omitting a single detail, he developed the new program that the thinkers of the following century would adopt: more falsehood and more hypocrisy; the torch of philosophy—which is to say, of science—having dissipated all the ancient impostures, it would be appropriate to hold to the role dictated by nature and no longer listen to anything but our instincts; man would seek to develop his emotions as much as possible in the direction indicated by nature, and, pain being greater than pleasure, pain would be the principal agent of success.
It is by wounding the trees that one obtains the finest fruit; cruelty is the essential order of nature. This, in contrast to false Christian ideas, orders us to do to others what we would not want them to do to us. The strongest reason is always the best; Bismarck, Nietzsche and the most celebrated novelists of the 19th century have not said anything better. It is regrettable that Sade compromised the reputation of his works by absurd erotic bluster, which permitted his immediate heirs to erase his name from literary history; if he had only held to the philosophical ideas that he expressed on the eve of the French Revolution, his place in the history of ideas would be that of a venerated ancestor. It is sufficient to reread the principal works of the writers of the 19th century to be convinced of that.
In his Origin of Species and his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin only confirmed, point by point, all the Marquis’ assertions, restoring the natural instinct of selection to primacy. The economists, from T. R. Malthus to John Stuart Mill, similarly ratified the brutality of such assertions. The writers and artists hesitated for a part of the 19th century, but they too were soon converted, in the presence of the incessant progress of science, to conclusions imposed by natural laws. Romanticism enslaved artists definitively with scientific doctrines. It was for this reason that literature, at the beginning of the 20th century, was nothing, in sum, but the rigid application of rules imposed by the French Revolution and then applied by the Empire, and that the supremacy of instinct brought man—who had thought momentarily that he might become God—to the simple rank of the animals that had preceded him.
This moral decay would have been insufficient to permit the realization of the Leviathan if the scientific organization of the entire world had not also offered the universal matter necessary to the creation of the new being. Man, reduced to the state of a social cell, having no other law than natural instinct, was no more than the plastic matter of the new being; the general bond charged with uniting these various elements was furnished by the scientific exigencies of the new organization. The world was no more than a colossal being, all of whose parts remained interdependent, and none of which could live separately from the whole. A malady felt at any point on the globe immediately echoed throughout the universe; an arrest of function in the nutrition or the nervous system of the Leviathan immediately compromised the life of the entire being.
The cells, incapable henceforth of independent life, no longer knew anything but their natural instincts. Deprived of any general idea, they could no longer aspire to the superb isolation of the individuals of old; mental life no longer appeared to be their own; that formidable hydra the Leviathan represented the external form of a purely mechanical three-dimensional economic State, in which carefully equilibrated needs and material appetites took the place of morality and the social contract.
Only the Leviathan could have a material scientific tradition exceeding the duration of human life. Every link with the past was, by contrast, forbidden to the human cells who, living under the dominion of natural law, could only be aware of the sensations and appetites of the moment. The divine Marquis de Sade was the veritable father of the precept “Live life,” which the best dramaturges of the 20th century illustrated. Since the 18th century, moreover, favor was transferred, in novels, to domestics drawn from the common people, who tortured the hearts of marquises and gave great social lessons while expressing themselves, doubtless by force of habit, in the third person in order to make their claims.
Almost everywhere, in the most various manifestations of human activity, attempts were made to cut traditional roots, and that unremitting war was manifest in the smallest details of everyday life. In painting, in sculpture, in music, everyone wanted to innovate loudly, no longer taking account of the centuries of research and experience that had gone before; painters no longer had any craftsmanship or technique; sculptors retained no memory of it except by the intermediary of their assistants. As for musicians, they deliberately rejected 20 centuries of natural grace and harmony maintained by generations of thinkers and poets.
This pursuit was even more marked in the establishment of educational programs, in the suppression of classical studies; an artificial wall was elevated in front of every child, between the present establishment of incomprehensible results and the study of causes and logical rationality of actual facts. One felt henceforth that one was still living on the legacy of the dead, but the cemetery gate was firmly closed and no one any longer learned about the sufferings and joys, ambitions and efforts of intellectual ancestors that had gone forever.
Without being aware of it, humankind had only killed the true artists and savants by accusing them of reaction. Honoring, by contrast, sorcerers and tricksters, it had no alternative but to fall back inevitably into the grossest fetishism. By the same stroke, it rid itself of the Idea that it wanted to combat and the Science that it wanted to maintain, and that deplorable decadence delivered it, defenseless, to the inconsequential artificial grouping of the Leviathan: that monstrous and brainless creature from which all direction was expected.
XVII. The Birth of Humor
It was not until a long time after the death of the Leviathan that a clear understanding began to emerge of the moral complicity that had allowed that colossal being to develop, and the laborious and obscure labor of its adversaries that had succeeded in breaking it up. That muted and profound conflict had begun towards the end of the 19th century, between naturalists and humorists, and even though the adversaries had changed their names along the way, they had never ceased to represent the two contending parties until the end of the struggle.
Since that hypothetical first day when the first man opened his eyes to nature, and then reflected on what he had just seen, nothing had, in fact, been modified in the history of human thought. There was still the double movement of flux and reflux, aspiration and respiration, that perpetual oscillation between the immediate givens of consciousness and the information regarding external phenomena furnished by the senses. Where, in that perpetual process of coming and going, was human personality really situated? No one could say, exactly. Mid-way between the relative and the absolute, judging moving events according to an internal and immutable yardstick, man sometimes looked outwards at the changing phenomena, sometimes inwards at the immutable notions to which he compared them.
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Almost always however, by an instinctive need for specialization, man settled on one or other of these attitudes. When he affected only to consider external phenomena, to analyze them scrupulously and to attribute a character of truth to them alone, he posed as a scientist and a naturalist, he became a disciple of Aristotle. When he affected, on the contrary, only to interest himself in internal notions, only to attribute reality to the mystical life, he became a Platonist and only found truth in the world of ideas. It might seem astonishing that an exclusivity that was as intransigent in one direction as in the other did not always seem ridiculous. It is not very difficult to understand, in fact, that a scientific analysis is non-existent without an immutable and unchanging principle that permits the observation of relative movements, and that, on the other hand, an artistic or moral synthesis is only possible on the basis of analysis. One cannot analyze without an analyst; one cannot synthesize in the absence of elements.
As things were, this infantile verity did not appear at all clear to the scientists and literary men of the 19th century, who, enthused by the ever-increasing discoveries of science, abandoned all synthesis and decided no longer to accept, in human research, anything but analysis. Naturalism invaded everything; it soon passed from the natural sciences into literature and art, by way of psychology. Nothing was any longer produced but exact descriptions, scrupulous analyses, monographs on the family, anthropometric lists, and realistic photographs that were called “slices of life;” painters applied themselves to becoming scrupulous color photographers or passive interpreters of instantaneous impressions. And as, quite naturally, synthesis still remained the unconscious and unacknowledged basis of these works, it seen became instinctive, devoid of choice—and, in consequence, lamentable.
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