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Adventures in Philosophy |
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by Jules Romains
It is in the human sphere that the problem takes on breadth and vital interest. The reader may know that I have devoted a great deal of attention to human groups. When unanimism is discussed, it ordinarily designates a specialized study, largely a literary one, of the life of human groups, and the relationship between the individual and these groups. I believe, in fact, that the adventure of humanity is essentially an adventure of groups. It is also an adventure of individuals in conflict with groups or with each other. This conflict is maintained under conditions which bring into constant play the aptitude for forming multiple ties, truly biological associations, as well as the aptitude for warding off the forces of "dispossession," both spiritual and physical, which groups or collectivities of various kinds may exercise over the individual. Reduced to its simplest form, this statement contains very little originality. The life of society, at whatever level, has always been considered important as a key to the explanation of human action. Experience, however, has proved that this bare statement takes on a special power of illumination when one endows the idea of the group with its full richness of content, its efficacy, one might almost say its virulence. Especially when on need not be afraid to look for the organic bond elsewhere than in mere metaphors and abstractions. This patient and painstaking quest for the organic bond down to its weakest manifestation is in brief the essence of unanimism: a quest rather than a doctrine. It will be noted that this quest profits by one very remarkable circumstance. Man forms part of the groups, the organizations which he seeks to understand. The situation is analogous to that in which he finds himself when he attempts to probe human consciousness. As he himself is "human consciousness," the facts he investigates occur within him, form a part of himself. He manages to grasp many of them, and to grasp them (without detriment to other methods) in a firm and essential way by the direct means of introspection, that is to say by consciousness carried to a high degree of acuteness and subtlety. There is a direct connection of the same kind between man and the groups or communities of which he is part. This connection cannot be questioned even by the most positivist, the most critical minds. They, for instance, admit that as part of society we can more readily than if we were not part of it, take account of the internal mechanisms of that society and understand the raison d'être of the varied behavior of social man, his customs and manners, the influence exerted on him by group emotions, public institutions, etc. -- even if this internal awareness does not reveal everything. But I for one go further. I hold, on the basis of an experience of a special nature, that we are able, with the aid of certain refinements of attention, to grasp the interhuman organic bond, even in its most essential and invisible form, its most fugitive nascent stages. This is, if you will, the counterpart of introspection when it functions most profoundly and permits us to grasp the psychic reality within us. Now it becomes a question of reaching a psychic reality which is not external to us but which envelops us. I am far from believing -- even if I have appeared to say so at certain times -- that this enveloping psychic reality does not exceed the bounds of human groups. But human groups elaborate and condense it in a fashion, raise it one degree higher, just as the human consciousness condenses and raises to a higher plane some psychic reality which exceeds the limitations of personal identity. It is not astonishing -- and I emphasize this -- that I have attributed a prominent part in this investigation to literature in all its forms. Literature has, for the same reasons, played an important part in the investigation of the spirit. I have been reproached for having "deified" the group. And it is true I have pronounced words on the subject dangerous to the extent that they might provoke a confusion between the order of fact and the order of right, between the real and desirable. That groups, having achieved a certain degree of organic reality, should be termed by the poet "gods" or, better, "divine animals" -- this is merely to express on the lyric or mystic plane a real fact. That fact arises from the disproportion in dimension and power (physical and psychic) between groups and individuals. It implies the change of magnitude occurring when one arises from one plane to the other. But it would obviously be hazardous to draw from this the unqualified conclusion that the group as opposed to the individual is always right, and that the individual's only attitude should be submission and worship. In any case, formerly no less than now, I have always insisted that the power of the group over the individual is justified only to the extent to which it finds expression in and by the spontaneity of the individual. I condemned the restrictions imposed upon the individual from without by society and its institutions. As forcibly as I could, I emphasized the contrast between "society," conceived as a system of restraints and conventions, and "the unanimous life," conceived as the "free respiration" of human groups and implying the voluntary surrender of the individual to their influence and attractions. I indicated the danger lying in the very idea of the state, with all its germs of juridical formalism and of oppression. I even declared that a certain infusion of "anarchy" is indispensable to avert the demoniacal mechanization of society and salvage "the unanimous life." On the other hand, I have always maintained the extreme importance -- for good or evil -- of the leader. The political and social events of the last twenty years have but confirmed these opinions. It has been said, ironically -- and hardly to make me feel happy -- that the founders of totalitarian governments are to some extent my disciples. My reply was that these governments are merely a burlesque of unanimism, and that they err and err gravely in two important respects. First, they proceed by coercion and are as far as possible from fostering the "free respiration" of the masses. Second, they have a shockingly oversimplified idea of unanimity. They interpret it as an inexorable uniformity of thought, an inflexible and sterile "union." Unanimism postulates the richest possible variety of individual states of consciousness, in a "harmony" made valuable by its richness and density. This harmony is necessary before any glimpse can be given of the birth of those states of consciousness that transcend the individual spirit.
Excerpted from I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of 23 Eminent Men and Women (1939) |
Men of Good Will, by Jules Romains
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