Maurice Blondel, Action
Earlier this year I finished Action by Maurice Blondel (translated by Oliva Blanchette), a late 19th century philosophical work on the philosophy of action, volition, and subjectivity. I heard about this book through the book Proofs of God by Matthew Levering, where Blondel’s argument for God from action is presented in condensed form.
The approach is largely phenomenological, starting from the fact of action, as unavoidable, we cannot but act, even refraining from acting is an act in and of itself. Blondel shows how subjective consciousness itself is the result of action, starting from an infinite “willing will” an infinite horizon of possibilities of the will to a “willed will,” a final cause which narrows down the will to a determinate end. Blondel shows how consciousness must posit a world of regularities and forms so as to act in it, to act in it such that the action has the willed effects. This does not exclude determinism, but Blondel sees determinism as part of action, we are determined by the world and the past, nevertheless, we direct the movement to a willed end.
Yet every act only re-ignites the will, which, Blondel argues, is ultimately oriented toward what he calls “the one thing necessary” (i.e. God), self-subsistence, no willed will can ever exhaust the willing will, because the infinite horizon of the willing will has an infinite end. That action is prior to consciousness is argued from not only the positing of regularities and forms, but of the positing of the distinction between the acting subject and the world in which she acts, for Blondel consciousness arises out of action as that which acts in the world, a world of necessity and form (i.e. the world whose regularities are known by the physical sciences). In a sense Blondel reverses the kind of common-sense scientistic view where you first have the world of necessity and regularity, a physical world of subatomic particles exchanging energy according to the laws of nature, and eventually by some amalgamation of particles consciousness arises and that consciousness acts with volution; rather the world of regularity is the posited model in which we act, and from that action our consciousness arises.
Blondel, in this works, sees the folly of a scientistic metaphysic in attempting to mathematise away all of phenomenal reality, but he also objects to the idealists who try to reduce all phenomenal reality to aspects of thought. Rather, Blondel argues for the centrality of action as the basis of knowledge, ultimately science depends on our interaction with the world, empirical verification, predicable results, and ultimately, or consciousness is always consciousness of the world as that which we act upon. For Blondel, we can never escape the primordial reality that we are willing wills who cannot but will, and act in the world, and this, for Blondel, points us to God as both the foundational ground of our will and its ultimate end.
Although this book has extremely difficult prose, I highly recommend it, and recommend taking one’s time with it. I’ll end with a quote:
What depths are we not led to? Even if we willed nothing else, we will ourselves. And in willing ourselves, we ratify what causes all the rest to be for us. All the apparent constraints that seemed to weigh upon us one after the other, then, are justified as though agreed to. But as necessity recedes before a will that takes it up and supports it, does it not reappear, beyond, more imperiously? Because determinism continues to develop its train, will we not fall under the lash of a despotism more tyrannical than all? It is imposed on us that we should will ourselves, it is imposed on us that we should impose ourselves on ourselves.
We do not escape the need to take this very necessity into account. It has its forced repercussion and its natural expression in consciousness. We now have to sort out, then, how it reveals itself to thought. Indeed, from the conflict that stirs up every consciousness, there comes inevitably a supreme alternative, and this alternative will have to be resolved inevitably. It is all the way to this necessary question, all the way to its necessary solution, that science must follow the determinism of action.
No doubt, this tragic problem does not present itself to consciousness in this abstract form. But the manner of presenting the conflict that arises within us matters little, if it does arise in fact. Life is more subtle than any analysis, more logical than any dialectic. What we sense from the start without having to be able to express it, is that the will is not content with any of the objects it has willed. There is always less in what is done or desired than in what is doing and desiring. The result seems like a caricature or a counterfeit of its real cause. The initial difficulty, therefore, remains in its entirety: it is possible to will ourselves and what is the true meaning of this necessary ambition? Torn between what I do without willing it and what I will without doing it, I am always excluded from myself. How then get back into myself and put into my action what is already there undoubtedly, but unknown to be and beyond my grasp? How can we make the subject equal to the subject himself? For me to will myself fully, I have to will more than I have yet to be able to find.
As I come up against the supreme necessity of the will, therefore, I have to determined what I will so that I may be able, in all fullness, to will to will (vouloir voulioir). Yes, I have to will myself; but it is impossible for me to reach myself directly; from myself to myself, there is always an abyss that nothing yet has been able to fill. There is no escape route for me to run away to, no passage for me to take forward by myself: What will come of this crisis?
Blondel, Action, 312–313