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I have already said how appealing he (1) was. A remarkable sensibility and intelligence. An exceptional lucidity on all the problems of the age. However, he had a tendency towards pantheism, which gave rise to passionate and endless discussions between us. I attributed this inclination to a lack of practical experience which prevented him from giving the words he used a concrete meaning. A pure intellectual, this philosopher, whose intellectual opinions were often very luminous, nonetheless seemed to me to be quite insensible to the simplest realities - the realities that lie most immediately within reach of our eyes and of our hands. This is a problem which is by no means unique to him. It is characteristic of all those who have received only an intellectual formation, without the hard control of experience. They never examine the foundations, the postulates which have to carry the whole weight of their intellectual constructions, so that, in spite of talent and of occasional fruitful encounters, the building is always held up by the image with feet of clay. Since I am not a professional philosopher, and I have the weakness to believe that one should always begin at the beginning - that is to say, with contact with things or, even better, with the movements by which things are made - I prided myself that I only used words whose reality was clear to me. In the end, I could not accept any line of reasoning unless we were agreed as to the premises, which, consequently, could not be adopted lightly. All our discussions turned on the nature of our premises.

(1) Louis Hoyack was a follower of the Sufi teacher Inayat Khan and was the executor of his will. He wrote several books on religious and esoteric themes during the 1930s, including Le Symbolisme de l’Univers (1931), Spiritualisme Historique - Etude critique sur l’idée de progrès and Où va le Machinisme? (1933) - Translator's note. 

It was very difficult to keep to this elementary terrain. It is too easy to be led astray and, without knowing it, to start arguing about things whose reality has not been established, whose motives have not been uncovered. Every time I realised that this was happening, I would cry out and bring my fellow worker back to the task in hand. The longer our discussions lasted, the more I realised that they were only being kept going by our points of view, our ways of understanding certain key words, and that they would get nowhere. I was persuaded that there would be no reason for them if only we could start with an agreement as to the meaning of these words. This is the origin of all ideological disagreements. We attach no, or at least too little, importance to our vocabulary. Words quickly turn into synonyms or approximations to which each of us attaches any meaning he likes, hence the impossibility of coming to any agreement. The fault lies in the very foundations. That is why I constantly asked Hoyack what he meant, or what he saw when he pronounced such and such a word.

In fact, the key words are not so numerous that we have to lose a lot of time looking for them. They are the words to do with things and the relations that exist between them. There are primary words, just as there are primary numbers. All the other signs we use in our vocabulary can be made out of them, just as all numerical series can be constituted from the primary numbers. They are the only worthwhile postulates. These words are the words that indicate state, position, action and relations. There would not be so many philosophical systems which contradict or jostle against each other if only we gave words their true value. And it is more than likely that we could then recover the real cultural unity which we lack in these days when, it seems, with all the specialisations of our time, that we want to reduce everything to dust, by a process of analysis.

To this unity in death, in disappearance, I think we need to oppose a unity in life, in unification. Our so-called modern culture is a logomachy; all civilisations are like this when they come to the end of their tether. That is why those that replace them begin by restoring the sacred character of words and immediately situate them as originating in the Word, the Logos-Creator. All the key-words derive from the Word, bearing its image and deriving from it an esemplastic power which they never lose, even in their lowest forms of expression. And that is why, so long as the authority of the Word is maintained, human communities show, in its image, a creative capacity which resembles its own, which restores the primacy of work - of that real work that is act, silent, which does not seek to assert any individual megalomania. When the Word loses its authority, the human act declines, retires, disappears, and writers and orators flourish on the word with which it is replaced.


It seemed to me that my friend Hoyack’s pantheism resulted precisely from this original sin committed against the key words. Pantheism would not be possible if we began by putting some order into the basic assumptions of our vocabulary. And numerous heresies would likewise cease as soon as an agreement could be reached about these basic words. So, for example, I insisted that, from the start, the exact meaning of absolute and relative should be established. 'Absolute' is used thoughtlessly in various different ways, all of which have the particular characteristic of being relative in their nature. So it is important to re-establish its original meaning, prerogative of the Word and, like the Word, inaccessible and ineffable. We can use the term to indicate omnipresence, but that is all we can do; we tend towards it, insofar as we have the love of our actions, but we know that we will never attain it. Because we are relative and because we act and move in the relative. Is there a numerical relation between absolute and relative ? No, because it is clear that the absolute is not a product of the relative. The difference between them is not a matter of degree but of nature. If one could take away or add a relative from or to the absolute it would no longer be or, rather, it could not ever have been, the absolute. If anyone thinks they can develop the relative into the absolute by using subtle arguments or calculations, they are chasing a chimera, because the relative is not of the same order as the absolute. It would be a crazed notion of another absolute, in the process of being realised, which would result in two. Two absolutes cannot coexist, so the attempt to produce an absolute by adding relatives together is absurd. 

The consequences of these clarifications are immense. They drive away a thousand modern intellectual illusions by rendering them impotent from the very start. They show them up as detours, fit only to lead man further and further away from himself. They prevent man from running after aesthetic will o’ the wisps that exhaust and undermine him. They lead him towards that consciousness of his limits that gives him fresh life and frees him from the sin of pride. They restore the authority of God, Who is the Absolute, transcending carnal man, inaccessible, ineffable. They establish it with ease and, at the same time, relative man is renewed when he understands that his worth depends on the analogy he presents in spirit with the divine absolute. Wherever he is, whatever he does, whatever he knows or does not know intellectually, his dignity lies in the perfection of those acts that are rooted in his own nature; and this perfection is only attained through a continual effort to renounce that which is relative. The opposite of our modern intellectual formation which always pulls us more and more in the direction of that which is relative.

What would remain of pantheism if we recognised how fundamental is the opposition between these two basic realities? The one transcendental, the other contingent. Once these two terms are well defined, we understand that quantity cannot form part of that which is without quantity and, thus, that that which is pure quality cannot be expressed in terms of quantity. So what is it that our sciences, our philosophies claim to be doing? Are they ways of knowledge for its own sake? Are they so drunk with their own fanaticism as to claim that, one fine day, they will reach the point where the absolute and relative come together? Once we have understood that this is an irreducible distinction, we can hardly be surprised to see them collapse, in an act of renunciation that is far from being voluntary, into self destruction, both around us and within us. Nowadays, our sciences and our philosophies have come to the point of death or, rather, to the point of decomposition. What they offer us has nothing to do with that knowledge that is of the nature of consciousness, rather it tends to lead us away from it. By the opposite path from that which leads to everything, to the qualitative absolute, they drag the relative towards its quantitative collapse, to nothingness. And this end is not in contradiction with their much vaunted material conquests which, as they take everything over, so they do away with man, who is responsible for it all. This is how he pays the price of his blind, inordinate pride.

These two clarifications with regard to the absolute and the relative ought to be established in a child’s mind from the very first moment that it begins to be disciplined. And he should be reminded of them periodically throughout the whole course of his studies. In this way, not just mistakes but irreparable catastrophes could be avoided by the adult who is being prepared. From the earliest age, man would thus be conscious of his limits and of his possibilities. He would cease to be this traveller who blindly climbs ever higher in a train whose point of departure and destination are each alike unknown to him; and who pushes his naivete and his trickery to such a degree that when some scruple takes hold of him he can reply that, in his journey, he does not need to bother himself with ‘first causes’ or ‘final causes’. One day, when we have been obliged by the sheer force of events to recover consciousness of the living order, we will be terrified of the evil that has resulted from this aberration. 


Cause is yet another of these key words on which our discussions turned. It is used in so many ways that one never knows what exactly anyone means by it. It is entirely necessary that it should be reduced to its original meaning so that all confusion can be avoided. Intellectual definitions have a tendency to empty words of their creative power. We must, then, restore to them their activity. To put a word into action prior to defining it. That is what I tried to do with Hoyack. ‘Here is a glass’, I said, ’what is its cause?’. Never have I heard so many complicated, specious reasonings, going nowhere. Simplicity is not an intellectual virtue. Hoyack told me that the cause of the glass is thirst, the need to put a liquid into a stable container, to give form to formless matter ... etc. ‘Not at all, quite simply, it is the glassmaker,’ I replied. ‘And the glass has no other cause. What you have called cause is only the motive or motives. Because you failed to distinguish between object and subject. (2) The object is the glass, the subject is the motive. The glass being invariable and the motives variable. The cause is linked to the object, the motives are dependent on the subject.’

(2) For 'object' and 'subject' as key words see the extract from correspondence with André Lhote which follows this extract from the Souvenirs. - Translator's note.

That got the discussion going because my friend Hoyack found my reply too simple. Of course. ‘Try’, I went on, ‘to verify what I’ve just been saying on something other than the glass. What is the cause of a painting? Isn’t it the painter? What is the cause of the crime? Isn’t it the criminal? What is the cause of tuberculosis? Has the person who has it nothing to do with it? What is the cause of philosophy? Is it not the philosopher? What is the cause of all the objects, all the facts, all the quantities, all the qualities which surround us and are in us? Whatever you try to think or do intellectually to avoid or postpone consideration of the answer, you have to see that, objectively, the cause is inseparable from the act. What is the cause of creation? The creator, without a doubt. Now, turn these questions over again and you will ‘see’ that the act is certainly inseparable from the cause. What is the cause of the glassmaker? Imagine, if you can, a glassmaker without a glass. A painter who does not paint. A criminal who does not commit a crime, a tuberculosis patient without tuberculosis, latent or active, a philosopher who never engages in philosophy. The things, the facts, quantities and qualities. which are in us or which surround us are things, facts, quantities and qualities. If you manage to do this, it means that the whole Universe has vanished from your mind and that you too have disappeared from in front of my eyes. The multiplicity of the definitions given to cause can, in the vague way in which language is used at the present time, be conceived. But not when we come to consider the word in its determinant value. Then it is an image of the Word, and we must catch it in action, creating itself. At that moment, it is unique. And then, cause and effect are simultaneous. Etymology often confirms what we have just found out by other means. Cause and ‘chose’ [French for ‘thing’ - translator's note ] have a common etymological origin, since causa means both ‘thing’ and ‘cause’; which shows that in the beginning there was no mistake about these matters and that the distinctions made later for the purposes of everyday living have ended up in so many complications that the real spirit of the term is obscured to the point where it disappears altogether.’

There too this confusion has had repercussions of incalculable importance. Having called the variable motive or motives cause, we have abandoned the object for the subject. Our intellectual opinions, deprived of unshakeable premises, have been drawn into a mad race that can only end in exhaustion. Our efforts to find the first and last cause in philosophy have got nowhere because we have seen the cause as being independent of the effect. In science, we have avoided compromising ourselves by treating the very idea of first and last causes with scorn, and we have searched the relations of cause and effect through successions of phenomena whose true cause has been ignored while we are only really interested in the motives. We have lost the object and are only capable of being excited by the subject. The absolute, and those of its images that are accessible to us, have become a dead letter; the relative carried all before it and did not allow of any hope. God was inaccessible and, in the confusion, His human image was lost.