God in the Ethico-Religious Thought of Henri Bergson

GOD IN THE ETHICO-RELIGIOUS THOUGHT OF HENRI BERGSON HENRI BERGSON'S Two Sources of Morality and Religion appeared in 1932. There had been a lapse of some 25 years since the publication of his last work, the celebrated Creative Evolution. During this time, Bergson, involved in a battle with serious illness, was nevertheless putting his immense powers of research and analysis to work on the problem of God, which he thought to be inextricably bound up with the question of morality. His researches carried him into sociology, anthropology, psychology, and comparative religion. They led him also into a thorough study of the Christian mystics. The product of his long labor shows an extraordinary command of the subjects he investigated and reveals many important insights into morality, religion, and natural theology that will continue to have an influence on philosophical thought. We propose to summarize the doctrine of the Two Sources and to relate it back to the dominant themes of Bergson's entire philosophy, as we find them in his earlier works. We hope to be able to show that Bergson's Two Sources, separated by 25 years from his earlier works though it is, and concerned with apparently quite different questions, is altogether of a piece with all his previous thought and brings it to completion. I. CLOSED MoRALITY Bergson's ethico-religious thinking takes up from the point emphasized throughout his previous works, especially Creative Evolution/ that all life is social. Even man, coming at the end of the process and rising above the other species of life 1 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mithchell (New York: Modern Library, 1944), ~84-84. This work will be cited as CE. 333 884 THOMAS N. HART by reason of his full consciousness and freedom, is naturally a social being. He needs other men to live his life. And he wants to live with others. It is from this need and this desire that morality is born.2 Bergson brings forward a pair of good examples to enforce his contention about man's gregariousness.3 The first is the instance of the criminal who voluntarily gives himself up. By his crime he has cut himself off from the group. Even if he remains undiscovered, it is not his real self with whom society deals and continues amicable relations. He is as isolated in his being as if he were on a deserted island. To restore the former solidarity, even if it means punishment, he gives himself up. The other example Bergson adduces is that of the man put in solitary confinement. In solitary confinement man's spirit dies, and often he loses his mind. These two extraordinary examples reinforce the point made by history and our ordinary experience that man is a social being. This fact of the organization of all life fits into Bergson's broad evolutionary context. It is verified at all three levels of individual organism, instinctual society, and human society.4 In the individual organism, the cell exists entirely for the good of the whole. In the societies of ants, bees, wasps, again the individual is subordinate to the society. There is a division of labor and a kind of instinctual fidelity to duty in the interests of the group. This is pre-conscious and amounts to a strict necessity. Now man, too, is social. But it is not by the same kind of necessity. The new factor that enters the picture at the human level is intellect. Whereas it is the cumulative function of life that accounts for the cohesion we have just spoken of, the dissociative function of life comes to the fore in man's intelligence. Its effect is to try to separate him from the group in the interests of self-aggrandizement. Man is free to follow this second kind of natural inclination. • Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, tr. Audra & Brereton (New York: Doubleday, 1935), 9-10. This work will be cited as TS. "TS, 16-18. 'TS, 29. GOD IN THE ETHICO-RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 335 Social pressure is effective in preventing him from doing so. Working on him from his earliest days, it engenders habits of conformity...