CHAPTER I

THE QUESTION OF BEING

A I stand on the threshold of this second series, I have

the same feeling of giddiness as that which comes over
a traveller when he reaches the edge of an abyss into which he
must take a headlong plunge. Last year we were crossing what
was certainly broken country ; there were traps of which we
had to beware, but we escaped any precipitous fall. What, then,
is this abyss into which we shall have to fling ourselves?
It is this : this time we shall have to ask ourselves questions
about the nature of being as such. As soon as we do that, it
will be as though we had to move in a new dimension. But I
must add a warning. It is only too clear that this new dimen-
sion will have to conform with those in which our earlier
enquiries were contained. I shall make use of the method which
I often found useful last year of continually reviving the
metaphors with which I reinforce my arguments. I shall say
that everything happens now, rather as in a fugue when a new
voice intervenes. It would not be enough to say that the new
voice is added to the earlier ones : in some way it changes the
whole colour of the complete work. Later, it should be
necessary for us and this, I grant, is rather an awkward task—
to keep the spatial metaphor present in our minds simultan-
eously with the musical metaphor. Thus we shall gain a more
distinct idea of the sort of transformation, of the sort of revival,
which this second series of lectures must attempt to introduce.
 FAITH AND REALIT)

Now, even more than before, we shall have to be contin-

ually on our guard against the traps that are hidden in language ;
and since it is without doubt much more difficult in the dom-
ain of strict metaphysics to advance by means of examples and
concrete illustrations, I promise you, and I promise myself,
that in making so far as possible concrete and even in a way
dramatic transpositions, I shall push to the extreme limit the
caution that I exercised in the first series. In this matter I find
my position a little puzzling, and I do not think it would be
a waste of time to try to make it more precise.
After more than thirty years, I have been going through the
unpublished notes of my first metaphysical enquiries, and I am
rather astonished to find that the problems which engaged me
then are precisely those which seem to me today to be the
most important ; I should even say that they are the only
ones, when you come to analyse them finally, which are wor-
thy of holding the attention of a philosopher. All the rest can
ultimately be dismissed as chatter. I should go even further—
the solutions (presuming that 'solution' is the right word to
use) which I was then—i.e. before the first world war—out-
lining, do not differ fundamentally from those I shall put for-
ward today. Nevertheless, life has intervened since that
distant time, with all the joys and sorrows, all the discoveries
and frustrations that it can bring to any being. I find since that
time that the formulae which used to give me a certain amount
of satisfaction, are no longer apposite ; they were much too
abstract. I purposely say a 'certain amount of satisfaction'
because even in those days I felt in my heart an invincible
distrust of pure abstraction; and, as I have often said since, I
made use, in a way, of dialectic in order to get rid of dialectic.
Remembering this, and to continue with a musical com-
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parison—I shall more than once make use of such—I should

be tempted to say that my thought has not undergone evolution
in the sense which is generally given to that word, but rather
that it has moved by working gradually and progressively at
the orchestration of a number of themes which were the
initial data. This word data itself raises some obscure and
perhaps insoluble problems. We should be certainly under a
delusion if we imagined that on the one hand we have a thought
whose make-up is fixed once and for all, and on the other hand
themes and motifs supplied to it from outside. We cannot
make such a picture for ourselves without forgetting precisely
the thing we are discussing. The true picture is rather that
thought—and I understand by that not thought in general, but
a concrete, personalized, thought—takes shape only in so far
as it discovers the exigencies by which it will be qualified.
You will remember last year I made frequent, perhaps almost
too frequent, use of this word exigence. Neither the word
`need' nor the word 'requirement' conveys the meaning of
this word, which corresponds to the German Forderung. We
shall meet it again now; and while we had then to be satisfied
with speaking of the exigence of transcendence, we shall now
be led to examine the exigence of God. We could say, I
believe, in future that the exigence of God is simply the
exigence of transcendence disclosing its true face, a face that
was shown to us before shrouded in veils. I said at the beginning
of this lecture that we should have to move in the dimension
of being. Now I must add that we shall deal with the exigence
of God, and, a still deeper matter, with faith in God. We
shall have to ask ourselves under what conditions, short of a
revelation properly so called, it is possible for us to make any
affirmations about what God is, or at least about what He is not
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 FAITH AND REALITY

or cannot be. But we shall have to make a very close examina-

tion—and this I consider will be one of the essential objects
of our enquiry—of the way in which strictly metaphysical
enquiry, which concerns what I have called being as such, is
related to religious philosophy: or rather we must find out
how the two are interlocked. Although many of the most
famous metaphysicians of the past seem to give us direct
encouragement, we cannot lay it down as a principle and a
starting point that being as such (if it can be thought of, which
is not a priori certain) is necessarily to be identified with that
to which a believing consciousness gives the name of God. Let
us accordingly lay it down once for all, as emphatically as we
can, that it is only the living witness, that is to say the believ-
ing consciousness, which can decide what can or cannot be
regarded as God. I shall lay it down as a principle—and this
postulate will doubtless become clarified later—that it is
beyond the power of any philosophy (we can leave theology
out of it for the moment) to force a coup d'etat which instals
as God something which the believing consciousness refuses to
recognize as such. It will be necessary, no doubt, to go more
fully into what we mean by the believing consciousness, and
in order to do this we shall have to make use of some of the
conclusions to which our last year's enquiries led us.
Nevertheless, the approach to this sanctuary of traditional
ontology is bound to overpower us with a feeling of fatigue
and oppression, I should even say, unhappily, of boredom. Is
it to be part of our duty to dig into the depths of Aristotelian
metaphysics; worse still, into the teaching of the schoolmen
who continued Aristotle's work? I shall make no bones about
it—I have no such intention. If I had, there would be a danger
that this second series of lectures would come down to being
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 THE QUESTION OF BEING

nothing but a misleading resume of the history of philosophy:

and, whether it be misleading or not, there is no University
Professor in this country or any other who would not, after
all, be better qualified than I am to give such a resume. At the
risk of appearing rather rash or cavalier in my treatment, I
propose to assume that all the essential historical background
is familiar, and to come straight to the question, What is
Being? I shall ask myself how we can give to Being a meaning
that is intelligible for us.
I say Tor us' with purpose. I shall not give a detailed
repetition of what I have already said about the necessity of
transcending the plane of thought in general, or better, as
Heidegger would express it, of the Man ; remembering that
this is of course the German word Man, not Mann, or the French
pronoun on. To put it in a more positive way, let us say that I
have to think not only for myself, but for us ; in other words
for everyone:who may have contact with the thought which is
mine. There is a sense in which we are all historical beings;
that is to say, that we come after other beings from whom we
have received a great deal, and this precisely in a way which
gives us something by which we are differentiated from them
but at the same time we come before other beings, and these will
find that they have the same relation to us as we have to those
who came before us. In every instance these relations are more
complex than at first appears, and we should do violence to
their nature if we tried to fit them into a serialized pattern.
Thus it is that the thought of a philosopher who lived many
years ago, Plato for example, can be revitalized as our road
winds round, can be recharged with an efficacy which it did
not seem to possess at certain earlier stages. In this sense,
though it might seem paradoxical, it would not be too much
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 FAITH AND REALITY

to say that something like an exchange takes place between the

present and the distant past. Moreover, this is only an illus-
tration of the important idea, to which we shall often have
occasion to return, that in the order of the spiritual the
distinction between the close and the distant changes its
nature and tends to transcend itself.
The question arises, however, whether, when we insist on
the fact that each one of us must be a philosopher both hic et
nunc and for those who may later have to cross his path, we
do not run the risk of overlooking the essential fact that to be
a philosopher is after all to think sub specie aeterni. But we must
here point out a possible source of grave misunderstanding.
That phrase is, in truth, ambiguous : it may mean that we
intend to abstract from the experience which is necessarily
peculiar to ourselves, to transport ourselves into a sort of
mental stratosphere ; or it can have an entirely different mean-
ing. We shall have good reason to ask whether the notion that
we can find an escape by climbing into such a region immune
from change, is not after all an illusion. In the final balance it
is neither proved nor even demonstrable that I can abstract
from my own experience, except of course in so far as I pro-
pose to confine myself to the study of certain abstract
elements of reality—or rather, let us say, of certain struc-
tural conditions of the type of knowledge which is ours.
But to philosophize sub specie aeterni may mean something very
different from just wiping the slate clean. It may mean devot-
ing myself to understanding my own life as fully as possible ;
and where I use the word 'life' in that connection, I could
equally well use the word 'experience'. If I try to do so, I
shall most likely be led to a strange and wonderful discovery—
that the more I raise myself to a really concrete perception of
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 THE QUESTION OF BEING

my own experience, the more, by that very act, shall I be

attuned to an effective understanding of others, of the exper-
ience of others. Nothing indeed can be more important and
helpful than to realize this fully.
But here, as before, I shall need to refer to the experience
of the specific type of creation, which is that of the dramatist.
The virtue proper to dramatic creation, where the creation is
authentic, consists in the exorcizing of the ego-centric spirit.
But one may perhaps ask whether ego-centric is not precisely
what concrete understanding of self always is? I shall categor-
ically deny that. Ego-centrism, on the contrary, is possible
only in a being which has not properly mastered its own
experience, which has not really assimilated it. It is worth
devoting our attention to this for a few moments, for it has an
important bearing on the rest of our enquiry.
In so far as I am obsessed by an ego-centric preoccupation,
that preoccupation acts as a barrier between me and others;
and by others must be understood in this connection the life
and the experience of others. But let us suppose this barrier
has been overthrown. The paradox is that at the same time
it is also my own personal experience that I rediscover in some
way, for in reality my experience is in a real communciation
with other experiences. I cannot be cut off from the one
without being cut off from the other. In other words, ego-
centrism is always a cause of blindness : but there is no
blindness that can be localized. I mean that you cannot be
utterly blind to one thing without being blind to other things
as well. All this may seem odd at first glance, but it is never-
theless evident to me that while this seems at first an a priori
view, yet experience adds confirmation to it. It is because the
egoist confines his thought to himself that he is fundamentally
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 FAITH AND REALITY

in the dark about himself. He does not know his real needs,
he does not realize that he betrays himself just to the extent
to which he concentrates all his attention upon himself.
But the corollary is equally true, and it is precisely this
corollary which is of importance to us for the next steps in our
enquiry. A complete and concrete knowledge of oneself
cannot be heauto-centric ; however paradoxical it may seem,
I should prefer to say that it must be hetero-centric. The fact
is that we can understand ourselves by starting from the other,
or from others, and only by starting from them; and one
could even anticipate what we shall have to recognize much
later, and add that it is only in this perspective that a legiti-
mate love of self can be conceived. Fundamentally, I have no
reason to set any particular store by myself, except in so far as
I know that I am loved by other beings who are loved by me.
Love of self can have a true foundation only by using others
as a medium, and that medium is our only safeguard against
ego-centrism and our only assurance that it will have the charac-
ter of lucidity which otherwise it inevitably loses.
It may appear at first that these remarks have no bearing
upon our original enquiry. How can they nevertheless serve
to advance it?
Two things seem to me to be of importance. First, we must
understand that this enquiry can be developed only if we take
a certain fullness of life as our starting point; secondly, we
must at the same time note well that this fullness of life can in
no circumstances be that of my own personal experience
considered in an exclusively private aspect, considered in as
much as it is just mine; rather must it be that of a whole which
is implied by the relation to the with, by the togetherness, on
which last year I laid such emphasis. The intersubjectivity at
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which we so painfully arrived must be, in fact, the ground

upon which we must base ourselves for our further enquiries
this year.
But to take up such a position immediately throws into
relief the essentially anti-cartesian character of the metaphysic
to which we shall have to direct ourselves. It is not enough to
say that it is a metaphysic of being; it is a metaphysic of we
are as opposed to a metaphysic of I think. It is most instructive
to note in our own days that Sartre, who makes use of a
cartesianism which in other ways he has mutilated (since he
has deprived it of the theology which crowns it) is himself
obliged to take the other only as a threat to my liberty; or,
strictly speaking, as a possible source of seduction which it is
very difficult not to interpret in a sadistic or masochistic
sense. When the author of Huis-Clos writes 'Hell—that's
other people', he supplies his own evidence of his impossible
position; whether it is for reasons which belong to existential
psychoanalysis or whether it is simply because of his meta-
physical postulates, he can have no understanding of philia or
agape. In the end it is only on the one hand the domain of
eros, with its formidable ambiguity, so far as it coincides with
want or desire, which is accessible to him, or, on the other
hand, that of a community of work which creates teams united
by the knowledge of a task which has to be done ; and it is
only if you look at it from outside that you can see in this
a genuine sort of solidarity. It must necessarily be so. It could
be otherwise only if he repudiated, explicitly or implicitly,
the principles of his ontology : the fundamental opposition
between being-in-itself and being-for-itself which by definition
makes impossible intersubjectivity in the precise sense I have
given to the word, or, if you wish, makes it impossible to be
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 FAITH AND REALITY

open to the other, to welcome him in the deepest sense of the

word, and to become at the same time more accessible to
oneself.
But it may be asked whether the inter-subjectivity upon
which I seek to ground my ontology can lead to some simple
proposition that can be clearly expressed. Is there anything
in it which could be put into the form of a logical principle?
Or is it not rather a simple inexpressible intuition which
runs, after all, the risk of being reduced to just a sentimental
disposition? If it is not an affirmation which can be expressed
in words, is it not simply a wish which mistakes itself for an
assertion?
But this word assertion should hold our attention for a few
moments. What can I assert? A fact, and nothing but a fact,
since the fact is the only thing which is presented to me. But
it is apparent by definition that what I may call the inter-
subjective nexus cannot be given to me, since I am myself in
some way involved in it. It may not perhaps be inaccurate to
say that this nexus is in fact the necessary condition for any-
thing being given to me—at least if 'given' is taken in its
narrowest meaning: and if this might seem arguable, one
should at least recognize that it is only this nexus which can
allow the thing which is given to 'speak to me'.
Now, if I am to answer it, it must in some sort of way speak
to me. Thus we can see the position we must necessarily
take up towards the embarrassing questions which presented
themselves to us just now. Without doubt the intersubjective
nexus cannot be in any way asserted : it can only be acknow-
ledged. Here again we meet an idea which has already taken up
much of our attention. This recognition must assuredly be patient
of translation into an expressible affirmation. At the same time
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 THE QUESTION OF BEING

we should be careful to remember that the affirmation should

possess a special character, that of being the root of every expres-
sible affirmation. I should readily agree that it is the mysterious
root of language. These words should be taken literally; and
you will understand that I am here referring to the definition
of mystery which I put forward in my first volume. But this
point is so important and at the same time, I must admit,
presents such difficulties, that it is well to labour it as we
continue to circle round the elusive centre of the problem.
At first it certainly seems that there is a difference only of
perspective between what I now call the intersubjective nexus
and that to which last year I gave, when speaking of truth, the
name of intelligible milieu; one might say that the intelligible
milieu or medium is only the projection on an ideal plane of what
existentially speaking presents itself to us as the intersubjec-
tive nexus. This elucidation is, however, quite insufficient. I
have had the misfortune to note by my own experience that
when we adhere to this expression of intersubjective nexus,
what I am tempted to call a mental clot is formed, which
interrupts the circulation of thought ; and it is precisely this
circulation of thought which we have to re-establish. I
mean that the words, so to say, interpose themselves between
me and the thought I am driving at; they get a bogey-like and
unwelcome reality of their own; they become an obstacle
instead of remaining an instrument. What exactly are we
looking for? We have agreed that it is not a fact, but no more
is it a form in the traditional meaning of the word. It would be
better to speak of a structure, so long as we remember that
when we speak of a structure, we commonly call up the idea
of an object which is patient of being observed from the
outside. But here the point with which we are concerned is
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 FAITH AND REALITY

what I should make bold to call the inside of a structure, of an

inside, moreover, to 'which we must realize we are entirely
unable, in our condition of finite beings and in as much as we
are tied to an earthly dwelling, to imagine, to set virtually
before ourselves, a corresponding outside. This should help
to throw some light on the strange and highly disconcerting
character of the foundations on which we have to build as
best we can the rudiments of a metaphysic ; and we should
doubtless emphasize this even more, so that we may throw as
much light as possible on those foundations. The great
difficulty with which we are now faced comes from the fact
that our thinking has had to bear the weight of idealist teach-
ings. It has great trouble in freeing itself from them and can
normally address itself to any object only by concentrating
upon I think, or upon something which is simply a vaguer
modification of / think—Ifeel, for example, or I see. But here
we are called upon for an entirely different type of effort. We
may say that we have to place ourselves on this side of the
insularity of the ego ; we must get to the centre of the actual
element from which the island emerges and presents itself to
our view. What, then, is the element of which I was able to
say that it was the inside of a structure? In the first place, can
we here legitimately ask the question, 'What is it' ? We must
first make a preliminary analysis.
If, for example, I am going for a walk and I find a flower
which I have never seen before, and if I ask, 'What is this
flower ?', that question has a relatively precise meaning.
Perhaps my companion can tell me the name of the flower, and
I may then consider the matter settled. But perhaps it will not
be enough for me to know the name which is commonly given
to it; and if I have some idea of botany, I may ask to what
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 THE QUESTION OF BEING

family the flower belongs. If I am told that it is an orchis,

shall conclude that it presents certain characteristics in
common with other flowers which I have already seen and
which I am able to recognize. There is thus a possibility of
progress in the answering of the question, 'What is this
flower?' Nevertheless we see directly that even the more
scientific answer, which enables me to classify the flower, is
not an exhaustive answer; in fact in a certain sense it is no
answer at all; it is even an evasion. By that I mean that it
disregards the singularity of this particular flower. What has
actually happened is as though my question had been interpre-
ted as follows—`to what thing other than itself, can this flower
itself be reduced?' But now we find the real paradox—the
first unscientific answer, which consisted in giving the name of
the flower, although it had practically no rational basis, yet
satisfied the demand in me which the interpretation by reduc-
tion tends on the contrary to frustrate. It is true that the
satisfaction which is here given by the name seems as though
it could be felt only by a consciousness which has been arrested
at a pre-scientific stage, practically at an infantile stage where
the name is taken as being one body with the thing named and
so usurps a magical potency. We shall have to come back
later, perhaps, to this important point.
In all these instances it is important to note, though it has
often been insufficiently appreciated, that the question 'What
is it ?' always has reference to something that can be given a
distinctive designation ; to look at it more profoundly, it has
reference in every instance to an order that implies threefold
inter-relations. To go back to the elementary example I made
use of before, I point out the flower—this flower—to my
companion; he has more botanical knowledge than I have, and
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 FAITH AND REALITY

1 count on him to explain to me what it is. It is, of course,

understood that I could look it up in a book of botany, which
would serve the same purpose ; or even, supposing that I am
alone, that I could consult my own knowledge. In all these
instances, there are the three elements, the three terms
subsist. Might one not, indeed, ask whether fundamentally
the question, if it is taken in its simplest form, will not be found
to rest on a plane which is not threefold but twofold, as though
I had asked the flower 'Who are you?' But to put the question
in that form is inevitably to distort it. It is not the flower which
tells me its name through the medium of the botanist ; I shall
be forced to see that the name is a convention, it has been
agreed to give that particular name to the flower in which I
am interested. By that convention we slip out of the realm of
being properly so called, and all that we shall learn will be
what one can say about the flower if we leave out the one
important thing—the singularity which forced my attention,
or which, in other words, spoke to me.
We have now reached some conclusions which may turn
out to be important for subsequent enquiries. We must be
careful to remember the starting point of the analysis we have
just made. We were asking ourselves what was the inter-
subjective element from which the ego seems to emerge like
an island rising from the waves. There is one point here, how.
ever, which deserves our close attention. I have been speaking
as though this element could be pointed out or designated, in
the sense in which I can point out the sea to someone else
when I have seen it for the first time. In such a case I should not
be satisfied with the answer, 'What you are looking at is the
sea' ; I could be given straightway a number of ideas about the
sea, about its relation to the continent, to the whole surface
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 THE QUESTION OF BEING

of the earth, and so forth. But the element with which we are
here concerned cannot really be designated ; I should say, to
put it briefly, that it cannot be contained in the designation of
the 'this' or the 'that' ; it is not, in fact, either this or that.
It transcends any disjunction of this kind. It would not be
inaccurate to say that it is an implied understanding which
remains an implied understanding even when I try to focus
my thought upon it. I agree that I shall almost inevitably be led
to try to make a picture for myself of this element of inter-
subjectivity; for example, I may conceive it as what I might
call a fluid medium; but by that very act I shall deprive it of
its own peculiar quality, which is a spiritual quality; I shall
rob it of the character which enabled me to qualify it as inter-
subjective. The best assurance against these misunderstandings
is to have recourse to metaphors. These metaphors are more
than mere metaphors, they are borrowed from the realm of
reality, but of a non-optic, a non-spectacular, reality. I am
now thinking primarily of the world in which I move when
am improvising on the piano, a world which is also, I am quite
certain, the world in which the creative musician constructs
his melodies. It is a world in which everything is in communi-
cation, in which everything is bound together. But we must
remember that the fruit of our earlier discussion has been to
pass beyond the plane of pure relations. What we commonly
mean by that word is after all only an abstract reckoning up of
what in this context should be recognized as living communica-
tion. The content of the words 'living communication', is still
somewhat indistinct. I hope, though I cannot be sure of it,
that in the course of our enquiry we may be able to elucidate
it without unduly intellectualizing it.
I am afraid this first lecture has been somewhat disconcert-
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 FAITH AND REALITY

ing ; but before I finish it I should like to try to answer a question

which we cannot help asking ourselves as we reach the end of
its tortuous progress. Can we admit that we have reached a
point where we may identify being with intersubjectivity?
Can we say that being is intersubjectivity?
I must answer immediately that it seems to me impossible
to agree to his proposition if it is taken literally. The true
answer, it seems to me, is something much more subtle, and
needs an expression that is at once stricter and more intricate.
In these matters it is as well not to take too dogmatic a
tone, but I think that one thing emerges : a thought which
directs itself towards being, by that very act recreates around
itself the intersubjective presence which a philosophy of
monadist inspiration begins by expelling in the most arbitrary
and high-handed manner. Remember, too, that the monadist
philosopher's universe is such that it is difficult to imagine
how the monadist philosophy itself could have taken root in it.
Does it not presuppose a sort of inter-monad background, and
does it not—at least when it is presented in its strictest form
—at the same time expressly preclude the possibility of such
a background? One might, perhaps, go further, and show that
a consistent monadist thought is obliged to put too much
emphasis on the domain of the possible at the expense of being
taken in its mysterious positivity. These, however, are only
preliminary considerations; at a later stage we should be able
to clarify them. We could perhaps express it in language that
can be grasped more immediately by saying that the more the
ego attempts to assert for itself a central or autocratic position
in the economy of consciousness, the more the density
of being is attenuated. Conversely, the more the ego realizes
that it is but one among others, among an infinity of others with
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 THE QUESTION OF BEING

which it maintains relations that are sometimes very difficult

to trace, the more it tends to recapture the feeling of this
density.
Nevertheless we must be on our guard ; for if we were to
confine ourselves to saying that the ego is simply one among
others, we should reduce it to the status of one element in
a numerical total. I have laid such stress upon intersubjectivity
precisely because I wish to emphasize the presence of an
underlying reality that is felt, of a community which is deeply
rooted in ontology; without this human relations, in any real
sense, would be unintelligible, or, to put it more accurately,
would have to be looked upon as exclusively mythical.
This, then, is the conclusion we can draw at the end of this
first lecture : whatever more precise characteristics may sub-
sequently be assigned to an enquiry which bears upon being as
such, we must recognize from the outset that the enquiry moves
in a dimension which cannot be that of solipsist reflection, even
in the most critical sense, that is to say of a reflection which is
centred on the transcendental Ego, by whatever name we may
call it. In more concrete language : I concern myself with being
only in so far as I have a more or less distinct consciousness of the
underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I
already have a preliminary notion. In the light of the ideas which
have not yet penetrated to the obscure regions in which we
have tried to hack a path for ourselves, I should say of these
beings that they are above all my fellow-travellers—my
fellow-creatures — for once the English language can give us an
expression for which there is no exact French equivalent; in
French one would have had to paraphrase it, to extract the
humble and at the same time inexhaustible depth of its
meaning.
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