Maurice Blondel (1861—1949)

1. Biography

Maurice Blondel was born in Dijon, France in 1861, entered the École
Normale Supérieure in 1881, and passed the aggregation in 1886. Like
many in his generation, he was profoundly affected by the tensions in
French life, particularly those between the French academic
establishment and Catholicism. Blondel defended his thesis, L'action
in 1893, at the Sorbonne. His thesis, which argues for the
inescapability of the "religious problem", brought him into the heart
of theological and philosophical controversy of his time, First,
Blondel was refused an university position on the grounds of having
taken an improperly religious position in his philosophy, finally
receiving a Professorship in Aix in 1897. After his difficulties with
the philosophers, Blondel found himself under attack by conservative
neo-thomist theologians for having rationalized theology, and
ultimately by the group L'Action Francaise, as a "modernist". Blondel
wrote the Letter on Apologetics in 1896 and History and Dogma in 1903
precisely to address these problems, not least the great gap between
Catholic thought and Modern philosophy and social existence.

Blondel refused to republish L'action (1893), intending to rework it
in light of a larger, more rigorous project that was to become his
metaphysical trilogy. In the meantime, he published numerous articles
upon Modern Philosophy and Church Fathers, and took part in the
Modernist controversy, taking a position that was neither Modernist
nor Veterist, but rather stressed the role of a living tradition. In
1905, Blondel purchased the journal Annales de la Philosophie
Chrétienne, and set up Lucien Laberthonière as editor, and engaged
himself in argument against L'Action Francaise and its authors. In
1919, Blondel's wife, Rose, died, and in 1927, his vision degenerated,
leaving him nearly blind, necessitating his retirement, able to work
only by dictation. From 1934 to 1937, however, he published the five
volumes, La Pensée (2 vol.), L'être et les êtres, and L'action (2
vol.) of the metaphysical trilogy, followed by L'Esprit chrétien, only
two volumes of which were completely finished at his death in 1949.

Blondel's importance has largely been in theological and Catholic
philosophical circles in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Quebec.
Among many other important authors in the 20th Century, Blondel is
responsible for the "new theology", that played such a great role in
the deliberations and arguments of the Second Vatican Council.

2. Immanence and Transcendence

Perhaps the most central theme in Blondel's work is the complex
relationship between immanence and transcendence. For each order of
phenomena, it is possible to carry out an analysis simply at the level
of those phenomena or in terms of those phenomena, within certain
limits. Such an analysis, while revealing the relative sufficiency and
structures of one level, for instance, those of affectivity and the
body on the one hand, or of political association, on the other, has
as its goal the indication at what points at to what degree these
levels are not self-sufficient and must make recourse, either overtly
or covertly to something transcendent to that level and order, for
example, intentional and voluntary action as transcendent to
affectivity, or humanity and morality as transcendent to political
association. This type of analysis does not nullify the reality of the
phenomena treated as immanent, but rather exhibits their necessary
co-structuring relationship with the orders of phenomena transcendent
to them.

This relationship is often figured in terms of adequacy and
self-sufficiency. The goal of Blondel's analyses is to show that the
order of phenomena treated as immanent from within the scope of that
particular investigation is not sufficient unto itself, that is, that
at least another order of phenomena, an order transcendent to the
order under investigation. Philosophical, religious, and scientific
doctrines function, never simply as representations of reality, simply
within the range of speculation or theory, but also serve to orient
the life, practices, and action of human subjects, and it is in this
respect that adequacy as a criterion comes into play. A doctrine about
the reality in which human beings live which does not sufficiently
take into account and provide a reflective basis for action, by which
a subject can come to understand their role and destiny within that
life, a life shared by others, mediated historically and materially,
and ultimately oriented towards transcendence, cannot but prove to be
inadequate to the demands of the problem of action.

In this perspective then, the goal of Blondel's life-work was
three-fold: First, to examine the exigencies of human action in order
to delineate the too-often neglected structures of this vital
dimension of human existence. Second, to examine the doctrines of
thinkers, texts, and movements, in order to assess the adequacy of
their positions and to expose the inadequacies of their positions and
practices. What Blondel carried out in his own time is what has come
to be called, in certain circles, as set of "philosophical
interventions"; Finally, the development of a more fully articulated
"philosophy of insufficiency", which would comprehensively treat the
relationship of action to thought and being for the human subject
oriented historically, socially, and in relation to the Absolute.

3. L'Action (1893)

L'Action: essai d'une critique de la vie et d'une science de la
pratique, with minor adjustments, is the thesis defended by Blondel at
the Sorbonne at. This work, despite its very early position in
Blondel's corpus, is perhaps the best known of his works. While not as
comprehensive as his later works, many of the themes that dominate his
work are treated in L'action, and for this reason, this article gives
the greatest space to a summary of these themes as found in that work.
The text consists of five main sections, developing a dialectical
phenomenology and ontology of the subject of action and its relation
to transcendence. Blondel begins, in the Introduction, by delineating
the relationship between speculation and action, and by arguing the
impossibility of a purely speculative resolution or even setting of
the problem action poses

The human condition is of the necessity to act, without ever having
the luxury of taking a purely speculative position prior to
involvement.

"Impossibility of abstaining or of holding myself back, an incapacity
to satisfy myself, to suffice to myself, and to be free of myself,
this is what a first glance at my condition reveals to me." (p.x)

At the same time, this condition of already being enmired in the
situation of action, action one has already taken, and action one is
yet to take, provides the subject with the possibility of knowledge
about the conditions and determinations of action, both a type of
self-knowledge, and a knowledge of reality. Commitment, therefore,
does not preclude speculative objectivity, rather it is its condition
of possibility.

I will not claim to know myself and to experience myself, to acquire
certainty, nor to assess the destiny of Man, without placing all of
Man that I carry in myself into the crucible. It is a living
laboratory, this organism of flesh, appetites, desires, and thoughts
whose obscure labor I feel perpetually. (p.xii).

In fact, Blondel will go so far as to demand that the understanding of
action must be brought to the point of a "science", a science,
however, which, must go beyond the limitations of the conception of
science as simply objective. What Blondel means by science in this
context is similar to what Hegel means by science in his discussions
in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. This science
is particularized as well in the knowing and acting subject.

It is therefore a science of action that we must constitute; a science
that will only be such to the degree that it is total, because every
way of thinking and living deliberately implies a complete solution to
the problem of existence. (p. xvii)

Blondel focuses his investigation upon action precisely because this
is the only way to call everything into question, to proceed without
relying completely on any presuppositions or predeterminations. This,
however, leads him to a central concept and experience, that of a will
(volonté), at the very center, the "common knot of science, morals,
and metaphysics", of his being.

At the ground of my being, there is a willing and a loving of being,
or there is nothing . . . Involuntary and constrained being would no
longer be: so much it is true that the last word of everything is
beneficence; and to be is to will and to love. (p. xxiii)

In the first part, Blondel asks whether the problem of action is
necessary to pose in the first place, or whether it can be avoided. By
the problem of action, Blondel means the problem of the determination
of the subject morally by some degree of reflection and engagement
within being. It is not possible to suppress or banish this problem
entirely by denying the possibility or reality of moral action, nor
to, in appearance going one step further, deny any possibility of an
adequate knowledge of being, in the first place because these attempts
to deny the ground of the problem must still make some claim to a
basis in truth and a relation to value.

"In order to suppress everything, it is necessary, and it suffices, as
it appears, to be all science, all sensation, and all action." (p.2)

This is a theme which appears over and over in Blondel's works. Such
negative and ultimately idealistic attempts to banish the problem
indicate a deep form of egoism, a taking of self as the ultimately
valuable and real, and an attempt, at the same time to remove any
constraints upon the pure freedom of the self. This takes place though
an attempt to conceal this position of a will, not only to power, but
for the preservation of the conditions of employing that power, by
means of a scepticism or nihilism that ostensibly denies the reality
of values, an treats being as appearance. What this position truly
maintains, however, is the will willing its own freedom, a type of
freedom, however, unconditioned by any object but the self.

And, "I do not will to will", nolo velle, translates immediately in
the language of reflection into the two words, volo nolle, "I will not
to will". At least to do violence to the laws of conscience, not
moral, but psychological, at least to dissimulate, under a completely
verbal subtlety, to truth of things, the single sentiment of an
absence of will implies the idea of a will that does not will and
abdicates. (p. 12)

No denial of the problem, therefore, can sustain itself, not simply
because it is false, but because it relies secretly upon that which it
would refuse to affirm. In the second part, Blondel asks whether,
given that the problem of action in unavoidable, one can consistently
take a negative solution to it, the solution of pessimism or of a
tragic sensibility. This position is not without a certain ground in
truth, for our experience of life is not one of simple harmony, but
one of discord, of suffering, of the presence of evil. It does not
suffice for us to will the good for the good to be produced, or even
for our wills to remain constant. The experience at the ground of
pessimism is one of futility and the vanity of our attempts to come to
terms with reality. Blondel views this problematic as especially acute
in modern times, promoted by the artificial modes of thought of
Kantian Critical Philosophy

Under the pretext of raising back up and of strengthening perhaps
practical reason, one ruined it by the same stroke that strikes a
deadly blow to pure reason. For all, whether they know or not, the
problem of life is at the same time a question of metaphysics, or
morals, and of science: action is that synthesis of willing, of
knowing, and of being, the link of the human composite that one cannot
separate without destroying everything that has been deunited.

The modern forms of pessimism result, in part, from the dominance of a
mode of thought that, driven by epistemological concerns, imposes
these ultimately false separations, both methodologically, as in the
sciences, and more generally in the conditions of public life. If the
possibility of a coherent totality of willing, knowing and being, is
denied, these fall apart into orders of mere positivities whose
ultimate meaning cannot be grasped. Indeed, pessimism is the very
denial of such a meaning.

Again, Blondel finds in pessimism a hidden movement and directedness
of the will. The pessimist cannot be satisfied with life because he
postulates some greater value, unsatisfied in that life, namely the
fullness of being, not merely the phenomenon.

From the phenomenon, he argues against being, even though he only
feels the insufficiency of the phenomenon if it is penetrated first by
the grandeur of being: he affirms before denying it and in order to
deny it. (p. 33)

At the moment when one declares the insufficiency of the phenomenon,
one attaches oneself to it as if it were the only real and solid
being; one persists in contenting oneself with what thought and desire
recognize to be vain, deceptive, and nul; one places one's whole where
one admits otherwise that there is nothing. (p. 35)

The third part of L'action, divided into five sections, takes up the
task of delineating a positive solution to the problem of action, by
means of generating and applying the "Science of action" Blondel spoke
of earlier. Blondel argues that one cannot restrict the phenomenon of
action or the science which would study it to a purely natural order,
least of all that of the "natural sciences" developed in Modernity. In
the first section, beginning with an analysis of sensation, the
incapacity for the natural sciences to deal effectively with sensation
as actually sensed, that is, buy a subject, and not treated merely as
an objective fact, leads Blondel into a distinction between two
different but auto-reinforcing fields of "science", namely deductive
science and positive or empirical science. Both of these types of
science, which remain incapable of treating subjectivity as such, are
justified by a covert appeal to each other, explaining the dominance
of the scientific viewpoint in Modernity.

In order to effectively study action, a subjective science is
necessary, a science that finds its basis in the very phenomenon of
subjectivity

That is to say that in every scientific truth and in every known
reality we must suppose, in order that it be known, an internal
principle of unity, a center of grouping imperceptible to the senses
or to the mathematical imagination, an operation immanent to the
diversity of the parts, an organic idea, an original action which
escapes from positive knowledge at the moment when it makes it
possible, and to employ a word which needs to be better defined, a
subjectivity (p. 87)

In the second section, Blondel begins to work out this science of
subjectivity, beginning at the level of the threshold of consciousness
and the affective and sensual structures of the body. In his
investigation of the determinations of these basic components of
consciousness, Blondel rejects any reduction to formal-mechanistic
conceptions of determination, namely mechanistic determinism. At first
this takes place in terms of a mere psychological spontaneity.

So, from the moment where it appears under the form of appetite or of
instinctual need, there is a spontaneity victorious over mechanist
determinism, an automatism already completely psychological. (p. 103)

The psychological determinism absorbs and puts to use the physical
determinism, and will, in its turn be likewise set upon by higher
levels of human existence, mediated in great part by symbolic
activity. Symbolic activity is the original basis of both the
intellect and the will, of intentional action and of reflection. The
categories by which action and thought become possible remain imbued,
but no longer determined by, affectivity and sensation, and enter into
and generate further complex orders of their own which, although they
are distinguishable from the lower orders, maintain a continuity with
them as well.

It is from this basis that the human being becomes conscious, no
merely of urges and desires or capacities, but also of freedom as such
and of more than fleeting self-consciousness. In fact, the two, while
not identical, are inextricable. Reflection guides action, and action
demands reflection, both of these taking place through the subject
which is never completely either one or the other. It is also at this
level where transcendence can begin to be grasped reflectively, as
further determination with respect to the immanent and not merely the
negation of the immanent. For the subject, this takes place in
relation to the infinite, and an infinite which one comes to know
imperfectly through action.

What is it in effect that reveals to consciousness that apparent
infinity of a power which is that agent's? It is the very action which
accomplishes itself in it and by it. And what inspires for it the
desire and the feeling of its own power? It is the idea of that
infinity of action from which it makes the origin of its voluntary
decisions: a reflection and freedom impossible for whoever instead of
acting would be acted upon. For there is no reason or reflective
consciousness or sentiment of infinity except where there is
consciousness of acting. (p.120)

Action then, reposing originally upon a ground of passivity, of being
acted upon by the world and others, is a transcendence of that
passivity. In turn, however, that means that the process of the
determination of that activity, that transcendence will be a process
that is in fact in process, that cannot be simply reduced again to
another immanent order, especially an order represented as purely
immanent, for that would involve us again in the problem of a
subjectivity which does not take account at all, as was the case in
modern science, of its continual, complex, and irreducible role in
orders of objectivity.

The freedom of the will and the capacity for reflection, for
rationality, cannot be maintained as purified, however, as they were
for Kant, for the attempt to guarantee autonomy of the will as a
condition for moral action ignore the requirement of commitment, of a
necessary degree of heteronomy. In order to act in a world which is
not simply dominated by the subject, the subject must allow its action
to de determined in part by the exigencies of the situation. A certain
heteronomy is therefore the condition for the possibility of autonomy.

Submitting itself to a heteronomy in order to maintain its own
sovereignty, it brings to the service of a chosen tendency the very
forces of the rival tendencies; it does what it does with the power
that it would have used to do everything that it does not do. (p.130)

Action is a sort of co-action, not simply the imposition of force
externally, but a relation to what one wills to act upon and with.
Blondel makes a distinction between the willing will (volonté
voulante) and the willed will (volonté voulue) which are both aspects
of this play between autonomy and heteronomy in co-action.

This is why, proposing to itself freedom as an end, one feels a
disproportion between the willing will, quod procedit ex volontate,
and the willed will, quod volontatis objectum fit. One experiences the
difficulty of a choice and a sacrifice.(p. 132)

In the three sections that follow, Blondel carries out a set of
analyses, moving from the body of the subject to the relationship
between the individual and society, and finally from the social to the
religious in a general sense, the "superstitious". The general
movement in each case follows the same structure: an analysis of the
order of immanence indicates the insufficiency of that order to the
phenomena that are uncovered in that analysis, pointing to the
necessity of something transcendent to and contributing to the
structure of meaning of the immanent order. That transcendent then is
explored from the new vantage point of that order of phenomena, and
reveals in its turn its own insufficiencies and exigencies.

Beginning with the body, Blondel exposes the relationship between
conscious life and the unconscious, which has its own role in action.
The very irreducibility of action to a verbal or conceptual
formalization derives from the fact that our existence as conscious
and self-conscious beings is mediated by the unconscious, that which
is, as determinations of agents, without being explicitly known by
those agents.

The unconscious is not down below only; it is also up above and beyond
deliberate resolutions. (p.150)

Consciousness is not something which sorts out the vagaries of the
unconscious or operates upon it afterward; rather it is a node of
clarity and lucidity which is at the same time, a shifting off into
regions of shadow. Blondel asks why the will has to incarnate itself
in materiality. The answer to this is not simply a matter of the
interaction between formal and material causes, so that in order to
have a form, there must be a matter in which the form resides. Nor, in
a variation on this, is it simply a matter of efficient causality, so
that the essence of the will be that it act upon and through the body.
Instead, there is a relationship of final causality which includes
these others but surpasses them. For, more is gained by the will than
simply the locus of its externalization in its incarnation, precisely
because the will is something which takes place temporally. The will
allows itself to be worked upon, to be unfolded, to blossom open, only
though its thoroughgoing ebb and flow into and out of materiality.
Hence, in order for the will to be, not simply what it wills, but what
it will be, what it would be, that is, for it to move towards its
final end, it must allow this incorporation and materialization in the
body.

This means that the will has to incorporate itself in habitual
processes, where there is an interplay between the conscious and the
unconscious. The permeability of the conscious and the unconscious to
each other is what allows them to interact.

Thus the prealable notion of effort is like the structure prepared to
receive all of the precise lessons of effective experience. What is
afferent in real perception is not perceived as such except as the
consequece of a yet undetermined initiative and because of the a
priori welcome of the expected a posteriori. (p.156)

This very complex process cannot be taken in by consciousness as a
whole without the aid of adumbration and imagery. At the same time,
however, the very passivity and habitude which is required for the
effectuation of the will is at the same time a product of previous
willings mediated through previous states of materiality.

The habitual comportments, modified by the conscious interventions of
the will and reflection, are not merely the relationship of a subject
to a set of objects. Rather, at this basic level, the relationships to
objects are already invested with a degree of subjectivity that is not
merely a projection on the part of the acting subject. To the degree
that the forces which resist the willing will and thus condition the
willed will are not simply physical factors of an order completely
heterogenous to the will, they take on a partially subjective nature.

But, the forces that are not a pure inertia, nor a brutal and blind
weight; the multiple forces that express themselves in us by an
instinctive tendency toward ends in view, by appetites, by
solicitations that hold our thought, of forces that, in a word,
reveal, below reflection, a subjective life and the intervention of
obscure consciousnesses. (p.162)

These forces, within the willing subject are partially dominated by
reason and the will, but a reversal of this is possible as well, where
the subject comes to be dominated by these impulsions of forces. In
fact, this is quite reflective of Blondel's position. These motifs can
come to dominate the reasonable willing subject precisely because they
play a necessary role in action. Rational and voluntary action is then
never pure, it always requires a co-action and synergy.

This co-action becomes much more explicit in the domain of the social.
The possibility of action does not lie simply in the relation of the
individual to the world, but is rather already permeated by sociality,
not least in so far as action is brought into reflective thought by
instances of conceptualization and language, but also by a categorical
exigency of intersubjectivity.

Just as the formulated liberty could not save its autonomy except by
imposing on itself the heteronomy of a practical obligation and an
effort, the person is not born in the individual, it does not
constitute and conserve itself except by assigning itself an
impersonal end . . .Man does not suffice to himself; he must act for
others, with others, by others. One cannot arrange for onself the
affairs of one's own life. Our existences are so connected that it is
impossible the conceive a single action that does not extend in
infinite undulations, quite beyond the end that it seemed to aim at.
(p.198)

The condition for all but the most primitive and basic types of action
is that one act within a social world, which means not simply a world
of others, but a world in which others act, have acted, and will act.
In the fourth section, Blondel turns his attention explicitly to the
conditions of the intelligibility of acts, and this implies a
necessary mediation by signification, signs, and language. In its most
fundamental form, this co-implication of self and other takes place in
terms of giving aid, of helping, prior to all strive and contention,
which, however, are also then possibilities of the acting subject in
relation to other subjects.

The fact of such an intricate relationship between action and
signification, however, also means that the expressivity of the act
does not remain with the subject, but is in a certain sense, just as
much as a word or a gesture, alienated from the originating subject.
Any other subject might be the one to perceive and interpret, give a
meaning to the action, and this is a condition for the ac even in the
process of origination, which makes all action, in a certain sense
universal. Significative action, however, is not simply
representation, but is also productive.

One should not believe that, in the sign, there is nothing more than
its weakened echo: no, there is, already in it, in order to make it
possible and to produce it, a commerce of the agent with something
other than the agent, a new synthesis of the individual life with the
milieu where it deploys itself. So, one does not speak in the void;
and it is a foreign concourse a parte acti, which permits the most
rudimentary expansion a parte agentis. Every sign is already a work.
(p. 208)

This does not mean, however, that action is always successful, always
aided by those brought into it through their own contribution to the
act. Working along with each other means that the guidance and
direction of the action is also alienable.

The impenetrability, the insufficiency, the unintelligence of our
allies mess up our projects just as much as the hostility of
obstacles: They make theirs what we want to be our own. (p. 217)

This, however, is never an all-or-nothing determination. Implicitly,
all involved in an action play some role in its determination.

So the causal link results at the same time from a subjective
disposition and an emperical association. Its originality is at the
same time analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori; for, in the
effect produced, each of the subjects who contributes is a principal
agent. The ideal intention seems completely drawn from the initiator;
the response appears to come entirely from the collaborator; but, in
fact, there is a reciprocity of the forma and the matter, and in the
work, there is a symmetrical operation: each thinks to have done
everything. (p. 223)

In the arrangements of social relations, a level transcendent to the
individual subject, this becomes explicit. And, with this movement to
the level of the social, Blondel treats another order of immanence,
one where the existence and agency of individuals is no longer
oriented around the subject alone.

That there are subjects foreign to the agent, this is a phenomenon of
the same order as the existence of the subject himself (p. 225)

Blondel elaborates the structures of social organization in the fifth
part of the third section. He does not assume a single basis for
society. There are different levels, all of which interpenetrate each
other and contribute to determination of each other, but within which
there exists a certain order irreducible to but affected by the other
orders.

These societies, more or less comprehensive, are in effect defined and
limited, just as every organism is. They form a collective
individuality, and bear, like a living being, a proper name: the
family, the homeland, humanity. But, at the same time that they are
circumscribed and as it were boxed-up in each other, they remain open.
(p.246)

These different levels of social organization, however, can fall into
difficulties and idolatries analogous to those that can bedevil the
individual. Often the capacity for healthy and salutary social
involvement exists only in potentia, in actu at the level of the
individuals only, not at the level of society. Blondel devotes
analyses to each of the levels. At the level of the family, a mutual
commitment, rooted in but not reducible to organic processes,
conditioned but not entirely determined by the culture of the
homeland, results in the generation of a new generation, maintaining a
certain identity through difference. More complex and serving
different ends than the family alone is the homeland, the patrie, the
nation, where a common culture is shared, the mode of life is
differentiated, and a continuity beyond that of blood-relations is
preserved.

Blondel is quite conscious of the dangers that a Romantic conception
of the nation as Volk promotes. He raises two very important
requirements for a nation to be more than simply an ideological
construct which conceals structures of domination. First, there must
be equitable relations of production between the classes and groups
comprising the society. Second, there must be a reflective and free
social discourse.

Not that the historical development of nations and races accomplishes
itself with the infallible spontaneity of instinct. It is not at all a
matter of that confused life that vegetates in the heart of popular
masses. Human history is not, in the strict sens of the word, natural
history. That is to say, beyond the indistinct forces which move the
great human currents, reflection and liberty are original powers,
capable of penetrating profoundly, as essential factors, into the
destiny of peoples. (p. 266)

In fact, this requirement for the social to be conditioned by
reflection and freedom, the province of the will and reason means that
the homeland, the nation is revealed as insufficient to itself. To the
degree that universal ideas are appealed to and promoted, the nation
is no longer able to close itself off and treat others as mere tools
or slaves. The higher developments of national consciousness, for
Blondel, introduce the development of consciousness of humanity as
such.

The universalization of morality that this movement introduces the
role of morality as more than simply a set of customs or an ethos. The
acting agent, acting within a social milieu which is, most often,
quite flawed and wracked by conflicts, injustices, violence, remains
capable of, even called to, action that can promote the good, both
social and individual. Morality, is not, however, as it was for Kant,
the universal precepts of a reason legislating for itself and for all
rational beings. Instead, more comprehensively, it consists in the
relations of social and moral solidarity with the actions, many of
them past, the actions of those who are already themselves dead.
Morality is something which exceeds the moral agent not because the
moral agent is not rational enough, but because morality is something
which, properly speaking, takes place within, but is not reduced to or
absolutely determined by society.

Morals are not simple individual habits generalized. If there is an
action of the individual on society, and of society on the individual,
we must above all take account of the influence of society on society
itself. That is to say that morals create morals; that a social fact
derives from other social and collective facts where the sentiment has
a greater part than the clear idea; and that individual action cannot
suffice to organize the life of the individual, because there always
is in practical logic more than the abstract analysis could discover.
(p.284)

Morality, however, and the possibility of moral action, leads to
another level of transcendence. It is impossible to account fully for
morality by reference to a purely secular order of phenomena, and the
demythologised accounts of Enlightenment philosophy remain unable to
account for it as well. There is a dimension which Blondel calls the
"superstitious" that supports value and morality and provides it with
an end and structure of motivations as well. Even in the appeal to a
demythologized or disenchanted social world, this functions as a new
type of myth, the myth of having and appealing to no myths. This means
that the social order, transcendent to the individual subject, cannot
be wholly self-sufficient as well, not even when expanded to a
generalized humanity. One must take account of the role of the
supernatural, not merely in its role in the origins of primitive
cultures, but within all cultures.

In the fourth part, Blondel, having elaborated the dialectical
relationships between the various orders of immanence and
transcendence, Blondel returns to the problem of action from
considerations of the single acting subject. In the first moment, the
will is revealed as inadequate to the action it aims to impose on
phenomena; something always escapes it in its striving towards a goal.
Second, willing action not only fails to produce entirely what it
wills, it produces what it does not will, unforseen consequences; the
will remains, itself one of these unforseen consequences, and this
means responsibility cannot be easily evaded. Both of these moments
lead to the point of realization that human action implies an
"inevitable transcendence", eventually leading the agent towards the
"one thing necessary", the necessary being, God, who we, however, are
not able to figure and dominate by concepts or phenomena.

The part culminates in a radical determination of the acting
individual subject in relation to the structures that have been
uncovered and explored throughout the work, and in particular to the
transcendent moment of unity, Religion and God. Blondel calls this
moment "the option". This does not correspond to a voluntarist
determination of either absolute obedience to a divine being whose
reasons one cannot question or to non-obedience, but rather to the
possibility of an ascesis of the will and a recognition of one's
insufficiency. The other pole of the option is selfishness (egoisme),
a decision taken against this insufficiency, to, in one permutation or
another, will onself as the center of being, remaining, to be sure,
inadequate to this position, but also concealing this from onself.
This latter Blondel calls "the death of action" , counterpoised to the
"life of action", in which one wills to take part in an economy of
grace, to recognize not only one's finitude, but also the infinitude
of the Absolute that is related to the finite personally.

Mortification is therefore the true metaphysical experiment, that
which bears on being itself. What dies is that which impedes seeing,
doing, living; and what survives is already that which is reborn. To
survive oneself, there is the proof of the good will. The be dead
would not be anything, but to survive, to feel oneself stripped of
one's intimate complacencies and of one's tastes of independence, to
be in the world as not being in it, to find for all human tasks more
ardor in detachment than one can force in passion, this is the
masterpiece of man. (383-4)

In the final part of L'action, Blondel turns explicitly to the
relationship between philosophy and Christianity, the natural and the
supernatural. He rejects the argument that anything supernatural must
be, from a human perspective, arbitrary, since humans are not simply,
as his studies of action have shown, confined merely to the immanent
and natural orders. Blondel attacks the sterility of critical
philosophy, the apogee of the Enlightenment, for having closed off
questions rather than answering them, for demanding God to show
Himself and to be judged by man. Blondel locates the fundamental error
in the lack of attention to the phenomenon of action. Too often
philosophy treats action as something only secondary, thinking that
the limited intelligible structures philosophy treats are reality
itself. Instead, action plays a fundamental mediatory role, it allows
the "conditions of possibility" to be such, and to be manifested as
such.

Blondel draws as a corollary the necessity for literal and actual
lived practice in order to tackle the religious problem, which has
important implications for philosophical practice

Without false respect or temerity, it is fitting to bring philosophy
to the point where it can go, to the point that it ought to go. It has
too often abandoned a part, the highest, of its domain; we ought to
give it back to it. . . . It is a matter of seeing how this notion of
the supernatural is necessarily engendered, and how the supernatural
seems necessary to the human will in order that action be equated in
consciousness. (406)

Blondel brings the work to a close by discussing corollaries to this,
particularly the concrete and particular exigencies of such a
practical grounding. This does not imply any sort of particularity one
wishes to take; rather, to respond fully to the problem of action and
the religious problem is already to be centered in a history mediated
by certain texts and practices. At the same time, this also involves
the acting subject in the most general determination, those of thought
and of being, and these are structured dialectically, by a "logic"
that does not allow itself to be subsumed simply to thought, or, as it
did for Hegel, to the relationship between thought and being. The
attempt to resolve the problem of action and the religious problem
thus finds itself brought back finally to the problem of the end of
human destiny

The Critique of Life, in order to resolve the human problem, can not
not resolve the universal problem. It determines the common knot of
science, or morals, and of metaphysics. It fixes the relations of
consciousness and reality. It defines the meaning of being. This vital
point it discovers at the intersection of knowing and of willing, in
action (480)
4. The Reaction to L'Action and the Dialectic Between Philosophy and
Christianity

Blondel came under attack from both sides after the defense of his
thesis, first from the philosophical establishment, second from
right-wing Catholic critics. It is in response to this second set of
critics that Blondel wrote Letter on Apologetics and History and
Dogma, two works which treat the relationship between Catholic dogma,
the historical role of the Church, Modern Philosophy, and Modernity.
These pieces allowed Blondel to clarify his position on the concrete
exigencies of the historical relationship between the Catholic Church
and the subject acting within a world which had changed drastically
since the Middle Ages, a subject confronted not least with the
increasingly marginalized role of the Church in politics, economics,
science, and philosophy.

In the Letter on Apologetics, Blondel calls the Thomist-Scholastic
synthesis, at its time an apogee of reflective and concrete thought
engaged in social, intellectual, and religious problems, an "unstable
equilibrium", one which cannot be returned to or reimposed by fiat,
but which must be replaced by a renewed consideration of the general
conditions such a equilibrium was an attempt to reconcile and resolve.
Blondel locates this in the capacity for the Thomistic synthesis to
mediate the two conflicting realms of philosophy and theology by
providing a third term, a mediating ground and link. This capacity,
however, was a transitory one, lost in the immense changes that took
place in Modernity, and Blondel calls for the restoration, through
rigorous examination of the demands, motifs, and systematic claims of
modern thought, of such a mediating term.

The central problematic, as Blondel views it, is one of conflicting
requirements of autonomy and heteronomy. Philosophy, since it
emancipated itself from theological concerns, in order to be what it
ought to be, must be acknowledged as autonomous, while theology, by
its very nature, cannot be theology under such conditions; while
requiring use of the intellect and will, it ultimately can only take
place in a fundamental heteronomy.

. . . the chief and indeed the unique aim of philosophy is to assure
the full liberty of the mind, to guarantee the autonomous life of
thought, and to determine in complete independence the conditions
which establish its sway. Can there be, then, any possible connection
between philosophy and Christianity, since the one seems to exclude
the other. (152)

Blondel aims to undermine this false dichotomy in the Letter in two
main ways. First, he addresses the question of the necessity of
Christianity.

If Christianity were a belief and a way of life added to our nature
and our reason as something optional, if we could develop in our
integrity without this addition and we could refuse deliberately and
with impunity the crushing weight of the supernatural gift, there
would be no intelligible connection between these two levels, one of
which, from the rational point of view might well not exist. (154-5)

Blondel argues that assuming such an optional status for Christianity,
not optional in the sense of being merely a possible choice of the
individual subject, but optional in the sense of being ultimately
superfluous to rigorous philosophical reflection, is precisely to miss
addressing the problem Christianity poses; ultimately, it is a
question of "all or nothing". One can reject the philosophical
viewpoints that Christianity nurtures, one can decide a priori that
there is no relevance or veracity to such a comportment or hypothesis,
but this is not a neutral decision.

Second, Blondel argues that a dialectical engagement between
Christianity, in particular Catholicism, and Modern philosophy has
become necessary for either of these to remain consistent to
themselves and their very projects. On the part of Christianity, if it
is to retain a faithful orientation to Christ as Truth, it cannot
afford to disregard the thought developed since the apogee of the
Scholasticism, as was too often the case in Catholic circles. Nor
could it afford to uncritically accept premises from current thought,
too often the case in Protestant circles. For philosophy, the question
is one of realizing the limits to its competence, not simply by laying
down boundaries in the fashion Kant followed, through an intellectual
division of labor that subordinated all other disciplines to
philosophy; rather, philosophy, in order to remain true to itself,
must come to recognize the competencies of other disciplines, and the
exigencies of the supernatural, as the criteria for its limits.

Philosophy, in fine, giving up the pretension of containing and
controlling totum et omne de omni et toto and the contrary but
correlative pretension which makes it only a construction of thought
or an epiphenomenon on the surface of life, must now precisely define
its own competence and scope, including its own dynamism in the whole
system of determination which it studies. (180)

Such a philosophy, which Blondel alternately calls a "Christian
philosophy" or an "integral philosophy", would in fact be the
mediating third term discussed above, and is, Blondel maintains, the
"subjective science" developed in his work L'action. This integral
philosophy would not aim to replace all other systems, whether
philosophical or theological, or to subordinate them, but rather to
provide the supplement that they in fact require in order to fulfil
their functions properly, including refraining from abrogating to
themselves privileges, responsibilities, and authority which not only
they do not rightly possess, but also interfere with their functioning
and self-regulation and critique. Blondel's critique, therefore, is
also positive in that it not only manifest dialectically the limits
and relations between philosophy and Christianity, but also
constitutes precisely the theory and practice that maintains this
reflection.

In History and Dogma, Blondel returns to these problems in a more
historically motivated fashion. In the Letter on Apolgetics, he argued
that there was a historical progress in the emancipation and
subsequent development of Modern thought, not progress simpliciter,
however, but rather a condition for progress, a condition that would
be satisfied only in the evaluation, critique, and reappropriation of
Modern thought by the integral philosophy he elaborated. Blondel also
maintained that the proper attitude for the Catholic Church to take in
the face of the effects, and even dominance, of Modern thought in
recent time was not one of retrenchment, or return to an idealized
Middle Ages dominated by Thomism, in part because of the progress to
be realized through the confrontation with Modern thought, but also in
greater part because there is no humanly historical origin-point to be
returned to, which means that those advocating such a return are in
effect covertly relying upon a form of idealism. In History and Dogma,
Blondel takes up this problem more explicitly, arguing for a middle
position between and critical of historicism and extrinsicism.

The question in particular was to the status of Christian dogma and
its relationship to historical developments. One view, extrinsicism,
held that dogma was unchanging, that it provided the meaning to
historical events and developments, and that therefore the problems
posed by the development of dogma in human history simply reflected
errors. The static position taken by extrinsicism was motivated in
part by the excesses of historicism, which argues that since dogmas
arise historically, they are merely contingent products of historical
processes. Within Catholic circles, such historicism took the form of
Modernism, which, among other things, advocated accommodating dogma to
Modern thought, precisely by using the categories and systems of
Modern thought as the criteria for such accommodation.

Blondel rejects the explicit and systematic claims of both sides in
the dispute, but offers a solution that allows a more fertile
relationship between history and dogma. Dogma does in fact develop
historically, and it is the product of historical process that are to
a great degree contingent; in fact, going even further, in order for
Dogma not to be simply another form of idealism, the believer must
acknowledge that it is never present in absolutely completed form as
extrinsicism maintains. Since Dogma purports to refer to reality, as
part of that reality changes though the momentous changes of History,
Dogma must be open to reinterpretation in light of, but not simply in
terms of, present situations. In fact, living tradition allows for
such a dialectic between past and present without requiring one to be
absolutely subsumed to the other. On the other hand, the relativist
claims of historicism are not even coherent, when they are taken to
their logical conclusions. While the direction and thematics of
history cannot be determined a priori (one of the conditions of it
even being historical development), this does not mean that there are
not some central processes and events that are more important than
others and which play a much greater determinative role. In addition,
for Blondel, history itself poses the religious problems that the
dogma of Christianity represent solutions to.

Blondel's emphasis upon tradition reflects his very methodology.
Tradition is to function a a guide to the interpretation of the
relationship between dogma and history, but this tradition itself, if
it is not to falter and slip into one extreme or the other, must be a
living and vital tradition. This means that it must remain engaged
with the developments of the world outside of that tradition while at
the same time remaining engaged within in a continuing conversation
with the luminaries and decisive agents of its past. In the case of
Catholicism, as Blondel argues both against the conservative Catholics
of his time and against the Modern thinkers hostile to religion in
general, let alone to Christianity or Catholicism, the very nature of
the tradition requires a reflective and assiduously maintained
commitment to fidelity to keeping that a living tradition.

5. Blondel's Metaphysical Trilogy

In his later years, Blondel returned to the themes of L'action (1893),
this time as a moment in a much more explicitly worked out
metaphysical trilogy, La Pensée (2 vol.) in 1934 and 1935, L'être et
les êtres in 1935., and a new version of L'action (2 vol) in 1936 and
1937. The later works reflect not only a deepened philosophical
conception of the problems Blondel grapples with, nor simply a greater
contact with and comparison to the thoughts of other philosophers, but
also a more systematic structure of the problems. By treating the
categories of thought and being rigorously in two separate, but
related, works, he evades some of the difficulties that arise by
placing action as the primary category. The various studies, however,
form a cohesive whole, which is, in the end, rounded out by his more
properly theological works, L'esprit chrétien and Les exigences
philosophiques de chrétienité, and All of them culminate, like the
first L'action, in considerations of the "option" and in the
relationship to God. Only a greatly adumbrated account can be given
here of these five volumes of work, but perhaps the key points can be
made evident. In terms of this article, this requires a presentation
that departs from Blondel's explicit structuring of the works and
instead places the key points in relation to each other synthetically.

In La Pensée, Blondel outlines a doctrine of "unthought thought", or
"cosmic" thought, thought that has not been thought by any human
thinker, but nonetheless admits partially of being brought to
intelligibility in a mediated fashion by human thinkers. This
intelligible structure of phenomena does not remain, however, for the
observer, merely immanent structures of phenomena, a dialectic of
nature to be discovered and participated within. Nor does the thinking
subject alone supply the determination to the reason and order it
finds in the cosmos it explores, as in a dialectic of spirit. The
thinking and acting human subject represents, not the ground of being
and thought, nor simply a function or product of being or previous
human thought, but rather an insufficient acting and thinking being
whose action has its intelligibility and whose thought has its power
of action only partly on its own basis. In effect, Blondel elaborates
a dialectic of the supernatural that does not, as those of German
Idealism do, reduce the spiritual to the human, a dialectic between
nature, spirit, and God, which is a dialectic unfinished but not
undetermined from the perspective of the human agent. In La Pensée,
this takes place in terms of intelligibility , and in terms of the
relationship of the subject to two constituitive types of thought.

In L'être et les êtres, the same problematic is approached in
ontological terms, ultimately through the notion of created being.
Blondel denounces various forms of what he calls "ontologisme",
ontologies that falsely hypostatize or reify some aspect of being as
the ground or essence of all other beings and of Being itself. As he
noted in La Pensée and comes to note in both L'action (1893) and the
later L'action. There are striking similarities, given this
formulation, between Heidegger's insistences throughout his works that
the question of Being has been reduced in each historical epoch to
questions about beings; however, Blondel's analyses both radically
depart from Heidegger's claim that all valuation is simply
illegitimate projection onto Being on the part of the subject, and
that the Christian God, as concept in a philosophical-theological
system (for instance that of Thomas) does not address Being, but only
a being to which all other beings are placed into relation.

In order to preserve and do justice to both the mysteriousness of
Being, and the constant determination of beings, these cannot be
strictly separated from each other by a concept of "ontological
difference" as Heidegger claims. Rather than Being having to be
unfigurable, it must be figured, there is an exigency within our very
relation to Being that requires us to give it, and to discover within
it, determination and solidarity not only between beings and other
beings, the immanent order, but also between beings and Being, the
order of transcendence. At the same time, from the human side, the
thought of this, the being that supports this, and the action that
produces this is always insufficient, meaning not that it necessarily
fails, but that it requires the succor, teleological draw, and
assistance of a greater Being, the "uniquely necessary". Blondel
argues that this is the Christian God.

It is for these reasons that the concept of created being is taken by
Blondel to be the only truly coherent and consistent one. Any other
ontology, in particular those of various forms of idealism, is more
than simply a theory about the structure of and essence of beings; it
is also an act of the willing subject, an act that covertly places the
willing subject and its experiences as the center and ground of all
other than itself, a form of self-idolatry. The central problem with
such a position is not, however, simply that it is idolatrous, but
that it betrays itself and its self-imposed philosophical task; such a
position inevitably requires dismissing or reducing to another domain
central phenomena of human historical existence. It is only through a
study of being that acknowledges the insufficiency but also the
capacity of the creature to know creation and the Creator that the
being of the human person can be properly grasped. This has, as a
consequence, the effect of arguing against the privileging of
epistemology over a metaphysics of the knowing and acting subject, a
common occurrence in Modernity.

Materiality is the first level of being that Blondel turns his
critical attention to, primarily because materialisms of various
sorts, as well as idealism as reactions against the stultifying
effects of materialism, is a very common prejudice of Modernity.
Blondel reiterates his argument made earlier in the article
"L'illusion idéaliste" that any form of materialism that takes matter
as something absolutely self-sufficient, as the ground of which all
determinate things are made is actually a covert form of idealism,
since it hypostatizes a concept, namely that of matter, and simply
assumes the reducibility of all phenomena to arrangements of matter,
actually to idealized structures. At the same time, Blondel does not
aim to simply replace the concept of matter with that of thought and
generate a new idealist system. Rather, his concern is to take account
of the role of matter. Here, his account bears similarities to both
the Thomistico-Aristotelean and the Marxist accounts of matter. For
Thomas, prime matter is a mere conceptual necessity, a being of
reason, but at the same time, our spiritual nature cannot be
extricated absolutely from our matter, which provides the possibility
not only for passion and duration, but also for action, sensation and
intellection itself. Marx makes a distinction between vulgar
materialism, which views matter and spirit as completely separate, and
dialectical materialism, which views matter as already inhabited by
spirit.

For Blondel, matter likewise does not simply provide the possibility
of individuation and differentiation, but also of the solidarity of
phenomena, even those of different orders, not least because being
material also means at the same time insufficiency and determination.

Just as matter serves to separate them [beings] from Being in-itself ,
it also permits a participation without possible confusion with it.
(EE.78)

Our material nature and the material nature of other beings we are in
relation reflects our nature as thinking beings, a nature which,
however, is not determined by an univocal or single grounding kind of
thought.

If we have to speak according to sensible appearances and according to
the common imagination, it is thought that seems to be contained in
organized matter. Quite to the contrary, it is matter that is
comprised between two very real faces of imperfect thought, of a
thought that, irreducible to diaphanous unity, senses itself
everywhere, in its effort to know (connaître), to will, to act, and to
perfect itself, faced with an obstacle, a wall, an opacity, not,
certainly, absolutely inscrutable, but which never allows itself to be
entirely suppressed, to be entirely traversed. . . . So, matter is
less a thing (chose) than the common condition of the resistances that
all things (choses) oppose to us, and that we ourselves oppose to
ourselves. (EE 80)

This thought finds itself split.

Our thought assumes two forms, neither self-sufficient in isolation
nor directly connected, which we cannot therefore define either in
their separate being or in their conjunction, and which operate, like
all the generations of nature, in darkness and a kind of
unconsciousness (Vol. 2. 41)

Blondel calls one of these forms noétique, the type of thought that
unifies, that grasps universally and abstractly. The other form is the
pneumatique, thought that grasps the particular, that penetrates to
singularity. Both of these require the mediation of the other, and the
task of the management of these introduces new possibilities of error,
or rather of making the grounds of certain errors clear, errors which
correctly recognize part of the being that they misunderstand. On the
one hand, one can attempt to grasp all beings, thought and action
primarily through the medium of abstraction, imposing strictures
thereby upon what can be considered to be real, and thereby taken into
consideration. On the other hand, one can go to the other extreme and
privilege something particular or singular as the sole reality, around
which all else is organized.

The exigencies that these two forms of thought necessary for human
being and action impose are irreconcilable in any absolute sense for a
human being. This introduces two other exigencies, one of the human
relation to self, the other of the human relation to God. First, the
insufficiency of human thought requires that all thought must be
placed in relation to, but not reduced to practical comportment. Moral
action and speculative knowledge thereby both depend

on the use to which the willing subject puts the two types of thought,
not allowing itself to be dominated by either type while it relies
upon them for determination of the relationships to self, world, and
ultimately to God. Second, the recognition of such insufficiency also
requires, given the fact that human action and thought does in fact
possess a limited sufficiency, a recognition of what allows that to
take place, namely the supernatural order, and ultimately the creative
and loving action of God.

Thought, being and action are not three separate categories that could
be schematically or deductively arranged apart from one another. To
begin with, both thought and action are modes of being; neither one of
them could be completely separated from a general study of being, but,
on the other hand, neither one of them is simply reducible to a type
of being, so that, having determined general characteristics of being,
one would have at the same time defined and determined all
characteristics of thought and action. All thought is a kind of action
as well, without, again, thought being reducible to action; being
requires for its part activity as well as duration and determination,
and to be already implies, not just for the human, but at all levels
of being, action. Thought provides coherent and reflective
intelligibility to both being and action, a capacity for
self-determination, limited by its insufficiencies to fully determine
being or action, but also acting as a guiding function of both.

The metaphysical trilogy is rounded out by the partially unfinished
theological work, L'esprit chrétien (completed by the two studies, Le
sens chrétien and De l'assimilation, brought together in the work,
Exigences philosophiques du christianisme), towards which all the
texts of the trilogy lead. The analyses of the previous works lead to
the point where the insufficiency of solely human thought, being, and
action was successively demonstrated. At the same time, this
insufficiency was always in relation to the Absolute, not an absolute
insufficiency; human being, thought, and action possess determinacy,
and a limited substantiality and consistency. Philosophy, carried out
rigorously and in as much self-honesty as possible, ends up revealing
its own limitations, the areas where it no longer possess a full
competence. It retains, however, a role in relation to the Absolute,
to the relationship to the Absolute that is religion, and, for
Blondel, in particular Catholicism. Jean Lacroix provides an excellent
summation of this:

On the one hand, rational thought has revealed exigences and
aspirations to which a revelation must answer. . . . On the other
hand, if it is truly an answer, this revelation in turn must nourish
reason itself, must magnify it in some way and enable it to develop in
a way that it could not have done on its own. (Maurice Blondel: An
Introduction to the Man and his Philosophy, p. 65)

6. Blondel's Methodology

Blondel, because of the systematicity of his work, has been called the
"French Hegel" and the "Catholic Hegel". In his main works, Blondel
develops dialectical treatments of a set of levels of the phenomena
under investigation, beginning from the requirements imposed by the
subject matter itself. He treats the level of the acting subject early
on in each of his works, first demonstrating that the subject cannot
be reduced to any type or order of objectivity, whether it be of . The
similarities to the Hegelian use of the dialectic lie in Blondel's
attention to structures of mediation and the role of determinate
negation. Indicating the determination of the immanent by the
transcendent does not mean referring the order of immanence simply to
an order of transcendence or to a single transcendent moment, but
rather means uncovering structures of mediation, by which the order of
immanence is mediated by the entire structure of the transcendent,
including by other levels relatively transcendent to the level treated
as transcendent in relation to the immanent order, the order of
phenomena being investigated. For instance, the social order is
transcendent to the order of individual subjects, and mediates them in
relation to each other and in the relation of the subject to itself,
but the social order is itself mediated by larger social structures of
shared history, and by the order of religion in relation ultimately to
the Christian God.

This requires that the point of view, of analysis and description, be
shifted from the immanent order to the transcendent, guided by the
structure of mediation. This means that the immanent order, as in
Hegelian Aufhebung, is not reduced to or nullified by the transcendent
now under investigation, but is rather conserved and affirmed as an
integral part of the larger structure and order, simply recognized as
insufficient to itself and as mediated by the transcendent order. This
recognition, from within the process of investigation of the immanent
order, of the need for transcendence in order for the immanent
phenomena to possess their meaning and being, is analogous to Hegel's
determinate negation, in which the negation of the thesis, the
antithesis, emerges from the historical working-out of the truth and
meaning of the thesis. It is through a full investigation of the
immanent order, treating it provisionally as if it were fully
self-sufficient and adequate to itself, that the order indicates its
own negativity, its requirement for transcendence.

Blondel's attention to the structures of the individual subject in the
beginnings of his works does not at all therefore reflect a commitment
to an ontology which would take those individuals as primary, and
ontologically prior to the other levels of structure, in particular
the social and the religious, which he later turns to. In fact, as
pointed out earlier, his use of the method of immanence has as its
purpose and aim to indicate the interpentration of those higher-level
structures transcendent to the individual in the very structures by
which the individual, the acting subject, exists. This involves
Blondel in a sort of return to a realism about universals and about
social structures, a realism, however, whose objects remain
constrained by the same unfinished . Ontologically, one can put this
in the following way. Individuals and individual things do not have
full being, but the structures in which they take place do not have
full being either. In terms of subject and object, one can say that
both subject and object have an ontological insufficiency, which does
not the same time, negate their reality or their existence.

Whereas, for Hegel, the System found its unity in the subject of
Absolute Knowing, later treated as the philosophical subject or as
Absolute Spirit, for Blondel, the ultimate unity comes in the
Christian God as creator, who remains outside of the order of
description of the relations and structures of the phenomena. Blondel,
therefore, rejects Hegel's insistence that the relation to the
Absolute must, in the end, get beyond representation (Vorstellung) and
assume the condition of Absolute Spirit conscious of itself in
relation to its Other. Blondel also rejects Hegel's doctrine that at
the end of the process of development, all difference is no longer
difference of form but only of content. For the acting human subject,
who acts, thinks, and is, in relation to the Absolute, History has not
come to an end, and humanity is still involved in processes that also
involve development and difference in form as well as content, meaning
that no speculative or theoretical body of doctrine can legitimately
claim full adequacy, while, at the same time, the process of
development remains one inhabited by and guided by a rationality which
humanity and the acting subject can participate within fully.

Blondel's use of the "method of immanence" (a term taken originally
from Eduoard Le Roi's works) bears a strong resemblance to methods
used by other philosophical movements of the time. In that Blondel
explicitly rejects anything like the Husserlian epoche, because it
makes an unwarranted assumption of the possibility of suspension of
claims to existence as well as a disengagement from practical and
moral comportment, which in tunr does not allow the meanign of moral
and practical phenomena to be grasped, Blondel's way of getting at the
phenomena bears a closer relationship to the phenomenologies of Max
Scheler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

From the moment when I pose the theoretical problem of action and when
I claim to discover the scientific solution, I no longer admit, at
least provisionally and to that different point of view, the value of
any practical solution. The usual words of good and evil, of duty, of
culpability, that I employed are, from that moment on, denuded of
meaning, until, of there is a place, I could restitute to them their
fullness. (L'action. p.xix)

Scheler develops a hierarchy of values, which is not simply a
hierarchy of meanings relative to each other, but also an order of
constitution, ultimately guided by the value of the Holy that at the
same time recognizes the relative sufficiency and absolute
insufficiency of the other orders (utility, pleasure, life, and
culture), and the constant interpenetration of these other orders by
the transcendent as Holy. Merleau-Ponty places a constant emphasis
upon the dialectic of the present and the absent, or the virtual,
mediated by structures of affectivity and the human body, which is it
the same time, in so far as it is a human body, socialized and
oriented towards transcendence. On the other hand, Blondel's
insistence upon engaging with the phenomenon as the condition for
knowledge of it does bear much in common with what Phenomenology, at
its best, purports to require, getting "back to the things themselves"

Blondel's readings of other philosophical figures also bears a
striking resemblance to the type of reading carried out under the
rubric of Deconstruction. There are some major differences, however,
both in the aim and the method of the reading. Blondel's style of
reading is to read a text through fully, eschewing polemics and taking
of reified positions until the doctrines advanced in a text have been
adequately understood. Then he proceeds to develop these doctrines or
theses to their fullest extent, acting as if they were true in order
too see what sort of consequences they would have for the thinking and
acting subject. The aim is to assess the adequacy of the doctrines as
the representation of a philosophical position, and this consists in
two parts. First, there is the question of the adequacy of the
representation. Second there is the question of the adequacy of the
developed philosophical position itself. The goal of such a reading is
to allow a doctrine or philosophical position to provide evidence of
its own inadequacy on its own grounds, by indicating to us the extent
to which it is true and able to provide an account of itself
immanently, and by thereby indicating to us the extent to which it is
only relatively true and insufficient, without thereby being simply
false.

In his focus upon and demonstration of the inadequacy of the various
philosophical positions and theses Blondel considers in his works, the
mediations of human action that remains irreducible to unreflective
practice, and the necessary requirement of a transcendence which the
philosophical positions and doctrines attempt to efface, disparage, or
force into forgetfulness, Blondel can also be brought into a
continuity with certain Western Marxist figures, perhaps most closely
with Theodore Adorno. Although Blondel does not use the term until his
later works, he is intent upon critiquing reified consciousness and
ideology.

7. Partial Bibliography of Primary Texts

At present, most of Blondel's works remain untranslated into English.
Two translations of L'action (1893) exist, one by James Sommerville,
the other, more recent, by Olivia Blanchette. The essays, "Letter on
Apologetics" and "History and Dogma" have been translated by Alexander
Dru and Illtyd Trethowan,and placed together in one volume, along with
extensive introductions by the Dru and Trethowan.

L'action: essai d'une critique de la vie et d'une science de la
pratique. Alcan and Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. 1893.

Les premiers écrits. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1956
(includes the Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma as well as
several other important early works)

Dialogues avec les philosophes, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche,
Pascal, Saint Augustin. Paris: Aubier Montaigne. 1966. (reproduction
of some of Blondel's articles on philosophical figures)

Patrie et Humanité Lyons: Chronique Sociale de France. 1928. (A course
taught by Blondel in 1927)

La Pensee. 2 vol.Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1934, 35.

L'être et les êtres: essaie d'un ontologie concrète et intégrale.
Paris: Alcan. 1935

L'action 2 vol. Paris: Alcan. 1936, 37

La philosophie et l'esprit chretienne. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France. 1946

Exigences philosophiques du christianisme. Paris, Presses
Universitaires de France. 1950.

Blondel et Teilhard de Chardin; correspondance. Paris: Beauchesne. 1965.

Correspondance philosophique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1961.