Summary: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

I/ Moral obligation

Our oldest memory is obligation, as well as prohibition: The memory of forbidden fruit is what is oldest in the memory of each of us, as in that of humanity ¹.

We obeyed because they were our parents or our masters, but beyond that, society.

This society appears as a huge organism whose parts, whose organs have mutual relationships, subject to a discipline so that the whole works well.

However, this analogy has its limits: society differs from an organism, because in an organism the relationships are necessary and never change, whereas they change in society because of human freedom.

In society habit plays the same role as necessity in the works of nature ². The sum of these habits, which reinforce each other, is duty, or moral law.

A common mistake is to confuse the moral law with a natural law.

Duty comes from society, but is not imposed on the individual from outside, because part of the individual's self is the social self. It is society that has integrated itself into the individual's self. This social self is opposed to the intimate self or deep self which represents what the individual has that is unique, singular and inexpressible, and which may be another source of morality, which Bergson will examine later.

For now, Bergson focuses on the social self, one of the two sources of moral obligation: Cultivating this social self is the essence of our obligation to society ³.

It would be wrong to believe that we can live without a social self. No man can isolate himself from society completely. Bergson takes in the Two Sources of Morality and Religion the example of Robinson Crusoe, who remains in contact with society through the objects he has saved from shipwreck and because he draws energy from the society to which he remains ideally attached ⁴.

We do our duty most often not by conscious and voluntary choice, but by allowing ourselves to be carried along by habit:

We make no effort. A road has been laid out for us by society; we find it open before us and follow it. Duty, thus understood, is almost always fulfilled automatically ⁵.

How is it, then, that acting out of duty appears to be a difficult thing, requiring an effort on our part? Because there are rare cases that are out of the ordinary, and where we have to make a difficult choice. These are the ones we remember (because we do not pay attention to what we do automatically).

Habit, more than reason, is therefore an origin of morality. We do not act morally because it would be more rational to do so, but because we are in the habit of doing so. Reason does not oblige: You might as well believe that it is the steering wheel that makes the machine go round ⁶.

Reason only ensures the logical coherence of obligations.

Habit, for man, is an imitation of instinct for animals. At the bottom of moral obligation is social instinct.

Bergson is going to show the limits of this first source of morality, society, which means that a second source of morality will necessarily have to be imagined.

In fact, what is this society? It is not this open society that would be the whole of humanity ⁷, which would impose duties on us towards all human beings, but a society that aims at social cohesion in the face of an enemy ⁸.

It is a closed society: the nation. Yet between the nation, however great it may be, and humanity, there is the whole distance from the finite to the indefinite, from the closed to the open ⁹.

Love for the nation is a primitive instinct, whereas love for humanity is acquired with difficulty, and rarely.

It is therefore time to examine this second form of morality, the absolute, or complete morality, opposed to the social morality, and determine its origin. This is what Bergson does in the following pages of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

¹ Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, PUF, Quadrige, Paris, 2000 chap.1, p.1
² p.2
³ p.8
⁴ p.9
⁵ p.13
⁶ p.17
⁷ ibid., p.25
⁸ p.27
⁹ ibid.