Summary: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (page 3)

Nature intended the human species to be sociable—which is why we adopted the first kind of morality. Yet we transcend nature and make our morality more complex. With complete morality, we break free from the enclosure in which nature had confined us and carry the élan vital further.

This second form of morality, which accompanies the élan vital, does not detach us from nature, but from a certain conception of it. To put it in Spinozist terms: It is in order to return to naturating Nature that we detach ourselves from naturated Nature ¹.

If social morality is a morality of pleasure and immutability, complete morality is one of joy and mobility—of momentum and thrust.

This is why the latter is difficult to define, unlike the former, which is imprisoned in formulas ².

The morality of the Gospel is that of the open soul—for whenever we attempt to formulate it, we fall into paradoxes or contradictions. If wealth is evil, then giving money to the poor harms them. If one must turn the other cheek, then justice becomes meaningless.

Yet there is no contradiction—provided we consider the intention behind these maxims, which is to induce a state of mind ³.

To synthesise absolute morality into formulas is to reduce the mobile to the static and thereby render it incomprehensible—just as Zeno of Elea renders movement incomprehensible by adopting the same approach.

Bergson notes the commonalities between Stoicism and Christianity, observing that they express the same fundamental ideas, though not with the same emphasis ⁴.

In Stoicism, which is essentially a philosophy ⁵, the idea precedes emotion. In Christianity, by contrast, emotion precedes the idea.

One example of a philosophy in which emotion precedes the idea is that of Socrates—whose enthusiasm spread to Western thinkers and shaped their consciousness—as attested by the many mystical passages (myths, daimon, and so on) in Plato's works.

Bergson thus demonstrates that there is an intermediary between the closed (social morality, based on habit) and the open (complete morality, based on emotion): namely, intelligence, which has constructed moral or metaphysical doctrines such as that of the Stoics.

Intelligence has managed to break free from habit but has not yet heard a calling. As a result, such a soul would cultivate indifference or insensibility—it would reside in the ataraxia of the Stoics ⁶. Reason alone can lead only to that half-virtue which is detachment ⁷.

We have therefore identified the two forces that act upon us: impulse and attraction. The error of intellectualism lies in failing to recognise this—and, as a result, it cannot explain how morality can exert a hold on souls ⁸.

Bergson examines the particular case of justice—the most instructive of virtues—because it encompasses most of the other virtues, is expressed, despite its richness, in simple formulas, and contains within itself both forms of obligation.

From its very origins, justice has been closely linked to geometry: equity, rule, regulation, rectitude. It first intervened in the exchange of goods, ensuring the equivalence of what was traded—justice has mercantile origins. It was then extended to relationships between individuals, applying to people the notions originally applied to objects: rule, and so on. Hence formulas such as "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

Yet we feel that justice is also something more than this—that it responds to a deeper need. How, then, do we move towards the second form of justice, which involves neither exchange nor services, but is the pure and simple affirmation of an inviolable right ⁹?

It would be a mistake to assume that the first form of justice was merely a tentative expression of the second—a preliminary stage in a process aimed at attaining absolute justice. To think so is to fall into what Bergson calls the retrospective illusion, a concept he will go on to define.

¹ p.56
² p.58
³ p.57
⁴ p. 59
⁵ ibid.
⁶ p.63
⁷ p.64
⁸ p.64
⁹ p.71