25/04/2021 Blondel, Maurice | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Maurice Blondel (1861—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.

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 po-
sitions until the doctrines advanced in a text have been ad-
equately 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 ade-
quacy 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 read-
ing 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 irre-
ducible 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.

Table of Contents
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1. Biography
2. Immanence and Transcendence
3. L’Action (1893)
4. The Reaction to L’Action and the Dialectic Between Philosophy and Christianity
5. Blondel’s Metaphysical Trilogy
6. Blondel’s Methodology
7. References and Further Reading

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 af-
fected by the tensions in French life, particularly those between the French academic establish-
ment and Catholicism. Blondel defended his thesis, L’action in 1893, at the Sorbonne. His the-
sis, 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, fi-
nally receiving a Professorship in Aix in 1897. After his difficulties with the philosophers, Blon-
del 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 prob-
lems, 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 nu-
merous 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 de-
liberations and arguments of the Second Vatican Council.

2. Immanence and Transcendence

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Perhaps the most central theme in Blondel’s work is the complex relationship between imma-
nence 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 in-
stance, 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-suf-
ficient 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 ori-
ented 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 exi-
gencies of human action in order to delineate the too-often neglected structures of this vital di-
mension of human existence. Second, to examine the doctrines of thinkers, texts, and move-
ments, 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 relation-
ship 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 rea-
son, 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

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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 suf-

fice 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 la-
bor I feel perpetually. ([Link]).

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 con-
ception 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 Sci-
ence 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 every-
thing into question, to proceed without relying completely on any presuppositions or predeter-
minations. 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

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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 ade-
quate 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 sci-

ence, 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 con-
science, 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 dis-
cord, 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 pes-
simism 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 ru-
ined 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.

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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 method-
ologically, as in the sciences, and more generally in the conditions of public life. If the possibil-
ity 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 de-
nial of such a meaning.

Again, Blondel finds in pessimism a hidden movement and directedness of the will. The pes-
simist 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 deny-
ing it and in order to deny it. (p. 33)

At the moment when one declares the insufficiency of the phenomenon, one attaches one-
self 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 sci-
ences” 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 be-
tween two different but auto-reinforcing fields of “science”, namely deductive science and posi-
tive or empirical science. Both of these types of science, which remain incapable of treating sub-
jectivity 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 ba-
sis 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)

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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 re-
jects 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 com-
pletely 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 sym-
bolic activity. Symbolic activity is the original basis of both the intellect and the will, of inten-
tional action and of reflection. The categories by which action and thought become possible re-
main imbued, but no longer determined by, affectivity and sensation, and enter into and gener-
ate 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 reflec-
tion, 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 con-
sciousness 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 repre-
sented 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.

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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 het-
eronomy. 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 het-
eronomy 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 au-
tonomy 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 or-
der to the phenomena that are uncovered in that analysis, pointing to the necessity of some-
thing 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 re-
veals in its turn its own insufficiencies and exigencies.

Beginning with the body, Blondel exposes the relationship between conscious life and the un-
conscious, which has its own role in action. The very irreducibility of action to a verbal or con-
ceptual 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 resolu-
tions. (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 varia-

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tion 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 ex-
ternalization in its incarnation, precisely because the will is something which takes place tem-
porally. 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 inter-
play between the conscious and the unconscious. The permeability of the conscious and the un-
conscious 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 wel-
come of the expected a posteriori. (p.156)

This very complex process cannot be taken in by consciousness as a whole without the aid of ad-
umbration 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 medi-
ated 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 re-
lationships to objects are already invested with a degree of subjectivity that is not merely a pro-
jection 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 re-
versal 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 domi-
nate the reasonable willing subject precisely because they play a necessary role in action. Ratio-
nal and voluntary action is then never pure, it always requires a co-action and synergy.

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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 con-
ceptualization 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 im-
possible the conceive a single action that does not extend in infinite undulations, quite be-
yond 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 so-
cial 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. Significa-
tive 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 con-
course 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)

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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 mat-
ter, 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 be-
comes 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 exis-
tence 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 cer-
tain 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 circum-
scribed 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 mu-
tual 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, main-
taining 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 pro-
motes. He raises two very important requirements for a nation to be more than simply an ideo-
logical construct which conceals structures of domination. First, there must be equitable rela-

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tions 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 infalli-
ble 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 his-
tory. That is to say, beyond the indistinct forces which move the great human currents, re-
flection and liberty are original powers, capable of penetrating profoundly, as essential fac-
tors, 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 ra-
tional 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 phenom-
ena, 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 ap-
peal 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 gener-

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alized 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 consid-
erations 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 conse-
quences, 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, how-
ever, 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 be-
ing 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 selfish-
ness (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 it-
self. 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 supernat-
ural 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 intelligi-

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ble 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 do-
main; we ought to give it back to it. . . . It is a matter of seeing how this notion of the super-
natural 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 sub-
sumed 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 univer-
sal 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 philo-
sophical 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

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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 syn-
thesis 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 im-
mense changes that took place in Modernity, and Blondel calls for the restoration, through rig-
orous 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 ulti-
mately 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 indepen-
dence 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 ad-
dresses 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 some-
thing 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 ratio-
nal 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 ul-
timately 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 rele-
vance 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 consis-
tent 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

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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 construc-
tion 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 determina-
tion which it studies. (180)

Such a philosophy, which Blondel alternately calls a “Christian philosophy” or an “integral phi-
losophy”, 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 prop-
erly, including refraining from abrogating to themselves privileges, responsibilities, and author-
ity 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 eman-
cipation 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 retrench-
ment, 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 dog-
mas arise historically, they are merely contingent products of historical processes. Within
Catholic circles, such historicism took the form of Modernism, which, among other things, ad-

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vocated accommodating dogma to Modern thought, precisely by using the categories and sys-
tems 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 solu-
tion that allows a more fertile relationship between history and dogma. Dogma does in fact de-
velop historically, and it is the product of historical process that are to a great degree contin-
gent; 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 extrinsi-
cism 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 log-
ical 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 it-
self, if it is not to falter and slip into one extreme or the other, must be a living and vital tradi-
tion. 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 re-
quires 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 ac-

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count 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 phe-
nomena, 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 ex-
plores, 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 elabo-
rates 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 unfin-
ished 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 constitu-
itive 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 “ontolo-
gisme”, 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, be-
tween Heidegger’s insistences throughout his works that the question of Being has been re-
duced in each historical epoch to questions about beings; however, Blondel’s analyses both radi-
cally depart from Heidegger’s claim that all valuation is simply illegitimate projection onto Be-
ing on the part of the subject, and that the Christian God, as concept in a philosophical-theolog-
ical 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 deter-
mination of beings, these cannot be strictly separated from each other by a concept of “ontologi-
cal difference” as Heidegger claims. Rather than Being having to be unfigurable, it must be fig-
ured, there is an exigency within our very relation to Being that requires us to give it, and to dis-
cover within it, determination and solidarity not only between beings and other beings, the im-
manent 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.

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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 ideal-
ism, 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-im-
posed 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 conse-
quence, 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 be-
cause materialisms of various sorts, as well as idealism as reactions against the stultifying ef-
fects 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 ideal-
ized 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 differ-
entiation, but also of the solidarity of phenomena, even those of different orders, not least be-
cause 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 par-
ticipation without possible confusion with it. (EE.78)

Our material nature and the material nature of other beings we are in relation reflects our na-
ture 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 imagi-
nation, it is thought that seems to be contained in organized matter. Quite to the contrary,

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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 sup-
pressed, 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 op-
pose 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 univer-
sally 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 privi-
lege 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 exigen-
cies, one of the human relation to self, the other of the human relation to God. First, the insuffi-
ciency 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 de-
ductively 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 de-
termined general characteristics of being, one would have at the same time defined and deter-

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mined 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 ca-
pacity 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 to-
gether 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. Philoso-
phy, 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 revela-
tion 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 demon-
strating 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 me-
diation 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 tran-
scendence or to a single transcendent moment, but rather means uncovering structures of me-
diation, by which the order of immanence is mediated by the entire structure of the transcen-
dent, including by other levels relatively transcendent to the level treated as transcendent in re-
lation to the immanent order, the order of phenomena being investigated. For instance, the so-
cial 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.

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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 individu-
als 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 act-
ing 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 un-
finished . 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 in-
sufficiency, 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 condi-
tion 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

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unwarranted assumption of the possibility of suspension of claims to existence as well as a dis-

engagement 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 dis-
cover 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. [Link])

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 tran-
scendence. 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, how-
ever, 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 doc-
trines 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 in-
sufficient, 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 irre-
ducible 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

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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. References and Further Reading

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, “Let-
ter 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 [Link]: 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.

Author Information
Gregory Sadler
Email: greg@[Link]
Marist College and ReasonIO
U. S. A.

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