Emile Boutroux

Of the most recent French philosophers, Bergson is mentioned more often than the recently deceased Emile Boutroux. Contemporary judgment may not be entirely right about this. Bergson speaks in a way that is more understandable to the public; he bases his ideas more on familiar scientific findings than Boutroux does. But Boutroux seems to be the one of the two who moves with greater ease in the sovereign philosophical formation of concepts. Bergson starts from individual scientific findings; Boutroux from an overview of the scope and limits of scientific knowledge as such. Bergson contrasts the scientific way of looking at things with his mysticism, which is based on an indeterminate intuitive feeling; Boutroux does the same with his intellectual interpretation of the world. Both feel the need to move from knowing nature to knowing the spirit; both recoil from a real experience of the spiritual world.

Boutroux asks himself: how does man recognize the inanimate mineral world? He visualizes the mode of cognition that is applied here. He characterizes it. Then he turns to the living nature. He finds that a different mode of cognition must be applied. And yet another in the science of the soul for the individual human being; yet another in sociology. He arrives at a hierarchy of modes of cognition. In this way, knowledge points to a sequence of stages of the known being, from the material realm to the spiritual. But in relation to the spiritual, the living connection with reality eludes him. Here it is necessary to establish a relationship with reality through productive inner soul organs, which are not conscious of the ordinary soul life, similar to that which exists through the senses and through intellectual thinking for material reality. Therefore, for spirit-reality, Boutroux is left with only abstract concepts of the intellect. Hence, his view amounts to an intellectualism that may point to the spirit but cannot grasp it in terms of content.

One has to go back to the time of Leibniz if one wants to assess a thinker like Boutroux historically. In Leibniz one still finds the prospect of a real spiritual world. He sees monads that have ideas and are essential beings. What Leibniz seeks behind the world of the senses has, however, shrunk to monadism, that is, to the spiritual, abstract point-being. But at least it is still essence. Later times have replaced the search for such essentiality with the search for laws. One is no longer concerned with the beings that enter into reciprocal action and thereby reveal laws; one looks only at the laws themselves. One seeks natural law, not the beings that reveal this law in their behavior. At most, one still comes across the atom, the corpse of all being.

Boutroux has to a certain extent recognized this course of modern scientific life. He therefore seeks the laws again between the beings; he sees in them the revelation of the way in which the beings are active. In this way he arrives at the indication of the independence, the inwardness of the beings. He is clear about the fact that with the insight into the laws of the world one has not yet seen through the world beings.

Here begins the necessity to develop such a human way of looking at things, which ascends from the combining science of law to a living view of being. Emile Boutroux did not want to follow this path. He was unable to overcome the obstacles that modern thought habits place in the way of such a path. But he has pointed out such a path in the sharpest, most insistent way, which he perhaps did not even suspect given his own nature. He has pointed it out with such intensity as only a thinker fettered by the modern intellectualistic way of modern research can.

That is his great merit. Perhaps no one else can match him in the accuracy of his concepts in this direction. One must acknowledge this, even though the dark sides of intellectualism are revealed in him to a remarkable extent precisely because of it. He sought to prove the legitimacy of the religious way of thinking alongside the scientific-philosophical way. But in doing so, the inadequacy of his way of looking at things became apparent. He could not find the religious element within the field of knowledge. He believed that knowledge could not come from the whole person, but that one must still have a world view based on the powers of the full personality. For him, this results in science as an emanation of a part of human nature, and religion as an emanation of the whole human being. Thus a spirit of science is created, which, however, only buys its certainty by not creating a relationship to the inwardness of religious life on its own; and religion is assured of its existence by being granted a broader perspective than science, but one of lesser certainty. The severe conflict that plagues the sensibilities of the modern man is not resolved, but rather, by being dogmatized in a philosophical sense, it is significantly intensified.

Through this turn of his thinking, Boutroux also shows himself to be an important representative of the current world-view crisis. One must know him if one wants to judge how this world view, in its more outstanding cultivators, points beyond itself everywhere and yet is so entangled in its web that it cannot get out; how it declares itself incapable of building on its foundations, and yet does not want to let go of these foundations either.