What is a “Blondelian fragment”? And what, or who, is Blondel?
Maurice Blondel is a little known French Catholic philosopher of the late 19th century who is sometimes referred to as “the French Hegel” or “the Catholic Hegel.” While his magnum opus L’ Action bears structural resemblances to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I hasten to add that Blondel was not an Idealist, and, indeed, argued powerfully against German Idealism.
In this new series I want to play with one of Blondel’s contentions, something very Derridean, “All words have an opposed double meaning that opens up for thought innumerable subterfuges. Thus it is that none of the dilettante’s negations could have a simple meaning…because each one of them always contains its contrary.”1 Blondel uses this method of subterfuges a number of times throughout L’ Action, most notably when he argues that to deny the goodness of life, to will nothing, to wish to have never been born, is really a lament that the world is not what it should be. I can only disparage life if it fails to meet an expectation, otherwise there is as little point as there is in blaming a stone for being hard. What is this expectation? I have within me, even if unconscious and hidden, a belief that life ought to be better than it is, that something went wrong with life as such, not just my life, that warrants my lament. Being a Christian, Blondel eventually connects this hidden expectation to an unconscious recollection of The Fall.
In part because I am re-reading Blondel, and in part because I believe that Blondel is a valuable resource for these later days. Our first Blodelian fragment will be a simple riff on the above mentioned argument of Blondel, beginning our series off easy.
Fragment # 1
Cursed be the white man who hath brought us inequality, discrimination, and injustice! Blessed be the man who cometh in the name of anti-racism, and praise his holy fight!
If you pay close any attention to the media the world outside your bedroom, you will hear the pseudo-psalm chanted and the tones rising up to Zion. If not all, then almost all, of today’s problems are laid at the feet of the white man. Social ills? White people are, through a thorough genealogy, to blame. Economic troubles? White people. Ecological crises? White people. Foreign policy? Well, you get the idea.
It was Thanksgiving not long ago and I thought for a second what it would be like if I was still at university: there would be at least a morning mention and an evening mention, our replacements for morning and evening prayers (for these are prayers), of how Americans only have our land because it was stolen from the Indians. Never mind that every border on earth was established through either conquest or war, we should have been different.
Why? Why should the Americans (then the English, Scottish, and German pilgrims) have been different? Why is every ill the fault of the white man? If we are as bad and fascistic as we are made out to be, then why expect anything less? How can a race of barbarians be other than barbarous? There is a hidden assertion behind each of these attacks, an assertion unconscious and, if made conscious would be, odious to its holder. Behind the condemnations of the white man is the assertion that “white countries do better than this.” Our social, economic, ecological, foreign, and other ills are made worse by the fact that in white, in European descended countries, the standard of living is supposed to be higher than what we have. We were promised gold, but got silver…or maybe bronze at this point.
No dear Prager U, no my little Steven Crowder, this does not mean “the dems are real racists.” Please do not molest a genuine curiosity. What is present here is a subconscious affirmation of white, of European, civilizational standards…and hence why “conservatives” find it racist! Beneath these cries of condemnation is the muffled plea: “please white man, please make things again in your image.”
Blondel, Maurice. Translated by Oliva Blanchette. Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana. 2007. 33