THE
SEL ,F
AND THE OTHER
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order to think
but that
we think in order to succeed in subsisting
or surviving.
And you see how this attributing thought to man as
an innate quality-which at first seems to be a homage and even a
compliment to our species-is, strictly speaking, an injustice. Be–
cause there is no such gift, no such gratuity; thought, on the con–
trary, is a laborious fabrication and a conquest which, like every
conquest, be it of a city or of a woman, is always unstable and
fugitive.
This consideration of thought was necessary as an aid to under–
standing my earlier statement that man is primarily and funda–
mentally action. In passing, let us do homage to the first man who
arrived at this truth with such clarity; it was not Kant nor Fichte,
it was that inspired madman Auguste Comte.
We saw that
action
is not a random fisticuffs with the thing!)
around us or with our fellow men: that is the infrahuman, that
is
subjection to the
other. Action
is to act upon the material environ–
ment or upon other men in accordance with a plan conceived in a
previous period of contemplation or thought. There is then, no
authentic action if there is no thought, and there is no authentic
thought if it is not duly referred to action and made virile by its
relation to action.
But this relation-which is the true one-between action and
contemplation has been persistently misunderstood. When the
Greeks discovered that man thought, that there existed in the uni–
verse that strange reality known as thought (until then man had
not thought, or, like the
bourgeois gentilhomme,
had done so with–
out knowing it), they felt such an enthusiasm for ideas that they
conferred upon intelligence, upon the
logos,
the supreme rank in
the universe. Compared with it, everything else seemed to them
ancillary and contemptible. And as we tend to project into God
whatever appears to us to be the best, the Greeks, with Aristotle,
reached the point of maintaining that God had no other occupation
but to think. And not even to think about things-that seemed to
them as it were a debasement of the intellectual process. No, accord–
ing to Aristotle, God does nothing but think about thought-which
is to convert God into an intellectual, or, more precisely, into a
modest professor of philosophy.-But I repeat that, for them, this
