The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

Overview

About three hundred and twenty pages, published in 1932, Bergson’s last major book and the only one in which he turns his lifelong philosophical apparatus, duration, the élan vital, the distinction between intellect and intuition, directly onto morality, society and religion. He was seventy-three, already suffering the crippling arthritis that would keep him largely housebound for his remaining years, and the book was received as a genuine event, extending the vocabulary of Creative Evolution into ethics and the philosophy of religion in a way readers of his earlier, more purely metaphysical and psychological works had not fully anticipated.

The book’s structure follows a single, doubled distinction announced in its title: two sources, one social and biological, one mystical and creative, that Bergson argues underlie, respectively, morality and religion each in their own two forms, closed and open morality, static and dynamic religion. Rather than treating morality and religion as products of reasoned argument or as straightforward historical accumulations, Bergson traces both back to these two fundamentally different sources, and argues that failing to distinguish them, treating open morality as simply an extension of closed morality, or dynamic religious experience as simply an intensified version of static religious belief, produces confusion about what each actually is and where it actually comes from.

The argument

Closed morality. Bergson begins with the morality every human society actually runs on: a system of social obligation, pressure and habit that binds the members of a particular group together, enabling the cohesion, mutual trust and coordinated action any functioning society requires. This closed morality operates, he argues, essentially like an intelligent extension of biological instinct, comparable in its evolutionary function, though not its actual mechanism, to what holds an insect colony together; it is genuinely effective at producing solidarity, and it is, by its very nature and function, limited to the group it binds, oriented toward preserving us against them, however that boundary happens to be drawn in a given society, family, tribe, nation.

Open morality, a difference in kind. Against this, Bergson sets open morality, and his crucial claim is that open morality is not simply closed morality stretched wider, applied to an ever-larger circle until it eventually, in principle, includes all humanity. It is, he insists, a difference in kind rather than degree, arising from an entirely different source: not social pressure and obligation but the direct, personal example and call of an exceptional individual, a moral genius, a saint or a mystic, whose love of humanity is not built up gradually, moving outward from family to tribe to nation to species, but is universal from the very start, addressed to all humanity at once as a single, undivided object of love rather than as an ever-expanding aggregate of smaller loyalties. Ordinary moral progress, on this account, does not happen through the gradual, mechanical widening of closed morality’s circle, but through the historically rare, disruptive intervention of such exceptional individuals, whose example, imitated and diffused through a wider society, occasionally succeeds in genuinely enlarging what a given community’s morality actually includes.

Static religion. Bergson applies a structurally parallel distinction to religion. Static religion is what he calls the myth-making function, a capacity built into human intelligence specifically to counteract intelligence’s own corrosive, individuating tendencies: because developed intelligence inevitably confronts each person with the certainty of death, with the unpredictability of fortune, and with the ever-present possibility of simply calculating that one’s own private interest diverges from the group’s, static religion supplies reassuring myths, stories of protective spirits, an afterlife, and a benevolently ordered cosmos, that function to hold society together against these corrosive effects of too much individual, calculating intelligence, restoring, through myth, a kind of confidence and social solidarity that pure intelligence, left to itself, would tend to undermine.

Dynamic religion. Dynamic religion, by contrast, is mysticism proper, genuine, direct contact with what Bergson identifies as the same underlying creative force he had called the élan vital in Creative Evolution, now understood as itself a kind of love, actively expressing itself through the mystic’s experience. The great mystics, on Bergson’s account, are not simply unusually devout believers in a static religion’s myths but individuals who have achieved a genuinely different order of contact with the creative source of life itself, and whose resulting love of humanity, structurally identical to the open morality of the moral genius discussed earlier, flows directly from this contact rather than from any inherited social doctrine or mythic reassurance.

Mechanized humanity’s crisis. The book’s final chapters turn from this analysis to a genuinely alarmed assessment of Bergson’s own historical moment, written between the two World Wars. Humanity’s technological and mechanical power, he argues, has expanded with extraordinary speed, vastly outrunning the corresponding development of humanity’s moral capacities, still largely governed by a closed morality evolved for small-scale tribal cohesion and never designed to restrain the scale of destruction modern technology now makes possible. Bergson’s closing question, delivered with real and evidently personal urgency, is whether the mystical impulse, dynamic religion’s genuine contact with the creative source of life, offers humanity any actual remedy for this dangerous mismatch, some possibility of recovering, at a civilizational scale, the open morality and universal love the great mystics achieved individually, before the destructive capacity closed morality was never built to contain the technology now delivers to it, and the book ends without a confident answer, closer to a warning than a resolution.

How to read it

Read the closed and open morality distinction first, and test it against concrete cases as you go: which of your own moral commitments genuinely feel oriented toward all humanity, and which, on reflection, are better described as closed loyalty to some particular, bounded group, however large that group happens to be.

Keep the parallel structure between the two doublings, closed morality and static religion on one side, open morality and dynamic religion on the other, clearly in view; Bergson intends real structural correspondence between the two pairs, and following how each half of the moral distinction maps onto its corresponding half of the religious distinction is essential to grasping the book’s overall architecture.

Read the treatment of mysticism with Bergson’s earlier account of intuition, from An Introduction to Metaphysics and Creative Evolution, in mind. The mystic’s direct contact with the creative source of life is, for Bergson, essentially intuition operating at its fullest and most developed intensity, and understanding what intuition means in his earlier, more purely epistemological writing clarifies what he means by mystical contact here.

Notice how genuinely alarmed the book’s final chapters are, and take that alarm as historically specific rather than merely rhetorical. Bergson was writing in 1932, between two catastrophic wars, watching industrial and mechanical power expand at a pace he believed human moral development had no realistic chance of matching, and the book’s closing uncertainty reflects a real, historically grounded worry rather than a conventional philosophical flourish.

Read this book as a genuine departure from, as well as a continuation of, Bergson’s earlier work. It applies his familiar methodological apparatus, intuition, duration, the élan vital, to entirely new material, ethics, sociology and the philosophy of religion, and seeing both the continuity and the genuine extension is worthwhile for any reader already familiar with his earlier books.

Questions it raises

• Is the difference between closed and open morality really a difference in kind, as Bergson insists, or can a sufficiently gradual widening of closed loyalty eventually produce something functionally equivalent to open morality?
• Can moral progress actually occur the way Bergson describes, through the rare, disruptive example of exceptional individuals, rather than through gradual social or rational development, given how few such individuals any society actually produces?
• Does identifying dynamic religion, mysticism, with the same creative force behind biological evolution, the élan vital, strengthen or weaken the case for taking mystical experience as a genuine source of moral and religious knowledge?
• Bergson worries that technological power has outrun moral development. Has anything in the near century since he wrote this book vindicated or complicated that specific worry?
• If open morality and dynamic religion both trace back to exceptional individuals rather than ordinary social processes, what practical hope does Bergson’s framework actually offer for a whole civilization to adopt them at scale?
• Is static religion’s myth-making function, as Bergson describes it, a fair account of what religious belief actually does for most believers, or does it flatten religious experience into a merely functional, evolutionary explanation that misses something essential?