PAOLA MARRATIeven survive without the cohesion guaranteed by a network of habits. Moral obligation
(in any case, its first source) has no other origin or function; it is the pressure that society
exerts on us to give form to the network of habits of which our everyday life is made up.
Bergson further insists on the fact that obligation does not come from the outside, because
every individual belongs to society as much as to him- or herself. A subject outside of
society is nothing but an illusion, and obligation, prior to linking humans to each other,
‘‘links each one of us to ourselves.’’ This is not to say that our subjectivity is purely social
or that there are no other threads to give consistency to our psychic life, but rather that
most of the time, as Bergson would have it, ‘‘it is at the surface, at the point where it
inserts itself into the close-woven tissue of other exteriorized personalities, that our ego
generally finds its points of attachment; its solidity lies in its solidarity.’’^15
Made up of a set of everyday habits that attaches us as much to ourselves as to others,
moral obligation, according to Bergson, is never punctual or singular. Each obligation
implies others and would have no meaning by itself. That is why Bergson speaks of the
‘‘totality of obligation.’’ Society sketches the program of our lives and we follow this
sketch without particular effort, almost without noticing it. Thus, the origin of morality
is not to be found in an austere and rigid conception of duty demanding the ‘‘over-
human’’ effort of conforming to a categorical imperative. There is no need to be a hero
of pure reason to fulfill our many duties. Bergson certainly realizes that in moments of
‘‘crisis,’’ when the temptation to no longer follow the good path is strong, ‘‘to do one’s
duty’’ can cost us much, and moral obligation thus loses its anodyne aspect. In these
moments, reason can help us lean toward duty; yet, from the fact that reason can make
us return to duty, it does not at all follow that the origin of moral obligation is rational.
The totality of obligation, with its system of habits, does not rely on pure reason: on the
contrary, it is the human equivalent of or supplement to the social instinct that makes
animal societies function.
Not without a little malice, Bergson remarks that no human being obeys by virtue of
pure logical coherence; the ‘‘one must because one must’’ of a categorical imperative is
never encountered in human conduct. And the thought experiment of a pure categorical
imperative suggested by Bergson does not look very Kantian:
If we want a pure case of a categorical imperative, we must construct one a priori or
at least make an arbitrary abstraction of experience. So let us imagine an ant who is
stirred by a gleam of reflection and thereupon judges that she has been wrong to
work unremittingly for others. Her inclination to laziness would indeed endure but
a few moments, just as long as the ray of intelligence. In the last of these moments,
when instinct regaining the mastery would drag her back by sheer force to her task,
intelligence at the point of relapsing into instinct would say, as its parting words:
‘‘You must because you must.’’^16PAGE 596596.................16224$ CH29 10-13-06 12:37:04 PS