MYSTICISM AND THE OPEN SOCIETYWhat it does is to lead us elsewhere, toward another morality, another religion. The
totality of obligation in its moral or religious versions has its source in the pressure exer-
cised by society inside and outside of ourselves; its natural function is to ensure the
group’s bond, to—in a way—imitate organic and instinctual links to ensure that collective
life is possible, even if it demands the sacrifice of personal interests. Human societies rest
neither on utilitarianism nor on a contract, but on a biologico-evolutionary ‘‘social in-
stinct,’’ of which the closure of the group is an essential aspect. According to Bergson,
between this type of morality and religion, which springs from closed societies, on the
one hand, and an open morality and open religion, on the other, there is neither continu-
ity nor rupture, because they are not of the same nature; their respective sources are
different. To say it in a formula dear to Bergson, what separates them is a ‘‘difference of
kind and not one of degree.’’ One is the effect of a pressure, the other is but an opening.
But an opening onto what? Onto everything or nothing, and there is no difference
whatsoever:
The other attitude is that of the open soul. What, in that case, is allowed in? Suppose
we say it embraces all humanity: we should not be going too far, we should hardly
be going far enough, since its love may extend to animals, to plants, to all nature.
And yet not one of these things which would thus fill it would suffice to define the
attitude taken by the soul, for it could, strictly speaking, do without all of them. Its
form is not dependent on its content. We have just filled it; we could as easily empty
it again.^21The opening is nothing but a tendency or an attitude, and it is precisely in this sense
that the opening is essentially mystical, at least in the definition Bergson gives of mysti-
cism (which, incidentally, remains rather faithful to certain strands of mysticism). Yet it
seems important to insist on the fact that the opening has no object, not because its object
would be too large or too vague and consequently difficult to describe but because the
openingasopening does not have an object. Every object assigned to it from the outset,
even if it were the entire universe, would close it. This does not imply, however, that open
morality and open religion do not apply to all sorts of different objects according to
situation and context. Quite the contrary, mystics are, to Bergson’s mind, men and
women of action: they do not retire from the world, they act in it, and the force of
mysticism is a force of agency. It is in another sense that the mystic opening does not and
cannot have a determinate or determinable object. If the passage from the closed to the
open is not one of degrees, of a progressive broadening, that is because closed societies
always have a determinate object: a people, a nation, a community, and so on. They have
a figure, an identity, however precarious and provisional it might be. The open society is
neither the sum of these different faces nor the sum of a certain number of characteristics
that they all share. InCreative Evolution, Bergson defines the essence of life and of forms
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