As I reread Bergson for a previous article, I came across the following text, in which the philosopher evokes a very present notion in the ancient times, so present indeed that I have always wondered why and never can I give any answer. Thanks to Bergson for finally bringing me the right solution! In his time, he could never have guessed and would be the first surprised by this elegant solution. Rest his soul.
Bergson rejects both the outdated heroes of the reasoning brain and the gullible scientists for whom only science has the answer to everything. It depends on which science… He stands out from his friends as well as his teachers, oh how I like that. If his rebellion is less total than that of Nietzsche, Bergson has a way of putting Plato and Descartes back to back quite delectable for the schoolboy I was. And that I am still, we don’t reconnect.
My good master Jean Millet liked to cite three great men of the early 20th century who illustrate the same inner tendency, a philosopher, a novelist, and a poet. The philosopher is Henri Bergson, the novelist Marcel Proust and the poet Paul Valéry.
“At the death of Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry greeted “the greatest philosopher of our time”. After centuries of primacy of reason, Bergson revolutionized thought by introducing intuition as a method for knowing and understanding life.
Explorer of consciousness based on recent discoveries in psychology, scientist close to Albert Einstein, he developed a theory of duration as an expression of our deep self. Thus did philosophy regain with him the importance of inner life and spirituality as opposed to a material view of the world.” (source)
Certainly, he did not find the true meaning of this expression, but he gave me all the keys to achieve it, and I am so grateful to him for that ! Here is the point :
Ancient wisdom “explained the regular succession of causes and effects by a true deus ex machina – it was sometimes a necessity external to things and hovering over them, sometimes an internal Reason, guided by rules quite similar to those which direct our conduct,” writes Henri Bergson in his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
I have already outlined his guiding ideas, so I will not go back to them. What interests me is this concept of deus ex machina, as the philosopher deciphers it. Bergson has marked the points on the i so that this usual expression does not remain misunderstood in its deep meaning. And there I can only thank this genius of analysis. Thus opposing an external necessity to an internal reason, frankly, it’s genius!
And there, it was too far from the way of thinking that prevailed at the time, a good hundred years ago.
Deus ex machina, the god comes out of the machine, fundamental and founder concept. Fundamental: it sums up a mountain of misunderstood maintained for ages. Founder: he inaugurates a new reading of antiquity, and of the period that preceded it, ie protohistory. This period is not silent. It is told through texts unfairly relegated to the radius of curiosities, if not that of nonsense and bullshit. These texts, essential to my eyes, are called myths. Every old culture has its mythology. All planetary mythologies tell the same story.
In fact, what Bergson could not understand is everything I tell you in these pages. The paradigm shift of the 3rd millennium leads us to turn our gaze and see the world from a different perspective. This is what I have undertaken to show in the 700 articles at the date I publish this one from this site. Before giving my point of view, I would like to recall the accepted meaning of deus ex machina.
Here is the definition given by Google: Deus ex machina, invariable masculine noun – In theatre and figuratively in life: Character, an event whose improbable intervention brings an unexpected outcome to a situation with no or tragic outcome.
Here is the definition of Larousse, more relevant by its precision: 1-In a play, intervention of a god, of a supernatural being descended on the stage by means of a machine. 2-Unexpected character or event opportunely coming to resolve a dramatic situation.
Here is again the definition of Wikipedia, as incomplete as that of Google: Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase meaning God descended by means of a machine. In the theater, a person who arrives, unexpectedly, at the end of the play and by whom the denouement is carried out.
On the court side, it is a machine like those that were used in temples to make believe in divine omnipotence among a naïve audience. On the garden side, it’s any artifice that allows to resolve an inextricable situation in extremis. It’s the favorite recourse of TV writers.
Allow me to present to you the idea that came to me. The stories I tell here are not free inventions. They are the result of a lifetime of observations, readings and strolls on the timeline. And all these reported elements, all this heteroclite junk formed in my head and in my heart a puzzle certainly still incomplete — will it ever be complete? Still, I live with him.
My living puzzle is constantly in search of a new missing piece. Everything I look at, I observe through this filter. Everything I explore immediately takes the color of the puzzle, and automatically matches it. The world is a chameleon that embraces the tiniest hues of the puzzle in progress. I am myself a chameleon. And my discoveries are as many little chameleons, always ready to marry with other chameleons who have been growing in my puzzle for years sometimes.
This strategy which is not one has become a way of being. I react at the turn, an idea imposes itself, develops, that’s it, I’ve straddled my hobby. And you who follow me, admit it, you are only waiting for that. You ask for more. So listen carefully. At that time, humans were simple and rough. They had a magical vision of their environment. The gods walked among people, who considered them masters of magic.
Our ancestors had noticed their merry-go-round. As soon as an inextricable situation emerged, a god immediately arrived at the controls of a terrible flying machine. He settled the matter in three strokes with a spoon. Then he nobly descended from his turbo-jet. There’s the god who comes out of the machine. Here is the deus ex machina.
For the simple people of this distant time, everything ended with the miraculous arrival of an almighty in his machine. They watched him straighten a wall or a megalith, tear down a tree, dig a well, build a dam, drain a swamp, and they always saw the god as a mechanical centaur, being one with the machine he drove. When everything was settled, the god came out of the machine. And humans admired him.
There was nothing religious about their worship. It was made of respect and fear, as in the face of the forces of nature. When the lightning ignited a tree or when the god burned a forest, people felt the same thing. The fact the god uses his laser beam, that escaped people completely. For the human crowd, he commanded the lightning. His discretion to kill or remove people made him dangerous, terribly. Hence the Qur’anic verse: “Fear God as he deserves to be feared.“
He comes from the beginning of time. It comes from dawn, when the giant gods walked among humans. It expresses in a few words this memory of terrible gods, all-powerful, formidable.
A long time later, another memory floats in the collective unconscious: the god of love. It would be better to say the goddess of love, since it is a goddess who commanded the gods. Like the queen of bees or ants. The Mother Goddess. Isis and the child Horus. Pachamama holding a human standing on her lap. Even the size is the same. The child standing on the knees of the Black Virgins is not an ordinary baby. He represents, on the scale, a small human on the knees of a giant goddess.
Yes, my friends. Without the gods and their machines that work, heal, and kill, we would not be here. Without the Great Goddess and her hive instinct, we wouldn’t be what we are now …
But let our scientists continue to believe that everything here is the work of the insects that we are. The truth does not concern them. Otherwise, since the time they’ve been searching, we would have noticed it.
Anna, the Blessed Virgin and Mother Goddess, has lived so long she has no age.
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