Impossibility of
abstaining and of holding myself in reserve, inability to satisfy myself, to be
self-sufficient and to cut myself loose, that is what a first look at my condition
reveals to me. That there is constraint and a kind of oppression in my life is
not an illusion, then, nor a dialectical game, it is a brute fact of daily
experience. At the principle of my acts, in the use and after the exercise of
what I call my freedom, I seem to feel all the weight of necessity. Nothing in
me escapes it. If I try to evade decisive initiatives, I am enslaved for not
having acted. If I go ahead, I am subjugated to what I have done. In practice,
no one eludes the problem of practice; and not only does each one raise it, but
each, in his own way, inevitably resolves it. It is this very necessity that
has to be justified. And what would it mean to justify it, if not to show that
it is in conformity with the most intimate aspiration of man?
—Maurice Blondel
