Letter to Julien Benda

Dear friend,
It is not correct to say, as you do, that the Fleurs de Tarbes "claims to establish a thesis". It's quite the opposite: they are not a thesis, they are an adventure. An adventure which I do not yet see very clearly how it will end, but which I see very well how it began. It's an adventure that begins with a sort of scandal.
I admire the intrepidity with which you resolve — or more precisely consider them resolved — the problems that most linguists and psychologists have today, tired of fighting, given up asking. That there is "no thought without words" (for example), as you maintain, is very possible. But you are wrong to believe that this is an opinion accepted by all scholars. It's the opposite. Victor Henry criticized it at length. Meillet calls it a metaphysical superstition. Brandstetter sees it as the effect of "idiotic confidence in language". Vendryes even avoids examining a problem that he considers poorly posed. As for men of letters, who should nevertheless have a sure experience of the thing, we see that they are divided into two camps, some holding that they think because they write, others that they write because they have thought. That we are reduced, on a question so serious (and for the writer, so pressing) to personal fantasies, to gratuitous biases, admit that there is a sort of scandal for the mind. Here is a case where the scandal seems both more threatening but easier to resolve:

When I observe, in Contemporary Letters, a certain constraint, a certain monotonous and unpleasant mechanism - a more curious thing: when I see this mechanism or this constraint at play in the very place where the stereotype and the constraint are denounced - I do not discover anything very new. It is (roughly) what Gide calls romanticism; of what Lasserre and Maurras also call romanticism (but with much more contempt); Paul Valéry, shock literature; and Baron Seillière, mystical imperialism; and Clément Vautel, modern literature ; and yourself Belphégor. It's not much smarter to call it Terror. No. But it draws attention to a trait of romanticism (or of Belphegor), which we had not noticed.
This is because it includes (or claims to include), on language, less a thesis than a series of observations - which it is up to us to redo; a sequence of experiences — that it is up to us to start again; in short, a science of expression that is coherent, precise, and which, like any science, is open to analysis, criticism, and confrontation.
The Flowers are just this critique, or this confrontation: patient, methodical, and, after all, rather modest. If I discover (or think I discover) that the alleged observation of Terrorists can be reduced to a series of fairly simple illusions, but as precise as an optical or perspective illusion - if I further admit that the Rhetorics (which seem to us today to be monuments of absurdity) must have been invented to counter precisely such illusions, I am careful not to conclude from this - whatever you may say. you said—that we must therefore become a rhetorician. I'm not that bold. I'm waiting for the Rhetoricians to work. I propose to examine the reasons that they have always given us: observations, experiences, classical conventions—with the same rigor as I did the terrorist reasons. Finally, I only want to retain from a first study the three or four illusions of language, the regular character of which I seem to have demonstrated. It is a lot, after all, if such laws, in a domain which remains almost unknown to us, happen to be precise and certain. This is little, if we consider that it is even more difficult to suspend our language than our judgments, and that we men of letters are in a hurry to write. It surprises you that my criticisms differ on the scope of Fleurs; Well, it's because they are bolder than me, and are trying, in various senses, to transform a science into technique - an outline of a science.
I cannot yet follow them, and I must admit that Flowers remains an adventure for me, the end of which I do not clearly see. Let us at least recognize that it is a truly intellectual adventure.
Because there are two kinds of intellectualism, one of which consists of rigorously applying certain principles - generally metaphysical - that we posed at the beginning: without the slightest proof or the slightest demonstration. It is the intellectualism of the moralists. It's yours. But there is another intellectualism, which sticks to patient observation and methodical experience, attempts to identify a few laws, avoids biases, however attractive they may be, and refrains from concluding for as long as possible. I wish it was mine. I am yours cordially.