Bergson

by Mark Sinclair

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the most celebrated and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He was awarded in 1928 the Nobel prize for literature for his philosophical work, and his controversial ideas about time, memory and life shaped generations of thinkers, writers and artists.

In this clear and engaging introduction, Mark Sinclair examines the full range of Bergson's work. The book sheds new light on familiar aspects of Bergson’s thought, but also examines often ignored aspects of his work, such as his philosophy of art, his philosophy of technology and the relation of his philosophical doctrines to his political commitments. After an illuminating overview of his life and work, chapters are devoted to the following



the experience of time as duration the experience of freedom memory mind and body laughter and humour knowledge art and creativity the élan vital as a theory of biological life ethics, religion, war and modern technology With a final chapter on his legacy, Bergson is an outstanding guide to one of the great philosophers. Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, it is essential reading for those interested in metaphysics, time, free will, aesthetics, the philosophy of biology, continental philosophy and the role of European intellectuals in World War I.

Genres: Philosophy

326 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 8, 2019

Reviews

[William West]

Bergson is an author I have never read. What knowledge of his thought I had before reading this survey by Mark Sinclair was through the work of other, later philosophers, most particularly Gilles Deleuze. It is often said that addition is easier than subtraction and that this truism applies to many schools of thought, including that of the philosophical. I will say that I initially found this true of my introduction to Bergson. I struggled with this book as I actually read it some six months ago. Returning to my notes to write this review Sinclair’s Bergson seemed much more comprehendible to me. I hope to demonstrate this in the below summation of Sinclair’s summations of Bergson’s major works.

In “Time and Free Will” Bergson challenges prevailing scientific conceptions of time and some of their implications for the understanding of psychology. He held that both natural and psychological science relied overly on methods of quantification in realms where such mathematical measurements do not apply. The mathematical/ scientific conception of time was of a series of spatialized units that are infinitely divisible- much like the space of a clock that can measure time by any number of units- hours, minutes, seconds, half-seconds, quarter-seconds, etc. These units of time that form a series do not, in and of themselves, account for movement. Indeed, they seek to negate movement by reducing it to a series of static units.

Bergson challenged the notion that time could even be conceived as a series. Not everything, after all, can be counted in the same way. Material objects can clearly be counted numerically. One can always say what number of chairs are in a room. Facts of consciousness, however, cannot be. Can a person really say how MANY memories they have? The only way a person could even claim to do so, Bergson contends, is by reducing their memories to single, static images- symbols of a memory rather than the memory itself. This symbolization necessitates a crystallization (my term) which Bergson claims, perhaps shakily, in turn necessitates a spatialization (again, like the spatial measurements of a clock).

To count spatialized units is to, Bergson again perhaps a bit shakily claims, reduce them all to the same, crystalized (my term) thing. (Me: Just because these symbols of time/memory are frozen and serializable does that mean they are all the same? There are, after all, plenty of differences between static images. One photograph is not identical to another.) Bergson does insist that the spatialization and serialization of time is the negation of difference and if there is no difference than all of time is a Total-All that cannot, by definition, be counted. This, for Bergson, proves that the scientific, mathematical notion of time is not adequate.

So, how are we to conceive of time without relying on symbolization and serialization? The concept with which Bergson offers as an alternative to serialized notions of time is “duration”. Duration is a “qualifying synthesis thats parts would not be what they are without each other”. It is a succession without distinction in which human consciousness continuously synthesizes the present and the past.

Human consciousness does this passively. The synthesis of past and present is performed by what Bergson calls the “profound self”, a “fleeting duration that is part of a perpetual becoming”. It is the work of the profound self that makes the “superficial self”, the social being whose reality can be conveyed through the symbolization of language, possible.

Duration is not quantifiable but only qualifiable. A memory, rather than its symbolization, is never revisited in the same way. And the memory of a movement, a synthesis of past and present, is just as much a duration as the initial experience, but it is not the same duration. Durations are always different from themselves, just as our profound selves are.

“Matter and Memory”, as its title suggests, devotes more time than its predecessor to the material world, the way the human body engages with other physical objects, and further details the author’s concepts devoted to memory first engaged with in “Time and Free Will”. Memory, writes Bergson, is nothing less than the “ground of conscious existence”.

He identifies two types of memory. First there is “procedural memory”, which is basically remembering how to do something. (This seems a little problematically simplistic. Are habit and memory the same thing? Can the former be reduced to a sub-genre of the latter?) For Bergson procedural memory relies on “simple recognition”, the knowledge that we have encountered something before and thus know what that thing is. The second form is “declarative memory”, our independent recollections of something that has taken place, which relies on “personal recognition” in which we recognize something not as merely the type of thing it is but the specific thing- such as THE chair in my room, or MY father.

The past, in the form of memory, is always part of the perception-of-the-present. It is the synthesizing of our past(s) with our present, the work of what was called the profound self in the former book, that constitutes our “character”, who we are in the present. (“Character” and “superficial self” strike me as essentially interchangeable concepts.).

Bergson reiterates in the second book that the synthesis of the past engenders difference-in-itself- a memory is always different from itself whenever it is revisited. Memory is never an image. It is not projected from outside onto the present but is itself part of the perception of the present. Indeed, the synthesis of the past with the present as one perceives is what duration, reintroduced in the second book, is. Duration exhibits different degrees of contraction of the past. This is why consciousness can be said to have a plurality of rhythms.

The only distinction between the past and the present within-duration is that the past exists virtually where as the present exists actually (albeit only fleetingly). To put it another way, memory provides the subjective element of perception and the living body provides the objective element. And the activity of the body, and its needs, are imperative to the forming of perception. Indeed, perception is a function of bodily, biological need. Our perceptions reflect our potential bodily uses for the objects it encounters.

Perception, in other words, only perceives aspects of the world which are of personal interest to bodily need. It isolates and focuses on certain aspects of presented data and marginalizes others. There is always more to the world than what we perceive. For Bergson, there is no telling where the mind ends and the body begins, and vice-versa.

At this point, Bergson returns to the spatial themes that occupy such an important part of “Time and Free Will”. Matter, declares Bergson, is not composed of solid elements! Solid elements would exist only in space and Bergson conceives of matter as motion. Why, then, do we perceive matter as solid and the world as space? In what could be described as a Kantianism-gone-vitalist twist, Bergson says we perceive solidity and space because we need to. In acting on matter, humans subject reality to the interpretation most in line with their biological needs, and solidity and space, mechanization and determinism, are conductive to those needs.

In “Laughter: An Essay on the Comic” Bergson tackles themes from the previous two books regarding habit. Sinclair does not believe Bergson is a vitalist, although many have labeled him as such. It seems to me that Sinclair rejects that label for Bergson based on ideas from “Laughter”, which tackles repetitive and mechanized human behaviors.

Bergson finds laughter to be an important subject regarding the human condition because, as he points out, humanity is the only creature that laughs or is laughed at. Laughter is also a deeply social practice. Even when we laugh alone doing so is implicitly an appeal to others. On some level, we are letting the social world know, “I find this funny.”

Bergson also considers there to be a necessarily derisive aspect to laughter. One laughs at what they don’t want to be themselves. But derision is always at least in part defensive. In saying what we don’t want to be, we are also acknowledging our fear of becoming what we deride, or already being that which we deride in others.

Bergson believes all forms of the comic have one ultimate source (a highly questionable claim). He declares that the comic always on some level “derives from the mechanical plastered on the living”. He offers the rather crude and callous example of someone tripping and falling down and another who views this finding it funny and laughing. Why someone falling is funny, claims Bergson, is that the fall reveals the human body to be just another body-in-the-world subject to “mechanical rigidity” where as what we hope to find in ourselves is a body in conscious control of itself.

Bodily movements and functions are comic to the degree that they remind us of the workings of a machine. Ultimately, our bodies are machine-like- they keep doing the same thing- eating, sleeping, purging, occasionally falling. Why Sinclair may have a point in refusing to call Bergson a vitalist is that Bergson claims that a “fully vital” being would never repeat itself, but bodily life is defined by repetition. We are bodily, and we are habitual, and both of these traits make us thing-like. Bergson suggests that there is a social corrective in the derision of laughter- “falling is bad”, “don’t be predictably machine like” “stay vital”- yet humans keep falling, and laughing, anyway.

In this sense, “Laughter” might ironically be Bergson’s saddest work. It imagines humanity as a creature that has a mind advanced enough to imagine pure vitality, but a body incapable of realizing it. All we can do is laugh at the other who reveals this by telling ourselves “that’s not me” in an inverted acknowledgment that the other is just like ourselves.

“Laughter” is also perhaps the Bergsonian work that is hardest to reconcile to his general oeuvre. Before and after this work Bergson maintains that solidity of matter is a rationalization on the part of human consciousness designed to define the world in accordance with human need. In “Laughter” it seems the human is abandoned to a clumsy physicality that is at odds with its inherent desire for transcendence.

“Introduction to Metaphysics” more closely resembles Bergson’s first two books than does “Laughter”. As its title suggests, this work attempts to posit a “mission statement” for Bergson’s, and indeed all, philosophy.

Bergson identifies two ways that human beings know of a thing. There is analytic knowledge, or scientific inquiry. This is achieved, whether Bergson directly says so or not, in the spatialized world created by human consciousness. It involves an individual perspective (inherently spatial) and the symbols of measurement. Bergson considers scientific knowledge, which often posits itself as the closest thing to absolute knowledge, as actually quite relative. It involves placing the knower outside of the object of knowledge.

What, then, would qualify for Bergson as absolute knowledge? What can be known absolutely and how can this knowledge be achieved? Bergson calls the path to absolute knowledge “intuition”, which requires no perspective within space, nor symbolization of any kind. Rather, it entails “sympathy” with the object of knowledge. And for Bergson, the object of knowledge which a thinking human can place themself within is duration itself. The profound self simply is its own duration. So to know the absolute, we must only know ourselves. But is this as easy as it sounds? Bergson thinks it is exceptionally difficult and rare.

In fact, the only folks who achieve it in a lasting way are those exceptionally rare artists who can be said to exhibit “genius”- for Bergson this is when a work captures the artist’s profound self- their intuitive sense of the world, in an objective work of art. (This sounds to me a lot like the tenants of impressionism, which was coming into popular vogue in France during the first years of the twentieth century when Bergson was writing.) Bergson makes clear that he does not consider himself a genius. He, like most humans, subordinates his intuition to his intelligence, the analytic mind. How, then, are mere mediocrities like Bergson, myself, and the vast majority of us supposed to know, even momentarily, the absolute?

This is the role of metaphysics. Philosophy is a method by which those lacking in “genius”- natural intuition, can capture the “absolute truths” known to great artists. As Bergson’s ideas demonstrate, philosophy allows a non-genius such as Bergson to “dilate consciousness” and understand, at least analytically, intuitive understanding. The analytic mind of the superficial self can, through the method and process of philosophy, at least comprehend the reality of the profound, intuitive self.

Bergson’s claim that the “dilation of consciousness” is possible reminds me of Simone Weil’s notion of personal “decreation”. In both cases, I am uncomfortable with any thinker claiming the possibility of an absolute transcendence of self. This claim, which can sound almost self-deprecating at first glance, in fact leads to a mentality that claims “absolute truth is what I (who have shed myself) claim it is.” This can lead to a dangerous and terrifyingly messianic mentality that has so often been the dark underbelly of philosophy.

In “Creative Evolution” Bergson further develops his notion of intuition. If, in his previous work, Bergson sometimes sounded like he was denigrating the role of the intellect, he here restores analysis to a paramount position within human subjectivity. Whether he does so convincingly or not is another story.

The broadest term introduced in “Creative Evolution” is coined by Bergson as, well, “life” a wholly temporal phenomenon. The evolution from one species to another is not so different than the switching of a person’s mood from happy to sad. Life is change and change takes place within time. All change, which is to say all life, is the product of the “elan vitate” which translates into English as “will-to-live”, a “purposiveness without purpose” (and a vitalist conception, par excellent). Pure “will to live” exists independently of all matter.

Bergson introduces the term “instinct” into his account of consciousness. Instinct is the force which produces the fixed patterns of behavior of a particular species. All animal life, according to Bergson, perceives the world in a way that accords with their needs. Being tool making critters, humans encounter the world and understand it in relation to how they can further their needs: as a collection of objects that can be taken apart and used as different things- tools. To put it another way, humans instinctually comprehend the world as a collection of objects and objects as divisible.

Given Bergson’s definition, first articulated in “Time and Free Will”, of movement as something indivisible (movement cannot be divided into non-movement and still exist as such) it follows that the human intellect cannot comprehend movement as such. Rather, human intellect (mis)interprets movement as space. It is only at this stage of human interpretation that matter (and the space it occupies) can be said to be brought into being by consciousness, and it is only retrospectively of this process that phenomena can be understood in terms of mechanical explanations.

In “Creative Evolution” “intuition” is (re)defined as the synthesis of instinct and intelligence. Intuition is the process by which the past, as instinctually experienced, comes under analysis in the present. In the human mind, at least, the past and the present are always intermingled. It is intuition then, that brings duration, actually lived human time, into being. Each duration constitutes something new and unique- a human individual.

As Bergson has shown, human consciousness is impossible without the mental process of spatialization. However those humans who are most reliant on spatialization, on viewing the world as sheer utility, are those who are most prone to relying on habit and thus becoming more mechanical and thing-like. (This is, perhaps, an attempt by Bergson to integrate his ideas about spatialization with those concerning habit and clumsiness in “Laughter”.)

“Two Sources of Morality and Religion” was published a quarter century after “Creative Evolution”, in 1932, after the horrors of the first World War, during which Bergson had become a fervent nationalist. Bergson contends that both morality and religion have “closed” and “open” tendencies. While both have their functions, the “open” path is clearly presented as the higher.

Morality, Bergson somewhat surprisingly argues, originates with habit. People try to treat each other decently enough to avoid conflict and animosity. In this sense, morality is another way the human animal responds to the world in accordance to its needs.

“Closed” morality is the most immediate and habitual form. Essentially, it only entails adhering to the standards of behavior of whatever society to which one belongs. Because such morality only applies to certain groups these moral codes, such as nationalism, can also become war codes. Different societies have different moral standards and such morality can become crusading.

“Open” morality does not adhere to any closed customs. It involves a radical love for all humanity and requires creative genius. Such genius can reimagine morality and invent new ways of communal existence.

The two forms of religion correspond to those of morality. “Closed” religion is largely instinctual and encourages community. It also shields the human individual from an unhealthy fear of mortality and contingency. “Open” religion is not communal but mystical. Bergson describes such mysticism as “love of that which is all love”.

Open religion seems to relate to open morality in some of the same ways that philosophy relates to art in “Introduction to Metaphysics”. Through open religion, those lacking in genius can glimpse the radiance of open morality.

Having read of Bergson, and “through” Bergson by way of other thinkers, I wanted a clarifying survey of his oeuvre. Mark Sinclair’s book, I feel, did a good job of providing just that.

[Paolo De Ruggiero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ups and downs. The introductory chapters and the part on TWF are quite crisp, conclusive and to the point. The middle part on MM goes around in circles, between quotations and paraphrasing, and does not help getting in focus, also could use another pass of editing. Can’t comment on Laughter because I haven’t read the Bergson material and most likely I never will. Chapter 7 is back in focus with the Kantian debate, and it is again quite crisp. I think the Author rushed to the finish line, but with another turn at some parts could make this into a really good book.