The New Century

Bergsonism, Phenomenology and Responses to Modern Science

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Alan D. Schrift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317546924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

This volume covers the period between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that witnessed revolutions in the arts and society which set the agenda for the rest of the century. In philosophy, the period saw the birth of analytic philosophy, the development of new programmes and new modes of inquiry, the emergence of phenomenology as a new rigorous science, the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the maturing of the discipline of sociology. This period saw the most influential work of a remarkable series of thinkers who reviewed, evaluated and transformed 19th-century thought. A generation of thinkers - among them, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - completed the disenchantment of the world and sought a new re-enchantment.

1

HENRI BERGSON

John Mullarkey

For reasons too numerous to list here fully – many of them unrelated to what is normally called philosophy – Bergson’s place in the history of continental philosophy is one that has always had to be contested.¹ By “continental philosophy” I understand the anglophone reception of the past hundred years of mainly French and German philosophy, a field in which one is as likely to come across Bergson’s name as not at all. He appears as a central figure in one or two studies (in Eric Matthews’s history, for example, all twentieth-century French philosophy is dubbed a “series of footnotes to Bergson”² ) but he is mostly neglected in others. This is not always a product of laziness or ignorance; despite much recent work done by Bergson scholars in the US, Britain, and France on the centrality of Bergson to the French reception of phenomenology – or to the philosophy of time (or the body, or life, or difference) – Bergson still remains a blind spot, a repressed element that needs to be defended, resurrected, or rehabilitated time and time again. Of all the moderns named in Gilles Deleuze’s famous counter-canon of philosophy – Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson – it is really only the last mentioned who has not been canonized anywhere.³ The others have their long lists of disciples, societies, journals, schools, and recognized methods. Bergson has few or none, and remains an orphan within philosophical history, despite numerous efforts to reverse this; he appears as the perpetual outsider, uncategorizable, and anomalous in his place in the history of philosophy. It does not help, of course, that Bergson’s complex theoretical positions make him resistant to assimilation within other movements: he has phenomenological aspects to his thought, and yet was not a phenomenologist; he was a naturalistic philosopher, but his was a far from standard naturalism; his work valorizes difference, but not through the structures of language. One is tempted to define Bergson in terms of his own concept of the “indefinite”: as that which is always “on the move” and so incapable of being positioned.

It is not so surprising, therefore, that it has of en fallen to the lot of the “Bergsonian” today to undo history’s “damnation of Bergson,” to make recompense for this unfair neglect, to show how he preempted Heidegger, influenced Merleau-Ponty, or shaped Deleuze’s thinking (the strategy of tethering his name to more lustrous figures is a well-worn one). Yet anyone who has tried in vain to reverse this neglect over the past decade, and who has seen others attempt the same with little success over many decades, could be forgiven for growing weary of the cause.⁴ The pressure of historical entropy seems to win out, its inertia irreversible: despite much evidence in favor of a Bergsonian dimension to their subject, most scholars (with a few of notable exceptions) of Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze (or Sartre, Henry, Levinas …) rarely read Bergson. Not that this is surprising any longer, however, for it was rare for any of the major postwar French philosophers themselves to acknowledge an influence from Bergson, and without that clear expression of lineage it must be difficult to pursue lines of inquiry outside the authorized version of intellectual history. Apart from Deleuze (who did write extensively on Bergson), only Levinas takes time to credit Bergson with any sustained significance for him, but even then does so only in interviews rather than primary works.⁵ The rest remain silent.

And yet for nearly twenty years Bergson was at the center of Western philosophy; for half of that time, from 1907 to 1917, he was the philosopher of Europe, with an influence spreading beyond philosophy and into the arts, sociology, psychology, history, and politics.⁶ Although that influence had been severely diminished by the end of the First World War, all the same Bergson must have remained an important presence for the French philosophers born at the turn of the century. Whatever their reasons for not wishing to acknowledge that presence directly, there may be traces of it left in their work. One way to discover such traces is through the language used in their writing. And when one looks at Bergson’s own vocabulary – the one he invented – one does have a sense of déjà vu. One discovers that the language that has been in use over the past hundred years of continental philosophy has an obvious Bergsonian provenance despite his own work’s reversal of fortune. This is not direct enough to be a specif c philosophical influence nor, alternatively, coherent enough to warrant it being called the Weltanschauung in which French thought conducted itself. But there is a range of words and terminological strategies that stands out because it is only after Bergson that this kind of language became de rigueur in French continental thought.

Alternatively, one all too visible trace of Bergson’s presence that does not need any detection is what we should call “comic-book Bergsonism”: in its pages we find the comical picture of a dualism that opposed all forms of space to time, a vitalism that argued for a special form of living energy determining the direction of evolution, and a monism that denied the existence and appearance of substance in favor of everything being in motion. All of these stereotypes of Bergson were and are straw men: implausible positions set up mostly in order to cast a favorable light on whatever supposedly stark alternative to Bergson was being forwarded at the time – a new phenomenology, logical positivism, structuralism, and so on. Yet Bergson would have found these views no less incredible, for he never opposed all space to time, did not think of the élan vital as a special kind of energy, did not think that evolution was heading in any direction, and did not deny the existence and appearance of substance (but only showed what substance was – a complexity of movement).

It is the task of what follows, then, to replace this comical image with a serious one: the image of a thinker whose influence on philosophy’s language has been immense, yet rarely acknowledged by other philosophers. More often than not, of course, what philosophers say is at variance with what they do, and in the case at hand it will be the language of French philosophy that expresses a latent Bergsonism “acting itself out,” so to speak. With this in mind, I shall set out a number of categories (not all of them explicitly used by Bergson – e.g. “holism”) that tie together Bergson’s terminology, while also linking them to his texts, to other philosophers, and to recent themes in continental philosophy. Although the terms will often overlap in usage, I shall try to separate them according to a number of linguistic practices:

• some of them methodological – the language of holism (vagueness, abstraction as immobilization, interpenetrating images, antibinarism, metapho-ricity, thick descriptions that restore singular novelty, the concrete); the language of intuition (metaphysical perception, knowledge and sympathy, immanent thought as becoming the thing); the language of immanence (antitranscendence and the antitranscendental); the language of pluralism (multiplicity, levels, dissociation, qualitative difference and differentiation); and the language of nonphilosophy (philosophy in art, in mysticism);

• some of them metaphysical – the language of the Real (radical empiricism as metaphysics, the rejection of negativity, the critique of possibility); the language of time (novelty, becoming, change, process, movement, heterogeneity); and the language that goes beyond subject and object (refraction, endosmosis, mixture);

• some more naturalistic – the language of Consciousness (the unconscious, fractured ego, memory, the virtual); the language of the body (affectivity, motility, habit), and the language of nature (the animal, biology, evolution);

• and some more normative – the language of Life; the language of ethics (alterity, attention, sympathy, the Open and the Closed); the language of anti-reductionism (antimechanism, antiscientism); and the language of freedom (the given fact of liberty, the free act that dissolves aporia).

The philosophical origins of a term such as “multiplicity” are not exclusive to Bergson, of course (Husserl would also have to be brought into that account): no one can own a concept uniquely. But there is a critical mass attained by a large array of Bergson’s favored terms that, only after him, became widespread and publicly owned, evolving by mutation in the hands of others. Nor is this Bergsonian inheritance operating in isolation; it coexists with the language of Greek philosophy, Cartesianism, and Kantianism that can be found in every Western philosophy. But it is the layers of Bergsonisms that especially characterize French thought this past hundred years, layers that might also reduce the gap between Matthews’s comment on French philosophy as a “footnote” to Bergson, and the lack of actual footnotes to Bergson in its pages.

I. METHODOLOGIES

Holism

The mutation of Bergson’s language also occurs in his own hands, for concepts such as “duration” or “space” do not hold the same meaning across his works. They evolve or, rather, they co-evolve in the presence of other concepts in other contexts (the duration of consciousness in Time and Free Will is somewhat different from the duration of life in Creative Evolution). This co-evolution is indicative of a Bergsonian principle that is now a commonplace: the holism of the Real. Bergson is a holist such that the analysis of ideas and of things never reveals their genuine inner reality, but only a set of immobile parts. Analysis does not reveal truth, but only our material intervention upon reality; it breaks things up, killing the Real while vivisecting it. And this very notion of holism is itself holistic, having different meanings when taken in the context of logical abstract...