The Bergsonian Mind

Mark Sinclair, Yaron Wolf, Mark Sinclair, Yaron Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367074333
• eBook ISBN: 9780429665264
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is widely regarded as one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work explored a rich panoply of subjects, including time, memory, free will and humour and we owe the popular term élan vital to a fundamental insight of Bergson's. His books provoked responses from some of the leading thinkers and philosophers of his time, including Albert Einstein, William James and Bertrand Russell, and he is acknowledged as a fundamental influence on Marcel Proust.

The Bergsonian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging volume covering the major aspects of Bergson's thought, from his early influences to his continued relevance and legacy. Thirty-six chapters by an international team of leading Bergson scholars are divided into five clear parts:

• Sources and Scene
• Mind and World
• Ethics and Politics
• Reception
• Bergson and Contemporary Thought.

In these sections fundamental topics are examined, including time, freedom and determinism, memory, perception, evolutionary theory, pragmatism and art. Bergson's impact beyond philosophy is also explored in chapters on Bergson and spiritualism, physics, biology, cinema and post-colonial thought.

An indispensable resource for anyone in Philosophy studying and researching Bergson's work, The Bergsonian Mind will also interest those in related disciplines, such as Literature, Religion, Sociology and French Studies.

Part ISources and scene

1The roots of Bergson’s concept of duration reconsidered

Mark Sinclair

DOI: 10.4324/9780429020735-3

Bergson’s intellectual celebrity in the Anglophone world in the early twentieth century was not immediately accompanied by an appreciation of the historical roots of his ideas. “To the English-speaking world at least, Bergson’s views came with such force of novelty that he seemed to have no roots in the past” (Stebbing 1914: 36), and “the fashionable world, and many among the thinkers of his time, saw in him a man of originality without parallel” (Scharfstein 1943: 3). English-language historical inquiries into Bergson’s philosophy began in earnest only in 1913, with a study by Arthur Lovejoy in Mind – “Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson: the Conception of ‘Real Duration’” (Lovejoy 1913) – that critically assessed Bergson’s debt to Félix Ravaisson’s remarks on durée in his 1838 doctoral thesis Of Habit (Ravaisson 2008), as well as to the lesser known late nineteenth-century thinkers Lionel Dauriac and Georges Noel, both influenced by Charles Renouvier. The following year, Susan Stebbing published her Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, which sought to show in Bergson’s work “a continuation of the current of French thought that proceeds from Maine de Biran through Ravaisson and Boutroux” (Stebbing 1914: 35). Long after the Bergson boom had subsided, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, during another world war, developed Lovejoy and Stebbing’s approaches with his Roots of Bergson’s Philosophy, a systematic attempt to assess the French philosopher’s originality on the issues of time, intuition, psychology, biology, morality and religion.

This important and instructive attention to the historical roots of Bergson’s philosophy in the Anglophone world was not revived at the beginning of the more recent wave of interest in his thought, a new wave occasioned by the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s approach to his predecessor through the prism of a contemporary concern for a philosophy of difference (Deleuze 1956a, 1956b), and then the methodically ahistorical reconstruction of his doctrine in the longer Bergsonism, meant that a new generation of readers, once Deleuze’s texts had been translated into English in the 1990s, were without any real understanding of the traditions that Bergson develops. This is problematic in that an understanding of Bergson’s ideas – or any canonical philosopher’s ideas, for that matter – in their context allows us to grasp them as living philosophical developments, as the expression of a movement that takes particular paths rather than others, and thus to discern more clearly the philosophical possibilities that they can still open for us in the present and future.

In the last few years, however, English-language scholarship has begun to resituate Bergson’s ideas historically, and this essay aims to add to that effort. In building on recent work (see Sinclair 2018 and 2019: Chapter 5), it aims to offer the most complete account of the precedents for Bergson’s conception of time as duration, of duration as distinct from a spatialised time as recorded by clocks, in nineteenth-century French and francophone thought. Bergson admitted that there were precedents: the account of duration in Time and Free Will was the expression of a “movement of ideas that has been developing more or less everywhere [un peu partout] and that has its own more general and profound causes” [M 658]. Of course, Time and Free Will enables us, with hindsight, to perceive this movement clearly, and in any historical inquiry of this nature, we should not forget what Bergson will later characterise as the retroactivity of the present on the past (see Sinclair 2020: 191–7) together with the risk of retrospective illusion that this retroactivity entails. We should avoid, that is, unduly asserting that ‘Bergsonian’ ideas were already present in the tradition. When looking for the historical sources of a philosophical idea, it is important to understand that, insofar as it changes what the canon is for us, all creative work, in the words of Pierre Bayard (2009), is anticipatory if not actual plagiarism; it may look like actual plagiarism after the fact, but have involved a rather more creative return to sources. With that proviso, the essay first examines Félix Ravaisson’s account of durée together with the associated philosophy of number in Of Habit, before turning to the Belgian Joseph Delboeuf, whose 1865 philosophy of science distinguished vulgar from scientific time. A third section examines the ideas of Albert Lemoine, whose L’habitude et l’instinct characterises durée in remarkably Bergsonian terms, as well as the continuation of these ideas in the work of his student and editor, Victor Egger. A concluding section refers to the work of Alfred Fouillé, Jean-Marie Guyau and then Emile Boutroux, and argues that on the question of time as duration, Bergson’s ideas emerge from a broad nineteenth-century constellation of more or less ‘spritualist’ thinkers, rather than from the narrower Biran–Ravaisson–Lachelier–Boutroux lineage that features as a more prominent influence on other aspects of his thought.

1.1Number, space and time in Of Habit

The second chapter of Time and Free Will, the one in which Bergson according presents his account of the purely qualitative experience of duration, opens with a brief account of number, a key element in any philosophy of mathematics. For Bergson, “any clear idea of number … implies a vision in space” (TFW 79/59). A particular number is a unity, since it is apprehended as such, and bears a single name, but this unity is, at the same time, a sum that allows for division into smaller units and that thus contains a multiplicity of parts that can be considered in isolation. In order to count these units in, say, a flock of sheep, we ignore the individual differences of the sheep and take into account only what is common to them all, and to do that we have to treat them as co-existent and simultaneous. Co-existence, however, amounts to spatial juxtaposition, since the meaning of ‘nine sheep’, Bergson argues, is given in the mental representation of eight things next to each other.

This argument concerning number is already laid out in Of Habit, wherein Ravaisson attempts to account for the nature of consciousness, and what he takes to be its principal faculty, namely the understanding:

the understanding grasps quantity only under the particular and determining condition of distinguishing parts – that is, in the form of the unity of plurality, of discrete quantity, of number. The idea of distinct parts is, in turn, determined within the understanding only under the still more particular condition of distinguishing the intervals separating them; in other words, the understanding represents number only within the plurality of the limits of a continuous quantity. Yet continuity can be grasped by the understanding only on the basis of coexistence. Continuous, coexisting quantity is extension. Thus quantity is the logical, knowable form of extension; and the understanding represents quantity to itself only in the sensible form of extension, in the intuition of space.

(Ravaisson 2008: 39–41)

Quantity, then, implies number, number implies co-existence, co-existence implies extension, and extension implies space; and if Bergson seems to take this argument as a given in 1888, it is presumably because Ravaisson had already presented it.

In Time and Free Will such an account of quantification as spatialisation acts as a kind of stepping-stone towards the idea of a purely qualitative duration irreducible to quantification and spatial representation, but it is important to underline that the latter is not dependent on the former. If the argument concerning number and space fails (for a recent critique, see Watt 2021), and if we find another philosophy of mathematics more convincing, Bergson can still rely on the claim that any application of number to time involves space in that our measures of time derive from the locomotion of the earth around the sun. In any case, we can see how Ravaisson did not quite arrive at the same conclusion as Bergson about time in observing that he seems to endorse the argument of Immanuel Kant – who is cited in these paragraphs of Ravaisson’s text (2008: 120) – that number is also essentially related to time. Somewhat obscurely, the Critique of Pure Reason had argued that although “the pure image of all magnitudes (quantorum) for outer sense is space”, time is necessary for the application of the concept of magnitude to appearances. The “rule” or “schema” of this application is what Kant calls number, “a representation which comprises the successive addition of homogeneous units”, and “number is therefore simply the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogeneous intuition in general, a unity due to my generating time itself in the apprehension of the intuition” (Kant 1929: 183 [A142–3/B182]). As Ravaisson argues more simply, “addition is possible only in time”:

if diversity is represented only in the plurality of the divisions that I establish within extension, and through which I reflect my own unity, then it is necessary, in order to represent the totality or wholeness of that extension, that I combine the different parts, bringing them together. This addition is successive; it implies time.

(2008: 41)

Bergson rejects this claim and considers it to be a confusion resulting from the “habit we have acquired of apparently counting in time rather than space” (TFW 78/58). In his treatise on habit, that is, Ravaisson has succumbed to the illusions of habit! We might count to 20 when, say, playing hide and seek, and Bergson can even admit that in so doing it is “incontestable” that we have thus “counted moments of time rather than space”. In “counting” in this way, however, we do not arrive at a sum, and we have, in the end, merely enumerated a learnt sequence of numbers in time, numbers whose sense derives from space. To count in a genuine way, we have to “fix in a point of space each of the moments that we count”, and “it is on this condition alone that the abstract unities form a sum” (TFW 79/59). The result of counting, then, is simultaneous, and the meaning of number resides in this simultaneity.

In Of Habit, Ravavisson’s claim about time and counting has significant consequences. He claims that the time supposed by quantification can itself be measured, and that this quantification of time requires an extra-temporal principle:

But in time everything passes and nothing remains. How to measure this uninterrupted flux and also this limitless diffusion of succession, if not by something that does not change, but which subsists and remains? And what is this, if not me? For everything that belongs to space is outside time. Substance, at once inside and outside time, is found within me, as the measure of change and permanence alike, as the figure of identity.

(2008: 41)

The claim that quantification, although intrinsically spatial, also requires time has, then, led Ravaisson to the further claim that the measurement of time itself requires an extra-temporal principle, the ‘substance’ of the self. Has Ravaisson thus led us back “to the Kantian Ego, to the ‘Synthetic Unity of Self-Consciousness’” (Lovejoy 1913: 470)? Ravaisson’s is hardly the most faithful rendition of Kant’s doctrine, since he apparently commits the paralogism of applying the category of substance to the ‘subject’ who thinks.¹ Stil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of abbreviations and method of citation
• Introduction
• Part I Sources and scene
• Part II Mind and world
• Part III Ethics and politics
• Part IV Reception
• Part V Bergson and contemporary thought
• Index