Bergson and Phenomenology

Bergson and Phenomenology

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Bergson and Phenomenology Edited by

Michael R. Kelly Department of Philosophy, Boston College, USA

Selection and editorial matter © Michael R. Kelly 2010 Chapters © their individual authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–20238–2

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bergson and phenomenology / edited by Michael R. Kelly. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–20238–2 (hardback) 1. Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941. 2. Phenomenology. I. Kelly, Michael R., 1974– B2430.B43B4215 2010 194—dc22 2010010812 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: Bergson’s Phenomenological Reception: the Spirit of a Dialogue of Self-Resistance Michael R. Kelly

1

Part I Reading Bergson Anew: a Foundation for the Bergson/Phenomenology Debate 1 Intuition and Duration: an Introduction to Bergson’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ Leonard Lawlor

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2 Bergson on the Driven Force of Consciousness and Life Rudolf Bernet

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3 Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on Experience and Science Gary Gutting

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4 Man Falls Down: Art, Life and Finitude in Bergson’s Essay on Laughter Stephen Crocker

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Part II Intersections: the Bergson/Phenomenology Debate 5 Intuition and Freedom: Bergson, Husserl and the Movement of Philosophy Hanne Jacobs and Trevor Perri

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6 Life, Thinking and Phenomenology in the Early Bergson Dan Zahavi

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7 A Criticism of Sartre’s Concept of Time Pete A.Y. Gunter

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8 Life as Vision: Bergson and the Future of Seeing Differently Alia Al-Saji

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9 Miracles of Creation: Bergson and Levinas Nicolas de Warren

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10 The Psycho-Physics of Phenomenology: Bergson and Henry John Mullarkey

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Contents

Part III Life-World and Life: the Fundament of the Bergson/Phenomenology Debate 11 From the World of Life to the Life-World Pierre Kerszberg 12 Consciousness or Life? Bergson between Phenomenology and Metaphysics Frédéric Worms

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13 The Failure of Bergsonism Renaud Barbaras

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Index

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Acknowledgements Many people in many ways contributed to the production of this collection and made it a more manageable and pleasant undertaking. Priyanka Gibbons remained committed to a project that she inherited when she came to Palgrave, and I am very grateful for her kind support and continued endorsement. I also want to thank Dee Mortensen and Anne Roeckline at Indiana University Press for patiently and understandingly guiding me through the acquisition of rights for Renaud Barbaras’s essay reproduced herein. Trevor Perri offered his time and provided a careful eye in reviewing the consistency of my proofing, formatting and copy-editing of the volume. He carried out this task diligently. Any errors that remain are mine and surely have been minimized thanks to his generous efforts. I also want to thank Bob Vallier (with John Nale), Mark Sentesy and Joe Spadula for their careful translations of essays by Renaud Barbaras, Frédéric Worms and Pierre Kerszberg, respectively. And Renaud Barbaras is owed thanks for patiently and professionally working with me on his contribution to the volume. Two people perhaps on slightly different sides of the Bergson/Phenomenology debate played integral roles in the volume at a very early stage, Rudolf Bernet and Leonard Lawlor. Rudolf backed the project by lending his name to my invitation to contributors. His well-earned authority in the world of continental philosophy surely reinforced the importance of this kind of philosophical dialogue and very likely inspired other phenomenologically minded contributors to participate. Len backed the project in many ways throughout, and my greatest debt of gratitude is to him. Like Rudolf, Len agreed to back the project from the time that I circulated invitations. I believe that if he had not put his name and very fine reputation behind my invitation, I probably would not (and certainly would not easily) have secured the contributions from Bergsonists. Len put me contact with the people at Palgrave, and his support greatly reduced the stress and uncertainty of convincing a press of the value of this project. In a specific regard, Len charitably and enthusiastically facilitated my contact with Renaud Barbaras, acquired on my behalf a translator for Renaud’s contribution, and put me in contact with Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press when it came time to work through copyright matters. His commitment to the importance of not letting Bergson’s thought once again go neglected, I think, prompted him to remain very present in, but very quietly behind, this project. From start to finish, this volume depends deeply and in large part on Len’s generosity of time and spirit. vii

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I also must thank Indiana University Press (with Vrin) for allowing me to reproduce in this volume a translation of a chapter from Renaud Barbaras’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Life and Presses Universitaires de France for allowing me to reproduce in translation the essay from Frédéric Worms. Finally, I thank my wife, Sabrina, for her love and support throughout the process. She lives graciously with me, even when I am working; she lives apart from me, so that I can work in a different city. I realize that these are not always easy ways to live, and I am more grateful to her than I likely express. Acknowledgment is due to Indiana University Press for permission to print Renaud Barbaras, ‘The Failure of Bergsonism,’ which will appear in Renaud Barbaras, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming) and originally appeared in Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 141–55, for which translation Indiana University Press owns the rights. Acknowledgement is also due to Presses Universitaires de France for permission to print in translation Frédéric Worms, ‘La conscience ou la vie? Bergson entre phénomenologie et métaphysique,’ which first appeared in Annales Bergsoniennes II: Bergson, Deleuze, La Phénoménologie, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 191–206.

Notes on Contributors Alia Al-Saji is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. Her research explores questions of embodiment, memory and intersubjectivity. In her published work, she seeks to develop an account of the temporality of the lived body and of perception, drawing on the works of Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She has also written on time in Husserl, Bergson and Deleuze and on the appropriations of Bergson by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In addition to several anthologies, her articles have appeared in such journals as the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Research in Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy Review and Philosophy Today. Her current work interrogates the critical and ethical potential of vision through a feminist and phenomenological lens. Renaud Barbaras is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. Among his ten published books are De l’être du phénomène – Sur l’ontologie de Merleau-Ponty (1991; Prix d’Aumale de l’Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, 1992, reprinted in 2001, and translated into English by L. Lawlor and T. Toadvine (2003)); Le désir et la distance – Introduction à une phénoménologie de la perception (1999, reprinted in 2006, and translated into English by Paul Milan (2005) and Czech by Josef Fulka (2005)); Le mouvement de l’existence. Etudes sur la phénoménologie de Jan Patocˇka (2007); Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie (2008) with an English translation by Robert Vallier forthcoming. Rudolf Bernet is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and President of the Husserl Archives. He has studied at the universities of Louvain/Leuven and Heidelberg and has been the President of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für phänomenologische Forschung. He is on the editorial board of numerous philosophical and psychoanalytic journals. As a guest professor he taught at the universities of Nice, Copenhagen, Rome, Boston College, State University of New York at Stony Brook and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2008 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt-Forschungspreis. Rudolf Bernet has prepared critical editions of Husserl’s late writings on time (1985, 2001) and published more than 200 articles in French, German, English and Dutch in the fields of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy. Together with D. Welton and G. Zavota he edited Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, 5 vols (2005). His books include An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (in collaboration with I. Kern and E. Marbach) (1993), La vie du sujet (1994) and Conscience et existence (2004). ix

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Stephen Crocker is Associate Professor of Sociology and Humanities at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. His interests range across philosophy, social theory and aesthetics. He has written on the phenomenology of time and anticipation; the evolution of the plane in painting, film and philosophy; and on mediation and media in the work of, among others, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben and Marshall McLuhan. His work has appeared in Philosophy Today, Continental Philosophy Review, ctheory, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Topia, Cultural Values and various anthologies. Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College, USA, and has been a visiting faculty member of the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research and Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille3. His most recent publications include a book on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness, The Promise of Time (2009), and translations of the Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao. He is currently writing a phenomenological study of the imagination. Pete A.Y. Gunter is currently Regents’ University Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas, USA. A lifelong environmentalist, he was instrumental in creating and enlarging the Big Thicket National Preserve in Southeast Texas, the first such preserve in the history of the National Park Service. A process philosopher, he has written widely on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and on the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Lecomte du Nouy and George Herbert Mead. Among his books are Bergson and the Evolution of Physics (1969), Bergson and Modern Thought (1987) and Creativity in George Herbert Mead (1990). Among his environmental writings are The Big Thicket: an Ecological Reevaluation (1993) and Texas Land Ethics (1997) with Max Oelschlaeger. Professor Gunter played a major role in creating the program in Environmental Ethics at the University of North Texas. Gary Gutting teaches at the University of Notre Dame, USA, where he holds the Notre Dame Endowed Chair in Philosophy. He is the author of six books: Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (1982), Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (1989), Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (1999), French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (2001), Michel Foucault: a Very Short Introduction (2005) and What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy (2009). He has co-authored or edited another six volumes. Hanne Jacobs is a doctoral student in philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and is supported by the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO). She is a member of the research center of the Husserl Archives where she has worked as a transcriptor of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. She is currently completing an edition of the Husserliana Materialien series entitled, Einleitung in die Philosophie 1919/20.

Notes on Contributors xi

Michael R. Kelly teaches philosophy at Boston College, USA. His research interests and publications primarily deal with Husserl’s reception in the phenomenological tradition and history of philosophy, particularly with respect to time and intentionality, as well as Bergson’s relation to phenomenology. Pierre Kerszberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toulouse, France. His areas of research include history and philosophy of science, Kant and phenomenology. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Brussels in 1982 and his Habilitation from the University of Paris in 1998. In addition to numerous articles in French and English, his books include The Invented Universe (1989), Critique and Totality (1997), Kant et la nature (1999) and L’Ombre de la nature (2009). He has held professorships at the University of Sydney (1987–89) and Pennsylvania State University (1990–2000). He is a member of the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology (CREA, Polytechnic School, Paris). Leonard Lawlor is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of six books: This is not Sufficient: an Essay on Animality in Derrida (2007), The Implications of Immanence: Towards a New Concept of Life (2006), Derrida and Husserl: the Basic Problem of Phenomenology (2002), Thinking through French Philosophy: the Being of the Question (2003), The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (2003) and Imagination and Chance: the Difference between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (1992). He is one of the co-editors of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. He has translated MerleauPonty and Hyppolite into English. He has written dozens of articles on Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Gadamer. He is translating Merleau-Ponty’s L’institution, la passivité for publication and he is writing two books: Never will there be enough Written: an Essay on the Problem of the Worst in Deleuze and Guattari and Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside. John Mullarkey, born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated at University College, Dublin, University College, London, and the University of Warwick, has taught philosophy for the last 15 years at the University of Sunderland, England (1994–2004) and the University of Dundee, Scotland (2004 to date). His major publications include Bergson and Philosophy (1999), PostContinental Philosophy: an Outline (2006) and Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (2009). Trevor Perri is a doctoral student in philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and is supported by the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO). He is working on Bergson and French phenomenology. Frédéric Worms is Professor at the Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille3 and Director of the Centre international d’étude de la philosophie française

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contemporaine at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. His major publications include Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie (2004) and La philosophie en France au XX ° siècle (2009). Director of the Annales bergsoniennes (4 volumes published), he is also the coordinator of the critical edition of Bergson’s works (2007–11). His personal research leads towards a philosophy of vital and moral relationships. Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He obtained his PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1994 and his Dr.phil. (Habilitation) from the University of Copenhagen in 1999. He was elected as a member of the Institut International de Philosophie in 2001 and of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2007. He served as president of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology from 2001–07, and is currently co-editor in chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In his systematic work, Zahavi has mainly been investigating the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. His most important publications include Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität (1996), Self-awareness and Alterity (1999), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005) and together with Shaun Gallagher The Phenomenological Mind (2008).

Introduction: Bergson’s Phenomenological Reception: the Spirit of a Dialogue of Self-Resistance Michael R. Kelly

It is curious that a philosopher who one phenomenologist, Sartre, admits ‘bowled’ him over and who another, Merleau-Ponty, acknowledges ‘bowled over philosophy’ would receive such scant attention from phenomenology – both in its emergence as the dominant discourse in continental philosophy and its persistence as such today.1 Despite Bergson’s immense popularity at the turn of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Péguy suggested as early as 1913 that his thought, or the fashionableness of it, was already in the process of dying. That is, it was clear that Bergson would leave behind no Bergsonian school; Bergson was dead, and European intellectuals had killed him, with a cultural ‘vice grip’ of sorts. Indeed, even ‘the enemies of [Bergson’s] enemies were ranged against him’: Radical thinkers found Bergson’s ‘spiritualist’ notion of freedom unsatisfying, while the Catholic Church indexed Bergson’s writings in 1913 charging that his notion of the élan vital allegedly mixed human consciousness with revelation and privileged prideful, self-determining virtue over humility and grace.2 Then began the period of the world wars, which for European intellectuals brought home the tragic dimension of human existence to which Bergson’s ‘optimistic’ thought could not present a plausible response. 3 What remained during the time of phenomenology’s ascent to dominance in European philosophy, specifically in France, was ‘two Bergsonisms,’ as Merleau-Ponty noted: There is that audacious one, when Bergson’s philosophy fought and … fought well. And there is that one after the victory, persuaded in advance about what Bergson took a long time to find, and already provided with concepts while Bergson himself created his own. When Bergsonian insights are identified with the vague cause of spiritualism or some other entity, they lose their bite, they are generalized and minimized.4 As Merleau-Ponty’s remark implies, the general manner of relating to Bergson by twentieth-century philosophers seems to have been to latch onto one or 1

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another of Bergson’s articulations of a problem, rather than his reformulations of problems and solutions, and either absorb his position or dismiss it.5 One could argue that a curious feature, namely clarity, of Bergson’s philosophy combined with the cultural factors cited above to contribute to his unhappy philosophical fate. Clarity in writing can condemn a philosopher to obscurity. It can encourage a superficial acceptance and diffusion of the thinker’s system, or a superficial rejection and dismissal of it. Since the clear and plain language of the arguments for which he fought was easily generalized into vague concepts – his elegant writing attempted to balance the poles of determinism and freedom, naturalism and mysticism, science and humanism, intellect and intuition, space and time – both fates associated with this curious feature of philosophy befell his thought.6 And the increasing popularity and spread of phenomenology on the continent, which inherited this vague Bergson, seems largely responsible for condemning Bergson to philosophical obsolescence. Yet the turn of the twenty-first century witnessed the appearance of a Bergsonian school of thought that did not emerge during Bergson’s lifetime. This movement has sought primarily to revive Bergson’s thought on its own terms, to look again and more seriously at what ‘Bergson took a long time to find.’7 After Bergson’s philosophical fate, one path Bergsonism has taken toward realizing this revival has been to challenge the fundamental tenets of the movement that around 1920 succeeded Bergson as paramount in European or continental philosophy, that is, phenomenology. Sometimes the new Bergsonism’s approach highlights and develops Bergson’s differences with phenomenology; sometimes it attempts to redress phenomenology’s misrepresentations of Bergson’s thought. In any event, philosophers who today work in the continental tradition find themselves on the cusp of watching the history of Bergson’s philosophical fate repeat itself – but now less out of cultural pressures and more as a result of the pressures and habits of our philosophical culture.8 Whatever one thinks of the variant forms phenomenology takes now it remains the dominant discourse in continental philosophy, and while many popular alternatives to phenomenology exist today, ‘Bergsonism’ barely registers among them. Yet if there is a reason for accepting Bergson into the continental tradition today, one can make sense of it not only by reconsidering Bergson’s unacknowledged influence on or undue neglect in phenomenology, but also by considering, in light of the revival of Bergson, how the ‘concepts … Bergson himself created’ now appear relevant for issues in contemporary research in phenomenology – even if Bergson’s concepts are not ‘phenomenological’, and perhaps most importantly precisely because they are not.

1. From phenomenology and Bergson to Bergson and phenomenology Early phenomenologists did not act alone in the campaign against Bergson. Mistreatment of Bergson at the hands of phenomenologists from the 1920s

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through the 1940s shares much with Bertrand Russell’s depiction of Bergson as a kind of experiential-Manichean. Russell read Bergson’s thought as a dualism of matter and spirit, instinct and intellect, evolution and freedom, where ‘instinct is fundamental … with instinct the good boy and intellect that bad boy’; indeed, on Russell’s reading, ‘intellect is the misfortune of man,’ while ‘instinct is seen at its best in ants, bees and Bergson.’9 Consequently, according to Russell, ‘there is no room in [Bergson’s] philosophy for the moment of contemplative insight when, rising above animal life, we become conscious of the greater ends that redeem man from the life of the brutes.’10 Bergson certainly struggled honestly and openly with the issues surrounding humanity’s place in nature by seeking a broader conception of life than that proposed by the sciences. Taking intuition, instincts and evolution seriously, he attempted to offer his readers careful and detailed arguments for the role of consciousness and its relation to time, the material body, the natural and social world, and other conditions often thought to mitigate or suppress the freedom, creativity and novelty of life ( both natural and cultural). Unlike traditional philosophical dualisms that parceled out one side of this divide in favor of the other or more exalted dimension of human experience – for example, Plato’s denigration of the sensible that replays through Kant’s transcendental idealism – Bergson advances more of a hybrid of these opposites. The issues driving his philosophy of life, however amenable they may appear on the surface to phenomenological interests, particularly existential and hermeneutical ones, received scant recognition from phenomenologists. To put phenomenology’s relation to Bergson coarsely, the redemption of man, or its supposed impossibility in Bergson’s thought, marked the broadest point of divergence for phenomenologists.11 If phenomenologists did not ignore Bergson, they derided his contributions to these perennial philosophical problems of life because they found in his vitalism either a thoroughgoing materialism or an unrealistically optimistic spiritualism. Twentieth-century phenomenology in its relations to Bergson thus ranges from the polite to the dismissive to the confrontational. But serious engagement never occurred. One may have heard that Husserl, on receiving a verbal report from Roman Ingarden concerning Bergson’s theory of durée, identified phenomenologists as the ‘true Bergsonians.’12 And indeed, both Husserl and Bergson, in response to the scientism and psychologism of their time, make a turn to experience – a point for further discussion below – and emphasize time, embodiment and intuition. Yet their agendas differ: Husserl sought a science of the essential structures of conscious experience, while Bergson sought to forge a new theory of life, a metaphysics of freedom and novelty. It is not surprising, then, that Husserl’s casual remark amounts to an isolated incident and that one hears almost nothing else from Husserl about Bergson.13 Husserl’s most famous student, Martin Heidegger, seems more familiar than his mentor with Bergson. Whether this results simply from

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Heidegger’s vast and varied engagement with the history of philosophy is not really relevant. Heidegger recognized where Bergson’s originality lay, namely his ‘most independent’ attempts to think in terms of time rather than space. But in Heidegger’s view the originality of Bergson’s account of the self’s relation to durée did not extend beyond its emphasis of time, for Heidegger concluded that Bergsonian durée ‘rests on a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s way of understanding time’ and thus ‘is … in this sense untenable,’ that is, ‘does not succeed by means of this concept [of durée] in working … through to the true phenomenon of time.’14 In short, Heidegger never acknowledged any influence from Bergson vis-à-vis his project of phenomenology as fundamental ontology captured in the ecstatic temporality of Dasein as germane to a remembrance of the forgotten matter of the meaning of being. Yet when phenomenology dispersed to France Bergson received his least hospitable treatment. Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty present misleading readings of Bergson’s philosophy (more will be said in this volume on this issue). Sartre lampooned Bergson’s account of subjectivity, perception, the imagination, memory and time, particularly attacking Bergson’s theory that (pure) perception arises in a realm of ‘indetermination’ created by the sophistication and speed of a bodily (material) organism (or central nervous system). This proposition, antithetical to the phenomenological dictum that all consciousness is consciousness of something, entailed a view of consciousness as an ‘impersonal consciousness’ in the material body that makes it difficult if not impossible to explain how consciousness ‘becomes the conscious consciousness of an individual subject.’15 And despite what some have rightly recognized as Bergson’s influence on Merleau-Ponty’s theory of habit-memory,16 Bergson’s view of consciousness as bodily rather than embodied remained a source of persistent reservation in MerleauPonty’s reading of Bergson. Concerned with the intentional comportment of embodied consciousness, Merleau-Ponty contrasts his phenomenological view of tacit environmental coping with that of Bergson, claiming that ‘the action of which Bergson is thinking is always virtual action, that by which the organism maintains itself in existence.’17 From his phenomenological perspective, then, Bergson’s theory of bodily consciousness and perception suffers from a ‘psychic blindness,’ a materialism ‘blind’ to the issue of intentional consciousness and the body’s directedness toward self and other, for ‘when Bergson stresses the unity of perception and action and invents … the term “sensory motor process,” he is clearly seeking to involve consciousness in the world … But the body remains for him what we have called the objective body … and one cannot see why … consciousness becomes involved in a body and a world.’18 Merleau-Ponty too would have to wait to find the audacious Bergson. In all of this, one can see why phenomenological readings of Bergson shared much with Russell’s (albeit for different reasons, of course). Each found that he could limit the length and seriousness of his engagement

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with Bergson when he based his criticism on whether or not Bergson met his interests and standards or shared his methodological approach. As it so often does, popularity in some circles shifts to authority. Phenomenologists’ appraisals of Bergson, which were as infrequent as they were curt, gave philosophers after phenomenology (and Russell) little reason to return to Bergson’s thought. What changed in later twentieth-century continental philosophy’s reception of Bergson, however, was a small but important movement that read Bergson precisely otherwise than phenomenologists had read him, that is, a movement that read Bergson on his own terms rather than within the context of, or as a footnote to, the agenda of phenomenology. Of the many essays and translations recently put forth to effect this change, despite the varied approaches to Bergson these commentators take, Bergsonism is unified in and by the belief that one must read Bergson as more than just a philosopher of intuition (as Russell caricatured him) and more than just a philosopher of vitalism or bland spiritualism (as most phenomenology caricatured him). The father of this new wave is Gilles Deleuze, whose study of Bergson, Bergsonism, re-introduced Bergson to contemporary philosophy on the continent as a counterpoint to the putative authority and shortcomings of the phenomenological tradition. At the close of Bergsonism, Deleuze suggests something of a rapport with phenomenology: To rediscover Bergson is to follow or carry forward his approach in … three directions. It should be noted that these three themes are also to be found in phenomenology – intuition as method, philosophy as rigorous science and the new logic as theory of multiplicities. It is true that these notions are understood very differently in these two cases. There is nevertheless the possibility of convergence … Scientific hypotheses and metaphysical theses are constantly combined in Bergson in the reconstitution of complete experience.19 Taking up Deleuze’s inspiration, Bergsonists today present Bergson as a philosopher who advocates a philosophy in flux in the most profound sense. That is, they present Bergson as a philosopher whose work embodies the belief that philosophy is philosophy only when it continually reflects on itself, only when it builds away from false problems and repackaged ideas to the creation of new concepts and categories that will capture the range of life more precisely.20 This new wave of Bergsonism thus presents challenges to phenomenology’s reading of and traditionally received dominance over Bergson. For example, Bergsonism has engaged Bergson’s theory of time and ‘self’ contra Sartre and Husserl; Bergson’s theories of pure-perception and memory vis-à-vis Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception; Bergson’s theory of memory as a challenge to Heidegger’s presumption that Bergson does not adequately

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account for ‘being’, and so on. As these examples suggest, the importance of this new wave extends beyond mere correctives to the Bergson of phenomenology. Bergsonism takes as its inspiration the most general point of Deleuze’s appreciation, which holds that ‘a “return to Bergson” does not only mean a renewed admiration for a great philosopher but a renewal or an extension of his project today, in relation to the transformations of life and society …’21 And it is precisely the inability of phenomenology to effect this transformation of life and society that the new Bergsonians identify as one of phenomenology’s most significant shortcomings. As Keith Ansell-Pearson puts it, ‘by … invoking the primordially lived, phenomenology was unable to fight against the tyranny of perceptual and affective clichés but surrendered the subject to the domain of the ordinary and the everyday, imprisoning the movement of life within the realm of opinion and common sense.’22 In short, phenomenology is not ‘presuppositionless,’ nor does it strive toward a reconstitution of complete experience, as Deleuze saw Bergson’s thought doing. Rather, it models itself on the sciences in order to clarify the intentional structures of the mundane, the content itself of which Bergson hopes to call into question, for his philosophy is a living philosophy that aims at forging new concepts. Whether or not the content or method of phenomenology succumbs to the weight of this critique, the revival of Bergson, as much a retrieval of Bergson as a rethinking of continental phenomenology and philosophy, has alerted phenomenologists to Bergson’s confluence with phenomenology and posed challenges to phenomenology’s accounts of subjectivity, time, embodiment, nothingness, alterity, life, freedom and so on. Yet this revival of Bergson’s thought could be short-lived without a sustained attempt to develop, however selectively and incompletely, this emerging dialogue. Most contemporary phenomenologists (with only a few exceptions)23 persist in not reading Bergson, still working under the influence and weight of the philosophical figures who dictate who counts as fruitful philosophical interlocutors. On the other hand, when contemporary Bergsonists address phenomenology without phenomenology replying on its own behalf, phenomenology curiously occupies a place similar to the one Bergson once held. This oddity suggests that a threat still exists that the history of Bergson’s philosophical status may repeat itself. Eric Matthews may very well be right when he notes that twentieth-century French philosophy is ‘a series of footnotes to Bergson,’ but from its suppression to its revival, the threat remains that Bergson’s thought may not make the transition from a ‘footnote’ to an ‘authorized’ interlocutor with twentyfirst-century continental philosophy’s reigning paradigm.24 To avoid continued philosophical oversight and contribute to a sustained dialogue between Bergson and phenomenology, the essays in this volume seek to take Bergson and this challenge of Bergsonism seriously. They hope to do this in two broad ways. First, they explicitly place phenomenology

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and Bergson in dialogue. Second, they try to follow Bergson’s regular and defensible insistence that mere philosophical ‘side-taking’ accomplishes little.25 Side-taking for its own sake perpetuates the recreation of false problems. And even if it is true, and perhaps trivially so, that philosophers must take sides on the issues, we should mine the very fundamental and shared conviction in Bergson and phenomenology that the philosopher’s duty is to clarify problems before taking sides, that is, to resolve philosophical problems by first resolving philosophical differences, an effort that requires, as Bergson suggested, ‘resisting oneself.’26 It is not artificial to put Bergson and phenomenology in dialogue. Rather, it is artificial to ignore their sometimes competing voices on the number of issues commonly addressed in their thought: consciousness, perception, time, association, memory, recollection, habit, attention, affectivity, embodiment, pathology, science, psycho-physicalism, selfhood, society, freedom, ethics: life, in short. The essays in this volume thus hope to rediscover the ‘audacious’ Bergson and through this recovery consider the perhaps ‘audacious’ claim that Bergson always has had more to say to phenomenology than phenomenology has allowed him to say.

2. The spirit of a dialogue between Bergson and phenomenology If one starts by taking philosophical sides rather than from a commitment to the issues at stake, Bergson reminds us, philosophy will continue to lack what it ‘has lacked most of all,’ namely ‘precision.’27 What Bergson has in mind when talking of precision is some manner of access to experience of the real (world) before habitual, lazy and dogmatic thinking co-opts the inquiry. This is hard work – reading across traditions and specializations. Yet Bergson’s point should resonate with even the casual reader of phenomenology. In the wake of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the zeitgeist of Western culture polarized around evolutionism and spiritualism, some citizens seduced by scientific certainty and the promise of its applied technological progress, others skeptical of techno-science’s pretension and dehumanizing tendencies. Bergson’s philosophy appeared in response to the spirit of this time and initially was able to charm both camps.28 From his first published work, Time and Free Will (1889), onward Bergson sought to navigate the divide between the ‘purpose-laden’ theological notions of evolution and the ‘purposelessness’ of biological mechanism directed by selection. In a letter from 1908 to his friend and Harvard psychologist and pragmatist, William James, Bergson declared that he developed his fundamental philosophical insight while reading and criticizing British evolutionist, Herbert Spencer. He writes, ‘I had remained up to [1888] wholly imbued with [the] mechanistic theories … of … Spencer … It was the analysis of the notion of time, as it enters into mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw

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to my great astonishment that scientific time does not endure. Spencer and those like him, including psycho-physicalists of his day, … explained evolution and change without explaining “change itself.”’29 Life occurs and changes within the stream of time’s flow and evolution, and it is well known that Bergson realized in Time and Free Will that the clock-time that proved so useful for scientific measurement, analysis and methodical calculation confused time with space. As such, scientific time makes the time of life look like the planks on a picket fence, successive but not continuous, thereby badly misrepresenting the real. Bergson’s arguments sought to throw science and scientism into question, particularly psychology’s pretension to quantify the quality or feel of life. Science was not wrong; it simply could not claim exclusive explanatory rights over human life and experience or even life and experience broadly construed. Any philosophy that rests on a spatialized and thus immobilized view of reality and human life amounted to a handmaiden of science and provided artificial responses to false problems. Again, a casual reader of phenomenology can locate in its thought an almost identical spirit to Bergson’s critique – or at least a common foe, namely the positivistic view of the sciences. More interestingly, one also can locate a point of undeniable methodological similarity: the use of the epoché to overcome the dominant tendency to rely on science and its philosophical minions to explain experience and life.30 Bergson’s second major work, Matter and Memory (1896),31 began with this philosophical move for which today Husserl seems better known. Each put this methodological move to work because he thought it ‘enlarged’ (MM 25/176) or gave expanded ‘depth’32 to philosophical research. Whether one reads this expansion as a diffusion in one sense or a constriction in another, this move, for both, created a space for the renewal of philosophical problems in an age of scientism and positivistic philosophy. For Husserl, We carry out an epoché in regard to all objective theoretical interest, all aims and activities belonging to us as objective scientists or even simply as [ordinary] people desirous of [this kind of] knowledge. Within this epoché ... neither the sciences nor the scientist has disappeared for us who practice the epoché. They continue to be what they were before in any case: facts in the unified context of the pregiven life-world; except that, because of the epoché, we do not function as sharing these interests ... (Crisis § 35) Bergson for his part described this methodological move as an assumption: We ... assume for the moment that we know nothing of the theories of matter and ... the theories of spirit, nothing of the discussions concerning the reality or ideality of the external world. (MM 17/169)

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This Bergsonian epoché, when it asks us to ‘assume … that we know nothing … concerning the reality or ideality of the … world,’ in no way entails a Cartesian ‘negation’ of the world. Rather, Bergson claims, ‘to forget [the disputes between philosophers] ... is what we ask of the reader’ (MM 10/162). Likewise, Husserl expresses the function of the epoché as a means of vigilantly side-stepping badly articulated philosophical problems in order to reclaim the philosophical issue at stake. As Husserl puts it, ‘I am not negating this “world” as though I were a sophist; I am not doubting its factual being as though I were a skeptic; rather, I am exercising the phenomenological epoché …’ (Id I 64/61). At the broadest level, one might say, both phenomenologists and Bergson seek to give voice to that still ‘mute experience which must be brought to the pure expression of its own sense.’33 But, as Merleau-Ponty rightly saw, this point of convergence between phenomenology and Bergson marks also a point of divergence, for Bergson’s is a ‘philosophy which does not aspire to system but to complete reflection’ because it is one that ‘wants to make being speak,’ one that cannot be complete because it aims to return to ‘complete experience.’34 Bergson’s expansion and Husserl’s deepening of experience put Bergson and phenomenology on the same road but walking in different directions. Bergson does not return to the qualitative feel of life in order to focus primarily on the first-person perspective of consciousness now buttressed against the hegemony of the sciences. Bergson invokes a ‘turn of experience,’ but this denotes a turn to a moment before experience becomes relative to human needs and intelligence (the normal and habitual workings of intelligence that best serve human being in its attempt to satisfy its needs) (MM 184–5/321). Yet even this does not render points of relation between Bergson and thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (particularly the latter’s theories of practical coping with the environment) superficial as much as it points to profound differences. As the work of Deleuzean Bergsonists suggests, Bergson proposes a turn back from the phenomenological turn of experience, a turn away from what is given to consciousness. Or, Bergsonists might say, phenomenology does not fully turn away from the human contribution to experience because its epoché turns only to a clarification of the dogmas and mundane engagements that obscure the phenomena as presented to experience. Desiring to explain the union in tension of conscious organisms and material organisms without reducing one to the other, Bergson placed the conscious human being within the evolutionary nexus, though always without presupposing the primacy of evolutionary materialism, theologicalphilosophical idealism, or intentional or pragmatic coping with the world. To put Bergson’s point too broadly, intelligence triumphs over the continuum of life, from plants to insects to mammals, but only thanks to the impetus of life (the élan vital) that permeates spirit and matter. But intelligence is not a spirit directed to the Absolute or a matter selected for survival.35

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One dimension of life gained victory over matter, and Bergson considered this triumphant dimension of intelligence as a human instrument that cuts up the dynamic world of matter and forces it into static concepts deployed to marshal nature’s or even society’s resources for its needs. Intelligence emerges and begets concepts that, like tools, human organisms test in practice, preserving those that serve the ends of utility, discarding those that do not. Directed toward productive utility, human participants in life repeat successful practices and turn what was novel for intelligence into intellectual habits whose very ease and convenience breed forgetfulness. What we forget, according to Bergson – what phenomenology seems to have forgotten too – is our other way of knowing: intuition, or instinctual or sympathetic engagement with things in the world. Put crudely, Bergson construes intuition as a method of reflecting on instinctual or sympathetic engagement with things in all their flux before the framework of practical utility obfuscates our relation to them and to life. If phenomenology and Bergson each suspend both the utility of the workings of technology and science and philosophical agendas that implicitly endorse their model, Bergson wants to suspend even the modes of practical, embodied coping with or individual manipulation of the real life.36 Consequently, although humans can know the world in two ways – intelligence and intellect on the one hand, intuition and instinct on the other – the convenience brought by the intellect and its tools, Bergson argues, has led Western culture and the phenomenological tradition to privilege detached, objective intellect over intuition, the subject over that which stands against it, fixed habits over changing and creative insights. If phenomenology attempts to place humanity, as Socrates did, in a more thoughtful engagement with its personal, cultural and political world, Bergson shares this agenda but wants to go further. Beyond clarifying the intentionalities of the natural attitude, Bergson wants a return from this turn, wants to effect a more radical turn to the ‘very life of things,’ or ‘events’ in the realm of the real (world) and our lives with (and perhaps within) them.37 Relying again on Merleau-Ponty’s mature appreciation of Bergson, ‘never before had anyone established this circuit between being and myself which is such that being exists “for me,” the spectator, but which is also such that the spectator exists “for being.”’38 The ‘expanding’ of experience by the ‘turn of experience’ that Bergson expresses in Matter and Memory and throughout his corpus is a ‘supra-’ or ‘ultra-intellectual’ turn toward sympathy with the things of experience themselves – a ‘hearing’ in the form of intuition from the perspective of the very life of things, the real itself, as it were, and not only from the intentional relation of consciousness to it.39 But even here, let us, in Bergson’s spirit, go further (allons plus loins),40 for it is both a slogan and feature of phenomenology to say that it is the work of perpetual beginning. Indeed, phenomenology as a movement has been a perpetual beginning, a constant

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renewal. And phenomenology’s many restarts may have brought it beyond its initial turn to experience (in a restricted way to the human realm) to what we today might consider more a Bergsonian than Husserlian turn to experience. As phenomenology has progressed from Husserl’s day its methodological commitments have slackened beyond Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty’s questions about phenomenology’s relation to the ‘reduction.’ More and more dominant strands of contemporary phenomenology seem to work independently of the reduction and with something more like Bergson’s notion of the élan, an ‘evolutionary’ moment of life neither mechanistically nor teleologically directed toward a particular end. If Merleau-Ponty is correct in his assessment of Bergson’s thought, it bears much in common with contemporary phenomenology’s increasing tendency and desire to explicate ‘pre-predicative’ realms of experience, for ‘Bergson himself describes a pre-constituted being that is always presupposed at the horizon of our reflection.’41 Bergson’s attempts to express a sympathy (or fusion) with this ‘surge of life’ (the real, being) appear in the increasing attention paid to the phenomenology of religious experience and the phenomenology of life, the increasing engagement in phenomenology with issues such as affectivity, the body, attention, naturalized perception or cognitive science, ethics and so on. Differences remain, of course, but the increasing talk in phenomenology of the solicitation of the object, sensitivity to how being gives itself (the es gibt) and the call of the other suggests an increasing convergence of phenomenology and Bergson – perhaps even with Heidegger’s later thought, for as Merleau-Ponty contends, ‘Bergson regains at the heart of man a preSocratic and “prehuman” meaning of the world.’42 But what could it mean to investigate a form of ‘intentionality’ – if the élan vital could be taken this way – that has no particular end, no telos as traditionally construed, and seems less concerned with the meaning of being than with being itself? Perhaps today we can better appreciate F.T.C. Moore’s labeling of crucial elements of Bergson’s thought as a ‘super-phenomenology.’43 Perhaps today we may wish to reverse the lines of influence implied in Moore’s expression, finding less a ‘super-phenomenology’ in Bergson’s thought and more a ‘nouvelle-Bergsonism’ in contemporary phenomenology. I leave it to the reader to assess the cogency of this ‘audacious’ claim in light of the dialogue to follow.

3. The content of a dialogue between Bergson and phenomenology The three sections of this book – ‘Reading Bergson Anew,’ ‘Intersections’ and ‘Life-world and Life’ – attempt to investigate a list (that is by no means exhaustive) of important and fundamental issues that Bergsonists and phenomenologists should pursue further. The chapters in Part I, which reads

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Bergson on his own terms, provide resources for helping the reader evaluate some specific points of intersection between Bergson and phenomenology as discussed in Part II. Both sections, in turn, prepare the reader to engage with the chapters in Part III, which deals with a – or perhaps the – fundamental issue that has run through the Bergson/phenomenology debate from the time of Bergson’s demise to the most recent work in Bergsonism and phenomenology. Reading Bergson’s 1903 essay, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ Leonard Lawlor’s ‘Intuition and Duration’ (Chapter 1) provides a sustained interrogation of Bergson’s mature thought in order to test Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson, which holds that that Bergson, following Spinoza, advances a theory of immanence where immanence means not immanent ‘to’ consciousness but consciousness as immanent to immanence. Indeed, Bergson’s first book in 1889 explores ‘les données immédiates de la conscience’ and not ‘les données immédiates à la conscience’; consciousness is a kind of multiplicity.44 The significance of this test is that, if passed, it will show that Bergsonian intuition consists in a movement ‘towards the outside of subjectivity.’ With this focus, Lawlor further considers whether and how Bergsonian intuition differs from presence, as Derrida concludes it does not. And since intuition is intimately tied to duration for Bergson, Lawlor asks whether and how it differs from internal and subjective lived-experience, which Foucault concludes it does not. This exploration of Bergsonian intuition, concludes Lawlor, reveals a Bergsonian concept of immanence that differs from the standard phenomenological concept.45 In addition to Bergson’s move toward the outside of subjectivity in the concept of intuition, Rudolf Bernet’s ‘Bergson on the Driven Force of Consciousness and Life’ (Chapter 2) provides a reading of Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution to demonstrate how Bergson moves outside bland materialism or scientism. Specifically, Bernet examines anew the dynamics of Bergson’s metaphysics (for example, ‘duration’) by accounting for them in terms of ‘a drive-like tension in the organism and the actualization of its drive in terms of a creative event.’ The dynamics of Bergson’s theory of life (duration, drive), argues Bernet, resist any view of life wherein everything would be given once and for all in the form of established ‘facts,’ that is, the positivism of science and philosophical theories of consciousness. In this respect, suggests Bernet, Bergson’s philosophy appears more attentive to complete experience than some phenomenology. While Bernet’s renewed understanding of drive and event in Bergson’s thought may not render Bergson a phenomenologist, it is for reasons otherwise than those presented by twentieth-century French phenomenologists. It is with respect to providing a complete account of experience that Bergson and his most sympathetic phenomenological partner, MerleauPonty, enter discussion with science. Adjudicating different philosophical versions of experience, particularly when broadened to science’s relation

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to philosophy, often proves difficult. As Gary Gutting maintains in his ‘Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on Experience and Science,’ (Chapter 3) contemporary analytic and continental thought have undone the view of the givenness of experience as the ultimate ground of our cognition. Yet Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, Gutting suggests, ‘make effective cases against scientism by showing that science succeeds precisely by excluding from its purview certain domains of truth.’ Though scientific accounts always leave out something of experience, Gutting claims, there is no basis for assuming that any one description or account of immediate experience (whether Bergson’s intuition or Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological descriptions) uniquely and correctly knows this truth that science neglects. Nevertheless, since science must ultimately come to terms with immediate experience, Gutting maintains, we can ‘justify the projects of Bergson and Merleau-Ponty’ on the grounds that ‘human life needs formulations of our guiding visions that make them intellectually respectable,’ and this is ‘the positive function of philosophy, which requires passionate and meticulous attention to the concreteness of lived experience.’ Such experience, as Stephen Crocker notes in ‘Man Falls Down,’ (Chapter 4) arises unexpectedly in ways that allow laughter to speak to us about life in a way that the order of science cannot. Crocker explores Bergson’s work, Laughter, as a challenge to what Deleuze and Deleuzean Bergsonism identified as phenomenology’s fundamental shortcoming or faulty ‘presupposition.’ Crocker develops the phenomenological aspects of Bergson’s reflections on laughter through an analysis of how comedy and laughter emerge at the point of human finitude as manifest in the breakdown of our body-schemes, habits, routines and conventions. Through such breakdowns, Crocker maintains, we recognize that a future-oriented schema was too fixed and not flexile enough to deal with the contingency of life that had emerged. Bergson’s theory – that laughter follows upon life’s unpredictable and inevitable interruptions – contains ethico-political underpinnings, suggesting that the clown, like civilization and society, ‘builds up an expectation in order to have it come to nothing, to show how they fail to contain the noise and point us to the background conditions of our lives’ such that we can perhaps laugh with, rather than at, the other. The chapters in Part II constitute new efforts at examining specific moments of Bergson’s relation to phenomenology in light of our status today as better informed readers of Bergson. In Chapter 5, Hanne Jacobs and Trevor Perri’s ‘Intuition and Freedom’ presents Husserl and Bergson as thinkers with opposing ends but rather similar methodologies. The authors press these apparent similarities in hope of arriving at a deeper, more profound and agreeable point of relation between Bergson and phenomenology, one that perhaps invites deeper consideration of Bergsonism’s critique of phenomenology’s ability to transform life and society. Bergson does not aim to provide a description of the essence of acts of consciousness; and

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Husserl is not at all interested in developing a metaphysics of life or reality. Yet, Jacobs and Perri argue, an important point of dialogue between Bergson and Husserl rests in their general views of intuition, which neither construes as ‘constructive.’ For both Bergson and Husserl, intuition is akin to what we normally call seeing, but now seeing differently. What remains deeply important, even if Bergson and Husserl differ in their approaches to seeing differently, is that for both this philosophical way of seeing is intimately related to freedom. For Bergson, it is ultimately in the immediate experience of our duration, intuition, that we are most free. Similarly, for Husserl, the transcendental reduction is not only performed freely, but it also sets us free from the limits of natural being. Thus, Perri and Jacobs claim that for both Bergson and Husserl, in one way or the other, the pursuit of freedom is intrinsically linked to the pursuit of philosophy and the novel experience it enables. The matter of intuition brings us to familiar reflections on time and subjectivity by both Bergson and phenomenology. As Dan Zahavi’s ‘Life, Thinking and Phenomenology in the early Bergson’ (Chapter 6) shows, the debates over the relative merits of these positions existed in Germany in the context of Heidegger and Natorp’s debate on self-consciousness. This discussion revolved in important ways around Natorp’s critique of the ineffable nature of subjectivity found in Bergson’s account of the ‘immediate data of consciousness,’ that is, durée. As Zahavi explains, the debate between neoKantians and phenomenology, which intersected with Bergson’s reflections on self-consciousness from Time and Free Will, reveals something not only of phenomenology’s distinctive approach in relation to Kantianism, but also of phenomenology’s differences and similarities with Bergson’s approach to time, consciousness and selfhood. While Bergson and Heidegger’s alternatives to the predominant psychophysical approaches to consciousness compliment each other in interesting ways, they return to different senses of experience, and Heidegger, Zahavi argues, offers a more robust philosophy of language than Bergson in order to capture a phenomenologically convincing analysis of consciousness. Even if, as Zahavi suggests, one should not read Bergson as a phenomenologist, Bergson’s reflections on this fundamental feature of experience, durée, often prove more persuasive than the reflections of some of his phenomenological counterparts, as Pete Gunter argues in ‘A Criticism of Sartre’s Concept of Time’ (Chapter 7). In his Bergsonian engagement with Sartre’s theory of temporality, Gunter maintains that Sartre thought that by making the fundamental character of the for-itself its persistent temporalization, placing the for-itself outside mere inert physical nature, he rescued the foritself from dualism. But Sartre’s view of temporalization is ‘dichotomized’ and fragmented, argues Gunter; Sartre described the temporalization of consciousness as cut off from its future, severed from its own present and disjointed from its past. Bergson’s concepts of temporality are thus proposed as

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more defensible than Sartre’s, since they (i) ‘avoid the strict dualism which Sartre trumpets and then neglects,’ (ii) ‘allow the necessary appropriation of the present by the past’ and (iii) ‘insist on the process of maturation necessary to the emergence of new ideas and veridical new acts.’ Alia Al-Saji’s ‘Life as Vision’ (Chapter 8) continues this inquiry into Bergson and phenomenology of time and newness by examining Bergson and Merleau-Ponty’s understandings of perception. Bergson’s critique of perception stems from his understanding of its evolutionary utility. That is, vision develops in response to life’s impetus to action and tendency toward utility; as such, vision amounts to a habitual and static cutting-up of the world, where vision tends to depart from and dominate the fluidity and becoming of life. For Al-Saji, by ‘exploring the phenomenology of indetermination and its temporality both life and vision can be rethought – beyond the initial frame of utility that limits life to action and vision to objectification.’ And this is because vision becomes action insofar as ‘it must also be memory and creation.’ By critically appealing to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Bergson, Al-Saji asks, ‘is there within the Bergsonian philosophy of life a phenomenological opening to, and ontological ground for, seeing differently’? Continuing along ethical lines and the chronology of phenomenological thinkers, in Chapter 9 Nicolas de Warren puts the ethical thought of Bergson and Levinas to the test vis-à-vis one another to examine the purported but neglected proximity of Bergson to Levinas. Short of uncharitable interpretations, Bergson’s philosophy belies the traditional philosophical alternatives Levinas employs to work out his history of philosophy, namely transcendence and immanence. The Two Sources (see note 20 below) assumes in this regard an unparalleled significance. Examining Levinas’s critique of Bergson’s thought along the lines of Levinas’s indigenous language of the impersonal and his generic language of pantheism, de Warren examines the extent to which Bergson eludes the Levinasian critique of the history of philosophy and thus exacts a significant yet unrealized influence on Levinas. The experience of mysticism and the passage from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ around which the argument of The Two Sources turns not only avoids the alternatives of ‘philosophy of transcendence’ and ‘philosophy of immanence,’ but also presents an alternative to Levinas’s ethical thinking that both confirms his attested ‘proximity’ and ‘faithfulness’ to Bergson and issues a counterproposal in terms of Bergson’s own ethical overture. The matter of seeing difference within experience without reducing it either to a negation of the other or a triumph of the other over the same comes to expression not only in Bergson’s thought, but also in the phenomenological work of Michel Henry, as John Mullarkey’s ‘The Psycho-Physics of Phenomenology: Bergson and Henry’ suggests. In Chapter 10, Mullarkey not only explores this convergence, but also the stronger possibility that in Henry’s hands phenomenology’s internal logic becomes Bergsonist.

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The matter of the philosophy of life, with respect to the relative merits of the possible contributions of Bergson and phenomenology, reaches critical mass, Mullarkey claims, in the contrast Henry establishes between his phenomenology of immanent self-affection, or Life, and Bergson’s notion of intuition, or affectivity. Bergson and Henry’s shared resistance to psychophysical reductionism, despite the special care that Henry devoted to showing how ‘un-Bergsonian’ was his Essence of Manifestation, present two different but nonetheless allied strategies: Henry’s material phenomenology, which ‘affectivizes’ matter and ‘idealizes’ physics as an imaginary, virtual world, and Bergson’s dualism, at least in Time and Free Will, of pure consciousness and inert space. Yet, Mullarkey maintains, the uniqueness of Bergson’s project lies somewhere between ‘Henry’s putatively “phenomenologist” rejection of Bergson’ and ‘Deleuze’s naturalistic (and ontological) appropriation of him.’ Mullarkey’s chapter, because it suggests the uniqueness of Bergson in the light of both phenomenological and Deleuzean-Bergsonist readings of him, thus takes us in an interesting way to the most recent line of debate between Bergsonists and phenomenology, namely that of life and life-world. The reflections offered in Part III by Pierre Kerszberg, Frédéric Worms and Renaud Barbaras enable the reader to understand that the question concerning the phenomenology of life takes the present investigations back to and perhaps beyond Husserl’s conception of the life-world. Indeed, the issue of life cuts to the very point at which Husserl (phenomenology) and Bergson may both meet and diverge, namely the relation between intentionality and the élan vital. The issue concerns whether Husserl and classical phenomenology or Bergson can possibly contribute positively to a phenomenology of life, if life marks the meeting point of the natural and transcendental.46 A constructive philosophical dialogue between phenomenology and Bergson, then, must examine anew the challenges that Bergson’s élan vital and concept of intuition raise for the phenomenological reduction and its resultant conceptions of the life-world. Beyond Bergson’s possible contributions to a specific phenomenological problem (though still with phenomenological interest) Kerszberg argues in his ‘From the World of Life to the Life-World’ (Chapter 11) that since the élan vital looks like a metaphysical transposition of the Cartesian God, the question concerning the verification of duration in lived experience arises, particularly since Bergson’s analogy with our inner sense of freedom turns out to be inadequate. For Bergson, Kerszberg claims, ‘the human problem is resituated beyond human history, in the entirety of Life, which is prior to human existence.’ This means that philosophical reflection must try to display itself clearly, that is, without excluding ‘that which it left unreflected.’ For Husserl, this means a turn not to life but Spirit, for ‘that which is unreflected is the life of reflection, and this life is that of the life-world.’ Husserl’s notion of the life-world, argues Kerszberg, presents a ‘universal

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framework,’ which includes all intentional achievements, whether practical or theoretical. Kerszberg thus suggests that in the life-world, the mythical harmony at the outset – whether life in Bergson’s sense or the ordered interplay between being and appearing, subject and object, individual and world in the sense of Cartesian-oriented phenomenology – ‘is done away with.’ While Kerszberg certainly acknowledges that phenomenologists once again must take seriously their relation to Bergson’s previously discarded view of life, in Chapter 12, ‘Consciousness or Life?’, Worms asks phenomenologists to consider the priority of consciousness or life or, better, the possibility of prioritizing one over the other. Worms argues that the fundamental task of Bergson’s thought is not to reduce ‘consciousness as such’ to ‘life as such,’ but indeed to ‘distinguish between two senses of consciousness and also between two senses of life.’ If Husserl’s philosophy opposes life in favor of consciousness and Nietzsche’s philosophy opposes consciousness in favor of life, Bergson holds that there is no consciousness without life and no life without consciousness. Bergson’s philosophy is important and significant precisely because it goes beyond these two senses of dualism, thereby assuring his ‘connection with phenomenology and the connection between phenomenology and metaphysics.’ Complete philosophy like the one found in Bergson’s thought, Worms suggests, is both more than and a combination of phenomenology and metaphysics, and this is so because our complete being is a mix of knowledge and of creation, of consciousness and of life. Speaking directly to the issues of consciousness, life and life-world, Barbaras’s ‘The Failure of Bergsonism’ (Chapter 13) argues that Bergson’s philosophy does not meet the conditions of an authentic phenomenology of life, which must make a transitive living appear within being-in-life or make room for experience in living. Since Bergson works from a dualism of matter and memory, which stems from his dualism of space and time, he ‘does not approach life on its own terms,’ according to Barbaras. That is, Bergson ultimately never gets to the question of the meaning of life, or never leaves room for experiencing. For a phenomenology of life, according to Barbaras, the ‘meaning of being is submitted to a condition: it must integrate both the dimension of belonging and the dimension of phenomenalization. The phenomenology of life must allow consciousness to be founded in the heart of the vital activity as an activity within exteriority,’ even if this activity is not something like Husserlian or even hermeneutical intentionality.

*** If, both in its methods and focus, phenomenology comes closer today to Bergson’s thought than it was during its classical days, then phenomenology must pursue this renewed dialogue with Bergson and, now, Bergsonism (and vice versa). Even if this dialogue reveals a still existing methodological

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rift between Bergson and phenomenology, it enables these interlocutors to test the limits of their purported commitments and/or the limits of the thought to which they expressly commit themselves. One point, at any rate, Merleau-Ponty had already realized toward the end of his career and life: If we had been careful readers of Bergson, and if more thought had been given to him, we would have been drawn to a much more concrete philosophy … . But since Bergson was hardly read by my contemporaries, … we had to wait for the philosophies of existence in order to be able to learn much of what he would have been able to teach us. It is quite certain … that Bergson, had we read him carefully, would have taught us things that ten or fifteen years later we believed to be discoveries made by the philosophy of existence itself.47 Merleau-Ponty’s observation is interesting and salient because it does not collapse Bergson into phenomenology or vice versa, nor does it even imply specific concessions of one to the other. Yet, as Merleau-Ponty’s assessment implies, one can learn from the other once we let the issues guide the inquiry rather than engaging in mere philosophical side-taking. The philosophy of existence at its basis must concern the shared spirit of existence understood in the very spirit of phenomenology and Bergson – a search for truth guided first by ‘self-resistance,’ but not abandonment of self.

Notes 1. J.-P. Sartre, Sartre by Himself, trans. R. Seaver (New York: Urizen Books, 1980), 27. Cited in Twentieth Century French Philosophy, ed. G. Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 114. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ in Signs, ed. R. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 182. 2. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ 182. 3. P. Gunter, ‘Bergson and Sartre: the Rise of French Existentialism,’ in The Crisis of Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. F. Burwick and P. Douglas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 230–1. See also, G. Gutting, Twentieth Century French Philosophy, 114 ff. and Pope Piux X, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis,’ in The Papal Encyclicals: 1903–1939, trans. C. Carlen (Wilmington: McGrath, 1981), 89, 74. 4. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ 182–3. 5. J. Mullarkey, ‘Introduction,’ in The New Bergson, ed. J. Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 1. Others have also noted that pragmatist and process philosophers were equally quick to selectively appropriate Bergson. John Dewey, for example, adapted Bergson’s theory of intelligence to fit his pragmatic view that thought and concepts were tools to manipulate experience and that truth was measured by utility; R. Jiseok, ‘A Letter from Bergson to John Dewey,’ in The New Bergson, 84. And process thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead adapted Bergson’s view of the élan vital to their anthropomorphic view of inorganic matter and lower organisms, thus encouraging the view of Bergson as a pantheist. Some

Introduction

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19

religiously minded readers, particularly American Baptists, even found a divine presence in Bergson’s view of the vital force of life that united all things; T. Quirk, Bergson and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Compare, J. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 1999), 2. Among the most extensive and important studies are: K. Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: the Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999) and Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (New York: Routledge, 2002); L. Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism (London: Continuum Press, 2003); and Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy and The New Bergson. J. Mullarkey, ‘Henri Bergson,’ in History of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 3: The New Century: Bergson, Phenomenology, and Responses to Modern Science, ed. K. Ansell Pearson and A. Schrift (London: Acumen, forthcoming), 22. B. Russell, Bertrand Russell: Logical and Philosophical Papers 1900–1913, ed. J.G. Slater (New York: Routledge, 1992), 312. Ibid., 347. Gutting, Twentieth Century French Philosophy, 114. P. Kerszberg, ‘Bergson,’ in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. L. Embree et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999). Interestingly, Bergson received from Husserl a copy of Ideas I in the summer of 1913. Apart from Bergson acknowledging that he received Husserl’s text, we do not know how he assessed it beyond the following: ‘Perhaps our sights differ on certain points; but there is of them more than one also on which they would agree easily together.’ A fuller version of the letter reads: ‘Je tiens à vous remercier tout de suite pour l’aimable envoi de votre très important ouvreage “Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie.” … Laissez-moi, en attendant, vous dire en quelle haute estime je tiens vos travaux. Nos vues diffèrent peut-être sur certains points; mais il y en a plus d’un aussi sur lequel elles s’accorderaient facilement ensemble.’ Text cited in R. Ji-Seok, ‘Une contribution a la recherché de la pensee d’Henri Bergson,’ PhD dissertation, University Charles de Gaulle – Lille III, 2000, 358. E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, edited by Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950). Translated into English as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Pure Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). Henceforth cited parenthetically as Id I with the German pagination following the English translation. M. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 231–2. J.-P. Sartre, Imagination, trans. F. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 40. E. Casey, ‘Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,’ Man and World 17 (1984): 279–97. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. A.L. Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1983), 176. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York: Routledge, 1995), 78, n.2. See also M. Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, trans. P. Milan (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2001), 89. For a different look at Bergson’s theory

20

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

Bergson and Phenomenology of perception and its relevance to the phenomenological tradition see M. Kelly, ‘A Phenomenological (Husserlian) Defense of Bergson’s “Idealistic Concession”,’ Epoché, 14(2) (Spring 2010): 399–415. G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 117–18. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and C. Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 241. See also, Deleuze, Bergsonism, 13–37 and Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, 185. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 115. Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 70–1. Compare, G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 150. In addition to Ansell Pearson’s Germinal Life, for other accounts of the revival of Bergsonism that accomplishes these two aims, see Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, Deleuze, Bergsonism and L. Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism (London: Continuum Press, 2003). Some shorter studies also of note include: A. Al-Saji, ‘The Memory of Another Past: Bergson, Deleuze and a New Theory of Time,’ Continental Philosophy Review (2004) 37: 203–39; S. Crocker, ‘The Past is to Time What the Idea is to Thought or, What is General in the Past in General,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 35(1): 42–53; F. Worms, ‘La conscience ou la vie? Bergson entre phénomenologie et métaphysique’, in Annales Bergsoniennes II: Bergson, Deleuze, La Phénoménologie, ed. F. Worms (Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 191–206. One might consider one of the exceptions from the phenomenological side to be Rudolf Bernet’s essay, ‘A Present Folded Back on the Past (Bergson),’ Research in Phenomenology 35 (2005): 55–76 E. Matthews, Twentieth Century French Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 13. H. Bergson, ‘Letter to Flewelling, Sept. 15, 1937,’ in ‘The Bergson-Flewelling Correspondence: 1910–1940,’ Coranto: Journal of the Friends of the Libraries – University of Southern California 10(2): 34. Ibid. H. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ in the Creative Mind, trans. M.L. Andison (New York: The Citadel Press, 1992), 11; H. Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1959), 1253. Compare, J. Mullarkey, ‘Introduction,’ in The New Bergson, 1–3. H. Bergson, Bergson: the Key Writings, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson and J. Mullarkey (London: Continuum Press, 2002), 362. Compare, P. Douglass, Bergson, Eliot and American Literature (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 7. I am indebted to Pierre Kerszberg for having brought this similarity between Husserl and Bergson’s method to my attention. I learned of and was persuaded by this interesting parallel while attending his seminar, ‘Bergson and Husserl on Perception and Imagination,’ offered in the spring semester of 1998 at the New School for Social Research, New York. H. Bergson, Matière et mémoire, in Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire; English translation by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer as Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1994). Hereafter cited as MM with reference first to the English translation, then to the Œuvres. E. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §32. (Hereafter Crisis in text.)

Introduction

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33. E. Husserl, Cartesian Mediations, trans. D. Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997), § 16. 34. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ 185. 35. T. Hanna, ‘The Bergsonian Heritage,’ in The Bergsonian Heritage, ed. T. Hanna (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 7. 36. G. Barden, ‘Method in Philosophy,’ in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, 33. 37. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ 43/1424. 38. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ 185. 39. Mullarkey, ‘Henri Bergson,’ 26. Compare, Bergson, Œuvres, 644–5/1395. 40. Thanks to Len Lawlor for pointing me toward this important attitude behind Bergson’s philosophizing. 41. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ 187. 42. Ibid., 185. 43. F.C.T. Moore, Bergson: Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9, 116. 44. G. Deleuze, ‘Postface pour l’édition Américaine: “Un retour à Bergson”,’ in Deux régimes de fous (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 314–15; English translation by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam as ‘A Return to Bergson,’ in Deleuze, Bergsonism, 117. 45. R. Boehm, ‘Les ambiguities des concepts husserliens d’ “immanence” et de “transcendence”,’ in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 84 (1959): 481–526. 46. R. Barbaras, ‘A Phenomenology of Life,’ in The Cambridge Companion to MerleauPonty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 208. Barbaras writes, ‘…the question of life, the question concerning the status, the meaning of the being of life, as that which comprises the natural and the transcendental, is the main question of phenomenology.’ 47. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosophy of Existence,’ in Texts and Dialogues, ed. H. Silverman and J. Barry, Jr, trans. M. Smith et al. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992), 132.

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Part I Reading Bergson Anew: a Foundation for the Bergson/ Phenomenology Debate

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1 Intuition and Duration: an Introduction to Bergson’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ Leonard Lawlor

Despite Bergson’s immense fame,1 Bergson never produced a movement;2 Bergson never produced a Heidegger. The lack of a movement explains why Husserl’s phenomenology continues to overshadow Bergsonism. Phenomenology looks to be so much more important than Bergsonism that Derrida, in his 1967 study of Husserl, mentions Bergson only in passing, implying that that his criticism of Husserl should be able to strike at Bergson as well.3 Foucault does the same, as early as 1963 in The Birth of the Clinic and as late as 1984 in an essay called ‘Life: Experience and Science.’4 Derrida and Foucault are able to subordinate Bergson’s thought to phenomenology not only because phenomenology virtually dominated twentieth-century thinking. They can do this also because Bergsonism seems to be conceptually similar to phenomenology. Bergsonism is an intuitionism, and Bergson’s central concept of ‘the duration’ (la durée) looks to be equivalent to Husserl’s concept of Erlebnis (lived-experience). In 1965 however, Deleuze asserted that Bergson holds a unique position – different from Husserl and even from Heidegger – in the Western philosophical tradition.5 This assertion distinguishes Deleuze from Derrida and Foucault. Indeed, Deleuze might be Bergson’s Heidegger. In What is Philosophy? for instance – a text co-authored with Guattari – Deleuze says that Bergson is the only philosopher who was mature enough for the inspiration Spinoza gives us. Bergson, he says, laid out a plane of immanence, a plane with ‘two sides’ – ‘both the infinite movement of a matter that never stops propagating itself and the image of a thought that never stops spreading everywhere an in principle pure consciousness (immanence is not immanent “to” consciousness but the reverse),’ meaning that consciousness is immanent to immanence.6 As is obvious, the concept of immanence that Deleuze is attributing to Bergson is different from the standard Husserlian or phenomenological concept of immanence.7 In this regard it is important to recall that Bergson’s first book in 1889 is called ‘les données immédiates de la conscience’ and not ‘les données immédiates à la conscience’;8 the multiplicity of phenomena are not given to consciousness in Bergson; consciousness is a kind of multiplicity.9 25

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Now what I intend to do here is in effect to test Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson’s thought. To engage in such a test, we must focus on what Bergson means by intuition: is Bergsonian intuition merely presence, as Derrida seems to assume; is what Bergson calls ‘the duration’ merely internal and subjective lived-experience as Foucault seems to think? Or, as Deleuze argues, does the Bergsonian duration lay out a plane of absolute immanence? To answer these questions I am going to focus on Bergson’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics.’10 First published in 1903, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ expresses the maturity of thinking that Bergson reaches after his first book in 1889 – the abovementioned Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (the English language title is Time and Free Will )11 – and after Matter and Memory in 1896.12 Here, Bergson lays out, for the first time, his method of intuition as the way into – it is an ‘introduction’ in the literal sense – metaphysics (PM 162/1396). Intuition in Bergson is always self-intuition. And yet – this is the thesis I am arguing for here – my self-intuition is, according to ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ what Bergson calls a ‘composite part’ ( partie composante) of the duration.13 As a composite part, my self-intuition can be followed up or down into the infinite multiplicity of the duration, and that following is why metaphysics (in Bergson’s sense) is possible. We can see already that Bergson is changing the concept of metaphysics. In ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ Bergson claims that he is elevating the soul over the idea in the Platonic sense (PM 194/1406), which implies that he is an anti-Platonist. But Bergson’s anti-Platonism does not mean that he is adopting modern subjectivism: following the duration, Bergsonian intuition consists in fact in a movement towards the outside of subjectivity.14 To appropriate a phrase that Foucault would never have applied to Bergson, we might characterize Bergson’s thought as a ‘thought of the outside.’15

1 Analysis and intuition16 In ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ – especially in the final two sections17 – we can see that Kant is Bergson’s enemy. Kant had made metaphysics impossible because he showed that human knowledge is always and merely relative. For Bergson, however, our knowledge can be absolute (PM 192/1424). If our knowledge is absolute, then metaphysics is possible. For Bergson, the mistake that Kant had made was that he relied on the ‘habitual work of the intelligence.’ The habitual work of intelligence serves a practical interest; it consists in going from the general concepts that we have already acquired to the things; then we label the things with these general concepts in order to manipulate the things for our own benefit. Yet, for Bergson (as for Husserl), metaphysics is possible only if we go from the things – we might say here that ‘we must go from the things themselves’ – to the concepts (PM 177/1410). Only through this ‘reversal’ of the habitual work of intelligence – Husserl would speak of the reversal of the

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natural attitude – is it possible to have an intuition. But what is intuition in Bergson? In the opening pages of ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ Bergson differentiates within a mixture; within knowing (connaître) there is a mixture between analysis and intuition (PM 159/1392–93). Bergson makes the distinction between analysis and intuition along the line of inside and outside.18 Analysis remains outside the thing; it consists in turning about the thing and adopting viewpoints on the thing. The turning about aims at taking the thing apart, at division and complexity; it is ‘analysis’ in the literal sense. The result of analysis is ‘elements’ or what Bergson will call ‘partial expressions’ of the thing (PM 171/1405).19 Then one reconstructs the thing out of the partial expressions or one ‘translates’ the thing, as Bergson says, into symbols. In analysis our access to the thing is mediated by these partial viewpoints and these symbols; thus it is relative and abstract. It is important to realize immediately that the distinction Bergson is making between analysis and intuition does not imply that intuition, being opposed to analysis, is a kind of synthesis. For Bergson, synthesis is the process of reconstruction of partial expressions broken apart by the analysis, a process that results in mixtures (compare, PM 176/1409). So, in contrast to both analysis and synthesis, intuition in Bergson involves no viewpoints and supports itself on no symbols used in a reconstruction. Intuition is concrete; ‘one enters into’ (en) the thing; one coincides with it immediately in its simplicity and indivisibility. Therefore, intuitive knowledge in Bergson is absolute and even, we must say, a-perspectival. Bergson illuminates the distinction between intuition and analysis with two examples, the first of which is ‘the movement of an object in space,’ in particular, the simple movement of me lifting my arm (PM 161/1395). This example is crucial since Bergson defines intuition as ‘sympathy’ (PM 159/1393),20 and first of all as self-sympathy (PM 162-63/1396). If I look at my arm lifting from the outside, I perceive it according to viewpoints. As the viewpoints change, the perceptions change. And I express the moving arm differently as I relate it to the system of axes or reference points, that is, as I coordinate it to points in space. For Bergson, when I do this coordination, I have started to think in terms of symbols, symbols by which I translate the moving object.21 So, when I look at the arm lifting from the outside I perceive it differently depending on the viewpoint adopted and I express it differently depending on the spatial system to which I relate it. In contrast, when I feel my arm lifting from the inside, I sense change immediately. But the sensing changes not according to the different viewpoints adopted; rather as my arm moves, my feelings change. Then I am ‘sympathizing’ with the object which in this case is my own arm. But, any example of bodily movement will illuminate the distinction. When I am running, I experience or sense change all the time, but I do not take the movement apart and coordinate it with spatial axes; I do not symbolize the movement on a grid; to

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do this coordination, I would have to be standing still, not running; I would have to be perceiving the running from the outside. When I enter into an object’s movement, it is as if I am doing the movement myself. The second example is a literary example. This example too is crucial, since it raises the question of intuition’s relation to language. A novelist, Bergson says, will be able to multiply the features of the character about whom he is writing (PM 160/1394). His novel would recount thousands of incidents, but these thousands of incidents would be only viewpoints taken on the character. The features described would be symbols, according to Bergson, by means of which I would come to know the character only by ‘comparing’ him to other things I already know. This description of what the novelist does means that I remain outside the character. But, the multiple elements, being divided, are never equal to the simple and indivisible feeling I would experience, as Bergson says, ‘if I were to coincide for a single moment with the character himself’ (PM 160/1394). In intuition, the character is ‘given suddenly [tout d’un coup] in its entirety and the thousand incidents that manifest the character … do not exhaust or impoverish his essence’ (PM 160/1394). With the word ‘essence,’ here, we have to wonder if Bergsonian intuition is an eidetic intuition as in Husserl. I shall return to this question of eidetic intuition below in my Conclusion. In any case, when I coincide with the character I am given his or her essence perfectly and completely. The novelist however analyzes the essence of the character into ‘the thousand incidents.’ If we again think of any bodily movement, any bodily movement can be potentially or virtually analyzed into an infinite number of points that would fill every interval of the movement. So, as Bergson says, ‘Now what lends itself at the same time to an indivisible apprehension and to an inexhaustible enumeration is, by definition, an infinite [infini]’ (PM 161/1395).

2 Duration and consciousness Of course, the infinite that is given in intuition – after the reversal of the normal work of intelligence – and that with which metaphysics concerns itself is what Bergson calls the duration. The duration is the flow of experience within the self. The duration is a succession of states, each one of which announces what comes after it and contains what precedes it. The duration does not consist in multiple separate states until I retrospectively look at what has flowed and then ‘see the trace’ of the states (PM 163/1397). As Bergson says, ‘when I was experiencing them they were so solidly organized, so profoundly animated with a common life, that I could never have said where anyone of them finished or the next one began’ (PM 163/1397). Instead, the ‘states’ ‘prolong themselves’ into one another. One finds, therefore, in the depth of the self, according to Bergson, ‘a continuity of flow [écoulement] comparable to no other flowing I have ever seen’ (PM 163/1397). For Bergson, the

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duration is primarily defined by continuity, more precisely, continuity without contiguity or juxtaposition.22 But also for Bergson the flow of the duration is unique. Being unique, the duration cannot be conceived by means of resemblances and comparisons. Nevertheless, Bergson provides three images of the duration. Each of the images is necessarily inadequate to the flow of the duration. All that the images can do is lead us to the place where we might be able to have the intuition (PM 166/1399). The first image of the duration is two spools, with a tape running between them, one spool unwinding the tape, the other winding it up.23 The duration resembles this image, according to Bergson, because, as we grow older, our future grows smaller and our past grows larger. The benefit of this image is that it presents a continuity of experiences without juxtaposition. Yet, there is a drawback to it: because a tape moves between the two spools, the image presents the duration as being homogeneous, as if one could fold the tape back over other parts of it, as if the tape were super-posable, implying that two moments in consciousness might be identical and homogeneous. Yet, as Bergson says, ‘No two moments are identical in a conscious being’ (PM 164/1398). The duration, for Bergson, is continuity of progress and heterogeneity. Continuity, Bergson realizes, never makes difference vanish; difference becomes internal.24 There is difference, because, as this image shows, the duration conserves the past. Indeed, for Bergson – and this is the center of his truly novel idea of memory – memory conserves the past and this conservation does not imply that one experiences the same (re-cognition), but difference. One moment is added onto the old ones, and thus, when the next moment occurs, it is added onto all the other old ones plus the one that came immediately before. In comparison, therefore, to the past collection of moments, the current moment cannot be the same as the one immediately before, because the past is ‘larger’ for the current moment than it was for the last moment. Although Bergson does not say this, one might say that Tuesday is different from Monday because Monday only includes itself and Sunday, while Tuesday includes itself, Monday, and Sunday. This first image, therefore, implies that the duration is memory: the prolongation of the past into the present. The second image is the color spectrum. Since a color spectrum has a multiplicity of different shades or nuances, the second image helps us see that the duration is constant difference or heterogeneity, precisely the characteristic of the duration that was lacking in the spool image. But, there is a drawback to the color spectrum image as well. With the color spectrum, we lose the characteristic of continuity or unity since the spectrum has colors juxtaposed. The color spectrum is a spatial image, while the duration is time. If Bergsonism indeed presents us with something like a challenge, it is this principle (PM 34/1275): all questions of subject and object, and their relation, must be put in terms of time rather than space. To think in terms of duration is the Bergsonian imperative par excellence. So, as Bergson says,

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‘pure duration excludes all idea of juxtaposition, reciprocal exteriority, and extension’ (PM 164/1398). We come then to the third image, which is an elastic being stretched. Bergson tells us first to contract the elastic to a mathematical point, which represents the now of our experience. Then, draw it out to make a line growing progressively longer. But, he warns us not to focus on the line but on the action which traces it. If we can focus on the action of tracing, then we can see that the movement – which is duration – is not only continuous and differentiating or heterogeneous, but also indivisible. We can always insert breaks into the spatial line which represents the motion, but the motion itself is indivisible. In Bergson, there is always a priority of movement over the thing that moves; the thing that moves is an abstraction from the movement. Now, the elastic being stretched is a more exact image of duration. But, the image of the elastic is still, according to Bergson, incomplete. Why? For Bergson, no image can represent the duration for the simple reason that an image is immobile, while the living duration is ‘pure mobility’ (PM 165/1398). Nevertheless, Bergson compares all three images: ‘the unrolling of our duration [this unrolling is the tape between the spools] on one side [ par certain cotés] resembles the unity of a movement which progresses [this unified progression is the elastic being stretched], on the other side [ par d’autres], a multiplicity of states spreading out [this spreading out is the color-spectrum]’ (PM 165/1399, my emphasis). On the basis of this comparison, we are able to see that the duration really consists in two ‘sides’ (cotés): unity and multiplicity. When conceived or turned into symbols, however, the two sides of the duration, according to Bergson, give rise to metaphysics understood as a play of contradictory systems such as empiricism and rationalism (PM 168/1401). But, for Bergson, the duration can never be ‘enclosed in a conceptual representation, if we give to the word concept its literal meaning’ (PM 168/1401). Literally, a concept grasps and immobilizes, while, once again, the duration is pure mobility. Now, to demonstrate the impossibility of conceptual representation, Bergson says, ‘Let us try to turn the duration into a multiplicity’ (PM 168/1402). Here we are very close to the idea at the center of the Bergsonian duration: the idea of multiplicity. Therefore, while turning the duration into a multiplicity, we have to keep in mind that there are different kinds of multiplicities. We must constantly ask, which multiplicity? Which unity? (PM 176/1409.) So, according to Bergson, the ‘endpoints’ (termes) of this multiplicity are not ‘distinguished’ like those of any multiplicities whatsoever, but ‘encroach’ (empiètent) on one another (PM 169/1402). Once the duration has passed, we can divide it into pieces and juxtapose the pieces and even count all of them; but this quantitative multiplicity is produced by means of ‘the frozen memory’ of the duration. We must not confuse the idea of a ‘frozen memory’ (le souvenir figé ) with the kind of memory in which duration consists.25 A frozen memory is, once again, an

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image, which by definition is immobile or frozen. The duration however is always progressive memory; it progresses from the past to the future. As it progresses, the duration is a multiplicity (remember the color spectrum image), but the multiplicity of the duration is, according to Bergson, ‘a multiplicity like no other’ (PM 168/1402, my emphasis). This multiplicity – as we shall see, it is a qualitative multiplicity – does not mean that we have no unity. There is always a continuity of elements being prolonged into one another. As well, then, we have a unity like no other. As Bergson says, ‘this moving, changing, colored and living unity scarcely resembles the abstract unity, empty, and motionless which the concept of pure unity circumscribes’ (PM 169/1402). The description thus far seems to imply that we must define duration by both multiplicity and unity. But, no matter how I arrange the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, according to Bergson, I shall never obtain anything that resembles the simple intuition of duration. These concepts – in the literal sense – are merely external viewpoints on duration and do not make us penetrate duration (PM 169/1402–3).

3 Composite part and partial expression The idea that analysis makes concepts in the literal sense (which does not exclude the possibility of there being other kinds of ‘metaphorical’ or better mobile concepts) brings us to the crucial distinction that allows us to determine intuition in Bergson: the distinction between composite parts and partial expressions. For Bergson, partial expressions result from psychological analysis of the self. Psychology ‘resolves’ the self into ‘elements,’ sensations, feelings, images and so on, which it studies separately as psychological states. Bergson compares the psychological analysis to ‘sketching’ or ‘note taking,’ and the notes taken he calls ‘schema.’ Like the images we saw earlier, these schema are immobile. Even if the psychologist finds some change in the state, he or she says that there is not a simple sensation but several successive sensations. The psychologist then transfers the characteristic of being immutable to each successive sensation. The immobility or immutability of the partial expressions allows psychology to have a solid foundation. While Bergson does not say this, we can see here that what Bergson is calling analysis is idealization, and schema or partial expressions are idealities capable of being represented separately from other representations. The immutability of the sensation implies that a partial expression remains the same throughout a variation. Composite parts of the duration, however, are something else (PM 171/1404–5). Bergson explains the distinction between composite parts and partial expressions in the following way. Suppose someone puts before me all the letters of a poem but they are jumbled or mixed together: ‘If the letters were parts of the poem, I could attempt to reconstruct it with them by trying various possible arrangements, as a child does with the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But I shall not for an instant think of attempting it, because the

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letters are not composite parts, but partial expressions’ (PM 171/1404–5). In this quotation, Bergson is implying that letters do not prolong themselves into one another; the lack of prolongation means that the letters can be arranged in an indefinite and arbitrary number of ways. The letters can be arranged in so many ways that one might never find the poem. The duration, in contrast, consists of parts that can be arranged only in a non-arbitrary way, just as jigsaw puzzle pieces can be arranged in only one way. Insofar as the parts encroach on one another, they belong to or are for one another, and yet like jigsaw puzzle pieces, they remain closed off from one another. In other words, partial expressions are always general, which means that they can be repeated indefinitely. In contrast, composite parts are singularities, just that one piece and no other. Because a composite part is singular – in a lecture course from 1902 Bergson says that this kind of part is ‘finite’26 – it can be fitted into other composite parts and only in one way. One composite part, then, has the potentiality of variation into other and different composite parts. Bergson uses the language of reflection to describe the relation of composite parts to one another and thus to the duration. He says, ‘It is undeniable that any psychological state, by the sole fact that it belongs to a person, ref lects the whole [ref lète l’ensemble] of a personality. There is no feeling, no matter how simple, which does not virtually enclose the past and present of the being that experiences it’ (PM 169–70/1403, my emphasis). I have been using the definite article in English for ‘la durée,’ because the duration is a whole. In this whole, all the parts are implicit, virtually; the parts explicate the whole. Or to use other Bergsonian terminology, a composite part (which in French is ‘une partie composante,’ literally, a composing part) is mobile, moving, encroaching. It is possible, therefore, to move along with it from one composite part to the next. In other words, we can follow one composite part of the duration to the next and then to the whole of the duration. This claim about following really tells us what intuition is in Bergson. While not being an external viewpoint, intuition is a finite opening onto infinite mobility; the composing part, we might say, shows the duration.27 But still we can ask, what is the duration?

4 The real duration We have seen that psychological analysis results in a schema or concept (in the literal sense), which is immobile, for example, the schema of a simple sensation. However, we have also seen that there is no psychic state which does not change at every instant, since there is no consciousness without memory, since there is ‘no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments’ (PM 179/1411). This is Bergson’s definition of the duration: the continuous life of a memory [une mémoire] which prolongs the past into the present, whether the present distinctly encloses the ever-growing

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image of the past, or whether, by its continual changing of quality, it attests rather the increasingly heavy burden dragged along behind one the older one grows. Without this survival [cette survivance] of the past in the present, there would be no duration, but merely instantaneity. (PM 179/1411) Bergson calls the duration ‘the real duration’ (la durée réelle) because the duration of clock time, objective time, is only an apparent duration (PM 180/1412). The real duration is heterogeneous, while objective time is a ‘homogeneous surrounding’ (PM 180/1412). Here, opposing objective time, Bergson is of course very close to Husserl and to Heidegger. But, even more, what defines the ‘real duration’ for Bergson is ‘variability’ (PM 180/1412). As we saw in our discussion above of composite parts, variability for Bergson is not the variation of a thing; the thing that varies is an abstraction from variability just as the thing that moves is an abstraction from mobility. We can see that, if the duration in Bergson is variability, then the duration cannot be mere psychological duration, which would itself be only one potential variation of the duration. If the duration is not solely psychological duration, then intuition cannot consist solely in ‘self-sympathy’ or in ‘selfcontemplation’; when I intuit, it cannot be the case that I merely ‘watch myself live, like the dozing shepherd watches the water of a stream flow’ (PM 184/1416). Instead of a passive feeling, intuition in Bergson then is an activity; intuition always requires effort. Through the ‘dilation of the mind’ (PM 183/1415), Bergson says, we are able ‘to affirm the existence of objects that are inferior and superior to us, though however in a certain sense within us [intérieurs à nous]’ (PM 184/1416). In other words, if I place myself in the duration by an effort of intuition, ‘one has the feeling,’ Bergson says, ‘of a certain well determined tension whose determination itself looks to be like a choice between an infinity of possible durations. This being so one apperceives any number of durations, all very different from one another’ (PM 185/1417). To explain this idea, Bergson refers us back to the image of the color spectrum.28 It may be the case there is no other duration than my own, just as there may be no other color in the world than orange. But, if I place myself in orange, that is, if I make the effort to sympathize with orange and not perceive orange from the outside, my consciousness of color ‘would feel itself caught’ (se sentirait prise), Bergson says, between red and yellow; it would ‘have a sense’ ( pressentirait) of a whole spectrum in which the continuity of red to yellow prolongs itself naturally (PM 187/1418–19). The case is the same with the intuition of my duration: we place ourselves in a continuity of durations that ‘we must try to follow [suivre] either upward or downward’ (PM 187/1419). The comparison means that there is an infinity of other possible durations in my self. Or, more precisely, I would say, the inferior and superior objects are in a certain sense in me because our or my psychological

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duration is a composite part of the duration; my psychological duration is in the whole duration. Following the interlocking composite parts that are for one another, we ‘indefinitely,’ Bergson says, ‘dilate ourselves by a more and more vigorous effort and in both cases [both upward and downward] we transcend [transcendons] ourselves’ (PM 187/1419). Descending, we have a duration, more scattered, whose palpitations are more rapid than ours, dividing our simple sensation, diluting its quality into quantity; ‘by advancing into the other direction, we go towards a duration which stretches, tightens, and becomes more and more intensified’ (PM 187/1419). At the two limits, we would find, on the one hand, all matter and repetition, and, on the other, all memory and difference. Bergson concludes, ‘Between the two extreme limits [of the duration] moves intuition’ (PM 188/1419).

5 Conclusion: the multiplicity of the duration We are able, I think, to confirm our thesis immediately. The duration in Bergson is a plane of immanence because, as he says, there are objects inferior and exterior to us and yet ‘in a certain sense within us.’ This ‘intérieurs à nous’ implies immanence. And yet, this immanence is not immanence to consciousness, since Bergsonian intuition ‘transcends,’ as he says, psychological consciousness. My consciousness, our consciousness, is a composite part that can be followed and thereby intuition moves towards the outside of us. As we just saw, on the one side, intuition is able to descend to or dilate into matter. As Bergson shows in Matter and Memory, such a dilation would involve me no longer perceiving according to the requirements of vital needs; such vital needs require that I diminish what I look at (MM 137–8/187–8) and thereby divide space. If I suppress ‘my consciousness,’ as Bergson says in Matter and Memory, this suppression would free me from the requirements of life, from diminution, and thereby from divisible space. Then, the discontinuous objects of daily experience would reconnect themselves into a motionless continuity of qualities; then the motionless continuity of qualities would resolve into numberless vibrations which are moving in place; then I would find myself attached to these movements, which is the vision of matter (MM 208–9/343). Composed of innumerable ‘minute perceptions,’ as Leibniz would say,29 this vision of matter is one side of the duration. But, as we have seen, there is a second side of the duration, which is memory. Recall Bergson’s definition of the duration: ‘the continuous life of a memory [une mémoire].’ Again, in Matter and Memory, in the famous discussion of the image of the inverted cone, Bergson states that ‘to have images is not to remember’ (imaginer n’est pas se souvenir) (MM 135/278). This formula means that pure memories, memories not mixed with images, are unconscious. And again, just as when we descended into matter, here when we ascend toward memory, we are moving towards the outside of

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consciousness. The formula, however, also implies that, when I start to remember, at first I see nothing, no image comes into view. It is as if I am looking up at the night sky. At first, the sky looks simply black. But as I focus, and especially if I am using a telescope, stars come into view, perhaps the Milky Way comes into view. As I focus the telescope more closely, more and more stars come into view. Likewise, when I remember at first I cannot remember all the events that have shaped me. But as I make the effort, I start to see my character. Then, the images of the multiplicity of events that made up my character come into view. Just as when I coincide with a character in a novel, I coincide with my own character, being given ‘suddenly in its completeness’; and yet ‘the thousand incidents that manifest the character … do not exhaust or impoverish [my] essence’ (PM 160/1394). In fact, Bergson uses the word ‘essence’ infrequently in his writing. Here essence does not refer to an abstract or general form. It refers to what I was;30 it is a singular essence (and as singular it refers to what earlier we were calling a composite part). As a part, my essence or ‘whatness’ is connected to all the events throughout the past in general (and Bergson’s conception of memory indeed implies a form of metempsychosis). Therefore, my singular essence or my character is a shining point in the past in general. As it comes into view, the shining point diffracts into the thousands and thousands of events that have occurred in my past. And yet, as it actualizes into images, it is always possible to divide the images further just as it is always possible to see more and more stars in the Milky Way. Indeed, even if they remain unconscious and without image, the events that made up my character continue to affect my present behavior, thereby producing, as I act and exist, more and more events. Because it is always possible that the past will produce more and more events, memory in Bergson – the other side of the intuition of matter – is an intuition of potentiality, of unforeseeable potentiality. As Bergson says in Creative Evolution, ‘the whole is never given.’31 In fact, the duration in Bergson is not a whole but a series without beginning or end.32 Intuition, therefore, in Bergson is not eidetic intuition, that is, not an intuition of a necessary structure (an invariant) that can be idealized.33 The series of events never exhausts essence in Bergson, which implies that intuition is the intuition of an ‘impetus’ (élan), as Bergson would say (PM 120/1357), an intuition of power, of what might be. It would be, to use another Bergsonian phrase, the intuition of a ‘creative evolution.’ And yet, as Bergson would say, ‘Allons plus loins,’ ‘Let us go further.’34 We see now that we have endowed the a-perspectival nature of Bergsonian intuition with an additional sense. Intuition is not relative like a perspective, but absolute. It is absolute since intuition is in the thing – here in this preposition (en) is immanence – and yet the thing given is a composite part that extends to infinity. Extending to infinity, the whole is never given, which implies that what is potential is literally unforeseeable. Intuition is

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a-perspectival in Bergson because the whole can never be turned into a spectacle. Intuition, therefore, in Bergson involves a kind of blindness. Bergson would never say this, and probably we have gone farther than Bergson himself went. But, only the blindness necessarily at the heart of intuition allows us to confirm our thesis. Only the blindness allows us to show the importance of Bergson’s thinking, even if Bergson himself did go this far. It transforms Bergson’s intuitionism. To understand the blindness a bit more, let us turn to Bergson’s concept of multiplicity. As we have seen, in ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ Bergson says that the duration consists in ‘a multiplicity like no other’ (PM 168/1402, my emphasis). Now, Bergson develops his concept of multiplicity – the concept that Deleuze thinks is unique to Bergson – in Time and Free Will. For Bergson, the duration is a qualitative multiplicity – as opposed to a quantitative multiplicity. In Time and Free Will, we find several examples of a quantitative multiplicity; the example of a flock of sheep is perhaps the easiest to grasp (DI 76–7/52–3). When we look at a flock of sheep, what we notice is that they all look alike. Thus a quantitative multiplicity is always homogeneous. But also, we notice that we can enumerate the sheep, despite their homogeneity. We are able to enumerate them because each sheep is spatially separated from or juxtaposed to the others; in other words, each occupies a discernable spatial location. Therefore, quantitative multiplicities are homogeneous and spatial. Moreover, because a quantitative multiplicity is homogeneous, we can represent it with a symbol, for instance, a sum: ‘25.’ In contrast, qualitative multiplicities are heterogeneous and temporal; this is a difficult idea since we would normally think that, if there is heterogeneity, there is juxtaposition. But, in a qualitative multiplicity, heterogeneity does not imply juxtaposition (or it implies juxtaposition only retrospectively). Again, in Time and Free Will, Bergson gives us many examples; but perhaps the easiest example to grasp is the feeling of sympathy, a moral feeling (DI 18–19/16–17). As we have already seen, Bergson defines intuition as sympathy. Our experience of sympathy begins, according to Bergson, with us putting ourselves in the place of others, in feeling their pain. But, if sympathy consisted only in feeling the pain of others, sympathy would inspire in us abhorrence of others, and we would want to avoid them, not help them. Bergson concedes that the feeling of horror may be at the root of sympathy. But then, one realizes that, if one does not help this ‘poor wretch,’ it is going to turn out that, when I need help, no one will come to my aid. There is a ‘need’ to help the suffering. For Bergson, these two phases are ‘inferior forms of pity.’ In contrast, true pity is not so much fearing pain as desiring it. It is as if ‘nature’ has committed a great injustice and what we want is not to be seen as complicitous with it. As Bergson says, ‘The essence of pity is thus a need for self-abasement, an aspiration downward [into pain].’ But, this painful aspiration develops upward into a sense of being superior. One realizes that one can do without certain sensuous goods; one is superior to them

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since one has managed to dissociate oneself from them. In the end, one feels humility, humble since one is now stripped of these sensuous goods. Bergson calls this feeling ‘a qualitative progress.’ It consists in a ‘transition from repugnance to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from sympathy itself to humility.’ The genius of Bergson’s description is that there is a heterogeneity of feelings here, and yet no one would be able to juxtapose them or say that one negates the other. There is no negation in a qualitative multiplicity. The feelings are continuous with one another; they interpenetrate one another, and importantly there is an opposition between inferior needs and superior needs, between abasement and aspiration. A qualitative multiplicity is therefore heterogeneous (or virtually singularized), continuous (or interpenetrating), oppositional (or dualistic) at the extremes, and progressive (or temporal, an irreversible flow, which is not given all at once). Because a qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous and yet interpenetrating, it cannot be represented by a symbol; indeed, a qualitative multiplicity is ‘indefinable’ (DI 17/15), or, as Bergson says in ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ ‘inexpressible’ (PM 161/1395). The description of quantitative and qualitative multiplicities overlaps with the distinction with which we started between analysis and intuition. But what is important in the description is that Bergson says that the qualitative multiplicity in which the duration consists is inexpressible and indefinable. Indefinability implies that there is something in the duration that has no form, something about which we cannot decide whether it belongs to this side or that side. In particular, what is a-formal is the point at which the multiplicity passes over into duality.35 In the description of sympathy, this point would be the one at which repugnance passes over into humility. This singular point would not be able to have, necessarily, the form of either side of the duality, the form neither of repugnance nor of humility, neither of superiority nor of inferiority, neither of memory nor of matter. Lacking a form, the singular point could not be seen or remembered; here, at this very moment, the eye closes, which implies that the intuition of presence is at the same time the intuition of non-presence. At the same time, the intuition of power is the intuition of powerlessness. This point remains obstinately invisible. The blind spot in the middle does not even have the form of an exterior as opposed to an interior. The blind point is a true outside. And here indeed, we have gone farther than Bergson’s explicit thought. No longer are we conceiving the duration as temporal, as time opposed to space. The blind spot, a miniscule hiatus, opens upon a different kind of space, a non-place or a dead zone. And in this zone, all we can do is follow the point up and down. Following would not be a way into metaphysics, but a way into what is called thinking.

Notes This chapter extends the interpretation of Bergson I presented in The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (London: Continuum Press, 2003). It is

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also the basis for a chapter of a book in progress to be called Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside. But all the essays I have written over the last two years attempt to lay the foundation for an original work of philosophy to be called Memory and Life: an Archeology of the Experience of Thought. The title of this work in progress is taken from Henri Bergson, Mémoire et vie, textes choisi par Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). I would also like to thank Cheri Carr and Heath Massey for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1. Legend has it that Bergson’s first American lecture in 1913, in New York City at Columbia University, attracted such a large crowd that Broadway experienced its first-ever traffic jam. See T. Quirk, Bergson and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1. 2. At this moment Bergsonism is undergoing a kind of renaissance. A sign of this renaissance is that Etudes bergsoniennes came back into existence in 2002 as Annales bergsoniennes. See F. Worms, Annales bergsoniennes I. Bergson dans le siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). 3. J. Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983 [1967]), 13; English translation by D.B. Allison as Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 13–14. 4. M. Foucault, La Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997 [1963]), 147; English translation by A.M. Sheridan Smith as The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage, 1994), 144. See also M. Foucault, ‘Vie: expérience et science,’ in Dits et écrit, IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 763–76; English translation by R. Hurley as ‘Life: Experience and Science,’ in Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 465–78; original publication date for this essay is 1984. 5. See G. Deleuze, Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); English translation by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam as Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988). Deleuze’s triad is Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson. 6. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), 50; English translation by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill as What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 48–9. See also, G. Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 103; English translation by M. Joughin as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 118. 7. R. Boehm, ‘Les ambiguities des concepts husserliens d’ “immanence” et de “transcendence”,’ in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 84 (1959): 481–526. 8. In a lecture presented in Prague on 9 November 2002, Frédéric Worms made the comment about the immediate data being of consciousness, not given to consciousness in Bergson. The essay that Worms presented that day can be found in Annales bergsoniennes, II: 191–206; Worms’s essay is translated and reprinted in this collection as ‘Consciousness or Life? Bergson between Phenomenology and Metaphysics’ (Chapter 12). 9. G. Deleuze, ‘Postface pour l’édition Américaine: “Un retour à Bergson”,’ in Deux régimes de fous (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 314–15; English translation by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam as ‘A Return to Bergson,’ in Deleuze, Bergsonism, 117. 10. H. Bergson, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique,’ in La pensée et le mouvant, in Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1959), 1392–432; English translation by M.L. Andison as ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ in The

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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Creative Mind (New York: The Citadel Press, 1992 [1946]), 159–200. Hereafter I will refer to this essay as well as all of the essays in La pensée et le mouvant as PM with reference first to The Creative Mind, then to the Œuvres. H. Bergson, Les données immediate de la conscience, in Œuvres, 1–157; English translation by F.L. Pogson as Time and Free Will (Mineola: Dover Publishing Company, 2001 [1913]). Hereafter cited with the abbreviation DI with reference first to the English translation, then to the Œuvres. H. Bergson, Matière et mémoire, in Œuvres, 161–382; English translation by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer as Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1910]). Hereafter cited with the abbreviation MM with reference first to the English translation, then to the Œuvres. As far as I know, no Bergson commentator has stressed the role of composite parts in Bergson’s conception of intuition. Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron however says that ‘[L’intuition] nous donne une connaissance absolue, mais partielle’ (Bergson [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991], p. 107, my emphasis). The following texts have been consulted in the writing of this chapter. M. Cariou, Bergson et le fait mystique (Paris: Abier Montaigne, 1976), especially 21–85 and Lectures bergsoniennes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), especially 112–18; B. Gilson, La revision bergsonienne de la philosophie de l’esprit (Paris: Vrin, 1992); J.C. Goddard, Mysticisme et folie (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002); V. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959); M. Mazzone, ‘Les stations du devenir. La métaphysique de Bergson au-delà du dualisme?’, in Henri Bergson. Esprit et langage, ed. C. Stancati et al. (Hayden: Beligique, 2001), 51–9; F. Worms, ‘La conception bergsonienee du temps,’ Philosophie, 54 (1 June 1997): 73–91; ‘Intuition,’ in Le vocabulaire de Bergson (Paris: Ellipses, 2000), 37–9 and Annales bergsoniennes II: Bergson, Deleuze, la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). See for instance L. Brunschvicg, ‘La vie intérieure de l’intuition,’ in Henri Bergson, essais et témoignes recueillis, ed. Albert Béguin et Pierre Thévenaz (Neuchatel: Baconnière, 1943), 182. M. Foucault, ‘La pensée du dehors,’ in Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1969 (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1994), 546–67; English translation by B. Massumi as ‘The Thought of the Outside,’ in Essential Works of Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 1954–1984, vol. 2, ed. J.D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 147–69. See especially p. 554/154, where Foucault says that the outside ‘could have nothing reserved since it has no interiority,’ which implies that the ‘outside’ of which Foucault is speaking is not opposed to the inside. It is informal: see 552/153, 562/163, 566/167. We shall return to this idea of the informal outside below in our conclusion. G. Canguilhem, La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1965), 13, my translation. The Introduction to La connaissance de la vie is interesting in comparison to Bergson’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics.’ Canguilhem states that knowledge is based in analysis, but then claims that the living (le vivant) may require something else to be known, ‘de nous sentir bêtes.’ Perhaps Bergson would agree that one side of intuition is that we sense like animals. The French edition contains paragraph breaks where new themes start. There are also titles for each section at the top of the page. Here is the ‘table of contents’ for ‘Introduction to Metaphysics.’ I. Analysis and Intuition (159–62/1392–6); II. Duration and Consciousness (162–9/1396–403); III. Composing Parts and Partial Expression (1403–6/169–73); IV. Empiricism and Rationalism (1738/1406–11);

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

Bergson and Phenomenology V. The Real Duration (178–88/1411–18); VI. Reality and Mobility (188–9/1418–19); VII. The Alleged Relativity of Knowledge (188–93/1419–26); VIII. Metaphysics and Modern Science (194–200/1426–32). Later, in the 1934 introductions to La pensée et le mouvant, Bergson will develop the intuitive method precisely as a differentiation within a mixture (given to us ahead of time in language) along the natural articulations (PM 29/1270). See also the course Bergson taught in 1902, the year before the publication of ‘Introduction to Metaphysics.’ Cours de Bergson au Collège de France: ‘Histoire de l’idée de temps’ (1902), in Annales bergsoniennes I , 25–68. Husserl makes a similar distinction between ‘pieces’ or ‘independent parts’ and ‘parts’ or ‘dependent parts.’ See E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II/1 (Tübingen, 1980); English translation by J. Findlay as Logical Investigations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), Volume II, Third Investigation, paragraphs 1 and 2. The English translation renders ‘sympathize’ as ‘in harmony.’ Whenever we see this word ‘translation’ in Bergson, we should keep in mind that translations can always be perfected. See G. Deleuze, Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 28; English translation by T. Conley as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20. See also M. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 203. See Deleuze, Le pli, 88; The Fold, 65. See Matter and Memory (MM 86/231). ‘Image-souvenir’ defines the element of ‘regressive memory’ in Matter and Memory. By itself, regressive memory amounts to dreaming, hallucinations, or contemplation. A ‘frozen memory’ is not progressive; it is not memorial in the way that the duration is. See my The Challenge of Bergsonism, 34–49. H. Bergson, ‘Histoire de l’idée de temps,’ course offered in 1902 at the Collège de France, in Annales bergsoniennes, I, 25–68. The presentation here is based on a dactylogram which had belonged to Charles Péguy. For the quote on ‘finite’ part, see p. 43. See J. Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 88; English translation by A. Sheridan as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (New York: Norton, 1981), 75. See also Bergson’s discussion of color in ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson,’ in The Creative Mind (PM 1455–6/225). See also G. Deleuze, ‘La conception de la différence chez Bergson,’ in L’île déserte et autres textes (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 60; English translation by M. Taormina as ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference,’ in Desert Islands and Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 43. See G.W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 53. J. Hyppolite connects Bergson’s conception of memory to the German Wesen and Gewesen. See J. Hyppolite, ‘Aspects diverse de la mémoire chez Bergson,’ in J. Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 482; English translation by A. Coman as ‘Various Aspects of Memory in Bergson,’ in my The Challenge of Bergsonism, Appendix II, 122. H. Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, in Œuvres, 526; English translation by A. Mitchell as Creative Evolution (Mineola: Dover, 1998 [1911]), 36. Deleuze, Le pli, 62; The Fold, 46.

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33. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II/1, Logical Investigations, Volume II, Third Investigation, paragraph 5. See also E. Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 173; English translation by A. Orianne as The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 119. This book is very instructive for comparing Husserl and Bergson; see also 218–20/154–5. 34. See for example, Œuvres, 1027; English translation by R.A. Audra and C. Brereton as The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 62. 35. As always, this dualism is what Merleau-Ponty cannot accept in any philosopher, even in Bergson. See M. Merleau-Ponty, La nature (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 91–3; English translation by R. Vallier as Nature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 61–3. Merleau-Ponty always aims at a dialectical mixture.

2 Bergson on the Driven Force of Consciousness and Life Rudolf Bernet

I’d found myself thinking of Orest and his snakes and wanted a chance to talk to him further. … ‘Tell me, Orest. As you get closer and closer to the time, are you beginning to feel anxious?’ ‘What anxious? I just want to get in the cage. Sooner the better. This is what Orest Mercator is all about.’ ‘You’re not nervous? You don’t think about what might happen?’ ‘He likes to be positive,’ Heinrich said. ‘This is the thing today with athletes. You don’t dwell on the negative.’ ‘Tell me this, then. What is the negative? What do you think of when you think of the negative?’ ‘Here’s what I think. I’m nothing without the snakes. That’s the only negative.’ I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. (Don DeLillo, White Noise) Bergson is known as being a thinker of movement. That is, according to him, the being of consciousness, life and spirit are all characterized by an incessant creative surpassing of previous accomplishments. Bergson is also the thinker of an ontological difference understood as transcendence. That is, he never confuses consciousness with distinct experiences or psychological states, life with the (species of ) living beings or the spirit with its expressions. In its incessant becoming, being transcends all beings and never remains what it is. One would thus expect to find in Bergson a great sympathy for the idea of a non-being or a nothingness, and yet, this is not the case. According to Bergson – just as in the image of the athlete evoked by DeLillo – being can count on inexhaustible forces and it only knows the negativity of external obstacles that it is certain to overcome, making 42

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it even stronger. While being never remains what it is, it does, however, always already carry virtually in itself a sketch of everything that it can become. For Bergson, the movement of the being of consciousness, life and spirit can only consist in an internal movement that the philosopher will have to grasp internally. Only ‘intuition’ allows one to grasp this internal movement ‘from within.’1 In the same way that intuition opposes itself to an exterior comprehension by means of the concepts of ‘the intelligence,’ the internal movement or ‘mobility’ understood as ‘duration’ is contrasted to a spatial movement. The movement of being – and the understanding of this being – does not allow for a quantitative representation that would refract it into juxtaposed parts. But what is the movement of being? How can an intuition fall together with it and accompany it in its development without denying its differentiating and creative structure? And if the intuition of being as movement will finally have to be translated into a conceptual language, what conceptual apparatus is capable of betraying it least? In the following, by concentrating on the movement of consciousness and the creative evolution of life, we are betting that the language of the drive suits Bergsonian metaphysics best. Before Freudian psychoanalysis and its account of ‘Trieb,’ there was already a long philosophical tradition extending from Aristotle to Schopenhauer and passing by Spinoza and Leibniz that taught us to understand the dynamism of movement in terms of ‘force’ rather than in terms of the representation of an object to be reached and an end to be realized.2 In his analysis of the movement of perception, recollection and the evolution of life, Bergson has, in fact, no more pressing concern than to denounce the bad habits of a philosophy of representation. For him, consciousness is never the representation of an object, and life represents neither living beings nor the transformations of its own creative power. Our reading of Bergson can also be advantageously inspired by psychoanalysis – not so much by giving us a general concept of drive as by making us vigilant with regard to the negativity of every drive and the mechanisms of drives that can be as destructive as they are creative. The greatest risk of a drive left to itself is that it would go mad and degrade into a mechanism of blind repetition. Thus, either the drive must be contained from the outside, or it must contain within itself a hindrance that would save it from total dissolution. Bergson was not completely insensitive to the concern for the dissolution or suffocation of the dynamic of movement and its ‘tendencies.’ In his understanding, the ‘push’ of consciousness must be externally contained by the occasions that are favorable for an actualization of the past in an ‘attentive perception’ of the present. In the same way, ‘the obstacles’ that the objects of inert matter erect on the path of the evolution of life serve to canalize its overflowing and ‘explosive’ energy. The internal hindrance, on the other hand, is provided by the ‘virtualities’ of both consciousness

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and the ‘élan vital.’ These virtualities function like an internal framework for the tendencies of both consciousness and life, and thereby help them avoid the dangers of a blind forward fleeing or of an equally blind mechanical repetition. Bergson thus relegates any process of mechanical repetition to the domain of the objective ‘facts’ of physics. Repetition only occurs in the objective and quantifiable space of matter where it is solidly anchored in the laws of science. Every tendency is thus, in the eyes of Bergson, a force that is not only externally contained but internally structured by virtualities guaranteeing its creative power and preventing it from falling into a blind and destructive realization. Thus, we see that as a result of these same virtualities, the being of the movement of consciousness and of life have nothing in common with an abyssal nothingness. But we will have to investigate whether Bergson correctly estimated the negativity of every force, that is, of external counter-forces, but also forces’ internal ambivalence and possible measurelessness. Did Bergson turn too quickly to a spiritualist conception of force, and did he pay too little attention to the force of critical denial that is as characteristic of the spirit as its positive power of creation? We cannot draw any conclusions before earnestly attempting to bring to light Bergson’s conception of the dynamic of consciousness and life in all its novelty and promise. We will do this in two steps, following the chronological order that leads from Matter and Memory (1896) to Creative Evolution (1907). In doing this, it will appear that the notion of ‘duration’ introduced in Time and Free Will (1889) becomes charged with dynamical energy and its field of application is considerably enlarged. First, we will study the process of the projection of memories from a ‘pure past’ into the ‘concrete’ perception of the present situation. We will pay special attention to the ‘push’ of those virtual memories to be actualized. More specifically, we will show how the structure of the duration of a consciousness in the process of becoming – arising out of an indissoluble entanglement of present experiences with past experiences and experiences yet to come – is traversed by several forces that keep it in shape. Among all these forces of consciousness, one searches in vain, however, in Bergson, for a force of forgetting one’s past. We will turn next to the evolution of life, paying special attention to the fact that the explosive development – like a firework [en gerbe] – of its primitive unity is equally governed by the force of an ‘élan vital.’ This vital drive, which is the source of all the creative accomplishments of life, pushes this life to actualize its potential of virtualities through an incessant confrontation with the resistance of matter. However, even if the triumphant march of this vital energy is hindered by obstacles erected in its path by the inert objects that it encounters, and if some of its realizations freeze and wither away, the virtual resources of life itself seem inexhaustible and even immortal. Thus, in the same way that, for Bergson, consciousness escapes forgetting, life surpasses death.

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1 The driven encounter between the present and the past in perception Since we are dealing in this part with consciousness in terms of drive, we do not have to engage in a detailed description of the rather confusing analysis of ‘pure perception’ to which Bergson devotes the whole first chapter of Matter and Memory.3 We can forgo such a description specifically because perception is only pure in the absence of the participation of memory, which is essential for consciousness. Let us only recall that this pure perception has the dynamic character of a nascent action, or more precisely, of a virtual ‘reaction’ to objects (more precisely again, to ‘image-objects’) of the surrounding world. Thus, to perceive is in no way to contemplate or to represent something, it is to prepare one’s body to move in order to serve one’s vital interest, and thus, to take the exigencies of the situation into account. The difference between the perceiving body and the things perceived, far from being a difference in nature, goes together with the capacity of the perceiving body to erect itself as a ‘center’ in the midst of an objective network of material bodies and to react in an appropriate manner to the constellation of these separate bodies. For Bergson, this capacity for centering does not imply any form of subjectivity or individuality. But nonetheless, a pure perception allows a perceiving body to liberate itself, at least partially (that is to say, insofar as it is perceiving and thus no longer comporting itself as a mere physical body) from the causal action of physical bodies and to give a ‘response’ (MM 45/194). The perception introduces a margin of ‘indetermination’ (MM 32/183, 42/191) in the reaction of the perceiving body to other bodies; it transforms its mechanical movement into a behavior characterized by a certain ‘plasticity.’ Such behavior of the perceiving body is the privilege of a living being that has the double capacity of ‘filtering’ (MM 232/363) or ‘virtualizing’ the impressions that it receives from the surrounding world (MM 58/206), as well as suspending the physical mechanism of an immediate or mechanical reaction.4 This capacity to postpone its reaction leaves the living being a ‘choice’ from among different possible behaviors (MM 30/180). This choice is made against the background of indetermination and this (temporary) indetermination is the effect of the action of the brain. That is, the brain allows the perceiving body to filter the impressions that it receives from the surrounding world; the brain ‘inhibits’ an immediate reaction; and the brain – like a ‘central telephonic exchange’ (MM 30/180) – establishes the connection between the virtuality of nascent actions and the actualization of one of them. Thus, the brain always functions as the basis of consciousness in pure perception, and when we can qualify this perception as a ‘nascent’ action (that is to say, not yet effective action) it is essentially because of the mediating and instrumental function of the brain. Bergson does not fail to underline that such a ‘pure’ perception, in which consciousness only plays a minimal role, is a limit case that for human

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beings constitutes an exception and not the rule. Its purity results from an ‘abstraction’ and this abstraction concerns consciousness, specifically the consciousness of the past. On the other hand, in each ‘concrete’ perception the perception of present things is largely informed by the memory of past experiences. In a concrete perception, it is not the brain, but rather consciousness, and above all memory, that is at work: ‘Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; in truth, every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future’ (MM 150/291). This injection of memories of previous perceptions allows the ‘recognition’ (MM 90/235) of presently perceived things. But such recognition of the perceived does not take anything away from the practical character of the concrete perception. That is, it does not take anything away from the pragmatic interests that guide this perception or from the behaviors or actions in which this perception prolongs itself. Thus, we are dealing with a recognition that doesn’t imply any theoretical ‘knowledge,’ mental representation, or disinterested contemplation of what one perceives. On the contrary, it is all a matter of driven tension and its variations. Moreover, this is already the case in pure perception where the tension and precision increase proportionally with the increase in ‘distance’ (MM 56/205) that separates the perceiving from the perceived. We will see that this is even more the case for the ensemble of memories of the pure past in which the tension diminishes or decompresses in the measure that this past contracts itself in order to be able to insert itself into the context of a concrete present perception. Conforming to our program, we limit our investigation of this concrete perception – that is, perception saturated by memories – to the examination of the two following questions: (1) What is the status of this consciousness of the past that comes to aid the perception of present things? (2) How should we understand that a present perception lends itself to such an invasion of the past and even asks for it? We will see that we are, in fact, dealing with one and the same question, the two parts of which are related in the form of a demand and a response, or otherwise stated, in the form of a virtual push and the opportunity for its actualization. That is to say that the dynamic of a concrete perception is essentially composed of two drive-like forces that are reciprocal and complementary. What is usually retained from the long analysis of memory in the second and third chapters of Matter and Memory is the distinction between habitmemory and recollection, that is, the distinction between, on the one hand, a memory that results in an automatic actualization of past memories in the present by the force of exercise and repetition (the recitation of a ‘lesson learned by heart’), and on the other hand, a memory that turns away from the present in order to devote itself to a disinterested exploration of the past. One cannot forget, however, that the principle objective of the Bergsonian

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analysis (of the two forms of memory) consists in the demonstration that all the memories of the past are conserved in and by consciousness and not in the brain. For Bergson, all memories relating to past experience inscribe themselves in a consciousness of the past that subsides ‘in itself’ and for itself (MM 149/290), that is, independently of the brain and independently of the accomplishment of an explicit remembering. In this ‘unconscious’ consciousness of the past (MM 141/283), all the past experiences of a person coexist in the form of ‘virtualities’ or of potentialities that lend themselves to an actualization. This actualization necessarily remains partial, and even in the case where this actualization is rendered impossible (as in the case of aphasia) the virtual memories are not erased (MM 110/254). The ‘pure past’ which exists ‘in itself’ thus conserves the well-ordered totality of all the ‘pure memories’ in one consciousness. This virtual consciousness of the past has the structure of a ‘duration’ in which the particular memories ‘fit themselves together’ [s’emboîtent]. There is thus not something like an isolated memory, and the ensemble of memories is not a collection of juxtaposed memories. Depending on the level of the pure past that we are at, the configuration of (all) memories is more or less ‘contracted’ or ‘dilated.’ We know that Bergson makes use of the image of different sections of an upside-down cone in order to make us better understand the differences in the contractions and dilations of our pasts. We should not forget, however, that the different sections of the cone are all composed of the same memories. In function of their different degree of contraction and dilation, these sections are distinguished, however, by a greater or lesser clarity and differentiation in the way that they retain the particular memories. The enlargement of the section or, in other words, the dilation of the pure past, corresponds to the aims of a recollection-memory that is interested in the past for its own sake and is in search of individual memories. The narrowing down of the section of the cone serves, on the other hand, the interest of habit-memory, which far from being interested in the particularities of the memories sticks to the generalities in order to extract from them the most profit for a present behavior.5 In the free exploration of the past for its own sake, one moves away from the imperatives of practical life, and for this reason, Bergson compares the recollection-memory to a ‘dream’ (MM 153/294). It is entirely different for the habit-memory, where the memory of a ‘lesson learned by heart’ ‘is part of my present […] it is lived and acted, rather than represented’ (MM 81/227). The same must be said for any other form of actualization of memories that entirely serves the present situation, and thus the same must be also said for the ‘concrete perception’ of which we will now determine the drive-like character. To speak of ‘drive’ is to speak of tendency toward an action, and it is effectively under the influence of an internal ‘push’ (MM 168/307) that the virtual memories ‘tend’ towards their actualization in a concrete perception. One thus has to understand that it is not only particular virtual memories,

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but also the whole structure of the pure past that is in a state of tension and that is animated by dynamic forces. The pure past is like a living organism that dilates and contracts itself. But this life of the pure past is still just a virtual life and the pure memories that make up all its richness are ‘powerless’ (MM 141/283) to actualize themselves. The realization of the internal drive that pushes the virtual memories to their actualization depends on the mercy of external conditions – in the first place, the indetermination of the brain. This brain is both the condition for the ‘inhibition’ of memories of the past (that is to say that it is the guardian of their virtuality), and the condition for their actualization in the context of the present situation. It is because the brain has the capacity to suspend the immediate reaction of the organism to the present situation that the memories have the time to reorganize themselves in order to more advantageously insert themselves into the present perception.6 It is also the motor capacities of the brain that release the effective actualization of memories. But what memories are we talking about? If the brain doesn’t have the capacity to make a real choice and to select from among all the pure memories tending to their actualization the ones most advantageous for the situation of the perception, who is in charge of making that decision? It cannot be anything but consciousness. One thus has to admit that besides the external neurological conditions, there are also internal conditions for the realization of the push of memories. The internal conditions that aid the overcoming of the powerlessness of this push of the past to realize itself must come from perceiving consciousness. According to Bergson, in fact, perceiving consciousness makes an appeal to the memory of anterior perceptions when it finds itself in a perplexing situation. ‘Appeal’ (MM 168/307) is the right word, for it expresses well the drive-like or longing character of a demand that arises out of an experience of lack. Consequently, it does not suffice to invoke a perceptual situation that furnishes the virtual memories with an opportunity for actualization, one also has to take into account the pressing demand from perceptual consciousness that translates itself into a drive-like state of tension. It follows that the most essential condition for the realization of the drive that pushes the virtual memories of the past towards their actualization is nothing else than the inverse drive that originates in the present perceptual consciousness. It is this inverse drive of a pressing demand emanating from the present that lifts the ‘inhibition’ (MM 85/230) of the pure past and that overcomes the ‘powerlessness’ of virtual memories, or their inability to bring the drive to actualize themselves to fruition. The drive-like demand that liberates and canalizes the push of memory comes from the experience of a ‘rift’ (MM 95/241), or a weak spot in the perceptual tissue, a weak spot that the perceptual consciousness of the present is incapable of dealing with by means of its own forces. In responding to the needs of the present perceptual consciousness, however, the memories of past experiences do not

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only come to fill up a gap. On the contrary, they innovate and transform the given perceptual situation in a creative way. Their way of responding to the disorder of the perception thus has nothing mechanical or sterilely repetitive to it. One must, on the contrary, acknowledge the creative power of bringing original and ever-new solutions to the difficulties of perceptual consciousness through the process of actualizing virtual memories. That is to say that the appeal of the present is not only heard by the past, but that it is answered beyond all expectations. Let us summarize. There are six driving forces at work in a concrete perception: (1) We can call the dynamic manner in which all virtual memories of one consciousness overlap each other in a pure past a driving force. (2) This pure past, taken in its totality, finds itself in a state of drive-like tension; it is characterized by a living and dynamic structure that dilates or contracts with the different levels of the past or the sections of the upsidedown cone. (3) The push of the virtual memories towards their actualization in the present is also a driving force. (4) Both the appeal to the past of a present perceptual consciousness and the answer of a past that actualizes itself by transforming the present situation of the concrete situation in a creative way involve driving forces. (5) The way that the pure memories of the virtual past concretize and condense themselves in ‘memory images’ or ‘nascent perceptions’ (MM 133/276) in order to better serve the needs of the perceptual situation is also drive-like. (6) And finally, the behaviors that result from an effective realization of the nascent potentialities of concrete perception are drive-like. Since the force behind all these drive-like movements has its source in consciousness, the latter deserves to be called ‘driven consciousness.’ This drivelike nature of consciousness confirms itself when we pass from the force or ‘push’ to the consideration of its goal and objects. The goal of the abovementioned driving forces consists always in a useful action that serves the ‘vital’ interests and ‘practical’ concerns of consciousness. The objects that allow the drive-like forces of consciousness to realize themselves and that canalize the process of this realization are never brute material objects, but are always objects perceived by consciousness. It is always a particular situation of perceptual consciousness, and not separate physical objects, that provides the pure virtual memories with the occasion to concretize themselves into images and to actualize themselves. If ‘push,’ ‘source,’ ‘goal’ and ‘object’ are the essential constituents of the drive, according to the Freudian doctrine,7 the same has to be said for Bergson – with the notable difference, however, that in Matter and Memory we are always dealing with a ‘drive’ that originates in consciousness, even when it is a virtual or unconscious consciousness. What about the question of negativity in this Bergsonian conception of driven consciousness? We have to admit that one would search for such negativity in vain. There is nothing more positive, in fact, than that pure past that exists ‘in itself’ and which conserves the totality of the lived

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experiences of a person in the form of virtual memories. This pure past is like a kind of giant ruminator gifted with an infinitely expanding stomach and that does not at all feel the need to get rid of the weight of a past that it would find too heavy to carry. That is to say, according to Bergson, consciousness completely and definitely escapes the experience of radical absence or irreparable forgetting. A past that is always virtually available never fails to answer the appeal of the present. There is also nothing negative in the way that the particular virtual memories preserved in the heart of the pure past are related to one another in the form of a gigantic play of ‘overlapping.’ Their difference binds them to one another, and never divides them or opposes them to one another. Each memory one wishes to remember brings with it (more or less explicitly or distinctly) all the other memories of this same consciousness. The same has to be said in the case of concrete perception: it is never an isolated pure memory that comes to aid the lack of the present perception. Rather, the whole past presses itself into the encounter with the present and contracts itself to fit through the eye of the needle that is the tip of the cone. Thus, no memory is excluded, no memory is too much, in the actualization of virtual memories in the context of the present perceptual situation.

2 The push and explosive development of the ‘élan vital’ The description of life and its development in Creative Evolution8 is, in many respects, a simple enlargement of the problematic that occupied Bergson in Matter and Memory. More specifically, it is the common structure of duration that allows Bergson to pass from an analysis of consciousness to an analysis of life. In both works, duration functions as a principle of ‘organic’ organization and as the principle of a dynamic unfolding that takes on the form of the actualization of a network of virtualities. In the same way that the duration of consciousness is explicated through its opposition to the mechanistic psychology of associationism, the concept of the duration of life is thought in contradistinction to the mechanistic descriptions that one finds in theories of evolution. That is to say that the parallelism between Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution naturally lends itself to a reading in a double sense. For this reason, our preceding interpretation of the past’s push toward creative actualization in an ever-new present already relied on the characterization of the ‘élan vital’ as the motor of life. It is thus not surprising that in turning to Bergson’s later work, we encounter difficulties similar to the ones we have already considered with regard to Matter and Memory. With Creative Evolution, the difficulty of understanding how the affirmation of a pre-existing virtuality is compatible with the affirmation of a dynamism of life where nothing is ‘given’ in advance will only become stronger. The same must hold for Bergson’s aversion to an original negativity characteristic of both the structure of life and its evolution.

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Even if the time is past when the famous ‘élan vital’ did not need any explanation, we will have to limit ourselves here to a short summary of its principle characteristics. Like Bergson himself, we will begin by commenting on what the élan vital is not. The élan vital, out of which the unfolding and the diversification of life proceeds, is exactly that which distinguishes Bergson’s ‘transformism’ from all other evolutionary theories. Although Creative Evolution returns several times to the critique of evolutionism and discusses its variations in detail, one can say that in the end, all evolutionism is presented as either Darwinian mechanism or Lamarckian finalism. Bergson reproaches Darwin, not only for his rather ambiguous conception of the roles played by adaptation and by the hereditary transmission of acquisitions accidentally acquired, but also, especially, for his neglect of the ‘organic’ organization of living beings and of life. As usual, it is up to the notion of ‘duration’ to make us understand what distinguishes an organization and a creative reorganization from a simple addition to a structure made out of independent parts. Bergson criticizes Lamarck’s finalism for stipulating a predictable end to the evolution of life, but also, and above all, Bergson criticizes the claim that this end is supposed to be given from the beginning. Lamarck’s theory of evolution is thus presented as a ‘preformism’ of the Leibniz type that conceives of the evolution of life as a realization of a program or a pre-established scenario, and which, consequently, neglects the creativity of life. Compared to the élan vital, to its unpredictable unfolding and its capacity for finding ever-new solutions to ever-different problems, this finalism appears to Bergson as an ‘inverted mechanism’ (CE 39/528). Darwin and Lamarck’s theories are thus presented as two symmetrical versions of the same conception of the evolution of life in which ‘everything is given’ (CE 39/528) and nothing is invented. Both represent a static, linear and ‘spatial’ vision of the movement of life and its dynamics, which for Bergson is a matter of tension and ‘relaxation’ or ‘dilation.’ Characteristically, Bergson is not content with these critical findings and wants to expose the source of these erroneous conceptions of life, which is, according to him, related to the human intelligence and its way of acquiring knowledge. Incidentally, this is why Creative Evolution consists as much in promoting a new theory of knowledge as in developing a new metaphysical theory of life. For Bergson, human intelligence and science do not understand anything about life. It is above all this anti-intellectualism and Bergson’s vigorous critique of scientism that hasty readers retain and subsequently criticize as a dangerous tendency to irrational spiritualism. However, this reproach is unfair, too superficial, and frankly too stupid to even consider. It suffices to remind oneself of the detailed attention that Bergson gives to the most recent results of the biological sciences; his insistence on a complementarity between human intelligence and instinct; his critique of the ‘closed horizons’ (CE 182/649) of instinctive behavior; and above all his esteem for a secondary kind of intelligence that only belongs

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to life, in order to dismiss these allegations. It also suffices to remind oneself that Bergson is interested in developing a knowledge of life in accordance with the demanding method of intuition, which elevates the natural affinity between instinct and life to such a degree of sublimation that it mobilizes all the philosopher’s capacities for differentiation. This being said, it is still worth considering for a moment the reasons why, according to Bergson, intelligence thinks as it does – namely, in a way totally inappropriate to understanding life and its evolution. Human intelligence thinks in an analytic manner, which is to say that it analyzes holistic structures such as movement, time, consciousness, and again life, by cutting them into stable parts exterior to one another and juxtaposed in space. Intelligence proceeds in this manner for a practical reason: intelligence serves action and tries to master what it thinks rather than surrendering to its law. For Bergson, unlike Heidegger, this is only problematic when it has to do with understanding life. Even while insisting on the disastrous effect of a science that takes itself for a metaphysics by determining the nature of the whole of reality and of every process in it and in presenting itself as the guardian of every truth, Bergson doesn’t pass up any occasion to celebrate the utility of science and its capital contribution to human culture. But Bergson rejoins Heidegger when he says that the way of thinking of intelligence and more particularly of the sciences is entirely inspired by the process of a ‘fabrication’ (CE 137/612), that is, Aristotelian poiesis. (It is thus no accident that the description of the human being gifted by intelligence as a ‘Homo faber’ (CE 139/613) in the third chapter of Creative Evolution is followed in the next chapter by a critique of Aristotle’s conception of the ‘nous poietikos.’) The failure of theories of evolution can be explained for Bergson by the fact that they have confused the creations of life with the process of fabricating new living beings and new vital functions. In a production, which has the form of a fabrication, according to Bergson, ‘everything is given in advance’ – everything except the existence of the realized product. Before beginning the work, the eidos of the ergon to be realized is already clearly envisioned; the hyle that is to receive a new morphe must be available and the means of production must be at hand and effectively organized. Nothing like this can be applied to the evolution of life because one does not know in advance where this evolution will go, nor to what results it will lead, nor what ‘obstacles’ coming from whatever sort of ‘matter’ will arise along the way (CE 59/545, 93/575, 133/608, 254/710). One thus has to avoid conceiving of the creative power of the élan vital as a pre-given and pre-formed dynamis merely waiting to realize itself in an identical manner, not only, as Bergson does not refrain from repeating, because such a possibility would only be an impoverished reality retrospectively projected into the past, but above all, because it would never produce something new. If we want to understand the force of the élan vital, we will have to remember

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what Matter and Memory said about the pure past, its virtual existence, and its actualization in an unfamiliar and always different present. Let us thus admit that one finds a virtual unity ready to ‘explode’ at the origin of life and of its diversification in multiple series of evolutions. Let us also admit that this primitive unity of life, far from being knowable, is a network of virtualities, the actualizations of which are unpredictable because they are not pre-formed in life as clearly defined potentialities. And let us put aside the laborious efforts of Bergson to prove empirically that this primitive unity shines through the surprising similarities that one can discern in the evolution of species that are totally different from one another (for example, the eyes of mollusks and vertebrates) (CE 65/548). Still, we have to make clear what is essential: namely the nature of the origin of life; its unity and diversity; its virtualities and actualizations; its encounter with the resistance of matter; its success in overcoming obstacles; the fatal exhaustion of its energy; its failures; and the possibility of its creative force turning into an auto-destructive force. Maybe it was in remembrance of Schopenhauer that Bergson made the ‘élan of life’ (a term that he prefers above the élan vital) into a kind of will. In any case, familiarity with Schopenhauer’s thought can help us avoid several incorrect interpretations and will allow us to formulate our reservations with the Bergsonian doctrine in a more precise manner. What does the élan vital ‘want’? The answer can only be: to live and to prosper in developing all the virtualities inherent in life. By ‘élan’ Bergson thus understands a force, which pushes life forward, a tension in search of relief in creating new living beings and new ways of living. Thus, Bergson prefers the vocabulary of a dynamic virtual totality of life that diversifies itself and explosively develops into multiple and diverse forms above the conception of an ontological difference between life and living beings. These forms comprise the vital functions or different modes of life, as well as the different individual living beings or the separated species of living beings. This is why Bergson also prefers to speak of a ‘germination’ (CE 27/517) of life rather than of an ‘engendering’ or a ‘reproduction’ of (species of) living organisms. For Bergson, the germination of life means the explosive development of its primitive unity, the ‘sheaf-like’ [en gerbe] (CE 99/579) development of its virtualities. It is like a fireworks display in which the multiple rockets ‘explode’ simultaneously in innumerable and unsuspected points of light (CE 251/70). We end here our discussion of the explosive force of the virtual unity of life. Now, what about the forms of life and living beings that detach themselves from one another as the luminous points of a firework? Just as the appearance of the luminous points depends on atmospheric conditions, so the apparition of new forms of life depends on the ‘matter’ in which life will incarnate itself. This matter can be more or less receptive to the impulses of life, or it can more or less strongly resist. In any case, matter is different from the essence of life and poses ‘problems’ that life will have to

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‘solve’ (CE 70/555). The creativity of life thus consists exactly in its capacity to find solutions for unexpected and unforeseeable situations. ‘Adapting is not repeating, but replying – an entirely different thing’ (CE 58/544). That is, explosive rupture and creation are not unique events in the development of the élan vital. On the contrary, as Bergson writes, we find ourselves in the presence of a ‘creation unceasingly renewed’ (CE 103/582). This creative capacity, which distinguishes the vital processes from the sterile repetitions of a well-running mechanism, is what Bergson calls (this time with a Nietzschean term) the ‘plasticity’ of the élan of life (CE 23/514). This plasticity is the ingenious force that life utilizes in overcoming ‘obstacles’ posed by a resisting matter in order to use them to its advantage. It follows logically that the rockets of life do not fire off and come down in a straight line, but rather follow a route full of ‘sinuousities’ (CE 102/582). All this reminds us of what the second book of The World as Will and Representation had already said about the way in which the ‘objectification’ of natural forces directly springing forth from the will is dependent on the phenomenal objects of the world and the physical laws that govern these objects. We can thus straightforwardly claim that the material obstacles with which the élan vital is confronted in its progression are just like the objects of the world of representation for Schopenhauer – mere ‘occasional causes’9 for the formation of this or that species of living beings, of this or that vital functioning or process. Confronted with these obstacles, life bends but doesn’t break. Life continues doing what it wants even if it has to take into account a reality that is different from it. This also reminds us of what Matter and Memory said about the way that the pure past actualizes the dynamics of its virtual essence in taking advantage of the interstices in the indecisive and undetermined perception. Appealing to Matter and Memory here also has the advantage of making us better understand how life in confrontation with matter ultimately transforms matter by appropriating it. The opposition between life and matter is thus never definite. This opposition cannot even be understood as originary, since matter, considered in its totality and not in its particular manifestations, is still for Bergson, a fixed duration, a stretched living tension. Matter, just like the phenomenal world according to Schopenhauer, does not have an autonomous principle of existence. However, we must not forget all the things that separate Bergson and Schopenhauer. The first difference is related to the fact that with Bergson we definitively leave Schopenhauer’s metaphysical monism where the difference between will and phenomenal world was only a ‘Veil of Maya’ that would hide the fact that the reality of the objects of representation springs forth directly from the will. For Bergson, on the contrary, life is not everything. Its evolution is nourished by the difference with matter and the separation between life and matter remains in effect even when we discover surprising affinities between them. Material ‘inert objects’ effectively exist, they are not disguised living beings, and the science making use of

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the principle of reason formulating the laws that govern these objects is not a delusion. Bergson only remarks that what holds for separate material objects might not hold for the totality of material nature. Specifically, the organization of this material totality may not be as different from life as one might think. He also remarks that, in any case, there resides a material part of which life was able to take advantage in every living being. Pushing the analysis of the living being a little further will reveal a new form of duality that is reminiscent of the duality between life and matter, namely, between consciousness and the brain (or the nervous system). Again, Bergson strains to prove that even if the brain cannot be the cause of the experiences of consciousness, and even when consciousness infinitely ‘overflows’ the functioning of the brain,10 there is still an admirable ‘solidarity’ between both of them (CE 180/648). More specifically, in showing how the evolution of the nervous system of a species of living beings necessitates the refinement of their consciousness, the dependency of consciousness on the brain, in many ways, looks like the dependency of the evolution of life on material opportunities and obstacles. Again, the concept of an ‘occasional cause’ can help us better understand how consciousness can depend on the proper functioning of neurological mechanisms without depriving consciousness of its freedom. As Bergson writes, when one takes a screw out of a machine and the machine no longer works this is no reason for thinking that this little screw keeps the whole machine going (CE 355/795). That is to say, a part cannot cause the whole11 and neither the brain nor matter constitute an autonomous whole. Only consciousness and life constitute real concrete totalities, that is to say ‘durations.’ A second difference between Bergson and Schopenhauer is that the élan vital – unlike the Schopenhauerian will – is not ‘blind.’ The will, according to Schopenhauer only vaguely knows what it wants, or more precisely, all that it wants is to objectify itself in whatever possible way, under the condition that it serves the intensification of its force. It is true that life in the way that Bergson conceives of it also wants to live and not only to survive. That is, it wants to prosper in affirming and extending its power. But Schopenhauer’s vocabulary of an ‘objectification’ is not suited to characterizing the explosion of life in the multiple series of evolution. Whereas the objectification of the will is for Schopenhauer a work of production that involves alienation, Bergson characterizes the creations of life (that is, the actualizations of its virtual power) as a double process of concentration and dilation of the same vital energy. And one has to add that if the élan of life doesn’t yield to the rules of intelligence, it nevertheless does not act arbitrarily. As a power of organization and reorganization of the living beings and vital functions, it is, on the contrary, inhabited by a rationality sui generis, which Bergson calls ‘organic.’ Far from vanishing in the absurdity of the will of Schopenhauer, the élan vital of Bergson is gifted by an intelligence other than human intelligence, by an ingenuity that has nothing to do with technique. The

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explosive development of the primitive unity of life, however explosive it might be, does not proceed blindly. That is, it is not because the primitive unity of life explodes that its fragments must be dispersed randomly. On the contrary, the élan vital is solidly tied to the virtualities of life. Even if every actualization of a virtuality implies a creative and thus unforeseeable transformation, this does not mean that the virtualities of life fail to give it meaning and direction. But we must admit that it is not easy to have a very precise idea of the nature of these virtualities of life. If one wants to avoid falling into a kind of ‘pre-formism,’ one has to avoid above all attributing existence to these virtualities such that the effects of their multiple actualizations would be ‘given in advance.’ This is what Matter and Memory has already made clear. But is it certain that everything that we have said about the virtual existence of a ‘pure past’ can be completely applied to the virtualities of life? The pure past, with all its levels of tension and contraction exists ‘in itself,’ that is to say, independently of the consciousness that we have of it (we are dealing here with an unconscious past) and nowhere else than in itself (not in the brain). Effectively, Bergson seems to think that the same holds for the virtualities of life, that is, that they exist in nothing else than in life (not in a superior intelligence) and that they unfold themselves as a network without life being explicitly conscious of them. But this becomes problematic once one comes to think that the virtualities of life would have a determined content just like the virtuality of the ‘pure memory’ of the upside-down cone. And still: how should one think a state of greater or lesser tension without presupposing distinct elements among which the tension grows or diminishes? Without a doubt, one has to try to think a state of global tension or intensity; that is to say that one has to try to understand the elements in terms of the tension of the whole of the system and not the system in terms of the tension that is at work between its elements. Moreover, one should not forget that these elements or distinct virtualities of life are themselves also ‘tendencies’ with a specific tension. In fact, life is ‘an immensity of virtualities, a mutual encroachment of thousands and thousands of tendencies’ (CE 258/714; English translation modified). When Bergson writes that life is ‘a unity that is multiple and a multiplicity that is one’ (CE 355/795), one thus has to think both its unity and multiplicity in terms of tension or drive. That is, the concepts of unity and multiplicity, being categories of the ‘intelligence,’ are in the end not suited for the ‘intuition’12 of life. This new way of understanding the virtualities of life also retrospectively brings with it a new way of understanding the memories that compose the pure past. The positive content of these memories is thus a content under tension and the tension of a particular pure memory is a function of the tension that is at work in the pure past in its totality. The distinct pure memories thus have to be understood as virtualities that are emanations of the global system of the virtuality of the pure past. This means that the tension

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of the whole of this system is not reducible to the addition of the particular tensions that are at work between the singular memories. One sees that where Bergson differs from Schopenhauer, things become complicated. But must one conclude that with these complications, Bergson definitively avoids the difficulties that plague Schopenhauer’s sometimes too simplistic conceptions? Nothing is less certain. Just think of the young Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer. For Nietzsche, the core problem of the Schopenhauerian monism consists in its total neglect of a negative and destructive will that The Birth of Tragedy associates with the name Dionysus. How much of this negativity can one find in Bergson’s conception of the creative force of life?

3 Negativity of the creative force of life It is generally admitted that Bergson is everything except a positivist. The best proof of this is his incessant polemic against every form of scientific or philosophical theory of consciousness and life for which everything would be given once and for all in the form of established ‘facts.’ One could even say that in this respect, the philosophy of Bergson appears to be more vigilant than some phenomenology. Not only is the course of the evolution of life not the realization of a prewritten program, but neither the primitive unity of life, nor its virtualities, and not even its creative power is ever given as phenomenon. Transcending its realizations, life does not fall together with living beings, and further, it is never really what it is. And what it really is, namely the ensemble of its virtualities, only exists in relation to an actualization (which is always partial) that changes its form and content. Thus, the unity of life, for Bergson, has no effective existence preceding its explosive development, and what we grasp of this unity we only grasp in the form of a reconstruction in the aftermath of this explosive development. Equally so, the organizational force of the élan vital as a force of dilation and dissemination always appears to us in the form of a plurality of virtual tendencies. The élan vital, developing without ever escaping the confrontation with matter on which its actualization depends, transforms itself as much as it transforms matter. And finally, in dividing in multiple directions, of which some reveal themselves to be impasses and of which all are under the threat of a growing stabilization, life itself is forced to lose interest and even to abandon a considerable amount of its accomplishments. That is why it is unavoidable for Bergson to face the hypothesis of an ‘entropy’ of life (CE 243/701). With this term, taken from thermodynamics, he expresses the possibility of a degradation of a part of the intensity of the vital order into the extensive material order. But the evocation, from within life, of all the ways that a stable, persisting, inalienable given is absent goes, in Bergson, hand in hand with the affirmation of a more fundamental (or at least a complementary and compensating)

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positivity. In order to convince oneself, one only has to recall the surprising discussion in the first twenty pages of the last chapter of Creative Evolution, in which Bergson tries to convince us of the nonsense of the notion of a ‘nothingness.’ What is at stake in this discussion is nothing else than the demonstration that the creative evolution of life, far from being able to originate from ‘emptiness,’ and far from producing an existence that would be a ‘victory over nothingness’ (CE 276/728; English translation modified) is, on the contrary, necessarily grounded in an original positive (virtual) given. Even if the élan vital is incessantly confronted with the alterity of matter in the course of the evolution of life, and even if the explosive development or ‘dissociation’ of the unity of life always already occurs in ‘contact with matter’ (CE 258/714) this finitude of the élan vital does not prevent it from ‘being given once and for all.’ While it is true that the given of this donation has but a virtual existence, and that what will happen to this given in the course of the development of life is neither pre-given nor predictable, one is not prevented from supposing a donator. It is thus not coincidence that the shadow of God wanders through Creative Evolution. Bergson says little about this – only in order to criticize the God of the philosophers, that is to say a God invented by human intelligence who is therefore incompatible with the Bergsonian vision of life. Bergson’s sparse remarks make clear that a God who creates life can only be life itself (and not a superior intelligence). It is thus logical that Bergson thinks a possible divine creation of the universe in analogy with the explosive development of the primitive unity of life in distinct series of evolution: ‘Now if the same kind of action is going on everywhere …, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a center from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display – provided, however, that I do not present this center as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made; he is unceasing life, action, freedom’ (CE 248/706). One thus has to understand that the certainty that the existence of life could not have emerged out of nothingness is not, for Bergson, the direct consequence of the merely ‘probable’ existence of God. On the contrary, it is the consequence of his understanding of God as Life. Being Life itself, it is unthinkable that God would have created the life that we know in the way that human beings make things, that is, with their intelligence. Life doesn’t allow itself to be fabricated. If the idea of nothingness has a possible sense for Bergson, it can only be a ‘partial nothingness’ (CE 282/734; English translation modified) and this idea can only be applied to the process of human fabrication. It is true that human beings do not make something with nothing, but they do make something that does not yet exist and that they lacked. The result of their fabrication, the ergon of their poiesis, comes to fill an emptiness, comes to satisfy a desire. This model of fabrication of a thing that answers a need or a desire does not suit either the divine creation or the creative evolution of life. Life in its confrontation with matter

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does not create things, and the living beings or vital functions that it creates could not have been lacking for the simple reason that life already carried within itself their virtual sketch. To confuse the virtual tendencies of life with desires is to confuse a richness with a destitution; a force with a lack; an indeterminate potentiality with the experience of a particular nothingness. It is not because such a vision of creation that responds to the experience of a lack does not suit the divine creation that it does not suit the life created by God. On the contrary, because this vision does not suit life, it does not suit God. It is because God is Life (in Creative Evolution Bergson doesn’t say anything of the divine love of the Christians) that he could not have created the universe and its multiple worlds out of the experience of a lack and a desire. Life for Bergson does not lack, does not desire, does not fabricate, and is never satisfied. The élan vital is a drive which, to speak in the language of Plato’s ‘Symposium’, is only the daughter of Poros and not of Penia. This drive does not lack anything – except the realization of all its riches. The idea of God thus only comes to confirm the unpredictable and unintelligible positivity of life and of its force. And the ‘finitude’ of the creative force of life, that is to say its dependence on matter, does not take anything away from this positivity (CE 254/710). As the remainder of the demonstration of the non-existence of nothingness shows, Bergson’s positivism is in no way limited to his conception of life. He also wants to prove that ideas of the non-existence of consciousness and the non-existence of all exterior objects are as absurd as the idea of an absolute nothingness. The investigation of logical negation and negative judgment (CE284/737) will then come to support the thesis that every negation can only be partial and that every nothingness is necessarily a partial nothingness: ‘Negation, therefore, differs from affirmation properly so called in that it is an affirmation of the second degree: it affirms something of an affirmation which affirms something of an object’ (CE 288/738). This argumentation is reminiscent of the analysis of the experience and of the idea of a ‘disorder’ towards the end of the preceding chapter (CE 220/682). Just as every experience of a ‘disorder’ implies the perspective or the anticipation of an order, so each negation rests on an affirmation. This whole discussion of the idea of nothingness is thus based on Bergson’s conviction that every negativity presupposes a complementary and compensating positivity – every disorder implies another order; every negative judgment implies a contrary positive judgment; each affirmation of the non-existence of an object or an experience implies that one substitutes for it the existence of another material object or another conscious experience.13 One thus has to conclude that if Bergson recognizes a negativity in life and in the élan vital, this negativity can only come to it from the outside. The negativity that opposes the creative power of life is limited, in fact, to the resistance of matter. But does the active and actualizing power of the élan vital, in undergoing this counterforce of the inertia of matter, not

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also manifest a negative force of passivity? Even if Bergson does not say this explicitly, nothing prevents us from also understanding this capacity to undergo as a kind of force – in the same way that Aristotle envisages a dynamis tou paschein.14 It is because we granted a force of undergoing to the élan vital that we have been able to advance the idea that it bent but did not break in the course of its confrontation with matter. To this force of supporting the resistance of matter, we added a force of ingenuity that allows the creative élan of life to avoid the obstacles of matter by turning them to its advantage. The secret affinity that exists, according to Bergson, between life and matter also makes us better understand how the passivity in which life undergoes the counterforce of the resistance of matter is full of lessons for it. It is because what opposes life is not totally different from life that life can adapt itself by means of that form of intelligence that belongs to it alone. Appealing again to Aristotle, one can suppose that life, in its encounter with matter, exhibits the double force of a pheugein and a diookein, that is, of a sympathy and an avoidance. But we have to admit that neither the passive force of the élan vital, nor its capacity to avoid obstacles, and finally, also not its explosive development in an ‘immensity of virtualities’ changes anything fundamentally about the positivity of life. If the élan of life ends up being extinguished in a certain line of evolution, it always reappears with new force somewhere else. Bergson’s discussion with Lalande, who defends the thesis (taken over by Freud) that ‘all things march towards death,’ is significant in this respect (CE 246/704). It results from this discussion that for ‘life in general,’ there can only exist ‘the death of the individuals,’ and that there can thus not be ‘death in general.’ In other words, death strikes living beings, but it never reaches life itself. Death is thus not only exterior to life, but life simply ignores everything of death. One has to admit that the opposite hypothesis according to which life wants its own death is barely more convincing. But could one not suppose that life carries within itself a force of selfdestruction? Could one not suppose that at a certain moment it would put an end to its fertile dialogue with matter and that nothing could hold back its force of self-affirmation any longer, allowing it to go mad? Life would thus be divided between the will to take on the struggles of a ‘meandering’ course that has to deal with ever-changing objects and situations, and another will that is directed straightforwardly to maximal relaxation. This is close to the hypothesis of Nietzsche as well as Freud and Lacan. In any case, it is incontestable that Bergson substitutes the metaphysical monism of the will in Schopenhauer with a particularly optimistic version of the way that the élan vital explosively develops in a multiplicity of tendencies that, however differentiated, or even antagonistic they may be, never threaten the infinite resources of life. One does not even need to push this thought to the limit case of a possible self-destruction of life in order to assess the Bergsonian optimism and

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aversion to negativity. Isn’t it striking not to find anywhere in Creative Evolution, which stresses the impotence of the human intelligence, any allusion to the impotence of the élan vital? If anything opposes the élan vital and stops it in its trajectory, it can only be an effect of matter. The ‘finitude’ of the élan vital that we have discussed thus always results from an external limitation, never from an internal limitation. To speak again with Aristotle, the élan vital is a dynamis that doesn’t know about the fate of the adynamia, that is, impotence. It doesn’t even know about inhibition. Each of the forces in which the élan vital explosively develops is a disinhibited force that is void of inner restraints. One thus has to count on the occurrence of inert material objects that will come to inhibit the possibly disinhibited course of all vital forces. According to Bergson, while plants show a certain restraint and make the effort to accumulate energy, animals, on the other hand, spend their energy without moderation. Animal life, like life in general, is one giant forward movement. But is it not characteristic of human beings to have the powers that Aristotle called hexis and of which he says in Metaphysics theta 3 that one can conserve them without using them? From where do men and women have the force to restrain their force, an élan of life held in reserve, the power to not want to use or misuse power, and even the power not to want? It seems that just like Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, Bergson’s new philosophy of life cannot give us a satisfactory response to this question.

Notes Translated by Trevor Perri. 1. H. Bergson. ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ in The Creative Mind, trans. M.L. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 2002), 160/1394. (Translation of La Pensée et le mouvant.) All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of H. Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). 2. Compare, R. Bernet, ‘Drive: a Psychoanalytical or Metaphysical Concept? On the Philosophical Foundation of the Pleasure Principle,’ Philosophy Today, 51 (2007): 107–18. 3. H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Hereafter cited parenthetically as MM. 4. ‘Everything will happen as if we allowed to filter through us that action of external things which is real, in order to arrest and retain what is virtual: this virtual action of things upon our body and of our bodies upon things is our perception itself’ ( MM 232/363). 5. One should thus not confuse the degrees of ‘contraction’ and ‘dilation’ of the different levels of the same pure past with the intensity or relaxation of the ‘tension’ between the memories that compose these levels. The contraction of memories allowing their insertion into a concrete perception goes hand in hand with a decompression of their state of tension. Conversely, a greater dilation of the pure past, which results in the greater and greater specificity of each memory,

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7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

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Bergson and Phenomenology is accompanied by an augmentation of its state of tension. This is easily explained by the fact that an actualization of memories in a concrete perception (despite involving their concentration in a definite point) is equivalent to a passage from potency to act, and is thus equivalent to a loss of tension. The inverse movement of dilation, where one removes oneself from all actualizations of memory in the present and where one dives deeper and deeper into the past, heightens the dynamic potentialities of each virtual memory and thus, also its state of tension. ‘In other words, memory, laden with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state by two simultaneous movements, one of translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less, though without dividing, with a view to action; and the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns towards the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself which may prove to be the most useful’ (MM 168/307). See S. Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works (1914–1916), trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1968). (Translation of Triebe und Trienbschicksale.) H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911). Hereafter cited parenthetically as CE. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, Book II, § 26. H. Bergson, ‘Mind and Body,’ in Mind Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan and Company, 1920), 31/838. (Translation of L’energie spirituelle.) Hereafter cited parenthetically as ME. H. Bergson, ‘Brain and Thought,’ (ME 209/974). H. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ in The Creative Mind, 169/1402 One can question both the validity of Bergson’s demonstration, as well as its coherence with his own conception of ‘duration.’ The idea of a ‘substitution’ of one object by another, in fact, only seems applicable to the extensive order of simultaneously present material objects. The idea of a continuous creation, on the other hand, seems to imply a push of duration towards a future that does not yet exist. For these objections, see: C. Romano, ‘Bergson,’ in Le néant. Contribution à l’histoire du non-être dans la philosophie occidentale, ed. J. Laurent and C. Romano (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 483–91. In his long commentary on Metaphysics theta 1–3, Heidegger presents a particularly revealing interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the different sorts of forces and counter-forces. See M. Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics theta 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. W. Brogan and P. Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). For an overview of the various Heideggerian interpretations of Aristotelian dynamis and energeia, see R. Bernet, ‘La négativité et la contrariété des pulsions (Heidegger et Aristote)’ Alter. Revue de phénoménologie, 14 (2006): 65–86.

3 Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on Experience and Science Gary Gutting

The identity of philosophy has always been intimately associated with that of science. We can think of philosophy’s premodern period as the time, before the scientific revolution, when it was identical with science, when philosophy was simply the enterprise of understanding the world in all its aspects. How did the scientific revolution destroy this identity? By showing that there was at least one domain – namely, knowledge of the material world – where philosophy’s methods of rational insight and logical argument were not adequate. Here, it was gradually discovered (and, of course, anticipations of the discovery can be traced back to the very beginnings of Greek inquiry) that the empirical method of testing conjectures by observing whether their consequences were true was far superior. No doubt philosophy, considered simply as our search for ultimate truth or wisdom, could be regarded as employing this method. Then what the modern world has come to know as science would still be part of philosophy. But this is the mere contingency of words. The determining historical fact was that philosophy came to be identified with employments of reason other than the empirical, prediction-driven procedures of science. The future of philosophy, in the wake of these procedures, depended on the value of these other employments of reason. It is not, therefore, surprising that, roughly from the time of Descartes on, the critique of science becomes a major philosophical concern. Explicitly or implicitly, every modern philosophical enterprise has had to guarantee a place for itself by showing that there is something for it to know that escapes the grasp of empirical science. (I realize, of course, that some philosophers hold a methodological naturalism that assimilates their enterprise to empirical science. But for them, the fact that we still continue to talk of ‘philosophy’ – if we do – reflects only the contingent genealogy of certain discussions or the sociological classification of certain groups of inquirers. Philosophy has no irreducible epistemic status.) There have been many vehicles for staking out the domain of philosophy, from Descartes’s dualism through the positivist’s analytic-synthetic 63

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distinction. But one of the most persistently attractive has been the claim that philosophy can and should root itself in an experience with an immediacy or concreteness that escapes the abstractions required for successful empirical science. Here the general thought is that the precision required for rigorously testing hypotheses requires us to ignore certain aspects of our experience that are not open to scientific (for example, quantitative) formulation. The claim (or hope), however, is that philosophy is capable of giving us an epistemically adequate access to the experience that science must ignore. This appeal to a distinctive realm of philosophical experience is particularly prominent among the twentieth-century philosophers characterized as ‘continental’ and it has been especially important in the French philosophy of the last one hundred years. (I would suggest, in fact, that we can fruitfully read the entire development of this philosophy in terms of the effort to specify and exploit the immediacy or concreteness that eludes science.) It is, accordingly, appropriate to try to think through the complex questions of science, philosophy and immediate experience via some reflections on French thinkers. Here I find the work of two figures, Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, particularly helpful. I propose to sketch their critiques of the limitations of scientific knowledge, their consequent conceptions of philosophy as a distinctive epistemic domain, and their disagreements with one another on these topics. These disagreements will lead to my own concluding reflections on science, philosophy and experience.

1 Bergson and the limits of science Bergson sees science as essentially tied to what he calls the ‘cinematographical method.’1 By this he means that science always views reality not as a continuous flux (the duration that it in fact is) but as a series of instantaneous ‘snapshots’ extracted from this flux. In terms of a simple but fundamental example, science derives from the mind-set that makes Zeno’s paradoxes both inevitable and unsolvable. Bergson sees the scientific view as based on both the means it employs and the end to which these means are directed. Its means are signs (at first linguistic but eventually mathematical), which are constructed to ‘denote a fixed aspect of the reality under an arrested form’ (CE 357/773). This, moreover, is no accident, since its end is the control of nature and therefore more effective action in the world: ‘Science may be speculative in its form, disinterested in its immediate ends: in other words we may give it as long a credit as it wants. But … some time or other the payment must be made’ (CE 357/773). Now action, Bergson maintains, is always directed from a starting-point to an end-point and has no essential concern with whatever comes between the two. Therefore, science’s focus on action is necessarily cinematographic and its deployment of the discontinuous medium of signs inevitable.

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It might seem that such a construal makes sense for ancient science, which divided the world into a discontinuous series of qualitatively distinct essences or natures and for which, as Bergson puts it, ‘physics is but logic spoiled’ (CE 347/766). But what about modern science, which rejects the qualitative approach and conceptualizes the world as a continuous manifold, open to the technique of the differential calculus? Bergson recognizes the distinctive character of modern science but does not see it as abandoning the division of the natural flux into isolatable moments. Modern science abandons not the ancient division of nature into moments but the ancient assumption that certain of these moments are privileged over others in favor of the democratic view that science must be able to describe nature from the standpoint of any one of its moments. Thus, the ancients saw the motion of a falling body as intelligible in terms of the privileged moment of its telos, the earth to which it was naturally inclined. Galileo, by contrast, developed a kinematics for which ‘there was no essential moment, no privileged instant’ and for which ‘to study the falling body is to consider it at it matters not what moment in its course’ (CE 360/775). Accordingly, ancient and modern physics do not differ in their assumption that the flux of nature is divisible into discrete elements. They differ only on whether there is an intrinsically privileged division or an equivalence of all possible divisions. Bergson compares the difference to an ancient sculptural aesthetic that would see the horses on the Parthenon frieze as caught at a moment that distills the essence of their gallop with a modern photographic aesthetic that would see all instantaneous snapshots of the gallop as equally valid representations (CE 361/776). This difference has very important consequences, particularly the modern emphasis on quantitative rather than qualitative descriptions and the modern concern with laws rather than concepts. But the essential scientific view of nature as a succession of moments, as opposed to our lived experience of continuous duration, remains in place. It may be objected that modern science has given time an essential role, making it the independent variable in all its equations, whereas ancient science took a fundamentally static view of nature. Aristotle thought he had understood planetary motion adequately when he conceptualized it as circular (and even Ptolemy did not pretend to provide a physical explanation of celestial motions). But Kepler was not content with his discovery that planetary orbits were elliptical. He required laws that described how the planets traveled through these orbits over time. Bergson admits this modern enthronement of the temporal but maintains that the time in question is not the continuous flux of duration but a spatialized, immobile surrogate for it: In contrast with ancient science, which stopped at certain so-called essential moments, [modern science] is occupied indifferently with any moment whatever. But it always considers moments, always virtual

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stopping-places, always, in short, immobilities. Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as flux, or, in other words, the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge. (CE 366/779) It appears, then, that even modern scientific accounts fail to catch the essential movement of lived time. We might have expected, then, that modern philosophy, which was deeply concerned with finding itself a distinctive place in a cognitive realm more and more dominated by science, would have grounded itself precisely on lived duration. We might have expected a philosophy that rejected the ‘cinematographical method’ and focused on the ‘flux itself of duration’ of which ‘science neither would nor could lay hold’ (CE 372/784). Certainly, ‘this conception of metaphysics is that which modern science suggests’ (CE 373/784). However, although Bergson finds some hints of such a construal of philosophy, he admits that, on the whole, this was not the direction taken by Descartes and his successors. One reason was the abiding influence of the ancient view of reality, which made ‘time a degradation, and change the diminution of a form given from all eternity’ (CE 374/787). This view had led to metaphysical systems, from the Eleatic to the Aristotelian that, despite their differences, privileged eternal, spiritual structures and regarded the world of matter and change as inessential and ultimately unreal. Even Aristotle, who so resisted the Platonic separation of form from matter, ended by in effect combining all the forms into one, which he identified with the self-thinking ‘Thought of Thought’ and established as the ultimate unmoved cause of all motion. Modern metaphysicians were strongly inclined to ‘repeat with the new science what had been tried on the old’; that is, to view the new world of mechanized matter in the same way as the ancient metaphysicians had viewed their world of eternal forms: as a complete and unified system in which all truth and all reality were always simultaneously and already given. Admittedly, given its essential role as independent variable, time could not be simply reduced to an unreal status. But, since the modern view treated time as nothing more than a fourth spatial dimension, it could readily be viewed as having no creative efficacy, as merely the vehicle for the automatic unrolling of a nomologically determined sequence. Moreover, the direction modern philosophy took is the natural direction of the human mind, given its evolutionary orientation toward practical action. A metaphysics of duration is a precious theoretical truth, but not one for which we are adapted. ‘The science of matter proceeds like ordinary knowledge,’ perfecting and extending it but not altering its fundamentally cinematographic bias (CE 365/778). Descartes himself, according to Bergson, shows some inclination to the new metaphysical possibility in his separation of the mind as free agent (and God as continuous creator) from the universal mechanism of the external

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world. His dualism may well be incoherent, but it at least represents a bow to the reality of duration. By contrast, Spinoza and Leibniz, insisting on total systematic unity, return fully to the spirit of ancient metaphysics and refuse the new path suggested by the limitations of modern science. They transform the determinism that is a plausible methodological (that is, heuristic) rule of the new science into ‘a fundamental law of things’ (CE 378/790). The ancient system of concepts was merely replaced with a modern system of laws. Bergson sums up the essential similarity of ancient and modern metaphysics as follows: The resemblances of this new metaphysics to that of the ancients arise from the fact that both suppose ready-made – the former above the sensible, the latter within the sensible – a science one and complete, with which any reality that the sensible may contain is believed to coincide. For both, reality as well as truth are integrally given in eternity. Both are opposed to the idea of a reality that creates itself gradually, that is, at bottom, to an absolute duration. (CE 385/794) Bergson finds, however, in Kant an important tendency (not, admittedly, ever properly developed) to a new metaphysics. He agrees that, from one point of view, Kant’s philosophy ‘is only a continuation of the metaphysics of the moderns and a transposition of the ancient metaphysics.’ Certainly, ‘the philosophy of Kant is … imbued with the belief in a science single and complete, embracing the whole of the real’ (CE 387/795–6). Bergson does not, accordingly, read Kant as a critic of metaphysics as such. But he also sees Kant as developing an extremely important criticism of the modern metaphysics of Spinoza and Leibniz. The germ of this criticism is a distinctive feature, noted briefly above, of modern science as opposed to ancient: the focus on laws rather than concepts. Laws, Kant argues, are relations between two terms, and ‘a relation is nothing outside of the intellect that relates’ (CE 387/796). Since, then, as modern science tells us, the phenomenal universe is a system of laws, it follows that the ‘phenomena have passed through the filter of an intellect’ (CE 387/796). So far he is in agreement with the modern rationalist metaphysicians. The latter, however, go on to identify this intellect with that of God, the infinitely good and powerful source of the universe. Kant notes that there is no need to go so far, that the unification required for phenomena to be governed by laws might be provided by the human intellect. ‘Between the dogmatism of a Spinoza or a Leibniz and the criticism of Kant there is just the same distance as between “it may be maintained that –” and “it suffices that –”’ (CE 388/796). To this extent, ‘the criticism of Kant consisted chiefly in limiting the dogmatism of his predecessors, accepting their conception of science and reducing to the minimum the metaphysics it implied’ (CE 388–9/797).

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If this were all of Kant’s thought, he would offer merely a more modest and defensible – but, for Bergson, still misguided – version of modern metaphysics. But at the same time that he substituted human for divine intelligence as the source of the forms of our knowledge, Kant also insisted on a distinction between these forms and the matter of knowledge. The relations constituted by the intellect are, for him, between terms that have ‘an extraintellectual origin.’ Contrary to Spinoza and Leibniz, Kant ‘affirmed … that knowledge is not entirely resolvable into terms of intelligence’ (CE 389/797). Bergson argues that this extra-intellectual cognitive matter could and should be identified as the duration he regards as the content of our lived experience and of a new type of metaphysics. Kant, however, passed by this open door because he ‘believed this matter to be either coextensive with intellect or less extensive than intellect’ (CE 390/798). Rather than seeing the matter of knowledge as extending beyond its forms and providing the richer reality from which they are abstracted, he insisted that intellectual forms exist independently of matter, which had no role except to receive their imprint. As Bergson sees it, Kant thus subordinated matter because, despite the critical bent of his philosophy, he never questioned science itself. ‘The criticism of our knowledge of nature that was instituted by Kant consisted in ascertaining what our mind must be and what Nature must be if the claims of our science are justified; but of these claims themselves Kant has not made the criticism’ (CE 390/798). Kant held back from the critique of science because ‘he took for granted the idea of a science that is one, capable of binding with the same force all the parts of what is given, and of co-ordinating them into a system presenting on all sides an equal solidity’ (CE 390/798). In so doing, he ignored the fact that, as we move from the merely physical to the vital and then the psychical, science becomes less adequate as an account of our experience, that it becomes ‘less and less objective, more and more symbolical’ (CE 390/798). Formulated in terms crucial for both Kant and Bergson, Kant regards all our intuitions as ‘sensuous, or, in other words, infra-intellectual’ (CE 390/798). That is to say, for Kant, immediate experience yields knowledge only to the extent that it conforms to the structures of the intellect; beyond these structures it offers only the non-cognitive stuff from which knowledge is constituted. Kant thus ignores the possibility, exploited by Bergson’s philosophy, that there might be a supra- (or ultra-)intellectual intuition (CE 391/798–9) that would provide direct knowledge of concrete life and thought. Such life and thought are not things-in-themselves lying beyond our experience but the very stuff of that experience in its most immediate form, the stuff from which the world of the intellect is an abstraction. This stuff of immediate experience is, of course, Bergson’s duration, the lived passage of time that pervades our lives. Bergson develops the notion of duration and its significance for philosophy through his account of intelligence, instinct and intuition. As we have seen,

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the intellectual categories of science are not adequate to the concreteness of our immediate experience of lived duration. Intellect, although it is biologically the distinctive human trait, is a limited instrument of knowledge, formed to deal only with inert matter, that has ‘a natural inability to comprehend life’ (CE 182/635, emphasis omitted). But humans can overcome the limitations of the intellect, for we are, biologically, creatures of instinct as well as of intellect; and instinct is directed to the singular, concrete object, that is, to time as duration. Ordinarily, of course, instinct lacks the distance from objects needed for theoretical knowledge of them; its access to duration remains an unreflective sympathy that goes no further than an implicit know-how. But, according to Bergson, it is possible for instinct to become disengaged, for it to ‘become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting on its object’ (CE 194/645). Instinct then becomes intuition, the privileged vehicle of philosophical knowledge of duration. Bergson thinks that the possibility of something like intuition is apparent from the reality of aesthetic experience, which grasps the temporal unity of individual objects in a way that normal, spatialized perception does not. Philosophical intuition is the basis of an ‘inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life in general for its object’ (CE 194/645). The turn toward generality derives, according to Bergson, from intelligence itself. ‘Without intelligence, [intuition] would have remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special object of its practical interest’ (CE 646/195). Philosophy is born from a fundamental cooperation between two complementary powers: ‘There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them’ (CE 167/623, emphasis omitted). Intuition is precisely instinct directed toward the intellect’s goal of general, theoretical knowledge. The object of intuition so understood is precisely duration. As opposed to instinct, intuition does involve knowledge of duration, but this knowledge cannot be expressed in conceptual or theoretical terms. It seems to exist simply as an awareness of the limitations of all concepts and theories. We should not expect, therefore, any explicit articulation of the philosopher’s intuitive knowledge of duration; such knowledge can never be incorporated into the realm of thought. But this knowledge does enable us to see the points at which various modes of thought become inadequate, and hence to avoid intellectual paradoxes that would otherwise lead us to deny fundamental realities such as freedom, life, morality and God. Two generations after Bergson, the young French philosophers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s were once again seeking a philosophy grounded in the immediacy of experience. Their teachers, dominated by Brunschvicg, had raised them on a neo-Kantian idealism that they found removed from direct contact with the immediacies of life. They were eager for a philosophy of the concrete. It is extremely interesting that they turned not to Bergson but to a German philosopher who was his exact

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contemporary: Edmund Husserl. Merleau-Ponty himself raises this issue in some reflections (in 1959) on the attitude of himself and his contemporaries around 1930: If we had been careful readers of Bergson, and if more thought had been given to him, we would have been drawn to a much more concrete philosophy, a philosophy much less reflexive than Brunschvicg’s. But since Bergson was hardly read by my contemporaries, it is certain that we had to wait for the philosophies of existence in order to be able to learn much of what he would have been able to teach us. It is quite certain – as we realize more and more today – that Bergson, had we read him carefully, would have taught us things that ten or fifteen years later we believed to be discoveries made by the philosophy of existence itself.2 There were, no doubt, important psychological and sociological reasons why Merleau-Ponty and his friends did not take Bergson seriously. By the 1930s, his radical metaphysics had been appropriated by vapid ‘spiritualist’ thinkers and his last book, Two Sources of Religion and Morality, well justified his increasing affinity for Catholicism. From one point of view, the entire story is summed up in Père Sertillanges’s remark that the Church would never have put Bergson’s books on the Index in 1913 had it realized how his thought would look by 1934.3 But the rejection of Bergson did not remain without philosophical basis. Merleau-Ponty’s treatments of him in The Phenomenology of Perception (and his lectures on Bergson a few years later) are clearly the products of a ‘careful reading’ and raise serious philosophical objections. At the same time, there are interesting grounds for a Bergsonian critique of phenomenology. For a generation that sought a philosophy grounded in immediate experience, Bergson was a potentially viable alternative to Husserl. My concern is to understand the philosophical reasons, if any, that might ground a preference for Husserl over Bergson.

2 Merleau-Ponty and the limits of science My focus will be Merleau-Ponty and, in particular, his phenomenological critique of science. The domain of phenomenological inquiry is what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘phenomenal field,’ roughly, our immediate experience as we actually live it through (as opposed to scientific, philosophical and even common sense reconstructions of that experience). Merleau-Ponty particularly insists on the inadequacy of both science and traditional philosophical reflection for providing an accurate and complete description of this field. According to Merleau-Ponty, the basic problem with a scientific approach is that the deployment of its rigorously empirical and quantitative

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methodology requires regarding the contents of the phenomenal field as fully determinate and totally objective (that is, in no way dependent on our experience of them). Science must conceive of its objects in a way that allows them to be understood entirely in terms of ideal mathematical constructs. This means that science understands everything, including not only inanimate but also living, feeling and thinking bodies, as nothing more than a set of physical elements connected by causal relations. As a result, even the human body becomes pure exteriority, a mere collection of parts outside of parts, interacting with one another according to scientific laws. On this view, genuine subjectivity is simply eliminated, something that Merleau-Ponty regards as an obvious travesty of our experience of the phenomenal field. This is the motivation behind his dramatic statement that phenomenology’s ‘return to the “things themselves” … is from the start a rejection of science.’4 He also thinks he can show that the purely scientific account fails systematically when it is applied to particular physiological and psychological data; when, for example, we try to understand sense perception in terms of sensations produced by the brain’s interaction with the world. The general problem in all these applications is that the phenomenal field involves irreducible meanings (significations) that cannot be dealt with in objective causal terms. Science cannot, for example, explain why (to take an example from Max Scheler) ‘the light of a candle changes its appearance for a child when, after a burn, it stops attracting the child’s hand and becomes literally repulsive’ (PP 52). Rationalist and idealist philosophers have opposed the scientific reduction of the phenomenal field and agreed with Merleau-Ponty that the phenomenal field is prior to the objective world of science, which represents an abstraction from it. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, their mistake (and even, in some texts, Husserl’s), is in going on to subordinate the phenomenal field to a domain of transcendental subjectivity, a separate and entirely ‘inner’ world accessible only via special acts of introspection or intuition. This domain is said to provide a privileged reflective standpoint from which we can, in principle, have completely explicit knowledge of the phenomenal field, by understanding how its meanings are constituted by the transcendental ego. Despite their differences, the empiricist (scientistic) and rationalist (intellectualistic) approaches are grounded in a common desire to make our fundamental experience of the world entirely explicit and disengaged. The world must be the pure object of either an autonomous subjectivity or an autonomous scientific method. The mistake in both cases is to think that there can ever be total disengagement from the phenomenal field. Both scientific objectification and philosophical reflection are themselves rooted in and ultimately inseparable from the lived world. To overcome the mistake, we must realize that there is no going beyond the phenomenal field, neither below it via a empiricist reduction nor above it by idealistic constitution.

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We must, in other words, remain on the concrete level of existential phenomenology. The key to avoiding empiricist and idealist errors is to maintain a proper appreciation of the central place of the body in our experience. The body is not an object on a par with other objects. As my body it is the ineradicable locus of experience, the standpoint from which I must perceive the world. This is apparent from the perspectival nature – both spatially and temporally – of perception. We experience an object situated in a surrounding world and hence as having different perspectives from different positions. In this sense, an object, far from being seen from nowhere (as empiricism and idealism would suggest), is in fact seen from everywhere. But among all these perspectives, that from here – that is, from the perceiving body – is privileged. My gaze actually presents only those aspects of the object that are apparent from here (that is, given in a full perceptual synthesis); all other perspectives are indefinite and only presumptive. The body is privileged with regard not only to perspective but also to all other perceived meanings, such as color or tactile sensation. How one might experience, say, a pin-prick, depends not only on the pin but also on the internal disposition of the body that is being pricked. ‘The function of the organism in receiving stimuli is, so to speak, to “conceive” of a certain form of excitation’ (PP 75). There is a ‘constitution’ of the objects of my experience, but it is through a pre-conceptual structuring provided by my body.

3 Bergson versus Merleau-Ponty Bergson and Merleau-Ponty both see science as a ‘thin’ form of knowledge in comparison to the ‘thickness’ of experience. But they seem to have different views of just what experience involves. Merleau-Ponty notes that Bergson ‘shows in a profound way that science should be considered not only with respect to its completed formulas but also with an eye to the margin of indetermination which separates these formulas from the data to be explained.’ He further comments that metaphysics, for Bergson, ‘would then be the deliberate exploration of this world prior to the object of science to which science refers.’ Up to this point, he clearly approves of Bergson’s approach: ‘In all these respects it seems to us that Bergson has perfectly defined the metaphysical approach to the world.’5 But he remains dubious of Bergsonian intuition. His doubts can be cast in the form of a dilemma. On the one hand, Bergson’s intuition may be taken as pretending to ‘the absolute observer’s viewpoint’ that would ‘transcend the world.’ If so, ‘Bergson is not fully aware of his own presuppositions and of that simple fact that all we live is lived against the background of the world.’ If, on the other hand, Bergson in fact avoids this illusion of transcendence and ‘his philosophy is finally to be understood as a philosophy of immanence,’ then ‘he may be

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reproached with having described the human world only in its most general structures (e.g., duration, openness to the future); his work lacks a picture of human history which would give a content to these intuitions, which paradoxically remain very general.’6 Moreover, in developing this second horn of his dilemma, Merleau-Ponty objects not merely to the generality of Bergson’s account but to its rejection of certain essential structures of lived experience. Bergson rightly rejects the scientific view of reality as a mere ‘multiplicity of things externally juxtaposed.’ But his alternative to this view is a ‘multiplicity of fusion and interpenetration.’ Specifically, Bergson’s duration swallows up objects, along with the space and time in which they exist, into an amorphous unity: ‘He proceeds by way of dilution, speaking of consciousness as a liquid in which instants and positions dissolve.’ Bergson’s mistake is to ‘seek a solution in ambiguity.’ Merleau-Ponty maintains that ‘space, motion and time cannot be elucidated by discovering an “inner” layer of experience in which their multiplicity is erased and really abolished.’ The problem with Bergson’s intuition is that it purports to be a purely internal experience prior to any division between subject and object. Evoking Kant, Merleau-Ponty argues that ‘external experience is essential to internal experience,’ that there is an implicit separation of subject and object, of consciousness and world, in even our most immediate experience (PP 276, n. 1). Merleau-Ponty makes the same point in terms of the central Bergsonian notion of time. As Bergson describes it, duration is a concrete unity in which what the intellect distinguishes as past, present and future are all dissolved. Consciousness, as Bergson’s famous metaphor has it, is a snowball rolling down a hill, including the whole of time in a homogeneous unity. There is, according to him, a principle of continuity whereby ‘the past still belongs to the present and the present already to the past.’ But then, Merleau-Ponty argues, ‘there is no longer any past or present.’ ‘If consciousness snowballs upon itself, it is, like the snowball and everything else, wholly in the present’ and the structures of temporality (past, present and future) lose all meaning (PP 276, n.1; for the snowball image, see CE 4). To sum up: Merleau-Ponty maintains that if Bergson is offering a description of our actual lived experience in the world then the description is inaccurate because it dissolves into a unified flux of structural elements (past, present, subject, object) that need to be differentiated for our experience to have any meaning at all. The only alternative would be for Bergson to maintain that he has gotten beyond our lived experience and attained a transcendent, absolute standpoint that yields metaphysical truth beyond that which is available to lived experience. Bergson would not be without response to this critique. For one thing, he is entirely aware of the level of description at which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology operates. It is, indeed, the level at which Bergson himself operates in the beginning of Matter and Memory, where, as Merleau-Ponty

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himself puts it, he offers ‘an astonishing description of perceived being.’ Indeed, Merleau-Ponty goes on to say: Never before had anyone established this circuit between being and myself which is such that being exists ‘for me,’ the spectator, but which is also such that the spectator exists ‘for being.’ Never had the brute being of the perceived world been so described. By unveiling it according to duration as it comes to be, Bergson regains at the heart of man a preSocratic and ‘prehuman’ meaning of the world.7 But Bergson himself, at least by the time he wrote Creative Evolution, regarded this sort of description of perception as less than ultimate. The problem is that perception itself is structured by our practical activity in the world and is, therefore, informed by the categories appropriate for action. As we noted at the outset, these categories replace the continuity of life with the more practically effective discontinuities of spatial and temporal moments and separately existing bodies. There is, of course, a continuum from the full abstraction of mathematicized science, which maximizes discreteness and intellectual structure, to the philosophical intuition of pure duration, which, if only for brief moments, unites us with the full concreteness of the temporal flux. Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions in Phenomenology of Perception, like Bergson’s similar descriptions in Matter and Memory, allow us to avoid certain puzzles and confusions resulting from the extreme abstractions of science (for example, intractable forms of the mind-body problem). But they themselves, Bergson would maintain, are still significantly imbued with intellectualist categories. The very phenomenological project of description requires general categories that distort the lived experience of pure duration.

4

Conclusion

We see, then, that although Bergson and Merleau-Ponty agree on the fact that scientific knowledge is incomplete because it abstracts from the full concreteness of lived experience, they disagree on the proper philosophical characterization of that experience. Nor, of course is this sort of disagreement limited to these two philosophers. To Bergson’s duration and MerleauPonty’s phenomenal field we may add, for example, the classical sense-data account of Hume and the positivists, Reid’s common sense realism, even the pantheistic sensibility of certain mystics – and with these we remain within our own Western tradition, taking no account of the lived experiences of less accessible cultures. It might be maintained that this merely delineates the essential philosophical project of discovering just what is given in immediate experience. But can we in fact even imagine carrying out such a project? Recent philosophy on both sides of the Channel has devastated the idea that immediate

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experience is an epistemic given that can serve as the ultimate ground of our cognitive structures. I suggest that the very idea of a unique experiential given is equally vulnerable – and to many of the same considerations. For example, the critiques of the idea of interpretation-free observation, combined with arguments for the historically contingent nature of interpretative categories, refutes not only foundationalism but also the claim to have discovered the unique character of immediate experience. Accordingly, I see no point in trying to adjudicate the dispute I have evoked between Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. To my mind, the lesson of the confrontation I have evoked is that experiential immediacy is a well from which many buckets may draw. The ‘immediate givens of consciousness’ (to echo the title of Bergson’s first book) are an irrefutable and inevitable starting point of any inquiry. But while the sheer experience itself is certainly given, no preferred or controlling description or interpretation of it is. Experience can be read in many different ways, each with its own plausibility, self-consistency, and limitations. Some of these readings may be mutually incompatible, but many are literally consistent, tensions arising only when we ask which is the most comprehensive or most concrete. It is these latter questions I suggest we eschew, at least in their general form. On the whole, questions of superiority make sense only given a specific context, perspective or purpose. Experience as such is no doubt an absolute, but there is nothing absolute that follows from it. What, then, can we conclude about the status of philosophy and of science as ways of knowing? Scientific methods can, of course, be applied in one way or another to any subject matter at all. But there is no guarantee that these methods (essentially, the rigorous intersubjective testing of precisely formulated hypotheses) will tell us everything we want to know about a given subject. This is particularly true of experience, the first-person awareness that is our constant and immediate mode of encountering the world, and especially ourselves. It seems that scientific accounts always leave out something of this awareness; they do not, as Einstein remarked, give us ‘the taste of the soup.’ It is, however, easy to conclude too much from this fact. It does not, for example, follow that there is another realm of things outside of those treated by science; for example, spiritual substances such as souls. Nor does it follow that the entire domain of consciousness could never be entirely understood in terms of strictly empirical scientific categories. But at the very least we can say that immediate experience cannot be ignored. Science must ultimately come to terms with it, and we cannot imagine our lives not centering on it. This is sufficient to justify the projects of philosophers such as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. But there is no basis for assuming, as do both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty (along with many other philosophers), that any one description or account of immediate experience is uniquely correct. This may be true of scientific accounts of the ‘external’ world (though the point is controversial even

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there); but there is good reason to suspect that, for a domain as complex and elusive as experience, no one formulation will be comprehensively and exhaustively adequate. In appreciating and evaluating the great philosophies of experience, we should rather think of each as a particular vocabulary, with its own strengths and limitations, which we can expect to be of varying values for different purposes. In this regard, I would suggest, philosophies are like novels, not alternative absolutes among which we must choose the ‘right one’ but different perspectival visions (perhaps complementary, but perhaps incompatible or even incommensurable) all of which have their relative values and uses. In thinking about the relative significance of science and philosophy, it is crucial to avoid not only the well-known fallacy of scientism but also the much less noted fallacy of what I will call philosophism. Scientism illegitimately infers from the success of science in knowing certain aspects of reality its ability to know anything, in any domain, that is knowable. Philosophism is the corresponding error of arguing from the inability of science to know certain sorts of truth (regarding ethics, religion or subjective experience) to the ability of philosophy to achieve such knowledge. Bergson and Merleau-Ponty make effective cases against scientism by showing that science succeeds precisely by excluding from its purview certain domains of truth. But it does not follow that there is some non-scientific, philosophical method (Bergsonian intuition, phenomenological description) that knows this truth. Skepticism may be the proper conclusion from the cognitive failure of science in a given domain. My own conclusions about the prospects of philosophical cognition are not quite skeptical. But I would suggest that there is hyperbole in the claim of any philosophical method to have a privileged insight into the deliverances of experience. Nonetheless, the immediacy of experience is the primary source for philosophers’ development of overall ‘pictures’ of human existence.8 The philosophical instinct has long been to insist that we need to establish just one comprehensive picture as uniquely preferable, something I think we are very unlikely to do. But our inability to establish the unique privilege of a general picture does not imply that we have no need to develop such pictures and maintain them through theoretical formulations. A first and crucial point is that general pictures are essential elements of human culture. We have an ineradicable cosmic urge to act out of a comprehensive understanding of our situation. Even a view, like mine, that is skeptical about substantive grand narratives deploys this very skepticism as a general vision of the human predicament. Further, individuals and even entire cultures can face destruction through persistent adherence to a failing picture. The people perish not only when there is no vision but also when their vision no longer provides effective responses to the exigencies of life. When a dominant picture fails, we need others to replace it. It follows that the creation of alternative pictures – a primary achievement of philosophy – is culturally vital.

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But a picture has no value for us unless we perceive it as a live option. There are, of course, many merely affective reasons why certain pictures remain dead for us. But, at some level, intelligence is always a factor in our lives and the viability of a general picture will always importantly depend on whether we see it as coherent and plausible. We therefore need formulations of our guiding visions that make them intellectually respectable, even if they do not vindicate them over all rivals. This is the positive function of philosophy and carrying it out requires passionate and meticulous attention to the concreteness of lived experience.9

Notes 1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 357. Hereafter cited parenthetically with the abbreviation CE. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of H. Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). 2. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosophy of Existence,’ in Texts and Dialogues, ed. H. Silverman and J. Barry, Jr, trans. Michael Smith et al. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992), 132. 3. L. Kolakowski, Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 94. 4. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), viii. Further references will be given in the text as PP. 5. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Metaphysical in Man,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. and P. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 97n.15. 6. Ibid. 7. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ in Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 185. 8. I develop the idea of philosophical pictures more fully in What Philosophers Know: Argument and Intuition in Recent Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 9. Parts of this chapter are taken from my ‘What Have We Been Missing? Science and Philosophy in Twentieth-Century French Thought,’ in B. Leiter and M. Rosen (eds), The Oxford Companion to Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4 Man Falls Down: Art, Life and Finitude in Bergson’s Essay on Laughter Stephen Crocker

Bergson’s thesis on laughter is beautifully simple: laughter is the recognition of our failure to submit life to mechanism. In a joke or a gag, some plan or schema breaks down. Knock-knock jokes create in us an anticipation that the punch line brings to an abrupt end. Slapstick characters are restricted to such a narrow range of movements that they are defeated in the simplest of tasks. A speaker who repeats the same gestures is funny because, while his thoughts seem to be fluid and to change with the progression of his speech, his physical expression lags behind it. Things that are funny always concern a discord between what we had planned and what is actually occurring, between expectation and contingency, and so ultimately between mechanism and vitality. At the heart of the comic is a profound absentmindedness. We laugh when it seems as though life had forgotten to move forward and instead skipped and repeated itself like a broken record. In this way, laughter unites our most trivial encounters (a banana peel on the road) with the greatest flights of intellectual abstraction so that we may suppose that anyone who laughs has arrived at a metaphysical insight into the relation of spontaneity and repetition, life and art, or even being and event. With all the resurgence of interest in Bergson’s work, it is strange that his essay on Laughter is still largely overlooked. This long essay or short book published in 1901 occupies an unusual place in Bergson’s oeuvre. It continues themes already begun in Matter and Memory – the breakdown of sensory motor schemas, the subtractive nature of perception, the relation of mind and body – and it offers some of Bergson’s most interesting insights on the tension between mechanism and vitalism that informs all of his work. Laughter anticipates the critique of science that he would later develop in Creative Evolution and shows us that Bergson’s concerns about mechanical thought are not a romantic throwback to the pre-industrial age, but are based on the more exciting prospect that passing through the wasteland of mechanism will offer us some new insight into what sort of covenant we might make with the means – the gestures, languages and machines – in which our lives transpire.1 78

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For all these reasons Laughter remains compelling and instructive. Why then does it receive so little interest? It is remarkable, for instance, that Deleuze’s highly influential Bergsonism contains nothing about the essay.2 I suspect that this lack of interest may be due to its strong moralizing impulse. Under the otherwise inventive and illuminating essay is a weak sociology of moral regulation. Society demands flexibility, Bergson concludes, and laughter is a way of singling out whatever cannot bend with the contingencies of life and, through derision, of correcting it. Of course, we need to be aware of the political nature of derisive, contemptuous and ‘totalitarian’ laughter. But it is by no means obvious that ‘society’ demands flexibility. Couldn’t we argue, after all, that what society demands is routine, predictability and order? Or, shouldn’t we at least historicize Bergson’s image of society and see whether some social orders require flexibility, and others not? Bergson the sociologist is as disappointing here as he is later in the Two Sources of Morality, the other text that receives little attention – all of which raises the difficult matter of how we should read this essay today and how we might balance its metaphysical and moral dimensions.3 To this end I have found it helpful to consider a distinction, proposed by the literary critic James Wood between a pre-modern, theological humor that is based on a comedy of correction and a modern, secular humor of sympathy.4 An older, religiously inspired humor assumes an air of superiority and advantage over the subject at whom we are invited to laugh. This is the basis of comedy for Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Schopenhauer and countless others. A very different kind of comedy emerges with the modern novel that has as one of its central aims the cultivation of forgiveness or sympathy. This may be easily summarized as the difference between laughing at someone and laughing with him or her. The modern novel gives us characters who are free to contradict themselves without being corrected by the author. To clarify this distinction Wood invites us to consider one of the most compelling images in Bergson’s essay on comedy. In a section in which he discusses the ‘anesthetics’ of laughter, Bergson explains that that we have to cease to care about a thing in order to laugh at it. It is enough to plug our ears to the music while watching dancers perform in order to see the comic absurdity of their actions. Wood suggests that in this passage Bergson imagines that we view dancers with an air of superiority. We have an advantage over them since we know what they do not, namely how silly they now appear without the accompanying music. But what if, Wood goes on to ask, the watcher knew nothing of the music and saw instead a set of bizarre, unintelligible movements? He would not feel superior but might think that he was watching some macabre dance of death in which he was directly implicated. In these two very different scenarios we have the difference between a comedy of correction and a comedy of forgiveness, or sympathy.

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I have found this passage very helpful for understanding the significance of Bergson’s essay. It is true, as I pointed out earlier, that Bergson wraps up his thesis in a philosophy of moral regulation. Nonetheless, the essay’s central concerns go well beyond the comedy of correction. The basic problem Bergson addresses is the interval between the matter and manner of things, or in an older language, the essence and existence of things. This element of the essay contains powerful ideas for understanding both of the kinds of comedy that Wood outlines. In fact James Wood’s distinction, helpful as it is, raises the thornier question of what laughter must be if it can take on these two very different modes. On my reading, Bergson’s essay helps us address this problem. The basic cell of all humor is the broken schema. Whether we see that as a correctable fault of the comic’s victim, or a fallibility that we all share, the central question is still whether laughter reveals some fundamental truth about the nature of organization and time. In this regard, laughter per se is ‘beyond good and evil’ and concerns the most elementary relation of mechanism and vitality. This theme connects Bergson’s essay on Laughter with the most far-reaching metaphysical problems that run through all of his work. We are then faced with the very odd situation wherein the tools that Bergson gives us point beyond the conclusions at which he himself arrives. This is the same dilemma that Gilles Deleuze encountered in his reading of Bergson’s remarks on cinema.5 In spite of all the enthusiasm from those who wanted to see in the then new technology of cinema an image of the mind’s internal operations, Bergson himself dismissed film. He even went so far as to adopt the name ‘cinematographic thought’ to describe the unauthentic, reified and ‘spatial’ caricature of thinking that his philosophy opposed. Deleuze claimed that in spite of this disavowal, Bergson’s ideas contain all the essential ingredients for understanding the significance of the moving image. Bergson missed this significance because he only saw the most elementary kinds of film. It would require fifty years of filmmaking for the Bergsonian quality of the movies to become apparent. Should we say the same about laughter? Did it require the self-deprecating humor of Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Steven Wright, or the postcolonial novels of Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee or V.S Naipaul, and the countless local regional comedy troupes like Newfoundland’s Codco, to recognize the comedy of fallibility or finitude that invites us to sympathize and laugh with characters who find themselves in impossibly difficult situations? Could it be that, in the same way that he missed the significance of the cinema developing around him, Bergson also missed out on the significance of the new tragicomic novel? Whatever the answer to that question, Bergson’s essay contains essential ideas for understanding the ‘truth’ in laughter. For this reason I believe that rather than engaging the moralizing element of Laughter we would do much better to try to recover its basic metaphysical problem, which concerns the tension of vitality and mechanism that runs

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through all of Bergson’s work and finds some of its most interesting treatment here. In a word, it seems to me that if humor has an ethico-political dimension, as Bergson suggests, it does not (or does not only) lie in its capacity for social control, but in a more fundamental and existential problem that we might call the phenomenology of finitude. With this phrase I mean to indicate the basic problem of how we take ourselves in our finitude as objects of reflection, how we come to appear to ourselves. By finitude, I do not mean the fact of death exactly, but the dependence of our being on some object in which it comes to life. Finitude is receptivity, as Heidegger makes clear, which means that our being is always resolved in some concrete form that we ‘receive’ and that places us here or there, in this or that body or situation. As a result, we can only gain access to what we are through an engagement with the forms of being and kinds of identifications that we have.6 What we are remains in important ways outside us – at once external and constraining. Here is where we find the philosophical significance of laughter and, indeed, of Bergsonism in general. When we laugh, we find ourselves estranged from the language we use, the bodies we live in and the situations in which we find ourselves: I laugh, I am finite.

1 Laughter and subtractive perception At the center of Laughter is an old phenomenological truism that we learn most about ourselves when our schemas fail. Heidegger made this idea famous with his example of the hammer whose qualities we question only when it breaks down. Freud compared the mind opened to analysis to a crystal, which, flung to the floor, breaks so as to reveal its lines of cleavage.7 Earlier still, Bergson had made breakdown a central concern of Matter and Memory. In that book, he explained that our sensory motor schemas are guided by a ‘subtractive perception’: we perceive a thing minus all that does not interest us (MM 38/187–8).8 We screen out those elements of a situation that do not correspond to our needs. This filtering of experience produces a ‘habitual recognition’. Our sensory motor schemas allow us to navigate the things of the world and make use of them. We connect past, present and future together into habits. In this way, we give form to life. Or try to. For when life responds with unexpected contingency, whether it be as banal as a banana peel in our path, or as serious as a financial meltdown or outbreak of war, then our schemas no longer work and we wonder how they were ever put together in the first place. This theme of the broken or interrupted schema is also the guiding insight of Laughter. Things comic open up for our consideration the most elementary form of a situation. How does expectation come about? What is a schema? What does it try to regulate? Why do schemas fail? Where are we and what are we when we no longer belong to the most basic ordering principles of language (Dwayne the bathtub I’m

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dwowning), logic (either this man is dead or my watch has stopped working) or bodily movement (man falls down)? To appreciate the metaphysical element of Bergson’s thesis on laugher it helps to keep Matter and Memory close at hand. There, Bergson shows us that when the world becomes uncanny and our ‘sensory-motor schemes’ fail us, we turn to recollection. In ‘a series of attempts at a synthesis’ the mind tries to make the object intelligible by surrounding it with ‘recollection-images’ (MM 102/247). Bergson compares the mind engaged in this way to a telegraph clerk who, on receiving an important dispatch, sends it back again, word for word, to check its accuracy. Each sheet that is brought forward envelops the object, and in so doing, establishes a whole new perceptual circuit and movement-structure. The clerk occupied in this way, does not accept the veracity of the message he is printing, nor the original from which it derives. He is the middleman, who occupies a space between transmission and reception. Memory per se is this work of conveyance back and forth. Bergson compares the formation of habit to the way that ‘the multitudinous successive positions of a runner are contracted into one single symbolic attitude, which our eyes perceive, which art reproduces, and which becomes for us all the image of a man running’ (MM 209/343). Recollection unravels this tightly-wound thread of instants and brings us to the point of their diffusion – the pure past – where the most basic syntheses of time are put together. When we want to recall something from memory, Bergson explains, we do not go immediately to the past image. We first enter the ‘Past in General’ and, from there, move toward a particular memory (MM 133–4/276). He likens this to the way in which, when looking for a word in a foreign language, we do not go right to the word, but first enter the language, and from there orient ourselves toward a particular word. The essay on laughter brings us into a similar kind of intervallic state, which is not exactly between presents, but between the matter and manner of events. As any comedian will tell you, ‘man falls down’ is the basic cell of all jokes. Why is it funny? Because man had expected – unconsciously perhaps – to be able to walk along without event and continue on in some scheme or narrative he had planned. The conceit of the schema is that life would offer no other obstacle. The falling man is funny, then, because at that moment when life required something new, he just kept doing the same old thing. He fell into the interval between the future he had projected and the present that placed some new claim on him. He is suspended between the singular point of time in which he now finds himself and the long continuum he had laid out. We laugh, however, not only because a habit has ceased to work, but also because, like memory, this moment of breakdown opens onto a more intensive engagement with the situation at hand. When habits fail us, we look

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more attentively to see what our original perception had subtracted from view. What ‘absented’ element has returned to interfere in our plans? This is how we learn when we fail: perception is lifted out of the realm of use and need and connected instead with a circuit of thought and reflection where the activities of projection, synthesis and habit formation take place. A comic situation directs us to the point where perception and action meet. Consider a man falling down: what is even funnier than his falling is the little gesture he makes when, dusting himself off, he turns back to examine what had tripped him up. In that instant, he has entered the foreign language of movement where the chance encounter of the banana peel, the body and the stretch of time circle around each other before getting linked in a sequence. A new point in time interrupts an established pattern. And just as the ‘past in general’ does not belong to any present but is the connective tissue that links them in an order, so too in laughter we do not belong to the past where we had planned our actions, nor to the present where we tripped up, but to the interval between them, where a moment is hooked onto a sequence. Simon Critchley has shown how the temporal structure of many jokes oscillates between a point and a continuum.9 A joke usually has some long drawn out sequence in which a narrative or scenario is established: did you hear the one about the German, the Pole and the American who went fishing? Knock-knock jokes have an almost unbearable prelude to the punch line, which is a sudden interruption of a long line by a short point. The laughter produced is in direct proportion to the ratio of prelude to punch line. The important fact, however, is that humor is not in either the point or the line. It is not synchrony or diachrony that is funny, but the clash between them.

2 Life and art Jokes reveal to us the most basic activity of making time (or temporalizing), where we hook a point onto a line, a moment onto a sequence. This is the interval, according to Bergson, where we respond to the reception of sense with the execution of a sensory motor pattern we impose on it. Laughter signals our arrival in this division between life – what presents itself to us – and art, or what we try to do with the given. And, since we are the only creatures that shape life as an art, laughter always concerns the human element. It always reveals the stamp of the human on the trace of life. Even if we find a landscape humorous, Bergson argues, it is because we imagine that it has been fashioned in this way – into a nose or penis or an animal, for instance, by some human agent. For the same reason, bodily deformity makes us laugh because it appears to be an extra supplement that human agency has added on to an otherwise ‘normal’ body. In passages that date the essay from what seems like a prehistoric age, Bergson asks why we laugh

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at the hunchback (because he seems to be a normal person to whom a hump has been added) and the Negro (who appears to be a white person who has been painted black) (L 86/406). Laughter always concerns our efforts to stamp our human designs on the blind force of life. When our schemas fall out of synch, the form we give to life lags behind the vital force that thrusts onward, indifferent to our need. This clash of art and life is most apparent in humor that addresses the division between the moral and the physical dimensions of a person. We say of someone in whom these two elements are in stride that they have grace. The body seems to be animated by the spirit passing through it. Roland Barthes famously celebrated Audrey Hepburn’s face because it registers the changes taking place in its interior in a perfect way – gracefully.10 When body and soul come apart, however, we ask about incarnation and embodiment. Charlie Chaplin’s jerky movements lack grace, and therein lies their comic potential. He makes his body seem like a machine he has to carry along, which is always one clumsy step out of tune with his thoughts. So, ‘any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person when it is the moral side that is concerned’ (L 93/411). Jesus jokes, for example, usually concern Jesus’ bodily form. They undermine his divinity by showing how it must transpire in a carnal vessel. Jesus and Moses were strolling by the Red Sea. ‘Moses, my boy,’ said the Messiah, ‘I have still got it.’ And with a flourish of his robes, Jesus stepped onto the waters of the Red Sea and began to stride across without so much as a ripple. But to Moses’ amazement, halfway across the water, Jesus suddenly began to sink. He splashed into the water and began to choke and flounder as the waves tossed him around. Moses grumbled at Jesus’ silliness, parted the water and helped Jesus back to shore, as the Savior hacked up salt water. When they had finally reached shore, Moses slapped a consoling hand on Jesus’ shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Lord. Last time you tried it, you didn’t have holes in your feet.’ We expect Jesus to walk and he sinks. We expect the Lord to rise above his earthly condition and he does not. And so, for the humblest of reasons – because his feet have a material form in which his divine essence must take place – Jesus is comical. Man falls down. Jokes like these direct our attention to the sensuous qualities of Christ’s incarnate form. We consider that it has a weight that falls in a certain way. We wonder how a body hangs on a cross. We examine the unexpected complications that arise from having holes in your feet. With an almost scientific zeal, comedy returns us to the sensuous particularity where grace takes place. Magnificence finds it has to settle down. In the return to these details, in the scintillating, intensive engagement with the event, the joke requires us to reconsider what we thought we had known about a situation. What

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had we skipped over in our rush to make a plan? Comedy, then, is intellectual in a way that many other modes of comportment are not. It suspends the purposiveness and the need in activity in order to see what there is to learn in it. To speak phenomenologically, a joke or a comic sketch makes visible the background of a situation. It places in question the unstated assumption that gives an event its definition. Comedy has a defamiliarizing or alienating effect. It creates an ‘anti-environment’, as Marshall McLuhan calls it.11 It breaks down the givenness of an environment and makes us ask how we had ever constructed one in the first place. In other words, comedy directs us away from the figure at hand to the background against which it appears. In this way, it shares something in common with the phenomenological technique of epoché – the active suspension of our preconceived notions about things. Unlike the phenomenological gesture, though, Bergsonian laughter does not lead back to the transcendental conditions of experience, it directs us to the middle ground between the matter and the manner of being.

3 The anesthetics of laughter Bergson describes an ‘anesthetic’ quality of all things comic. Laughter always involves a ‘momentary anesthesia of the heart’ (L 64/389). We have to cease to ‘care’ about a thing in order to laugh at it. It is not exactly that we take up a callous indifference to the event, but that we can only laugh at something after we have removed it from the immediate sense of purpose that usually accompanies it. Laughing, we find ourselves in a peculiar relation to the purposive activities of the world. Our interest is not in the contents of an event, but in the way that it occurs. We observe it without being engaged. We stand there between the reception and transmission of a message, or the planning and execution of an event. I am a witness who watches without being involved. The comic sees the body’s movement not as a means to achieving some end – whether that is the simplicity of crossing the street, or the complexity of world domination. When we gaze on human movement separated from its need or plan, when we see the gesture isolated from its goals, we are better able to concentrate on the way that we occupy our bodies and the manner in which our matter occurs. So, laughter requires a suspension of concern, which is what is meant by an ‘anesthesia of the heart’. We suspend our anticipatory care and concern for the thing. In our habitual activities, we see the thing minus what does not interest us. In laughter that need is suspended and we see the thing without the purpose that otherwise filters it. How else could Richard Pryor mime for comic effect the gestures of his prostitute mother being mounted from behind, as the little Richard Pryor looks on? On stage he becomes his mother, writhing to the rhythm of a client as she, dead-pan, smoking a cigarette, files her nails,

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and decidedly uninterested, tells him what he wants to hear – ‘oh yeah, you’re really something, I never had it so good.’ Watching Richard Pryor play his mother is unbearably sad, and unbelievably funny. But not at the same time. We flip back and forth between pity and laughter. We suspend the pity in order to laugh. We cannot care and laugh at the same time, says Bergson. When we laugh we find ourselves on the perimeter of an event – inside it and tuned intensively to its details, but strangely separate from it too. To strike a more philosophical note we could say that the comic pursues what Alain Badiou, in a very different vocabulary, calls the nothing or the void of a situation – what constitutes the situation as a situation, but cannot be counted within it.12 All comedy is situation comedy, in this sense, since it always concerns the nature of a situation. Badiou asks us to consider what would remain of a situation if all its particularities were removed. What is the husk or shell of an event? What is the simple fact of its occurrence? Whatever that is, he concludes, must be distinguished from the events that occur within it. The fact is that the phenomenological disclosure of an event cannot be counted among the contents of the event. What makes the erotic possible, for instance, is not itself erotic, or as Deleuze says the source of information is not itself a piece of information.13 Still, while this may be true, we have no other way into this truth element of a situation than through some kind of intensive engagement with the elements in it that can be counted and quantified. The comic listens for the element that resonates with the noise of the outside and disrupts our habitual recognition. This requires a special kind of attunement to the world, which is not exactly an insight into what things exist, but how they do so. The comic gathers all the energy that we expend in establishing the rigor and seriousness of a situation and throws it, judo-like, against itself in an effort to move from the particular countable event at hand, to the being that it discloses. This explains why anything has a comic potential. Everything is material for the clown. What is our complaint to the class clown – to you, everything is a big joke, a big ha-ha. But there is a truth in that since, whatever the seriousness and gravity of the situation, there is always noise to be detected, there is always an outside. And so every situation has comic potential, hence Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay or Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful where even the death camps become an opportunity for laughter. This element of estrangement, the search for the void of the situation, is best illustrated through the comedy of movement and gesture. Bergson writes some beautiful and fascinating passages on gesture. These are all the more interesting now in light of Giorgio Agamben’s more recent suggestion that gestures reveal something about what he calls our ‘human being in a medium’. A brief comparison of Bergson and Agamben on gesture will return us to the thoughts on laugher and finitude with which we began.

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4 Movements and gestures Bergson’s thesis on gesture, like his remarks on graceless deformity, addresses the discord between body and soul. The comic fixes attention on our gestures rather than our actions in order to direct us to the space between our interior and exterior lives. To clarify the point, Bergson makes a useful distinction between gesture and action. Action is intentional and conscious and aims toward some definite effect. Gestures, on the other hand, are ‘the attitudes, movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a kind of inner itching’ (L 153/455). Gesture is involuntary, automatic and aimless. More importantly, action unfolds in exact proportion to the feeling that inspires it. The ease and efficiency with which Clint Eastwood lifts and shoots his pistol seems to be in exact proportion to the accuracy and speed of judgment he has made on the situation before him. But repeat the action out of context or make it appear to be a mechanical, repetitive action and the effect is comic. For Bergson, this is because it is disconnected from any interior state. The gesture itself is not funny. What it reveals about the relation of body and soul is. This is why even the most revolting of our gestures can be comic. When you vomit, for instance, the mouth opens and the stomach’s contents pour out. Look closely, though, and you see that between the opening of the mouth and the heaving of the gut there is a little pause and a clucking sound that originates somewhere between the diaphragm and the throat. It is the hidden expression of vomiting. It is what we do in spite of our best efforts to conceal our own repulsiveness from ourselves. At a certain point, the great Newfoundland comedian Andy Jones tells us, I began to recognize these little gestures and moments that others did not. In his one man show The King of Fun, Jones explains that, as a young man, he watched his friends go off to school to become doctors and lawyers but, he explains, while I knew that I could probably do those things too if I tried, I knew that I could never could do them as well I do that little clucking sound of someone vomiting … Anyone could be a judge or a teacher, or a cabinet minister. But only a handful of people see that little (gag) in the vomiting. I’m sorry kids, your father is not a doctor or lawyer … I vomit, I sneeze, I fart, I burp. I do them altogether.14 Kierkegaard describes, in his contemporary the Berlin comic Beckmann, this same ability to separate a gesture from the schema of need and utility in which it is embedded: He is not only able to walk, but he is able to come walking. By means of this genius he also improvises the whole scenic setting. He is able not only

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to portray an itinerant craftsman; he is also able to come walking like one and in such a way that one experiences everything, surveys the smiling hamlet from the dusty highway, hears its quiet noise. He can come walking onto the stage by street urchins whom one does not see.15 ‘To come walking’ is to walk in such a way that the ways and means of walking are what is at stake. The purpose of the walk is suspended and walking itself is placed on display. Our interest is no longer in what it means or accomplishes, but in how it takes place. It is this ‘purposiveness without purpose’ that stirs Agamben’s interest in the ‘pure mediality’ of our gestures. His thesis, while not specifically about the comic, is in many ways very close to Bergson’s. In the endless newness and ‘permanent obsolescence’ of modernity, Agamben explains, our gestures are ripped out of their sensory motor schemas. But, as the ‘the nineteenth century bourgeoisie lost its gestures,’ it also saw opening up before it a new kind of reflection on human embodiment which was neither moral (how one ought to be in a body) nor aesthetic (what an idealized body would be) but something altogether different.16 In a range of nineteenth-century developments – from Gilles de Tourette’s classification of human gestures, to Muybridge and Marey’s photographic breakdown of bodily movement, on into cinema’s analytic division of action into 24 frames a second – Agamben finds a new interest in the mechanical isolation of gesture and the separation of action from purpose. In Muybridge’s famous photographs and filmic experiments – such as ‘Man walking at normal speed’ and ‘Walking woman picking up a jug’ – the arm swinging is no longer part of a march. It is simply an arm swinging, arrested in its being toward some completed activity. If it were allowed to continue in its stride, the swing would be a means to carrying out some ambulatory goal. Directed away from its goal, however, it is simply a gesture, a means of moving the human body in a yet to be determined pattern. The inoperative gesture, as we might call it, offers us insight into what we are through an intensive gaze into what we do. Muybridge reveals the ‘apparatuses’ and ‘prostheses’ in which life transpires by removing them from the meaning that usually contextualizes them. We occupy a middle region, between the spirit that we are and the bodies that we have. Here in this interval we cannot escape our gestures, but neither can we fully belong to them, or be reduced to them. They are all, in some important way, external. But hasn’t this metaphysical interest in gesture, which Agamben locates in nineteenth-century media, long been the territory of the comic, and the clown in particular? Doesn’t the mime, for instance, already anticipate this intensive gaze into human movement? The comic plays back our actions for us, ‘comes walking,’ not to instruct us on how to better execute our movements, and not to offer them as complete aesthetic facts as they might be in dance, for instance. The comic replays

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our gestures for us in order to make visible this middle ground between the objective situations in which we find ourselves and the subjective capacities in which they make sense. Helmuth Plessner showed that laughing and crying are both kinds of liminal experiences where this difference between being and having a body becomes apparent.17 When we laugh, our bodily comportment and control break down and our physical being makes a demand on us. We are doubled over, racked with laughter, or conversely, in the face of a disturbing event – a death, for example – we can surprise ourselves as we collapse in tears. In these moments the body asserts itself and we lose mastery over it. Plessner’s thesis is not that we become the body, in a Rabelaisian revelry, but that in laughter we are brought into the divide between being and having. Our eyes water, we gasp for air as the hilarity overwhelms us. But even now as we lose all composure and seemingly become our bodies we are never that far away from the cognitive end of human experience, since it is always possible to say what we are laughing at – what we find funny – even if it is not entirely clear why we do. Agamben claims that gesture ‘Allows the emergence of the being-in-amedium – of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.’18 Notice that the claim is not that any given gesture itself is ethical. Gestures do not offer any particular code for living. Rather, the ‘anesthetic gesture’ opens up the division between being and having a body, between the life we are given and the art that we make of it, and presents our ‘humanbeing-in-a-medium’ as the most basic problem of how to be in the world. With this in mind we can return to my earlier comments on why we might want to ‘retrieve’ the more profound elements of Bergson’s thesis on laughter and separate it from the conservative theme of social regulation in which he presents it. Bergson’s usual gesture is to search through the mechanical world for evidence of some pulse of vitality that mechanism supposes but overlooks, or perhaps even suppresses. So, in Time and Free Will he wants to show that the quality of quantity makes the quantity of quality possible, or more simply that discrete multiplicities suppose the existence of continuous multiplicities. In Matter and Memory the point is that memory cannot be derived from the presents that it connects, but supposes a ‘past in general’ in which they communicate. In Creative Evolution, the scientific language of T1 and T2 supposes an open whole that science itself is incapable of describing. In each case, the detailed analysis of mechanism directs us to a vitality that cannot be contained in the discrete point elements of a machine. A similar theme runs through Laughter. Whatever vitality flourishes in gestures is not contained in these structures but is negatively marked out in them, like a kind of x-ray print that shows a thing through its absence. Gestures always lag behind the vigor of the living being. We only ever see the after effects of our being. So, that part of us that can be imitated, mechanically replayed and automated is never where the whole vitality of the living being can be located. As Bergson writes,

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our mental state is ever changing, and … if our gestures faithfully followed these inner movements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would never repeat themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay. We begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter. (L 81/402) We can only imitate those parts of ourselves that do not belong to us. Nonetheless, gesture shows us that we have nowhere else to look for insight into what we are. There is no other cache of evidence but the husks and shells, the wake of being, the bodies that we have, the dying animals that we are trapped inside. Bergson here is very close to Agamben who concludes that the fascination with gesture shows that The subject … is not something that can be directly attained as a substantial reality present in some place; on the contrary, it is what results from the encounter and from the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses in which it has been put – and has put itself – into play … Subjectivity [must] show itself and increase its resistance at the point where its apparatuses capture it and put it into play. A subjectivity is produced where the living being, encountering language and putting itself into play in language without reserve, exhibits in a gesture the impossibility of its being reduced to this gesture.19

5 ‘I collect moments’ The comic interest in this difference between what we are and how we are is beautifully summarized in the famous signature phrase of one literature’s best-known clowns. ‘I am a Clown. I collect moments,’ declares Hans Shier, the protagonist of Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown. ‘Moment’ is the word that Böll uses to describe the little turns and pregnant instants and gestures that a clown collects and replays for comic effect. The phrase is especially illuminating from a Bergsonian point of view because it directs us to a basic division at the heart of the comic’s gesture between the event that occurs in time and the time in which the events takes place.20 What Hans Shier collects are the moments, not the actions that fill them up. For there are lots of other unfunny occasions when we might imitate the military gait, the tinkerer’s gestures, the prostitute and her client, or the way

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that a body vomits. These are not funny until we take up a certain relation to them. Only when we suspend concern, when we cease to roll the point of the moment into the line of a schema, is it funny. When we ‘anesthetize the heart’ and separate the matter from the manner, we distinguish the moment from the activities that occur within it. In this way, we are led to the difference between the conditions and contents of events and so too, as Hans Shier’s phrase reminds us, between time and the intra-temporal events that occur within it. Time, as Kant, Bergson and countless others have reminded us, is not a thing. It is rather the most general condition of any event. The great sea of being – whether one understands this to be the mind of God or the mathematical complexity of the universe – is always individuated in some specific event. It always has a ‘thisness’ and a ‘nowness’. Still, while time may be a transcendental condition in which events occur, we can only get at it through the events that it orders and makes possible. Now is always ‘now that,’ Aristotle concludes. Now that it’s time to get up; now that we have burned a hole in the ozone layer; now that we are thinking about time. If that is true, then a moment is never available as a pure element without something occurring in it. We only get at time, or collect moments, through its resistances, its refusal to be counted among the events that it facilitates. God knows no distinction between here and there, now and then. In God’s mind – scientia dei – everything is tota simul, or simultaneously whole. For God, all is one, or one with everything as the Buddhist monk said to the hot-dog seller. But for us, finite creatures, who must exist in something and as something, who oscillate between the conditions and contents of experience, everything has a time. Each event must be distinguished from the next. This uniqueness gives each event a quality that we can distinguish from its quantity, or from the countable things that occur within it. ‘Intratemporal events,’ as we might call them, have a repeatable and countable quality. It is always possible to enumerate and therefore to imitate the things that occur in time. They have a measure of regularity and permanence. They involve signs and activities that can be repeated in other contexts. Their regularity is the basic material of any comic routine and, in fact, allows it to be routine. The sheer fact of occurrence, however, the husk of an event, is transient and rises and falls with each specific act. The ‘thisness’ or hacceity of an event is the absolutely singular quality that it does not share with others. All of which is to say that if the clown collects moments, then when he assumes a gait, mimes a face, or replays a story, it is not the events themselves that he wants to collect. Instead, he distills from them the stamp they bear of this individuation, the trace they carry of the enstatement or world entry that runs like a watermark through all events, no matter what activity is occurring in them.

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6

Finitude

This is why, as I mentioned earlier, Bergson’s essay, and Bergsonism in general, is best understood in the context of the nineteenth-century discovery of finitude. We come into the world through some set of conditions – a body, a language, a culture – that we did not choose but with which we must form some relation. I use words that are there before I came into the world. I live in a body that moves itself toward death, and I participate in a culture that has a form and structure that shapes me. My relation to these forms of life is complex. My words have no existence until I speak them and bring to them to life. I, however, have no enunciative function until I utter these dead letters in some recognized form. I cannot refer to myself, or distinguish myself from all others, without using the pronoun I; yet it is the same device that billions of others use, so in what sense does it refer to me? I actively move myself through the world, but in gestures and bodily forms that I have passively received. Michel Foucault says that there is a space, or a distance at the center of our being, where we continually shuttle back and forth between the transcendental conditions of experience and their empirical contents. We don’t belong fully to either of these because we are both at once. Man is the being who must live this doubled existence. A subject is defined neither by the storehouse of events it experiences, nor the set of conditions that makes it possible. In The Order of Things, Foucault writes a history of modern thought as a difficult pirouette around these two determinations. ‘Man’ is the being who finds himself straddled across this void. Trying to get some foothold in that abyss, he throws his weight on one or the other of its edges. So, one stream of modern thought deals with the problem of finitude by formalizing the contents of experience. Structuralism, positivistic strains of social science, and analytic philosophy with its catalog of truthful functions and propositions, all try to describe the contents of experience and draw up an index of the possible permutations of human thought. Another stream, opposed to this, and of which Husserlian phenomenology may be the best example, tries to distill from our engagement with things the transcendental conditions of our experience of any of them. Bergsonism stands out from both of these positions for its attempt to fuse these two dimensions of experience. Bergson begins from the premise that thinking is movement and mediation. The brain is an interval between the reception of sense and its execution in sensory motor schemas that combine thought and action in ways that are useful for life. Foucault described this resonant interval as a ‘fold,’ a ‘thin surface,’ an ‘opening,’ and a ‘rent,’ and man as a ‘distance’ within it.21 Elsewhere, he describes the nineteenth-century discovery of our finitude as ‘the opening of a narcissistic wound in our culture,’ suggesting a parallel between the narcissist’s withdrawal of investment from the object world, and the

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modern withdrawal of investment from the infinite, or the great chain of being.22 Just as the self, for the narcissist, becomes an object of love, so in modernity’s ‘inversion in the structure of finitude’ the finite becomes the ground of its own possibility and determination. In other words, for us moderns the finite ceases to be the merely limited, the merely apparent, and becomes instead, to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze, ‘an unlimited finity,’ a finitude without limit, a limit that is itself without limit.23 If finitude is a wound, that is because the gaping hole remains unhealed and unhealable. Phenomenology and structuralism are both ways of trying to sew up this unhealable wound. Now, in our everyday encounters with the world the space between these two dimensions of human experience recedes into the background and we can make use of the world and ourselves. We receive sensations from the world and execute these in sensory motor schemas that make the body and the world useful. Our actions have ends and purposes. We focus on how one action meets up with another that follows it. Some experiences open up that Foucauldian gap and give us insight into what we are. Philosophy is one way into that difference. Laughter and its comic dimension is another. One of the benefits of this approach to comedy is that we do not confuse the comic with any particular set of gestures, or routines. The comic is a relation to the order and regularity of events. Every comic has a routine, of course. There is always some device that breaks down – mechanical, bodily or linguistic. Bergson reminds us that repetitive, machine action is the real home of the comic. But the whole point of the comic’s routinization is to build schemas, devices, machines of one sort or another whose only purpose is to allow us to witness how they break down. The clown builds up an expectation in order to have it come to nothing, to show how it fails to contain the noise and point us to the background conditions of our lives.

7

Laughing machines

It’s easy to mistake Laughter and Bergsonism in general as a simple, romantic critique of the machine. It seems that it is only when the machine breaks down that we gain access to the spontaneous – the élan vital. Is Bergson suggesting, then, that if we could find some way of bypassing the contrivances we force onto life, we would have a more direct access to the spontaneous, or the comic? This is the thrust of many of the critiques of Bergson’s vitalism, from Bertrand Russell and Wyndham Lewis on down to Alain Badiou.24 Bergson seems to offer us a simple opposition of life and machine, and a moral judgment that favors one above the other. But this reading misses an important element of Bergson’s thesis. What Bergson says is that laughter emerges only when the machine breaks down. We laugh at the man who falls down because ‘the muscles continued to perform the same actions when the situation called for something else’ (L 66/391).

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It is in the falling itself that the person becomes thing-like and this is funny because only then do we recognize that a future-oriented schema that had been put in place was not flexible enough to deal with the contingency that had emerged in the meantime. The discord between machine and life, signal and noise, only becomes apparent at the moment of its breakdown. We only know the true through the correct, as Heidegger says. There are accidental situations in which this merges. But a gifted comic can build them too. Simon Critchley has recently argued that we should abandon a whole tradition that sees philosophy originate in wonder.25 It is common to suppose that speculative thought begins with the awe we feel in the sublimity of nature, or the expanse of the universe, or the impenetrability of another’s gaze. The philosophical impulse today originates instead, Critchley argues, in a sense of failure. The promise of modern philosophy from the Enlightenment on is to liberate us from our self-imposed domination, as Kant put it. The barbarism of global capitalism, our ineptitude in controlling the risk of industrial life, the collapse of the grand narratives the human sciences promised us all conspire to make us wonder about the relation of life and the artful designs we impose upon it. I have been trying to show that it is a central premise of Bergson’s work that we learn more about ourselves from our mistakes, when our schemas fail. This would suggest that philosophical insight does not originate in either simply failure or wonder, but that the two are inextricably bound together. For Bergson, failure is the precondition of any sense of wonder. We only gain insight into what reveals itself ( physis) through some engagement with the things that are made (techne). What we are saying about laughter here is, oddly enough, very close to what Heidegger says about Greek tragedy. At several points in his work in the 1930s Heidegger turns his attention to Sophocles’ Antigone, to distinguish the way that truth is revealed in ancient Greece from its modern technical presentation. In his An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger reads these famous lines from the ‘Ode to Man’ in Antigone. He set sail on the frothing waters amid the south winds of winter … and [he] hunts the beasts of the wilderness and the native creatures of the sea … And he has found his way to the resonance of the word, and to windswift all-understanding, and to the courage of rule over cities.26 The poem is often understood to be a paean to the world of man, his domination of the physical environment and the supremacy of human design over the nature in which it appears. Heidegger reads the poem in an entirely different way. The Greeks imposed their plans on nature, harnessed the wind and water, and fixed their schemas on the contingency of things, not out of a hubristic confidence in their abilities but as a method of inviting being to reveal itself. In other words, they wanted to watch and see how things break

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apart. But notice that the premise here is that physis (what reveals itself) does not precede techne (what is made). We have no immediate access to the taking place, or being of things except through some engagement with techne, which lets us see what it does not capture. As David Tabachnick explains, The sailor, by harnessing and manipulating the wind and water, is coercing the elements to do his bidding. Likewise, the farmer, hunter and city builder are taking hold of the movement of nature and violently imposing form onto it. But this imposition of form is merely temporary. Eventually, the violence of techne is countered by the violent return of the movement of nature: these products of techne become targets of nature’s wrath, destroyed or swept away by the very elements they temporarily harnessed. The products of techne are ‘scenes of disclosure’ in the sense that, through their destruction, human beings come to recognize the temporality of all things and come to think about or question the authentic or primal truth of all of existence. So, by sailing we bring to light the overpowering force of the sea, by hunting we highlight the overpowering pain of hunger, and by building cities that inevitably fall to some sort of disaster we recognize the power of nature to destroy all the more. In all of these things, the limits and finitude of beings come to light through a pushing back by nature. Presumably, without the building of technical products, this coming to light, this disclosure would not occur.27 Deleuze and Guatttari say we are desiring machines. Aren’t we also laughing machines? Don’t we make comic machines that are strong enough to hold the noise but supple enough to break down and let it come through? In the King of Fun Andy Jones creates a quite brilliant laughing machine. It is a beautifully simple device: he counts laughs. He has an assistant operate a scoreboard and each time someone laughs the numbers increase by one. A riotous applause gets ten. This has a most unusual effect on the audience. The visible quantification of their laughter produces a kind of rolling hilarity. Initially, the laughs begin in relation to some joke. But once one laugh is produced in this way it is registered as a number on a scoreboard and the registration causes the audience to laugh and they then laugh at their laughing at the numbers. The effect is something like a perpetual motion machine – the breakdown of a pattern produces laughter. The pattern of the laughter then becomes a system of regularity that can be hijacked and turned against itself. Equally fascinating is the strange role that the comic assumes in relation to his machine. As the laughing meter does its work, Andy Jones ceases to be the comic telling jokes and becomes for a moment a bureaucrat who is simply operating the device. He steps out of the function of comedian and appears now to be working together with the audience in some kind of Stanley Milgram-esque experiment. Strangely, it is now, when he himself insists on being unfunny, when he is a technocrat of

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laughter, that we recognize him as a master comic who can build a device out of anything, even our laughter. He literally makes us laugh, which is to say that he fashions us into a collective device that that produces laughter. To get at the timing, the moment of the event, something has to be quantified, and then broken down. In the hands of a gifted comic, anything will do. Even the pattern of your laughter.

Notes 1. H. Bergson, Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, in Comedy, introduction and appendix by W. Sypher (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1956), 61–190. Hereafter cited parenthetically as L. Compare, Matter and Memory, trans. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1911). Hereafter cited parenthetically as MM. See also, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1944). Hereafter cited parenthetically as CE. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of H. Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). 2. See G. Deleuze, Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); English translation by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam as Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 3. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R.A. Audra and C. Brereton, with the assistance of W.H. Carter (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1935). 4. J. Wood, The Irresponsible Self: on Laughter and the Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). 5. L’Image-mouvement. Cinéma 1 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983); English translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 6. M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 31. 7. S. Freud, ‘Dissection of the Personality,’ in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 73. 8. There, Bergson writes, ‘Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies: it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally, for our functions’ (MM 38/187–8). 9. S. Critchley, On Humor (New York: Routledge, 2002), 6–7. 10. R. Barthes, ‘The Face of Garbo,’ in Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). 11. M. McLuhan, ‘Art as Anti-Environment,’ Arts News Annual, 31 (February 1965): 55–57, 55. 12. See the editors’ introduction to A. Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. and ed. O. Feltham and J. Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 11. 13. G. Deleuze, Cinema I: the Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 269. 14. A. Jones, The King of Fun: a One-man Show, at LSPU Hall, St John’s Newfoundland, September 2002.

Art, Life and Finitude in Bergson’s Essay on Laughter 97 15. Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in T. Adorno, ‘Chaplin Times Two,’ Yale Journal of Criticism, 9(2) (Spring 1996): 57–61, 58. 16. G. Agamben, ‘Notes on Gestures,’ in Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49. 17. H. Plessner, Laughing and Crying: a Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. J.S. Churchill and M. Greene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 18. G. Agamben, ‘Notes on Gestures,’ 58. 19. G. Agamben, ‘The Author as Gesture,’ in Profanations, trans. J. Fort (New York, Zone Books, 2007), 72. 20. H. Böll, The Clown, trans. L. Venneweitz (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965). 21. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of Human Sciences, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1972), 330–2, 340. 22. M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’ in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy,’ ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 61. 23. G. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 131. 24. W. Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); A. Badiou, Deleuze: the Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2004). 25. S. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Political Resistance (London: Verso, 2007). 26. M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press), 146–7. 27. D. Tabachnick, ‘The Tragic Double Bind of Heidegger’s Techne,’ PhaenEx,1(2) (2006): 96–7.

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Part II Intersections: the Bergson/ Phenomenology Debate

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5 Intuition and Freedom: Bergson, Husserl and the Movement of Philosophy Hanne Jacobs and Trevor Perri

The relation between Bergson’s philosophy and French phenomenology has received far more attention than has the possibility of bringing Bergson’s philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology into dialogue.1 This is not only because Levinas, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty all at some point directly engage with Bergson’s philosophy in their work, but also because both the method and the aim of Bergson and Husserl’s philosophies seem incompatible.2 Most generally stated, unlike Husserl, Bergson does not aim to provide a description of the essence of acts of consciousness; and unlike Bergson, Husserl is not at all interested in developing a metaphysics that would ‘penetrate more deeply into the interior of matter, of life, or reality in general.’3 Nevertheless, despite such straightforward differences, for both Bergson and Husserl, true philosophical thought involves a kind of intuitive experience that is only possible once we have put aside habitual interests and the way of thinking that is customary in daily life. For both philosophers, since this experience is intuitive, and not constructive, it is akin to what we normally call seeing. But since both are convinced that this new way of seeing is not natural, they stress that, as philosophers, we must first learn to see differently. So, for example, Husserl writes that ‘the phenomenologist, first and foremost, must learn to see phenomenologically.’4 For Bergson, the role of the philosopher, like that of the artist, ‘is precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive’ (PM 135/1370). For Husserl, this new way of seeing is the transcendental experience that is facilitated by the transcendental reduction; for Bergson, this seeing is the immediate experience of duration enabled by his method of intuition. As Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘my perception of my duration is an apprenticeship in a general way of seeing. It is the principle of a sort of Bergsonian reduction.’5 Furthermore, for both, this philosophical way of seeing is intimately related to freedom. As we will show, for Bergson, it is ultimately in the immediate experience of our duration that we are most free. Similarly, for Husserl, the transcendental reduction is not only performed freely, but it also sets us free. As Husserl writes, ‘by means of the phenomenological 101

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reduction as “transcendental reflection,” the I frees itself from the limits of the naturalness of its being.’6 Thus, we will see that for both Bergson and Husserl, in one way or another, the pursuit of freedom is intrinsically linked to the pursuit of philosophy and the novel experience it enables.

1 Intuition: discovery or invention? In his work on Husserl’s theory of intuition, Levinas points out that ‘Husserl, like Bergson, had an intuition of his philosophy before he made it a philosophy of intuition.’7 Indeed, a look at the development of Husserl’s philosophy shows that, more often than not, his actual phenomenological investigations precede and seem to motivate his methodological reflections. But Levinas wants to claim more than just this and writes: ‘the intuition which [Husserl] proposes as a mode of philosophizing follows from his very conception of being.’8 However, the fact that Husserl, like Bergson, insisted that a specific method was required to guide his mode of philosophizing suggests that the being it gives access to is not the one that we are always already familiar with. As Husserl writes: ‘prior to any method for determining matters within the field of phenomenology, a method is needed in order to bring, without exception, the field of affairs pertaining to transcendentally pure consciousness within the regard which seizes upon it.’9 Ultimately, for Husserl, being is transcendental subjectivity or the correlation of constituting consciousness and the world it constitutes. And indeed, Husserl pairs the discovery of consciousness as constituting, which he often said was like the discovery of a radically new continent,10 with an equally radical method suited to bringing this new field of experience into view – the transcendental reduction. That is, the major achievement of the reduction is precisely to open up this field, and thus the method of transcendental reduction makes the discovery of transcendental subjectivity possible. Husserl himself writes that ‘it is not only factually so that we have an access to transcendental subjectivity through the method described, but this, or a related method, is indispensable as such to discover it. I emphasize: discover.’11 If we also recall, however, that, according to Husserl, we are unaware of the transcendental perspective while in the natural attitude, then we might wonder with him: ‘how can we have this knowledge prior to the phenomenological reduction, which is what first brings transcendental subjectivity, as universal absolute being, within the compass of experience?’12 That is, how can we know that there is something to discover beyond the natural attitude until we have discovered it and how can we do so? Interestingly, there is a similar tension in Bergson, whose method of intuition paradoxically seems both to follow from and to make possible his understanding of being in terms of ‘duration.’ At first glance, it appears that Bergson discovers pure duration and subsequently develops the method of

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intuition in order to lead us to discover the same. Bergson himself suggests as much when he writes in a letter to Höffding that ‘the theory of intuition, to which you give much greater weight than that of duration, only emerged for me quite a long time after the latter; it is derived from it and can only be understood through it.’13 On further consideration, however, it is hard to believe that Bergson would have seen anything like duration at all without the implicit workings of a certain intuition of what there is to be seen. That is, it is hard not to think when reading Bergson’s work that intuition, which he only explicitly declares as a method in ‘The Introduction to Metaphysics’ (1903), is already implicitly at work in both Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896). For instance, isn’t making the distinction between a quantitative and a qualitative multiplicity,14 or between homogeneous space and concrete extensity,15 already a kind of exercise of intuition? Indeed, Bergson seems to express the idea that his earlier works utilize a nascent form of the method of intuition when he writes in retrospect that: ‘My initiation into the true philosophical method began the moment I threw overboard verbal solutions, having found in the inner life an important field of experiment’ (PM 89/1330). Bergson generally contrasts intuition with the contentment with pre-given philosophical convictions and distinctions. Bergson’s gesture of throwing such ready-made convictions and distinctions overboard was enabled by his having a kind of intuition of something else. Thus, we can agree with Levinas’s claim that Bergson, like Husserl, had an intuition of his philosophy before he made it a philosophy of intuition. The question is, however, whether Bergson, like Husserl, thought of his method as a method of discovery. Further, is the metaphor of discovery at all apt to grasp what happens in the kind of philosophical breakthrough that both Bergson and Husserl accomplished in their work? This question is motivated by Bergson’s concern with a pervasive and functional way of thinking against which he himself repeatedly warns us: namely the retrospective illusion of thinking that ‘the possibility of things precedes their existence’ (PM 99/1339), or more specifically, the illusion of thinking that the real is the actualization of a virtually pre-existing possibility. Of course, once an event takes place, we can say that it was possible in the sense that nothing made it impossible. However, we should distinguish this kind of possibility, understood negatively as an ‘absence of hindrance,’ from possibility understood more positively as ‘pre-existence under the form of an idea’ (PM 102/1342). Bergson is especially wary of the latter kind of possibility. So, for example, one could rightly say that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was possible before it was written in the sense that there was nothing that made it impossible for it to be written. However, the thought that there was the pre-existing possibility of Hamlet of which the Hamlet that was written is an actualization, is for Bergson, an illusion.

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Applied to intuition, Bergson’s emphasis on the primacy of the real over the possible calls into question certain ways of thinking about philosophical intuition and what it intuits. Namely, it discourages us from thinking of what is intuited as a pre-existing thing that is already there and awaiting discovery. Rather, just as Bergson writes that ‘the artist in executing his work is creating the possible as well as the real’ (PM 103/1343), the accomplishment of the act of philosophical intuition also creates the possibility of what is intuited. Thus, Bergson writes that posing philosophical problems ‘is not just discovering, it is inventing. Discovery has to do with what already exists, whether actually or virtually: it is certain to be made sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have been’ (PM 51/1293, translation modified). Looking into Bergson’s emphasis on the nature of intuition as invention or creation will allow us to understand how intuition and the exercise of philosophy is, for him, in the end, an exercise of freedom. Although it is not yet clear how performing the transcendental reduction might also be an expression of our freedom, we aim to show in what way this can be said to be the case. In order to be able to do so, we devote the next two sections to Bergson and Husserl’s respective methods of intuition. We start with Husserl and ask ourselves if the phenomenological seeing really just discovers what had always been there awaiting discovery. In order to answer this question, we look into the nature of transcendental experience.

2

Phenomenological experience

For Husserl, transcendental reflection reveals something about our ongoing experience of the world that this experience by its own nature conceals from us. That is, living in a straightforward manner in our perceptual awareness, we only experience that which is other than this experiencing. In Husserl’s words: ‘Life, whose functioning enables pre-givenness and each givenness apperceiving experience is itself not pre-given and apperceived.’16 In order to unconceal (enthüllen, aufdecken) what is concealed (verhüllt, verborgen) in the natural attitude, a method is required that redirects our gaze to what normally remains outside the scope of this attitude. Such redirection can, according to Husserl, only be accomplished by a method of epoché, a bracketing or inhibiting of the straightforward directedness to the world and the position-taking on being, value and goals that this directedness entails. In and through this bracketing, a purified seeing or ‘phenomenological perception’ is enabled.17 And what is seen in this phenomenological perception ‘is the “phenomenon” of the houseperception, table-perception, etc. Or also, this ego cogito, this “I perceive this house, this table etc.”’18 Let’s press the differences and similarities between this phenomenological perception as it is enabled by the epoché and the straightforward transcendent perception of the natural attitude.

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Like the seeing in outer perception, the phenomenological perception or intuition characteristic of phenomenology is an original seeing. This means that in both outer perception and phenomenological intuition, the perceived is leibhaft da, given in person here and now. But unlike the object of an outer perception, in the case of a phenomenological intuition, the intuited is said to be absolutely given. As Husserl writes in a lecture course given around the same time as Ideas I: ‘the phenomenological reduction leads us, for the first time, to absolute givenness … i.e., to phenomenological perception’ (Hua XIII, 159). But what can be seen in this way and in what way is it facilitated by the phenomenological reduction? One of Husserl’s major insights with respect to outer perception is that it is always a pretension to see more than what is given in the sense that, in perceiving, we always posit more than what is absolutely given. Although a spatial object is always given from one side, I ‘see’ it as an object having more sides than the one that now appears and I believe in its existence in and beyond all of its partial appearances. In order to obtain an absolute intuition, I could thus bracket, but without negating, the positing character of the transcending intentions involved in every outer perception. In doing so I do not end up with nothing and by no means do I simply reduce to the present sensations. That is, I am free to bracket my positing, but it is not within my freedom to eliminate my transcending apperceptions, nor to negate my belief in the existence of what I perceive. The fact that something appears and appears as something cannot be undone. The only thing I can do is abstain from my belief in the existence of what appears. In and through this methodological bracketing or epoché of the positing inherent in our world-directed conscious experience, a new kind of perception is enabled. Moreover, as we have seen, according to Husserl, it has an absolute character; that is: ‘The phenomenological perception is absolutely non-annullable, the fact it grasps, it grasps as an apodictically evident one, as an adequately given fact.’19 What is given in this phenomenological perception is the outer perception reflected upon with the perceived object as perceived and how it is perceived – the ego cogito cogitatum. As Husserl often stated, this phenomenological perception is unnatural and requires a continuous effort. It is unnatural not only because it brackets the positing characteristic of our awareness of the world, but also because it involves a peculiar kind of reflective stance. That is, realizing that outer perception transcends what is given in the strict sense necessarily takes us to the level of reflection. Moreover, this reflection itself is unlike the inward directed introspection we are familiar with in our daily lives. That is, reflection is naturally an inner perception of a mental event belonging to an individual as a worldly human being, which thus harbors an empirical apperception of what is effectively given in reflection. This empirical apperception also has to be bracketed in order to come to a purified phenomenological perception.

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Thus, we see that the intuition characteristic of phenomenology is a purified intuition of consciousness by consciousness, a purified self-intuition. This intuition brings into view the given of the phenomenological reduction and cannot be limited to a purified reflection on the act. Rather, the consciousness that the phenomenological perception intuits is one that has a correlative structure. Husserl himself explicitly includes the ‘appearing as such’ in the domain of phenomenological investigation: ‘Even the phenomenologically reduced perceptual lived experience is a perceiving of “this blossoming apple tree, in this garden”, etc. … we can faithfully describe the “appearing as appearing” in complete evidence’ (Hua III/1, 183). The reduction opens up an entirely new way of experiencing our own conscious awareness, since it does not merely reveal a mental event like a psychological reflection does, but discloses consciousness as the ongoing experience of the world in which this world becomes constituted as a world and differentiates itself continuously. In what sense can we think of the purified givenness of the correlation of experience and world in the transcendental reduction in terms of a discovery? Unlike any worldly discovery, the transcendental reduction does not discover an object lost or hidden and is in this sense unlike, for example, an archeological discovery. If one insists on using the archeological metaphor when speaking of the discovery of transcendental subjectivity in and through the transcendental reduction, we could say that the reduction lays bare the ground on which we were always already standing and what we always took for granted in experiencing the world, namely this experience itself. But we are still left to wonder in what sense this altered form of selfexperience can set us free. And also, how do I come to realize that I can freely inhibit my world-directed interest and in doing so can switch from the natural to the transcendental attitude? Before we inquire into the issue of freedom in both Bergson and Husserl, let us look more closely at Bergson’s method of intuition.

3

Bergson’s intuitionism

In a certain sense, there is a resemblance between Bergsonian intuition and the purified phenomenological intuiting carried out in the phenomenological reduction. In both cases, the exercise of intuition is motivated by the conviction that philosophy cannot start from the beliefs and prejudices of daily life and that in order to achieve true knowledge we must go beyond the ‘point of view of customary or useful knowledge’ (MM 186/322). In order to make such a leap beyond our daily life, or the natural attitude, both Bergson and Husserl believe that a method is required. So, just as, for Husserl, the purified intuition in the stance of the transcendental reduction consists in bracketing the belief characteristic of the natural attitude, for Bergson, intuition consists in ‘a very difficult and painful effort by which we

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break with pre-conceived ideas and ready-made intellectual habits’ in order to return to immediate experience.20 There are, however, major differences between the two projects. While the phenomenological epoché is radically different from a negation of what we always already believe in, Bergsonian intuition requires giving up or negating certain habits of thinking and perceiving. More precisely, for Husserl, the phenomenological reduction gives us more than what was given in the natural attitude since the phenomenological reduction frames the world as we experience it in a broader transcendental perspective. That is to say, the phenomenological reduction is not a reduction of the world to consciousness. As Husserl states himself, ‘The world is and remains the one that is valid for me; the reduction does not change this.’21 What the reduction does is to bring into view this world as it is given to and disclosed by subjectivity. Thus, Husserl tries to understand what we always take for granted, namely the givenness of the world. This understanding, in a sense, changes what we once took for granted without, however, eliminating it. That is, what we took to be a world apart from and beyond ourselves is revealed as the intentional correlate of our conscious awareness. We can illustrate this divergence between Bergson and Husserl by taking a look at their respective treatments of concrete perception. For Husserl, a substantial part of phenomenological analysis consists in describing the lower, non-categorical acts of consciousness such as external perceptions. In doing so, he is interested in providing a constitutional account of, for example, spatial things, in the constitution of which recognition and apperceptions informed by the past play a crucial role. So when Husserl deals with perception, he is not concerned, as Bergson is, with pointing to the practically effective but disfiguring nature of every concrete perception and with ‘deepening and widening’ this perception into a more true intuition (PM 134/1370). On the contrary, Husserl aims to describe perception the way that it is and the way that it has to be in order for it to be a concrete perception. In other words, one could say that rather than trying to undo the stabilization of reality into neatly delineated objects, Husserl’s interest is in understanding how such a stabilization can come about, how a thing, and eventually a world of things, can be constituted in and through the manifold of its temporally fleeting adumbrations. Nevertheless, although according to Bergson the effort of intuition in philosophy involves an effort to undo what our natural experience has built up and acquired, we would like to stress that this intuition itself is not therefore alien to or radically other than our natural experience. As Bergson writes, ‘in order to reach intuition it is not necessary to transport ourselves outside the domain of the senses and of consciousness’ (PM 127/1364). Instead, we must effect a shift in or strengthening of our attention, like the shift a work of art can bring about when it shows the world as it was never visible before. Bergson insists that such a refocusing of our attention does not

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merely light up a new aspect in the experiential field. Rather, he writes, ‘if we reflect deeply on what we feel as we look at a Turner or a Corot, we shall find that, if we accept them and admire them, it is because we had already perceived something of what they show us. But we had perceived without seeing’ (PM 136/1371). Likewise, Bergsonian intuition shows something that is always already perceived but not experienced. However, that which is not experienced is therefore not nothing and can even be said to contribute to experience. That is to say, for Bergson, the partial experience that we have of ourselves as persons, or the relative experience of isolated objects mediated by our practical interests, is only possible because the richness of the totality they partially represent could be neglected for practical purposes. I perceive isolated objects because in the interest of executing this or that action they alone, and not reality in its entirety, appear relevant. Equally, in thinking about ourselves or other persons, only certain character traits and actions stand out in light of our interests. A disinterested attitude, on the other hand, for Bergson, would yield an unmediated intuition of reality (or ourselves) in its infinitely varied fullness. Thus, we can understand one of Bergson’s more straightforward definitions of intuition: ‘Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence’ (PM 32/1273). Thus, in the same way that the phenomenological intuition is not beyond experience but is a purification of our natural experience, Bergsonian intuition is not another kind of experience above and beyond our natural experience. Rather, Bergson writes that intuition is ‘an experience purified, or, in other words, released, where necessary, from the molds that our intellect has formed in the degree and proportion of the progress of our action on things.’22 Bergsonian intuition can only overcome the workings of the intellect by looking for what is immediately given in our natural perception, since though ‘Intellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality, … there has never been a clean cut between the two; and all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct fringe which recalls its origin’ (EC 193/659). We can now see in what sense intuition is an effort to go ‘beyond the human condition’ (PM 193/1425), which is the condition of our living in the world. As for Husserl, this effort to overcome the natural way of being in the world is so considerable that we might wonder what could motivate such an undertaking, and some might even wonder about the feasibility of such a project. But unlike the phenomenological intuition, Bergson is convinced that intuition occurs apart from us methodologically pursuing it. This is convincingly the case for the immediate experience that we have of ourselves as a continuously developing whole expressing itself completely at every moment anew. According to Bergson, we have this experience, for example, in the case of strong emotions: ‘here we feel a thousand different

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elements which dissolve and permeate one another without any precise outlines, without the least tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another’ (E 132/88). As a further example, Bergson sometimes appeals to aesthetic experience in order to demonstrate the possibility of and our familiarity with something like his intuition. In Creative Evolution, Bergson writes that the fact that intuition is not impossible is proved by the existence of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception: ‘The intention of life … is just what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself back within the object by a kind of sympathy’ (EC 177/645). Intuition, as these examples show, is thus possible. But in order to sustain it or even induce it in philosophy, a method of intuition is required. In the following, we intend to clarify this method of intuition by applying it to the philosophical problem of freedom. More precisely, our discussion of freedom will make clear how philosophy, for Bergson, does not only consist in dissolving philosophical problems by redefining distinctions but also has a practical function for the philosopher. Further, we intend to show that the same holds for Husserl. But first, what is freedom for Bergson?

4 Bergson on freedom For Bergson, metaphysics does not only consist in the intuitional experience of reality, but also has an important critical function. The methodological cultivation of intuition and the accompanying creation of concepts that are cut exactly to the measure of reality in its individual, streaming, and living character would result in ‘a science of the spirit, a true metaphysics that will define the spirit positively instead of simply denying, concerning it, all that we know about matter’ (PM 79/1320; translation modified). This science is critical insofar as it points to and resists the natural inclination to think in one domain (spirit) in terms of or by means of combining concepts originating from another domain (matter). Thus, more precisely, Bergson’s metaphysics provides a critique of a certain way of doing philosophy in which this natural inclination leads to the creation of what he calls false philosophical problems. One such problem is the question of whether one is free or determined. In Time and Free Will, Bergson undercuts the usual alternative between free choice and determinism by showing how both rely on the same false presupposition; at the same time, Bergson formulates a new conception of freedom that supplants the opposition. In doing so, he applies his method of intuition. One of the main aims of Bergson’s early philosophy is to show that we have lost sight of freedom and how this came about, and to show that what has usually been thought of as freedom is, in fact, a kind of bastardized version of the free act. This bastardized version of freedom is the free act thought of as a motivated choice. According to Bergson, this conception of freedom does not overcome the psychological determinism it opposes and which consists in the idea ‘that an act is absolutely determined by its

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motive and our conscious states by one another’ (E 158/105). While the psychological determinist ‘implies that there is only one possible act corresponding to given antecedents: the believers in free will assume, on the other hand, that the same series could issue in several different acts, equally possible’ (E 175/115). Freedom is thus defended by arguing that an act is free because one could decide to do otherwise. The opponent of free choice will readily point to the fact that there was a reason or motivation for someone to choose one action over another, and will thus conclude that there was in fact, therefore, no free choice. Bergson’s answer to this impasse inherently comes down to showing how both the conception of freedom as free choice and the psychological determinism it tries to refute rest on a misguided understanding of the true nature of consciousness as duration. In Bergson’s words, they ‘give a mechanical explanation of a fact, and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself’ (E 181/119). In this case, the fact is consciousness and the explanation is the one provided by a philosophy working within the conceptual confinements of our natural experience, which is primarily concerned with the isolation of material or objective elements and their relations. Consciousness, which is, in fact, a dynamic progression of mutually resonating perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas, is explained and viewed as a concatenation of elements, this time psychological ones regulated by laws of association. Once our thinking dissolves the enduring coherence of consciousness into psychological elements, it appears to be no longer able to think the free act. But there is more. Ultimately, for Bergson, associationism is more than just a misguided theory; it is an encroachment of our natural way of living in the world into the way we think about ourselves, which in a sense even changes who we are. That is to say, we can think of ourselves in terms of a collection of static psychic states because most often our decisions and actions aren’t integrated into the whole of the enduring life, which we, according to Bergson, most fundamentally are. This means, for Bergson, that these decisions and actions are not genuinely free, since for him, ‘we are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work’ (E 172/113). In the way that the artist expresses herself in the artistic creation, we express our whole personality in the free act. But as the artist is only an artist in the creation of the work of art, so we only fully live our duration at the moment that we act freely. And again, as one is never compelled to create, so it takes an effort to act freely. If, for Bergson, intuition is thinking in duration, it also brings freedom back into view because freedom is acting out duration. Thus, if associationism cannot think freedom, this is because the consciousness it describes does not have to make the effort of the free act: ‘For it is by no means the case that all conscious states blend

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with one another, … the self, in so far as it has to do with a homogeneous space, develops on a kind of surface, and on this surface independent growths may form and float’ (E 166/110). Bergson occasionally describes the free act as an emanation, as if the ‘free action drops from it [the self] like an over-ripe fruit’ (E 176/116). One could say that this metaphor implies, unlike what we have just suggested, that freedom has a rather passive character, as if the free act could take place without us willing it. However, such a vision of freedom as an emanation is nuanced by Bergson’s insistence that intuition requires a strenuous effort. That is, if intuition or placing oneself in duration requires an active and specific effort, then the free act that acts out duration must also involve a similar effort. In Creative Evolution, Bergson takes this thought one step further and identifies our becoming aware of our duration with our being free: ‘The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious of our progress in pure duration, the more we feel the different parts of our being enter into each other, and our whole personality concentrate itself in a point, or rather a sharp edge, pressed against the future and cutting into it unceasingly. It is in this that life and action are free’ (EC 201/666). The effort of the free act consists in the effort to contract as much of our own duration as possible and to push it into the present, thereby creating a future that is absolutely new. Intuition, then, is the experience of duration as this free and ‘perpetual efflorescence of novelty’ (PM 95/1335). If Bergson claims that his philosophy of intuition can again do justice to the fact of freedom, he can do so because in intuition, as it follows the continuous self-creation of duration, the philosopher partakes in nothing else than the movement of freedom. If philosophy frees itself from the confinement of the intellect, it thereby becomes itself an expression of freedom. Levinas points to this when he writes that: ‘Bergson’s philosophical intuition, tightly bound to man’s concrete life and destiny, reaches to its highest point, namely the act of freedom.’23 We still have to decide, however, if we agree with what Levinas immediately adds to this: ‘This metaphysical foundation of intuition is lacking in Husserl’s phenomenology and the ties which relate intuition to all the vital forces which define concrete existence are foreign to his thought.’24 In concluding, we would like to indicate in what sense Husserl did see the performance of the phenomenological reduction anchored in the concrete situation of the phenomenologist as a free person. If this is the case, for Husserl as for Bergson, philosophy does not only express what freedom consists in, but in so doing becomes itself an expression of our freedom.

5 Husserl on freedom In his description of the phenomenological reduction in Ideas I, Husserl underlines that the performance of the phenomenological reduction ‘is a

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matter in which we are perfectly free’ (Hua III/1, 55). Is that to say that the phenomenological reduction could be considered a genuine expression of our freedom? If this is so, it is clearly not a freedom in the sense of the free ‘I can.’ That is, the radicality involved in the performance of the phenomenological reduction is one that breaks with our normal acquaintance with our practical possibilities such that the possibility of this performance can by no means be prefigured. Correspondingly, Husserl says that we must ‘convince ourselves of the essential possibility of the alteration in question’ (Hua III/1, 53), namely the alteration of the natural attitude into a phenomenological one. If the phenomenological intuition is an expression of our freedom, it has a character that is unlike the freedom we always live – for example the free bodily movement of the ‘I do.’ For Husserl, this movement is free and not involuntary if the I gives a certain fiat to move. This fiat or ‘I do’ is the free actualization of a practical possibility or ‘I can.’ This means that, at the same time, the fiat is a choice against other movements I could have made. The awareness of practical possibilities in the ‘I can’ relies on what Husserl calls associative motivation, which he generally characterizes as follows: ‘Once a connection is formed in a stream of consciousness, there then exists in this stream the tendency for a newly emerging connection, similar to a portion of the earlier one, to continue in the direction of the similarity.’25 If a movement is free, then we do not readily comply with these tendencies but consider them and consent to one of them. The tendencies thereby become practical possibilities of which the ‘I do’ realizes one and they are precisely considered practically possible because of my previous acquaintance with them. That is, practical possibilities are more than and different from logical possibilities or imaginabilities because the execution of a certain movement in the past motivates me to do the same unless another motivation is stronger. Thus, in the case of the free ‘I can,’ ‘It is only between practical possibilities that I can “decide,” and only a practical possibility can … be a theme of my will. I cannot will anything that I do not have consciously in view’ (Hua IV, 258). Is this any different for what Husserl considers to be the free act in the strict sense and what he calls egomotivation or motivation of reason? If so, does this bring us any closer to the kind of freedom that Husserl sees to be involved in the performance of the phenomenological reduction? The freedom that is involved in the free act in the strict sense and that defines us as free persons is, for Husserl, not equivalent to a choice between practically motivated possibilities. For one, the free act in the strict sense consists in a position-taking that is rationally motivated. In order to understand in what sense such a motivation is not a choice between, this time, rationally motivated possibilities, it is important to insist on a certain element in Husserl’s characterization of the free act in this specific sense: ‘The autonomy of reason, the “freedom” of the personal subject, consists in the fact that I do not yield passively to the influence of others, but instead

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decide out of myself [aus mir selbst]’ (Hua IV, 269; translation modified). Such deciding out of myself does not only entail an autonomy from others, but also from habit, it appears. Granted, my position-takings are also experiences that, as such, are subject to the laws of association or habit and my position-takings also become habitualized in the form of beliefs that I do not question. But at the moment of a free position-taking, the decision is not motivated by the strongest associative anticipation, but, as Husserl strikingly states in a manuscript on freedom from 1921, if the decision is free it is an ‘expression of individuality [Bekundung der Individualität].’26 As an expression of the individuality of a person at a certain moment, the free position-taking is not to be understood as an actualization of one position-taking out of an array of other possible ones. We could, of course, imagine that we would have decided otherwise than we did, but according to Husserl, this is ‘a possibility that phantasizes me into another I and another monad, which is incompatible with the one I am.’27 Positively stated, the decision that ‘in a certain situation is considered as a possibility, is already decided in its possibility, and the real decision is the only evidently possible one.’28 This is not to say that, according to Husserl, we cannot go back on our decisions. In fact, we constantly do so, exactly because our individuality is not something static and the decisions and other position-takings in which it expresses itself are taken up in its development and consequently continuously modify the expression of our individuality in decision-making itself. In this discussion of the free act as an expression of one’s individuality, Husserl clearly comes very close to thinking what Bergson wrote about duration as incessant renewal and creation expressing itself in the free act. What concerns us here, however, is the question of whether Husserl’s characterization of the free act brings us any closer to the freedom that is said to be involved in performing the shift from the natural to the phenomenological attitude. At least one way to transcendental subjectivity is tightly connected to Husserl’s conception of the free person in the sense of the freely deciding subject. This way leads through the radicalization of doubt to what cannot be doubted and is apodictically given, namely the transcendentally understood ego cogito cogitatum. This way presupposes a latent desire for apodicticity within the natural attitude that could be awakened and lead one outside of the natural attitude. In the Kaizo articles, Husserl locates this desire in us being free persons in the strict sense discussed above. If the free act consists in an active position-taking that I, being the one that I am now, feel necessitated to take, but at the same time cannot absolutely justify and consequently can revise at a later point in life, this position-taking is, according to Husserl, not only the locus of freedom, but is also a source of disappointment and of growing dissatisfaction. It is, according to Husserl, ‘the motivation that arises out of such painful devaluations

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and disappointments that … motivates the specific striving for truth, that is, the striving for verification, for “ultimate” justification by means of evident grounding.’29 Thus, the recurring disappointment in our own positiontakings leads us to desire apodicticity; a desire that, ultimately, according to Husserl, will be fulfilled, though never exhaustively, in the practice of phenomenology. That is, in doing phenomenology, we open up the absolute ground or transcendental subjectivity and then, in describing this transcendental consciousness, we formulate apodictic propositions and take positions that are in their indubitable nature justified in any possible world and for any possible subject. Performing the transcendental reduction as a free act does, thus, indeed originate in the concrete situation of me being a free person having fallible convictions and desiring apodicticity; an apodicticity I find in the ego cogito cogitatum. We wonder, however, if in opening up the transcendental dimension of ourselves as (a community of ) constituting consciousnesses we have found an absolute ground whose structure we now have to explicate in indubitable propositions that express the essence of this constituting consciousness. Or rather, does the effort of the phenomenological reduction not exactly consist in becoming this ground by assuming it in a way that changes the way we take stances, by acknowledging that we alone bear responsibility for them and are therefore free. That is, is it in being the phenomenologist that explicates the eidos of consciousness that we fulfill our telos, or do we only find our telos in striving to become the absolute ground of our convictions in the sense of taking responsibility for it and therefore being free? Husserl himself sometimes hints at an identification of the telos of humanity with us becoming philosophers and developing a phenomenology as a first philosophy, that is, as an eidetic science of transcendental subjectivity. So, for example, in the Kaizo articles Husserl characterizes the path towards renewal as one that leads through phenomenology as a science, a science that ‘is the necessary presupposition for a true renewal, and yes, would be a first beginning of its factual staging.’30 Above, however, we have suggested a reading that could possibly anchor the phenomenological pursuit in our concrete situation and connect it to the philosophical question of freedom. In this reading, the transcendental reduction does not reveal or discover what we always already were and can then explore in an eidetic science. On the contrary, in performing the transcendental reduction, we become what we could never have envisioned ourselves to be, namely we create or constitute ourselves as the ground of appearance. That this thought is not entirely foreign to Husserl is shown in the recently published manuscripts on reduction, in which he writes: ‘The transcendental reduction is the creation of the constitution of a new sphere of objectivity, which was never before objectively constituted.’31 Moreover, as it is for Bergson, this creation is an expression of our freedom and this freedom expresses itself in and through the intuition enabled by

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the movement of philosophical thought itself. This intuition sets us free, because we come to see ourselves for what we are, or better, we come to see ourselves for what we have become, namely the ground of all constitution (Husserl) or the dynamic and perpetual upsurge of novelty (Bergson).

Notes Trevor Perri is supported by the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO). The authors would like to thank Rudolf Bernet, Nicolas de Warren and Michael Kelly for their advice and kind words of encouragement. 1. For some recent treatments of the relation between Bergson and French phenomenology, see: Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de l’expérience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 33–61; Roland Breeur, Autour de Sartre. La conscience mise à nu (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2005), 153–92; Florence Caeymaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: Les phénoménologies existentialistes et leur héritage bergsonien (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2005). 2. There is evidence that Husserl was acquainted with Bergson’s method of intuition. A manuscript from around July 1910 (A I 5/22a–23b) contains Husserl’s personal reading notes on Bergson’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics.’ In another manuscript (B I 38/115), Husserl is very critical of the Bergsonian appeal to intuition. (Manuscripts are in the Husserl Archives in Leuven.) A similarly critical appraisal of Bergsonian intuition can be found in the last section of Roman Ingarden’s doctoral dissertation on Bergson, which was supervised by Husserl. See: Roman Ingarden, Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson (Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1921). 3. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. M.L. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 2002), 124/1361. (Translation of La pensée et le mouvant.) Henceforth, cited parenthetically as PM. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of Henri Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: PUF, 1959). 4. ‘Der Phänomenologe muß allem voran erst phänomenologisch schauen lernen.’ Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana VIII, ed. R. Boehm (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 123. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua VIII. All translations of this text are our own. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) 299; trans. R. McCleary as Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 184. 6. ‘[D]urch die phänomenologische Reduktion als “transzendentale Reflexion” befreit sich das Ich von den Schranken der Natürlichkeit seines Daseins.’ Edmund Husserl, Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935), Husserliana XXXIV, ed. S. Luft (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 225. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua XXXIV. All translations of this text are our own. 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1994), 12; trans. A. Orianne as The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), LIV. Henceforth, references given to the pagination of the English translation followed by the pagination of the French edition. 8. Ibid., LIV/12.

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9. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976); trans. F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 120; translation modified. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua III/1 followed by the pagination of the original German edition. 10. See Edmund Husserl, ‘Nachwort,’ in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976), 154; trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as ‘Epilogue to the Ideas,’ in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 422. Henceforth, references given to the pagination of the English translation followed by the pagination of the German edition. 11. ‘[D]ass wir den Zugang zur transzendentalen Subjektivität nicht nur faktisch der beschriebenen Methode verdanken, sondern dass diese oder dass eine verwandte Methode überhaupt unerlässlich ist, sie zu entdecken. Ich betone: entdecken’ (Hua VIII, 78). 12. ‘Epilogue to the Ideas,’ 421/154. 13. Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. A. Robinet (Paris: PUF, 1972), 1148; trans. M. McMahon in Key Writings, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson and J. Mullarkey (New York: Continuum, 2002), 367. 14. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001), 75/51. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as E. 15. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 187/323. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as MM. 16. ‘Das Leben, dessen Fungieren Vorgegebenheit und jede Gegebenheit apperzipierende Erfahrung macht, ist nicht selbst vorgegeben und apperzipiert’ (Hua XXXIV, 251). 17. In the following, we use the term ‘phenomenological perception’ as well as ‘phenomenological intuition’ in order to refer to the purified experience attained by means of the transcendental reduction. Husserl himself uses the term phenomenological perception in this way in a lecture course from 1910/11 published in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Erster Teil: 1905–1920, Husserliana XIII, ed. I. Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) 159; this lecture course is translated by I. Farin and J.G. Hart as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, From the Lectures, Winter Semester 1910–1911 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua XIII. All translations of this text are our own. Husserl also uses the term phenomenological perception in this way in the lecture course Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen 1922/23, Husserliana XXXV, ed. B. Goossens (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002). Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua XXXV. All translations of this text are our own. 18. ‘[I]n ihr ist der Gegenstand das “Phänomen” der Hauswahrnehmung, Tischwahrnehmung usw. bzw. dieses ego cogito, dieses “Ich nehme dieses Haus, diesen Tisch u.dgl. wahr”. Diese phänomenologische Wahrnehmung ist absolut unaufhebbar’ (Hua XXXV, 69). 19. ‘Diese phänomenologische Wahrnehmung ist absolut unaufhebbar, die Tatsache, die sie erfasst, erfasst sie als eine apodiktisch evidente, als adäquat gegebene Tatsache’ (Hua XXXV, 69).

Bergson, Husserl and the Movement of Philosophy 117 20. Henri Bergson, Mélanges, 1197; translation ours. 21. ‘Die Welt ist und bleibt die mir geltende, daran ändert die Reduktion nichts’ (Hua XXXIV, 247). 22. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001), 363/801). Henceforth, cited parenthetically as EC. 23. Emanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 155/219. 24. Ibid. 25. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana IV, ed. M. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952); trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 223. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua IV followed by the pagination of the German edition. 26. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, Husserliana XIV, ed. I. Kern (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 20. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua XIV. All translations of this text are our own. 27. ‘[E]ine Möglichkeit, welche mich umfingiert in ein anderes Ich und in eine andere Monade, als welche mit mir, der ich bin, unverträglich ist’ (Hua XIV, 24). 28. ‘[D]as im gegebenen Zusammenhang als Möglichkeit erwogen wird, ist schon in der Möglichkeit entschieden, und die wirkliche Entscheidung ist einsichtigerweise die einzig mögliche’ (Hua XIV, 22). 29. ‘Die von derart peinlichen Entwertungen und Enttäuschungen ausgehende Motivation ist es, die, … das spezifische Wahrheitsstreben bzw. das Streben nach Bewährung, nach, endgültiger, Rechtfertigung durch einsichtige Begründung motiviert.’ Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), Husserliana XXVII, ed. T. Nenon and H.R. Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 30. Henceforth, cited parenthetically as Hua XXVII. All translations of this text are our own. 30. ‘[S]o ergibt sich, dass die Begründung dieser Wissenschaft die notwendige Voraussetzung für eine wirkliche Erneuerung, ja ein erster Anfang ihrer Inszenierung selbst wäre’ (Hua XXVII, 13). 31. ‘Die transzendentale Reduktion ist Schöpfung der Konstitution einer neuen Gegenstandssphäre, die nie gegenständlich konstituiert war’ (Hua XXXIV, 55).

6 Life, Thinking and Phenomenology in the Early Bergson Dan Zahavi

How should we appraise Bergson’s relation to phenomenology? There are different ways to tackle this question. In the following my focus will be quite narrow. I will restrict myself to a close reading of Bergson’s doctoral dissertation Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. The question I wish to ask is basically whether the analysis of consciousness that Bergson provides in the second chapter of the dissertation is phenomenologically convincing.

1 Time, space and language A central tenet in Bergson’s analysis is that our conscious states reveal themselves in two radically different ways depending on whether we perceive them directly or through spatial forms derived from the external world. Bergson argues that the spatial forms distort and conceal the real structures of consciousness, and that our philosophical task is to do away with the forms in question in order to allow for a disclosure of the true and ordinarily hidden nature of consciousness. In order to understand Bergson’s train of thought and his insistence that a spatialization of consciousness amounts to a complete deformation of its proper character and structure, we need to take a closer look at his discussion of the basic opposition between time and space. On a common understanding, time and space are both homogeneous media. The main difference is whether their contents co-exist or follow one another. On such an understanding, time can be viewed as a kind of line, and if we try to visualize our stream of consciousness, we frequently think of it as consisting of a temporal sequence of conscious states, ranged alongside one another so as to form a discrete multiplicity. This multiplicity will be very akin to the multiplicity of spatial objects. Spatial objects are also perceived as distinct, isolated entities, externally related to one another. But time understood in such a fashion is for Bergson something utterly distinct from and alien to the lived time that is unique to and distinctive 118

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of consciousness, and which he terms true or pure duration.1 Indeed, time conceived of as a homogeneous medium in which our conscious states are spread out so as to form a series composed of separate and distinct elements that stand in external relations to one another, like wagons in train, is for Bergson a spurious conception resulting from the transposition of the idea of space onto the field of consciousness (TFW 98–9/66–7).2 To think of time as a line presupposes a view from above, a view that, so to speak, takes it in all at once, but this merely reveals that simultaneity and thereby spatiality pervades such a conception of time. In fact, for Bergson, this conception of time basically betrays what is essential to time in favor of space (TFW 91, 98/61, 66). If we through a vigorous effort manage to isolate consciousness from the external world in order to intuit its true character, we will, according to Bergson, soon realize that true duration has nothing in common with space (TFW 90–1/61). It is not quantifiable, and the moment we treat it as such and try to measure it, we will do violence to it (TFW 106/71). Indeed, in pure duration, conscious states are not distinct, but united. They are characterized by a dynamical self-organization, where they melt into and permeate one another without precise outlines. In fact, on this level, there is no real difference between the persistence of one state and the transition to another state. They intermingle in such a way that we cannot tell whether they are one or several. We cannot examine or approach them from this point of view at all without altering and distorting them (TFW 137/91). To isolate one conscious state is consequently not like detaching one independent element from another, but rather like tearing off a fragment of material from a whole that is thereby left in tatters. Thus, rather than likening two conscious states to two wagons in the same train, it might be more appropriate to liken them to two waves in the same stream. In reality, consciousness is nothing jointed; it simply flows. Rather than being a quantitative succession of separate bits, the stream of consciousness is a qualitative continuity without distinctions, where the different states are characterized by mutual penetration and interconnection (TFW 105, 107/70, 71). However, unwittingly we will start to introduce spatial notions and categories into our understanding of experiential life. Distinction we find among objects in the external world will be transposed and introjected into subjectivity. In this sense there will be an exchange between the inner and the outer (TFW 126/84). To illustrate the problem at hand, Bergson asks us to consider the oscillations of a pendulum: As the successive phases of our conscious life, although interpenetrating, correspond individually to an oscillation of the pendulum which occurs at the same time, and as, moreover, these oscillations are sharply distinguished from one another, we get into the habit of setting up the same distinction between the successive moments of our conscious life: the

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oscillations of the pendulum break it up, so to speak, into parts external to one another: hence the mistaken idea of a homogeneous inner duration, similar to space, the moments of which are identical and follow, without interpenetrating one another. (TFW 109/73) To sum up, according to Bergson, we need to distinguish two ways of regarding conscious life; one superficial, the other more profound. To a superficial inspection, consciousness consists of a sequence of distinct conscious states. To a more profound investigation, consciousness reveals itself as a qualitative continuity of mutually permeating states that form an organic whole (TFW 128/85). Occasionally, however, Bergson also seems to suggest that there are superficial and more profound conscious states. The superficial are those through which the ego is in touch with the spatial world, that is, states like perception or sensation, and since they tend to acquire and take on the structures of that which they are about, they can to some extent be described in terms of spatial structures. But as for the profound levels of consciousness, they cannot be quantified in any way whatsoever without altering their character drastically (TFW 90/61). We are here dealing with a dimension so unique that it cannot be grasped by means of language or through any form of intellectual cognition. Reason can isolate, immobilize and spatialize the flow of lived experiences and thereby make them accessible to verbal description and analytic reflection. But the true life of consciousness cannot be caught in our conceptual network. It will always overflow our artificial demarcations and distinctions. Let us take a closer look at this latter more radical claim. As it turns out, Bergson seeks to support his analysis of the twofold way in which conscious states can reveal themselves by considering the relation between mind and language. As he writes, our perceptions, thoughts, and emotions can occur under two aspects: one clear and precise but impersonal, the other confused, ever-changing and inexpressible. As soon as we try to describe our conscious states, as soon as we try to analyze and express them in words, the conscious states that by nature are deeply personal will change character. They will be transformed into impersonal elements that are externally related to one another (TFW 163/108). This problem is not merely due to the fact that language employs general concepts, denoting, and thereby missing, the delicate shades of ever-fluctuating states with simple uniform words (TFW 164/108–9). The problem is also that language as a whole makes us operate with sharp and precise distinctions, thereby imposing the same kinds of discontinuities between our experiential episodes as exist between material objects (TFW xix/3). As soon as we introduce clear-cut distinctions, as soon as we isolate and identify a conscious state, we distort the processual character of our experiential life (TFW 132/87). As Bergson writes: ‘We must not forget that states of consciousness are processes and not things; that if

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we denote them each by a single word, it is for the convenience of language; that they are alive and therefore constantly changing’ (TFW 196/129). Language cannot get hold of consciousness without arresting its protean character and without fitting its irreducible individuality into a procrustean uniform of general concepts. Indeed, as Bergson writes, all that language is able to capture are lifeless shadows (TFW 132–3/87–8). At one point, Bergson considers the possibility that a novelist or poet, by employing a far richer and more nuanced language, might be able to demonstrate that each and every conscious thought or feeling rather than being adequately expressed by simple terms does indeed harbor ‘an infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions.’ But by naming and expressing this richness in words, the novelist or poet will in turn only offer us an impoverished substitute (TFW 134/88). Language is simply not able to convey or render the subtleties of our experiential life (TFW 13/12), and ultimately Bergson denies that there is any common measure between mind and language (TFW 165/109). Given these limitations, given the distortions allegedly inflicted on consciousness by language, why do we nevertheless incessantly strive to describe and account for consciousness by means of language? Why are we constantly tempted into introducing distinctions taken from the external world into our inner life, thereby replacing the interpenetration of a constantly changing qualitative multiplicity for a fixed set of numerical distinct states?3 As Bergson repeatedly asserts, when consciousness is broken into pieces that easily lend themselves to verbal expressions, it is far better geared and adapted to the requirements of social life. Given these demands, the self has everything to gain by assuming a form of self-forgetfulness (TFW 128/85). Or to be more precise, through socialization and languageacquisition a second self is formed, one that Bergson in turn characterizes as a colorless shadow, as superficial and parasitic, and one that by necessity will obscure the deep-seated self (TFW 138/91–2). As he writes, We generally perceive our own self by refraction through space, our conscious states crystallize into words and our living and concrete self thus gets covered by an outer crust of clean-cut psychic states which are separate from one another and consequently fixed. For the convenience of language and the promotion of social relations we have everything to gain by not breaking through this crust and by assuming it to give an exact outline of the form of the object it covers. (TFW 167/110) As time goes by – if such a phrase is permitted – the link to the external world is increasingly solidified, and as a result, our conscious states are not only broken off from one another and made into objects, they also break off from ourselves, that is, become alienated fragments (TFW 138–9/91–2).

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Thus in Bergson’s account, we would be in a much better position to attain a correct self-understanding if each of us lived a purely individual life with no interference from society or language – though even in such a condition we would have difficulties escaping the entrapment of spatial thinking (TFW 137/90–1).

2 A neo-Kantian digression Before comparing Bergson’s account with ideas found in phenomenology, let me briefly point to a different and perhaps slightly surprising convergence, namely the one existing between Bergson’s view and the position we find in the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp. According to Natorp, consciousness cannot be something with a temporal and spatial appearance, since only objects appear in space and time, and consciousness is not an object.4 For the very same reason, it is a regular category mistake to describe consciousness with the help of those categories and concepts that have their legitimate use in the world of objects (AP 28). It would amount to a spatialization and exteriorization of something purely interior. Ultimately, Natorp radicalizes this point and argues that every description involving the use of language, involving the use of generalizing and subsuming concepts will merely estrange us from that which we seek to understand (AP 91–2, 190). Indeed, for Natorp every expression (Äußerung) involves meditation and externalization (Entäußerung). The moment consciousness expresses itself, be it in language or behavior, it will leave its own domain behind. Every expression isolates and fixates that which cannot be isolated and fixated (AP 99). This view is eloquently presented in the following passage: If one were oneself to try, if it were at all possible, to somehow grasp the content of immediate experience purely as it is in itself – far from every expression, every judgment, every intention – would one then not somehow be forced, nevertheless, to delimit it, to raise it above the mesh of experiencing, be it with the pointing of a finger, with a blink of an eye; would one not be forced to artificially still and interrupt the continuous stream of becoming, which surely is how inner life presents itself, to isolate the individual finding, to fixate it with the isolation in mind, to sterilize it, like the anatomist does with his specimen? But doesn’t one then detach it from the experienced, from the subjective, and doesn’t one then, nevertheless, make it into an object? In the end, one apparently never grasps the subjective, as such, in itself. On the contrary, in order to grasp it scientifically, one is forced to strip it of its subjective character. One kills subjectivity in order to dissect it, and believes that the life of the soul is on display in the result of the dissection! (AP 102–3)

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What are the implications of Natorp’s view? Does he declare any systematic investigation of consciousness impossible in principle; is every description a falsification, every conceptualization a violation? Natorp certainly has strong misgivings about the reliability of reflection. On his account, reflection acts as a distorting prism and merely confronts us with a reified and petrified consciousness. But rather than investigating consciousness in a direct manner, Natorp proposes that we adopt an indirect approach and seek to recover pristine subjectivity through a neutralization of the effect of reflection. That is, after reflectively having analyzed and thereby destroyed the lived unity of consciousness, we should try to reverse the process, we should try to unite the detached elements and thereby restore the experiences to their original state through a kind of reconstruction (AP 192). We cannot investigate our own consciousness directly. But we can start with the objectified counterpart, and then proceed regressively in an attempt to recover the original subjective dimension. Ultimately, however, Natorp considers the dimension of pure subjectivity an unreachable ideal and limit-case (AP 233). As Natorp himself points out, there are many similarities between his own position and that of Bergson (AP 319). As he observes, Bergson never describes pure consciousness positively, but only ex negativo, by denying it objective properties. In that sense, Bergson is also seeking to effectuate a ‘cancellation of the objectifying performance,’ that is, he is also seeking to approach the immediate through reconstruction (AP 307). Ultimately, however, Natorp also insists on some important differences. To start with, Natorp argues that Bergson’s distrust of reason, his repeated contention concerning the intellect’s rape and violation, is partly due to a mistaken view of analysis. The ultimate aim of analysis is not separation and disintegration, rather analysis is merely a means towards a better understanding of unity, connection and context. Indeed, by slighting analysis, Bergson is flirting with what Natorp calls an ‘arbeitsfeindlicher Mystizismus’ (AP 308). Natorp also faults Bergson for operating with an unacceptable contrast between the concepts that are viewed as absolutely static, fixed and immobile, and the experiences that are seen as boundlessly streaming and variable (AP 323).5 Finally, Natorp points out that whereas his own project remains within the framework of Kant’s critical philosophy, Bergson claims that intuition can provide us with absolute metaphysical knowledge. It can give us access to the things themselves (AP 320).

3

Phenomenological misgivings

When coming to Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience from phenomenology, it is easy to pinpoint the thought in Bergson’s early work that would be of immediate appeal to phenomenologists. It is undoubtedly the idea that consciousness has its own unique structure and mode of existence;

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one we will utterly fail to grasp as long as we seek to describe and categorize consciousness as if it was merely a spatial object. There is far more to consciousness than what can be disclosed in an objectifying analysis. It is not surprising that it was particularly Bergson’s notion of pure duration that attracted attention. If we for instance consider the way Bergson was read by Schütz, who certainly counts among the more approving phenomenological readers, Schütz repeatedly places Bergson’s account of duration side by side with Husserl’s analysis of inner time-consciousness, and even compares Bergson’s description of how, through a strenuous effort, we can turn our attention away from the world of objects and towards our own inner stream of consciousness with Husserl’s notion of phenomenological reduction.6 Are we here faced with a profound convergence of interest and orientation or rather with a superficial similarity? To answer this question, we need to take a closer look at an issue that was already briefly alluded to in the Natorp overview, namely the daunting methodological challenges that the Bergsonian project is faced with. First of all, there is the inevitable question regarding the coherence of the entire enterprise. According to Bergson, if we try to grasp consciousness through analysis and by means of discursive reason we will inevitably miss the target. We cannot grasp pure duration through intellectual cognition, we cannot conceptualize it. Any intellectual, reflective or analytic attempt to comprehend pure duration will transform it into a sequence of static, immobilized elements. We will distort and petrify that which by nature is dynamic and processual (TFW 219, 229/143,149–50). But throughout the book, Bergson does precisely what he warns us against. He uses language and concepts in order to articulate and describe a dimension of consciousness that on his own account is inexpressible. He even admits to the problem himself, and the example he provides is illustrative since it touches on a quite central tenet of his theory. Bergson concedes that when describing how various conscious states organize themselves into a dynamic whole, where each of them permeates the others, he is already transgressing his own principles and doing violence to his subject matter by introducing distinctions that tend to isolate and externalize the states in question (TFW 122/81). The dilemma is of course well known from the history of theology and monastic mysticism. One traditional option has been to proceed ex negativo, which to some extent is also what Bergson ends up doing. But given that Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience is a work in philosophy, we are faced with a problem that puts pressure on the project. It is informative to compare Bergson’s suspicion of language, his conviction that the distinctions it sets up are misleading, with the rather different attitude that is expressed by Husserl in the very first paragraph of his introduction to the second part of Logische Untersuchungen. This is admittedly not Husserl’s final word on the relation between language and phenomenology,7 but that does not diminish its poignancy. Husserl writes,

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Linguistic discussions are certainly among the philosophically indispensable preparations for the building of pure logic; only by their aid can the true objects of logical research – and, following thereon, the essential species and differentiae of such objects – be refined to a clarity that excludes all misunderstanding. We are not here concerned with grammatical discussions, empirically conceived and related to some historically given language: we are concerned with discussions of a most general sort which cover the wider sphere of an objective theory of knowledge and, closely linked with this last, the pure phenomenology of the experiences of thinking and knowing. [...] This phenomenology must bring to pure expression, must describe in terms of their essential concepts and their governing formulae of essence, the essences which directly make themselves known in intuition, and the connections which have their roots purely in such essences.8 One finds a comparable rejection of the kind of position espoused by Bergson in Heidegger’s early lecture courses, particularly where Heidegger discusses the work of Natorp.9 As Heidegger asks, is it really true that all language is objectifying, and that all concepts inevitably fragment a hitherto unfragmented totality? Is it really true that any description will always be foreign to that which is given?10 For Heidegger, experiential life is not mute, chaotic and inexpressible.11 Rather, experiential life is imbued with meaning, is intentionally structured, has an inner articulation and rationality and is comprehensible because it always spontaneously expresses itself; because experiencing is itself a preliminary form of understanding, it is itself what might be called a pre-understanding.12 Thus, Heidegger basically argues that there is an intimate connection between experience, expression and understanding.13 It is also in this context that Heidegger quotes Dilthey – ‘Thinking is bound to life through an inner necessity; it is itself a form of life’ – and speaks of philosophy as a continuation of the reflexivity found in life.14 In clear opposition to the view espoused by Bergson, Heidegger can consequently claim that an articulation and conceptualization of our experiential life can be something that belongs to life itself rather than being something that is imposed on life arbitrarily from without. A true phenomenological description does not constitute a violation, is not an attempt to impose a foreign systematicity on life, rather it is something that is rooted in and motivated by factic life-experience itself.15 As Heidegger writes in the lecture course Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles from 1921/22: The categories are nothing invented, no ‘framework’ or independent society of logical schemata; they are rather in an originary fashion in life itself of life; of life, in order to ‘cultivate’ it. They have their own mode of access which, however, is not such as would be foreign to life itself, imposed upon it arbitrarily from without, rather it is just the eminent way in which life comes to itself.16

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The question is, consequently, whether Bergson might be faulted for operating with too narrow an understanding of both conceptualization and language. This is admittedly a somewhat awkward accusation to make of someone who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the question must be asked. Didn’t Bergson underestimate the protean character of language? Does language not have a multiplicity of forms; does it not possess a force and mobility that enables it to articulate the subjective without necessarily violating it in the process? Let us be a bit more precise and let us distinguish a number of interrelated but ultimately different claims. Bergson is certainly right in claiming that language can mislead us. Consider for instance the three following statements: ‘I see the moon,’ ‘I hear the violin,’ ‘I feel a pain.’ All three have the same structure. But whereas in the first two cases it makes good sense to distinguish the perceptual experience from the object of perception, it is far less obvious that in the case of pain we can make such a neat distinction between the experience and that of which it is an experience. Indeed, to attribute such a subject-object structure to pain-experience is arguably a serious mistake. So again, Bergson is right in claiming that language can mislead us – though we should obviously not forget that language also enables us to identify, articulate and criticize the mistake in question. Furthermore, Bergson is also right in claiming that language cannot replace intuition. There is indeed an irreducible difference between reading about the Aurora Borealis and seeing and experiencing it in all its splendor, but one can concede this without endorsing the idea that language rather than pointing us towards the phenomenon in question consistently points away from it, which seems to be Bergson’s view. Finally, while accepting the irreducibility and superabundance of intuition one should not overlook that there are forms of experience which rather than being deformed or corrupted by language are made possible by it. Think for instance about complex emotions like patriotism or repentance. It is hard to imagine the existence of either emotion in a creature living a purely individual life with no interference from society or language. Or to take a more mundane example, think of how language can enrich the appreciation of wine, think of how the proper concepts and terms can allow for the discernment of subtle flavors and aromas. Let us for the sake of the argument, accept Bergson’s reasoning. Given that our social interaction and our worldly engagement distort our selfunderstanding, given that the latter becomes deformed and contaminated through our language use, how are we to recover the pure inner self, how are we to acquire any insight into the true nature of consciousness? Bergson insists that a vigorous effort of reflection is necessary. We can reach the true self by means of a ‘deep introspection,’ one that allows us to intuit our conscious states in their inner fluctuation (TFW 129, 231, 233/86, 150–1, 152). But rather than really providing a solution this suggestion immediately

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raises additional problems. To start with, Bergson is not consistent in his terminology. In some places he uses the terms ‘reflection’ and ‘introspection’ synonymously (TFW 233/152), in others he clearly insists on their difference and writes that reflective consciousness ‘delights in clean cut distinctions, which are easily expressed in words, and in things with welldefined outlines, like those which are perceived in space’ (TFW 9/10), which obviously makes it incapable of revealing the true nature of consciousness. Bergson never makes the move of differentiating different forms of reflection, which would have removed the inconsistency, nor does he ever show why the introspection he favors, which supposedly makes us pay heed to something that we normally live through but fail to notice due to our absorption in the external world, doesn’t in the end amount to a kind of reflection.17 The basic issue at stake – whether reflection is trustworthy or rather a kind of falsifying telescope that transforms whatever it makes appear – is certainly one that has been discussed in extenso within phenomenology. In his debate with H.J. Watt in § 79 of Ideen I, Husserl provided a standard reply. According to Husserl, any skeptical claim to the effect that reflection falsifies the lived experiences and that they consequently elude it completely is self-refuting, since this very claim presupposes knowledge of those very same lived experiences, and how should one obtain that except through reflection?18 At the same time, however, Husserl certainly did recognize that rather than merely copying or repeating the original experience reflection actually transforms it, or as Husserl explicitly admitted, alters it.19 Otherwise, there would be no need for reflection. In a passage from Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, Husserl described this transformation in more detail. He wrote that the experience to which we turn attentively in reflection acquires a new mode of being; it becomes accentuated (herausgehoben). He argued that this accentuation is nothing other than its being-grasped.20 Husserl also spoke of reflection as a process that discloses, disentangles, explicates and articulates all those components and structures that were implicitly contained in the pre-reflective experience.21 What is important, however, is that this articulation is not necessarily imposed from without; is not necessarily foreign to the experience in question. In fact, rather than representing a distortion, it may constitute a consummation of the experience.22 As Husserl put it, in the beginning we are confronted with a dumb experience that through reflection must then be made to articulate its own sense.23 Rather than adding new distorting components and structures to the experience reflected upon, a reflection might, at best, simply be accentuating structures already inherent in the lived experience. In this case, the persistent fear that reflection is somehow prevented from attaining true subjectivity seems unfounded. One might see the phenomenological position as being situated between two extremes. On the one hand, we have the view that reflection merely

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copies or mirrors lived experience faithfully and on the other, we have the view that reflection distorts lived experience. The middle course is to recognize that reflection involves a gain and a loss. For Husserl and MerleauPonty, reflection is constrained by what is pre-reflectively lived through. It is answerable to experiential facts and is not constitutively self-fulfilling. At the same time, however, both recognized that reflection qua thematic self-experiences does not simply reproduce the lived experiences unaltered and that this is precisely what makes reflection cognitively valuable. As Ingarden correctly points out in the dissertation he wrote under Husserl’s supervision, and which was entitled Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson, even if an intuition of the kind envisaged by Bergson is attainable, its possession would hardly be sufficient for philosophers. If we want to do philosophy, it is not enough to intuit, we also need to grasp and know what we are intuiting, and this requires concepts.24 But this brings us back to the earlier problem, namely Bergson’s mistrust of concepts and language. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, was Schütz not right in insisting on some striking similarities between the respective projects of Bergson and Husserl? Consider for instance that Husserl frequently distinguished between a natural reflection and a transcendental reflection.25 When I grasp myself as a mundane object, I am given to myself as a constituted, objectified and transcendent entity. When asked whether this provides me with adequate knowledge of myself, Husserl’s answer is clearly negative, since I have still not attained an understanding of my own constituting, transcendental subjectivity. It is at this point that the transcendental reflection makes its entry, since its specific aim is to thematize a subjectivity purified and detached from all contingent, extrinsic and transcendent contexts.26 From the very start, Husserl emphasizes that this is a type of reflection that is not immediately available, and a central part of his writings is precisely dedicated to the task of developing a procedure that can make it accessible. I am, of course, referring to Husserl’s account of the phenomenological reduction. But for anybody familiar with Husserl’s ceaseless laboring over the question of how to effectuate the methodological step that will liberate us from a life lived in self-alienation and enable a form of reflection that removes the blinders (Scheuklappen) that ordinarily conceal the full and concrete transcendental character of life,27 the paucity of Bergson’s considerations is remarkable and deeply dissatisfying. Bergson doesn’t provide any instructions regarding how we are to liberate ourselves from the customs and conventions of ordinary social life in order to obtain an intuitive grasp of pure duration. The same frustration regrettably holds for his analysis of time. It is true that Bergson’s analysis of how spatialized clock-time conceals the distinctive temporality that constitutes the very interiority of consciousness antecedes the subsequent analyses of time to be found in Husserl and Heidegger.28 But if one compares the painstaking analysis of temporality that one finds in Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, say, his account

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of the relation between objective time, subjective time and the absolute pre-phenomenal flow of time-constituting consciousness or his analysis of the threefold structure of protention-primal impression-retention with what Bergson has to say about lived time, one will once again be struck by the negative character of Bergson’s account. We get to know far more about what duration is not, than about what it is. Moreover, some of Bergson’s fundamental assertions seem questionable. Consider for instance Bergson’s claim that there are no distinct conscious states in lived time, but that they rather intermingle to such an extent that we cannot tell whether they are one or several. Imagine then the following situation. You are sitting and enjoying a glass of wine. Suddenly your reveries are interrupted by the phone. It is your mother asking whether you have remembered to buy a wedding gift for your nephew. You shamefully confess that you have forgotten all about it. Now, whereas it is quite right to stress the qualitative continuity of the temporal phases of an experience, say, the auditory experience of your mother’s voice – it is just not right to divide the experience up into separate and externally related time-slices – more arguments need to be put on the table to make the case that the experience of wine-tasting and the experience of shame are not two different experiences. On the face of it, a denial of their distinctness just seems wrong.29 My initial presentation of the second chapter of Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience was quite concise, but even my brief overview unearthed several further aspects of Bergson’s theory that one could take issue with. Let me very briefly list three additional topics for discussion. • Bergson’s opposition of space and time presupposes a rather specific understanding of space. One might question the phenomenological pertinence of the notion he employs. Is it for instance really true that spatial objects are perceived as distinct, isolated entities, externally related to one another, or does this rather reveal Bergson’s own reliance on a derivative notion of space? As has been argued by many phenomenologists, the spatiality of our life-world is not a spatiality captured by geometrical measures, but one structured by contexts of use. Whether something is present or absent, near or remote is something that is determined by our practical concerns. Measured in centimeters I might be closer to the glasses I wear than to the picture I inspect, just as I might be closer to the phone I am using than to the person I am talking to. But phenomenologically speaking (in terms of meaning or significance) the relation is the reverse. This understanding of space is, however, very different from the one adopted by Bergson. • Given Bergson’s view on expressions – rather than revealing and articulating our conscious states, they falsify and distort them – it is hard to see how he will be able to come up with a satisfying account of intersubjectivity.

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Not only does his position lack the resources to tackle the problem of other minds in a convincing manner, but everything he says regarding sociality suggests a rather Cartesian view on the relation between self and other. On his account, social life is a danger to the integrity of subjectivity, rather than a natural prolongation and enrichment of the latter. This is hardly in accordance with the dominant view in phenomenology. • Finally, one might ask whether Bergson’s account of consciousness accords sufficient weight to intentionality. Does he fully recognize the selftranscending, world-involved, embedded and embodied character of the mind? As far as I can tell, the answer to these questions must be negative. Given Bergson’s repeated emphasis on the importance of maintaining the difference between the outer and the inner world (TFW 154/102), one is again struck by the Cartesian sounding character of his proposal.

4

Conclusion

My focus has been quite restricted. I have only examined one of Bergson’s many works, and when comparing his account with analyses found in phenomenology, I have mainly focused on figures in the German tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Ingarden and Schütz). Indeed, an in-depth investigation of how Bergson was received and interpreted by French phenomenologists would have proven a far more arduous task. As any reader of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Henry and Ricoeur will know, their work contains multiple references to Bergson. The contrast is striking. Whereas none of Husserl’s published writings on time – and this includes Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, Die ‘Bernauer Manuskripte’ über das Zeitbewußtsein30 as well as the recently published Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution31 – contain any reference to Bergson, Sartre devoted a substantial part of the second chapter of his L’imagination to a discussion of Bergson,32 and according to his own testimony, it was Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience that inspired him to study philosophy.33 Not only has my focus been narrow, perhaps it has even been a bit unfair. After all, I have been comparing a part of Bergson’s doctoral dissertation with the mature work of phenomenologists such as Husserl and Heidegger. Had the comparison been between Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience on the one hand and Husserl’s Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung or Heidegger’s Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus on the other, Bergson might very well have appeared as the more profound thinker. But despite these reservations the outcome of the present analysis should be clear. Bergson might be approached in various ways, but it does not seem advisable to read him as a (proto-) phenomenologist. Doing so is bound to lead to disappointment. His analyses are simply no match for what can be found in later phenomenology. Indeed, the account of consciousness that he offers

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us differs radically from that which we find in phenomenology. However, the lesson to learn from this might well be that it is more promising to read Bergson as somebody who challenges central doctrines in phenomenology rather than as one who anticipates them. As Lawlor and Moulard recently phrased it, ‘a revitalization of Bergsonism became possible because of Deleuze’s insistence that Bergsonism is an alternative to the domination of phenomenological thought, including that of Heidegger. The revitalization of Bergsonism leads to a revitalization of the question of life itself.’34 It is interesting to note that Heinrich Rickert, under whom Heidegger wrote his habilitation and who was Husserl’s predecessor, would have agreed with the latter appraisal. He viewed Bergson as the philosopher of life par excellence.35

Notes 1. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1910), 91/61. Hereafter cited parenthetically with the abbreviation TFW. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of H. Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). 2. Ultimately, Bergson will claim that science cannot deal with time without eliminating its essential element. For the very same reason, sequential time, time understood as a sequence of separate, distinct and externally related events or episodes, has nothing to do with real temporality. 3. When reading Bergson’s descriptions it is difficult not to be reminded of Heidegger’s discussion of Ruinanz or falling, that is, life’s tendency towards selfforgetfulness, its inherent tendency to objectify and cover itself up. M. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomnologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe Band 61 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), 119, 121. 4. P. Natorp, Allgemeine Psychologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1919), 151, 169. Hereafter cited parenthetically with the abbreviation AP. 5. It is a bit puzzling that Natorp directs this specific accusation at Bergson, since the case can easily be made that his own position is vulnerable to the very same criticism. 6. A. Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 47, 55 7. Compare E. Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, trans. R. Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 8. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II/1 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1980); in English as Logical Investigations, trans. J. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 165–6. 9. One of Heidegger’s most extensive discussions of Natorp can be found in the lecture course Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks from 1920. The first section of the second part of the lecture, which covers more than fifty pages, is entitled ‘Die destruierende Betrachtung der Natorpschen Position.’ 10. M. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe Band 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), 111.

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11. M. Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/1920), Gesamtausgabe Band 58 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 148. 12. M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, Gesamtausgabe Band 59 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 166. 13. Ibid., 169. 14. Ibid., 156. 15. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 87; M. Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/1920), 59. 16. M. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 88. 17. Furthermore, the choice of term is hardly a lucky one in that it suggests that self-knowledge is a question of having an inner perceptual object. The spatial metaphor is quite tangible. 18. E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I, Husserliana III/1-2 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 174; in English as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). 19. E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana I (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 72; in English as Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). See also E. Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), Husserliana XXV (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 89. 20. E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), Husserliana X (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 129; in English as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. J.B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). 21. E. Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, Husserliana XXIV (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 244. See also E. Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Husserliana XI (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), 205, 236; in English as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. A. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). 22. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 207; in English as Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). 23. E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 77. 24. R. Ingarden Gesammelte Werke – Band 6: Frühe Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), 146. 25. E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie I (1923–24), Husserliana VII (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff,1956), 262; see also, E. Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen, 72. 26. E. Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen, 117; see also E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie I (1923–24), 267. 27. E. Husserl, Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935), Husserliana XXXIV (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 226, 233. 28. Husserl’s spare references to Bergson in other writings – mainly in various letters – are almost all references to Ingarden’s dissertation, and given Ingarden’s statement in the beginning of the dissertation where he thanks Husserl for having provided him with many important insights (Ingarden, Gesammelte Werke, 1), it is probably not unreasonable to suppose that Husserl basically shared Ingarden’s critical appraisal of Bergson. 29. In his recent book, Consciousness and Persons, Tye has defended a view somewhat similar to Bergson’s. Tye considers the problem of how a sequence of experiences

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

is unified to be a pseudo-problem, since we are never aware of our experiences as unified or as continuing through time or as succeeding one another. If I have an experience of a red flash followed by a green flash, I experience two colored flashes as occurring one after the other. I do not experience my experience of a green flash as succeeding my experience of a red flash any more than I experience my experience of a red flash as red. Continuity, change and succession are features of the items experienced and not features of the experiences. M. Tye, Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 96–7. E. Husserl, Die ‘Bernauer Manuskripte’ über das Zeitbewußtsein 1917/18, Husserliana XXXIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). E. Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934) – Die C-Manuskripte. Husserliana Materialien Band 8 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). J.-P. Sartre, L’imagination (Paris: PUF, 1936). J.-P. Sartre, ‘Interview with Michel Rybalka, Oreste Pucciani and Susan Gruenheck,’ in P. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court, 1981), 5–51, 6. L. Lawlor and V. Moulard, ‘Henri Bergson,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2008 Edition), ed. E.N. Zalta, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2008/entries/bergson/. H. Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (Tübingen, 1922), 22.

7 A Criticism of Sartre’s Concept of Time Pete A.Y. Gunter

Critiques of Sartre’s concept of temporality developed in sections 1–3 of this chapter are free-standing. That is, they are intended as independent of concepts of time held by philosophers other than Sartre. The author, however, has no intention of hiding his own Bergsonian-Jamesian alliances. The concluding section (4) utilizes earlier interpretations of Sartrean temporalization to critique Sartre in the light of Bergson’s concept of inner duration. On this basis the chapter will argue that Bergson’s concepts of temporality are more defensible than Sartre’s, since they: (a) avoid the strict dualism that Sartre trumpets and then neglects; (b) allow the necessary appropriation of the present by the past; and (c) insist on the process of maturation necessary to the emergence of new ideas and veridical new acts. The most striking feature of Sartre’s philosophy, as developed in Being and Nothingness (1943),1 is his dualism: the absolutely sharp distinction that he draws between two modes of being, the in-itself and the for-itself. The latter is inert (BN 164), solid (BN lxvi), atemporal (BN lxvi) – without purpose. The former is spontaneous (BN lix, 92, 149) and purposeful – that is, it acts to fulfill its chosen possibilities (BN lxiv, 32). These two entities, he insists, cannot affect each other (BN liii, liv) or communicate with each other (BN lix). The for-itself is human consciousness; the in-itself is habitually described by him as physical nature. Never the twain shall meet. If dualism is central to Sartre’s thought, it also produces Sartre’s most difficult problems. These have often been discussed in the context of his treatment of the confrontation between man and nature or in his theory of interpersonal relations (it would seem, disrelations). In this chapter, I will deal with a relatively neglected aspect of Sartre’s thought: his treatment of time or, as he puts it, temporalization (BN 136, 148, 149). In particular, the chapter will focus on his treatment of the past and of memory. The problems of Sartrean dualism also arise here, in ways that, I believe, undermine his notion of inner time consciousness. It might be thought that Sartre, by sharply separating his two modes of being and placing the for-itself outside of mere inert physical nature, has 134

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rescued it (the for-itself) from any taint of dualism. Clearly this is not so. The fundamental character of the for-itself is its persistent temporalization (BN 149). But this temporalization is from the beginning dichotomized. That is – as will be explored below – it is described as cut off from its future (BN 27–8,192) severed from its own present (BN 27, 194) and disjoint from its past (BN 119–20, 195).

1 The past and memory The upsurge (BN 94, 149, 181) by which Sartre defines the present turns out to have definite structure. It is unified (BN 181) and, above all, it is active. Its activity, in turn, is revealed to contain distinguishable phases. The first of these is a ‘leap’ (BN 114) by the for-itself towards its own past. Through this transit, the present upsurge reaches back and encounters what precedes it. The past, for Sartre, is clearly distinguished from memory. The present encounters the past, and constitutes memories from it. This is an interesting thesis. Unfortunately, Sartre does little to elaborate it. By the time of Being and Nothingness, memory theorists had firmly distinguished short-term from long-term memory. Sartre nowhere invokes this distinction, leaving it unclear whether the transit of the present towards the past reaches the remote or only the immediate past or whether the immediate past contains only the content of the most recently perished present. His treatment of temporalization, as will be shown below, suggests the latter alternative.2 By Sartre’s time, memory theorists had also distinguished personal (now termed ‘episodic’) from rote (now termed ‘semantic’) memory. There is a general consensus that both are necessary to understanding the ways in which memory functions. Sartre also leaves this distinction out of discussion. The structure of Sartre’s present moment consists first, as noted above, in its transit towards the past. Having encountered this past it, second, ‘flees’ from it (BN 27–8). This flight is then, third, transformed from a flight from the past into a flight into the future (BN 124, 149, 154). The for-itself is thus a ‘nothing’ (BN 28, 140, 147) that embodies three successive phases of activity. Given Sartre’s general description, an additional phase may be required between the second and third, making four phases in all. That is, in its transit from past to future, the present upwelling finds itself obliged to choose between the possibilities it contains so as to constitute a ‘project’ (BN 179). Once this spontaneous activity is completed (that is, once the for-itself has completed its act of self-creation) it perishes. The present for-itself then becomes frozen, opaque (BN lix), inert. Thus, for Sartre, each present becomes an immediate past. At each moment, so to speak, the for-itself is cloned, depositing itself as the newlyconstituted past against which the new for-itself must revolt in ‘horror’ (BN 32).

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That the present upsurge, once its activities are terminated, becomes the immediate past is asserted by Sartre so often (BN 35, 112, 117–18, 119, 120, 128, 145…) that there can be no doubt of his meaning. His view, however, gives rise to any number of problems. One, possibly minor, concerns the transition between the present (a for-itself) and the immediate past (an initself). It might seem that such a transition would be instantaneous. Sartre does not deal with this question directly, but his remarks lead us to conclude that it is a separate, continuous process (BN 34, 35, 114, 120, 128, 144). The reason this is a problem is that it involves a process which does not fit Sartre’s dualism. That is, it is not reducible either to the for-itself or the initself, and Sartre’s logic forbids that there can be a hybrid of the two. Equally, it seems to involve a transposing of a for-itself into an in-itself: a transition that Sartre appears to forbid. In any case, given the successive deposition of the innumerable presents that constitute the personal past, we have, trailing behind the present, a series of frozen presents stretching like a line of boxcars to the remote horizon.3 These constitute an in-itself whose status is in no way clear. It might be thought that the personal past is part of the brain (that is, the physical world). This would be logically parsimonious, requiring only one level or type of past in-itself. But Sartre contests such reductionism, specifically rejecting the neurophysiologist’s notion of ‘engrams’: a concept introduced to help explain the location of memories in the brain (BN 108). But if the personal past is not in the brain (an in-itself ) and if it is not in the for-itself, what is its status? And there is another problem. Sartre nowhere mentions the maladies of memory. Many of these have an empirical and experimental base. A brain lesion is often accompanied by memory loss with damage to particular brain regions leading to the loss of particular sorts of memories. Were personal memories part of the brain apparatus this would pose no problem: brain damage would equate to memory damage.4 If, however, the personal past is not in the brain but ‘elsewhere,’ brain lesions leading to the loss of these pasts would involve the action of one in-itself (the brain, part of the world) on a very different sort of in-itself (Sartre’s segmented personal past). This problem will be discussed in the final section (4) of the chapter. Sartre’s transition from the for-itself into the past is problematic in another way. The personal past for him consists of an array of segments which at one time did not exist (prior to the existence of the person to whom they belong) and at a later time, do. The entire train of personal memories is thus created, not ex nihilo, yet still in such a way that, having once not existed, it now does. Sartre is at great pains, however, to deny that an in-itself can be created (BN lxiv). The problem becomes still more vexing when it is found that the personal past is not only created, but destroyed. Upon our deaths the entire array of personal memories is ‘annihilated’ (BN 112). We thus have an in-itself that is created, then disappears. This is particularly

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puzzling in the light of Sartre’s insistence that the in-itself is not subject to temporality (BN lxvi) and to which ‘transition, becoming’ are forbidden on principle (BN lxvi). The personal past as he describes it is an in-itself whose being grows sequentially, and whose growth must be conceived as temporal. It exhibits transitional becoming. For the moment, I will leave aside the problems created by Sartre’s notions of the past and point to some unexpected alliances between his position and that of other thinkers. The first concerns the analogies between Sartre’s theory of time and that of the process philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Readers familiar with the latter will have noted the use here of Whiteheadian terminology (phases, perishing) in the analysis of Sartre’s upsurge of the for-itself. This was intentional. The parallels between Sartrean and Whiteheadian temporality are undeniable. For both, a unit of existence springs up de novo then relates itself to its past (for Whitehead through prehension), assembles its possibilities (for Whitehead, concrescence), then perishes. For Sartre this elapsed process subsequently affects only a single (human) individual. For Whitehead the superject then provides factors potentially ingredient in all organisms (compare the principle of relativity). In writing Being and Nothingness Sartre seems to have believed that he had achieved real conceptual progress by making the present moment appear ex nihilo and then relate to its past. Whitehead had preceded him in this.5 Another implication of Sartre’s concept of temporality that has tended to go unnoticed is that of the universal survival of the past. The series of lapsed presents constituting the Sartrean past clearly contains the sum of all prior personal experience. As much as Bergson, Freud or Proust, Sartre proves that, this side of death, all we have experienced is retained. That this has not been universally noticed would appear to be a result of Sartre’s perpetual portrayal of the relation between present and past as one of negation, with the unstated implication that it is only the immediate past that is negated. This seems to make sense. Negation, as Sartre develops it, is rejection, not appreciative acquaintance. Hence his attitude towards the past would be the polar opposite of, for example, that of Marcel Proust, for whom every aspect, every nuance of the past is precious. (Sartre sometimes writes as if the massive character of the past were noxious.) Even so, Sartre must admit the existence ‘behind us’ (BN 119, 120) of lavish stores of potential personal memory. He must also admit to having pushed into the dim background the question of how we are to account for the utilization of this memory.

2 The past (memory) in the present On Sartre’s terms – that is, in terms of his reiterated descriptions – the relation between the existential present and the past is, as noted above, entirely one of negation. This portrayal has in its favor his axiom that the

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in-itself and the for-itself have no mutual commerce, a claim noted at the very beginning of the chapter. This claim could usefully be restated here: In particular the preceding reflections have permitted us to distinguish two absolutely separated regions of being: the being of the pre-reflective cogito and the being of the phenomenon. (These are) … two regions without communication… . (BN lxiii) Or again: The perceived being is before consciousness; consciousness cannot reach it and it cannot enter into consciousness. (BN lix) These statements appear in the Introduction to Sartre’s masterpiece. If he did not mean them to be taken literally and categorically, the strangest place for him to have stated them is in an introduction. That relations between present and past cannot simply be relations of negation can be seen by considering a simple case of recognition of objects. In order to recognize a coffee cup or a pen, innumerable memories must be focused to constitute recognition. Still more so for broader projects, whether of repairing a carburetor (a more complex practical task) or making a morally relevant decision. Apart from memory not only are our various positive projects impossible, negations in Sartre’s sense are impossible. We must know what we are rejecting in order to reject it. Otherwise there would only be a blind negation-of-everything, devoid of reference. But for negation to occur, memories, important aspects of the past, must be extant in the present. Sartre realizes this, but tries to escape the conclusion that aspects of the past are ingredient in the present. He must do so because such a reality is an in-and-for-itself and as such involves the penetration of the for-itself by components of the in-itself. In no way, as we have seen, can this be allowed to happen. Sartre’s treatment of the way in which this does happen involves a peculiar evasion. He states, for example, ‘By an internal negation we understand such a relation between two beings that the one which is denied to the other qualifies the other at the heart of its essence – by its absence’ (BN 175). Speaking of a deceased friend, Sartre states: ‘…Pierre’s existence has touched my inmost depths; it formed a part of a present in-the-world, for me-and-for-others which was present during Pierre’s lifetime…’ (BN 112). But here we cannot give Sartre the benefit of the doubt. Either aspects of Pierre’s nature are in the present or they are not. If they are not, both memory and directed negation are impossible. If they are, aspects of the in-itself (perhaps those not negatively prehended) are in the for-itself.

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This point needs to be emphasized. That is, I may indeed remember Pierre as ‘absent.’6 But if this means that his positive attributes are not here, in the present, recognized as such, the result is not the recognition of Pierre at all. Such attributes are a component by transfer from the past to the present upwelling for-itself, and no juggling of concepts of being, negation or absence can obviate the fact. Though Sartre states that at each moment the present negates the past (BN 28) he must also and equally concede that in each moment it actively recalls the past, components of which are involved in the putting-together of its projects. If so (to repeat what has been stated earlier), there is a lively commerce indeed between the in-itself constituting the past and the present for-itself.

3 The strange status of the stream of consciousness There is not space here for a thorough analysis of Sartre’s treatment of the stream of consciousness. It will be returned to in the final section of the chapter, but even there, the discussion will be brief. Readers of Sartre must be struck by the bleakness, the barrenness of his depictions; certainly of nature, but even more certainly of human beings. The color, the richness, the pleasure of human existence vanish, not only in his philosophical works but equally clearly in his novels, plays and short stories. There are only, it appears, bleak alternatives and, with them, bleak experiences. What is lost in Sartre’s literary and philosophical descriptions, however, is gained by what is for him a secondary and deficient mode of being, the ‘stream of consciousness.’ For Sartre, as in digital computing, there can only be either 0 or 1, with no byte in between. We have already seen that the great existentialist does not always hold to this dichotomy. He may waver, inventing new in-itselves and new modes of transition between them. Nowhere is this more true than in his treatment of the stream of consciousness. There are two sorts of reflection, he argues: ‘pure reflection’ (BN 163) and ‘impure reflection’ (BN 163). The latter provides the source for the empty, translucent (BN lix, 43, 140) for-itself, the former for the inherently misleading stream of consciousness. Pure reflection depicts the pure spontaneity of human freedom. Impure reflection dwells in a deceptively full and dynamic mode of being which not only cannot support the free act, but which is inherently predetermined. As such it can only support a basis for ‘psychological research’ (BN 163). One notes that Sartre does not think much of psychology. Under Sartre’s critical gaze the stream of consciousness dries out into no more than ‘the purely external relations of succession’ (BN 158) and amounts to a mere ‘multiplicity of existents external to each other’ (BN 159). It is, then, what John Locke and David Hume held that it is: a collection of atomized momentary parts. Sartre holds that besides affording a basis

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for psychology, it can help us date events (presumably those in which we are personally involved) (BN 158). It is a good question, on Sartre’s terms, how this secondary temporality ever arises. It cannot, he insists, stem directly from the original temporality of the for-itself (BN 159). It has, therefore, to arise indirectly. It does so, we are told, through a threefold reflection which transforms the purported insubstantiality of the for-itself into another of Sartre’s peculiar in-itselves: …this in-itself which reflection has to be is the reflected-on insofar as the reflective tries to apprehend it as being in-itself. This means that three forms exist in impure reflection: the reflective, the reflected-on, and an in-itself which the reflective has to be insofar as this in-itself would be the reflected-on, an in-itself which is nothing other than the For of the reflective phenomenon. (BN 160) Whether or not this explanation is valid, one can at least understand Sartre’s conviction that bad faith consists in a non-causal agent wrongly endowing itself with causal efficacy, constituting itself thereby as a thing (BN 161). In spite of Sartre’s proclamations, however, and notwithstanding his problem of accounting for the stream of consciousness on any terms, the difference between the stream of consciousness and the temporalization of the for-itself turns out to be only a matter of degree. The stream of consciousness, he states, is ‘heavier, more opaque, more solid’ than the transparent for-itself (BN 164). It is thus a quasi or semi in-itself. Moreover, it is on Sartre’s terms more of an in-itself at some times, less so at others. It ‘participates simultaneously in the in-itself and the for-itself’ (BN 167). Or, it oscillates between ‘…the multiplicity of juxtaposition and the absolute cohesion of the ecstatic for-itself’ (BN 170). Thus at some moments it participates in the true spontaneity of the for-itself, at other times it exhibits the segmentation and the inertia of the in-itself. This dual nature of the stream of consciousness not only contradicts Sartre’s initial categorical descriptions of it as atomistic, it contradicts another of his claims: namely the presumed priority of the past in the stream of consciousness (BN 166). To the extent that the stream of consciousness attains true spontaneity, its locus is in the present. Sartre’s strikingly ambiguous treatment of the stream of consciousness is directly involved in another ambiguity, that of the character and content of memory. Here again he makes sharply contrasting statements. In one text he describes memories as lacking vivid detail: as having ‘…the silent fixity of the grief of another, of the grief of a statue’ (BN 119). But elsewhere he insists, speaking of past states: ‘Nor is there a weakening of the motivating force of the prior consciousness; it remains what it is, it does not lose anything of its urgency’ (BN 28).

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One thus has two radically opposed descriptions of memory: the one abstract and, so to speak colorless, the other rich with the colors of concrete experience. One may be allowed, perhaps, to introduce as a piece of evidence a personal memory of the very recent past, sitting in the local Sweetwater Grill amidst the smell of coffee, huevos rancheros, the hum of air conditioners, the jangle of country music. This is no shadow of someone else’s grief or pleasure, no recall as abstract as a statue. It is concrete memory, which Sartre has at all costs to marginalize, even to deny. Yet it is real enough and rich enough in qualia, and the question arises as to how we can have such ‘Proustian’ memories at all. Unless Sartre is willing to hold that there are two distinct personal pasts, one deposited in its wake by the for-itself, the other a product deposited by the stream of consciousness as it perishes, he must concede that there is only one source or basis for human recollection: the inert product of vanished for-themselves. There must then be two radically different ways of accessing this past: the Sartrean way, producing a kind of bleak film noir, and the other way, giving rise to the rich Technicolor of the (presumably suspect) stream of consciousness. We are not told how this can happen. There are at least two other puzzles in Sartre’s treatment of the stream of consciousness. The first involves his treatment of this stream as mere Humean succession, the second involves Sartre’s concomitant (and perhaps inadvertent) transformation of the for-itself into a sort of stream of consciousness in its own right. Sartre’s Humeanizing of the stream of consciousness amounts to an ironic caricature. The discoverers of the stream of consciousness, William James and Henri Bergson, stated their positions precisely as a protest against the view that real psychological time is mere succession, or that it is comprised of discrete, atomic components. Their point of view amounted to a joint denial of quantitative, segmented temporality. What Sartre terms the stream of consciousness must be taken as his own transformation of the concept into its polar opposite: a dry and empty stream. But there is a peculiar inverse movement in Sartre’s thought. It can be argued that, contemporaneously with his (if ambiguous) demotion of the stream of consciousness, in his effort to exalt the for-itself, he covertly transforms it into a stream of consciousness on its own. He appears to realize this, for he warns expressly against treating the for-itself as a ‘thing.’ Rather than do so, he states, we should conceive the for-itself as a ‘hole’ (BN 147) or ‘hollow’ (BN 177). In stating his case this way, however, he opens himself up to serious criticism. A hole has two characteristics that the for-itself does not: it is passive and it lacks any internal cohesion. The for-itself, by contrast, is everywhere described by Sartre as frenetically active. It is also said, as noted above, to be unified (BN 161). This unified and unifying activity, again, is not formless, but has a definite temporal structure comparable (as we have argued above) to a Whiteheadian actual occasion with consecutive phases.

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These cannot consist of an endless negation of the past, but must involve the unceasing appropriation of the past to formulate the projects which are the essence of the free act. Sartre states: ‘…it is in terms of this past that the foritself makes known to itself what the future will be’ (BN 195). The for-itself thus turns out to be neither a substantive nothing nor a pure negation, but in Sartre’s hands increasingly resembles the stream of consciousness he denies.

4 Concluding reflections: Bergsonism in Sartre A The pure for-itself and its impurities The most significant result of the analysis of Sartrean temporality undertaken in this chapter is the unhappy contrast between his uncompromising absolute dualism and his tendency to create modes (degrees) of being intermediate between his dual absolutes. An example of this, which adds to those examined above but which is emblematic of all of them, is the following. Consciousness, he states, experiences itself ‘as the nihilation of its past,’ an experience which involves constant ‘anguish’ (BN 28); nine pages later he insists that in our ordinary lives we do not experience this anguish (BN 37). The problem here is not only one of apparent self-contradiction, it is that of explaining how pure, empty, transparent self-consciousness can ever veil or hide itself from itself: a veiling or hiding which Sartre depicts as if dramatic, never perfect, always a matter of degree. The attempted resolutions he suggests (BN 35–6, 48–70) seem unconvincing. Consciousness, he insists, upwells at each moment, does so equally at each moment, and in each moment is pure, empty. Thus pure consciousness does not wax or wane; it is equally vivid (and equally a negation of the past) at each moment. It is, at each moment, equally pure, equally transparent, and equally aware of its status as a negation. Like a fine Swiss watch or a Kantian ‘form of inner sense,’ moreover, it proceeds regularly, beating out time (temporalization) with successive negations. That is, in Sartre’s view it is an enclosure in which all is brilliant light. If so how can any of its characteristics be veiled, hidden, forgotten?7 On Bergson’s grounds this problem does not arise, precisely because he does not assume that consciousness is pure (that is, devoid of content), that its intensity never varies, that it is alien to the world it inhabits. The opposite is true for Bergson. It is our nature, he states, to exist at different levels of duration, to experience with varying intensity, and to participate variably in the world we inhabit. That is, consciousness on his terms is always colored by our pasts, varies according to present effort, and is more or less remote from the rhythms of our world. Thus we do not have to explain, as with Sartre, how an absolutely pure disembodied consciousness can hide its discontents from itself. We can follow, with Bergson, a consciousness that negates its own freedom from the heights of its active duration gradually down to a fragmented, passive, unreflective state of being.

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This is what Bergson describes in Creative Evolution: The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious of our progress in pure duration, the more we feel the different parts of our being enter into each other, and our whole personality concentrate into a point … It is in this that life and action are free. But suppose we let ourselves go, and instead of acting, dream. At once the self is scattered. … Our personality thus descends in the direction of space. It coasts around it in sensation.8 Interpreting this statement satisfactorily would involve a lengthy discussion, which must be cut short. Bergson is describing a descent from self-possessed reflective consciousness, with a prolonged duration, to a consciousness that has given up clear awareness and plunged itself into an extensive set of brief, vanishing durations. Our ordinary awareness, he insists, oscillates between these limits. On the same grounds he can, analogously, contrast moral clarity with moral self-deception, good faith with bad faith. We should thus not be surprised to find accounts of bad faith, sometimes etched in acid, interspersed systematically throughout his writings. The social (socially accepted) self, he insists, systematically parasitizes the genuine inner self while parodying virtue.9 The patriotic citizen may believe he is defending God while only defending his own very closed society.10 Laughter is unmasked by Bergson, showing the harsh grimace behind a facade of joviality.11 There is Bergsonian condemnation of bad faith,12 rather antedating Sartre’s analysis. But for Sartre we cannot understand how pure temporality can generate such shadows, such fallings-away. With Bergson’s inherently variable duration such debasement begins to be comprehensible. Sartre’s problem of generating ‘impure’ modes of consciousness from pure awareness is closely allied with his hesitations over the stream of consciousness. Discussed above (section 3) they will be explored again here. This exploration will reveal hidden affinities with Bergson. The stream of consciousness, Sartre begins, is a pure in-itself: segmented, atomistic, rooted in the past and, hence, deterministic. As such it has no kinship with or interrelations with the free for-itself. Having stated his opinion categorically, he then develops a contrasting view. It is now stated that, far from being an inert in-itself, the stream of consciousness oscillates between the for-itself and the in-itself, participating alternatively in each. Three things – each directly contradictory to his original definition – follow from this. (1) Insofar as inner duration participates in the for-itself it is unifed, not atomistic (broken into parts). (2) Insofar as it participates in the for-itself its locus (as noted in our original treatment in section 3) is the present, not the past. (3) Inner duration, thus, for Sartre escapes homogeneity, and inertness. It is free. But this new Sartrean inner duration, as our discussion of Bergson’s levels of duration shows, is the precise analogue of Bergsonian duration, moving

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between the limits of pure duration and pure perception. Reaching (closely approximating) the latter one has an in-itself: atomized, segmented, inert, predictable. Reaching (closely approximating) the former, one has a free act temporalizing itself: holistic, unified, spontaneous. Drolly, it seems to this writer, Sartre recreates the very stream of consciousness he has just condemned and dismissed. It is as if he had precipitously expelled Bergson (and James) from his ontological bistro, only to readmit them, sotto voce, through the back door. One wonders what they might say to Malraux or Gide. B A la recherche de la mémoire non déformé Sartre’s assumption of the preservation of our personal pasts, examined in section 1 above, leads to several problems. For one, there is the difficulty of explaining how – out of our immense store of memories – we are able to access the ones we need. For another, if the present upwelling is an isolated present, how can we come up with new insights, values, projects? Would not we simply repeat our isolation? Sartre’s few and sparse reflections on how we manage selectively to appropriate the past are too few and too sparse to be of much help. He states of ‘intellectual memory’: ‘[it] consists of a thousand empty indications, a thousand designations which point behind us, without image, without words, without thesis … This is my concrete past’ (BN 141). This is baffling. How an empty indication or a state of mind lacking any thesis (supposition) can enable us to access any particular memory or particular sort of memory appears incomprehensible. Do we ever, in fact, attempt to remember without the slightest notion of what we are trying to retrieve? If Sartre does not appear to help us with this problem, one of the virtues of Bergson’s theory of memory is that it provides the beginning of a solution to it. This solution involves three complementary parts. The first part involves his explanation of the loss of memories due to brain damage (compare section 1 above). Such memories are, Bergson argues, not destroyed. Rather, they can find no way to ‘fit’ into the brain’s motor mechanisms. They are not non-existent but merely hors de combat. It is when episodic memories cease to be able to materialize that they become unavailable to us. For Sartre the in-itself cannot affect the for-itself. But for Bergson the mind (a for-itself) requires the functional support of the brain (an in-itself) and it becomes intelligible that destruction in one leads to disorientation or lapse in another. The second part concerns a kind of recollection that Sartre neglects: habit memories are made part of brain mechanisms, Bergson holds, through efforts of attention.13 To recite the multiplication table or ride a bicycle is to call on such memories, which are actions in the present and which have no inherent reference to personal recollections. Without them no mind-body dialectic would be possible. It is hard to know what Sartre means by ‘intellectual memory.’ If he means to include by this term the mechanisms and

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skills involved in, for example, long division or deriving square roots, it can be accounted for by the collaboration, on Bergson’s terms, of reflective mind and neurobehavioral mechanism. The third part concerns the phenomenology of remembering. We habitually presume, Bergson points out, that in memory we reach back into the past to pick out the recollections that concern us. In fact we adopt an attitude that allows memories to come to us. Memories are thus vectored out of the past into the present. It is in no way clear for Sartre how the upthrust of the present can transit effectively towards the Proustian past to pick out specific components of it. For Bergson, however, it should be possible to study recollective attitudes relating to the materialization of different sorts of memory. However Sartre may have hoped to explain the particularities of memory, it is clear at least, that he views memory as fundamental to the nature of temporalization. In doing so, he takes one more step toward making the human self, if not a substance or a ‘thing,’ nonetheless a reality. Criticisms of Sartre’s depiction of the self as a ‘hole’ or a ‘nothing’ here take on additional force. He describes successive temporalizations as wholes which inherit from each other. But since inherent in each stream of consciousness is a different personal past, each will be different from all others. Sartre here, perhaps without fully realizing its import, introduces a principium individuationis which further undermines his treatment of the self as a ‘hole’ or ‘hollow.’ Holes can scarcely be conceived as differing from each other. That is, emptiness has no individuality. If so it cannot be used to characterize different for-itselves as ‘unique’ (NB159), ‘individualized’ (BN 177) or as a ‘qualified negation’ (BN 202). C The past as prolegomena, the future as endurance In Time and Free Will Bergson states concerning the free act: ‘…in reality there are not two tendencies, or even two directions, but a self which lives and develops by means of its very hesitations until the free act drops from it like an over-ripe fruit’ (TFW176/116). This fundamental tenet is never abandoned by Bergson. Free acts, never mere choices between pre-existing alternatives, are never random for him. They require a preparation in real duration, a struggle for self-definition without which they can find neither definition nor expression. This understanding of freedom emerges again in Bergson’s final study, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where human ethical and religious values are described as involving a constant effort, experienced not only in the lives of individual religious geniuses but in the histories of peoples and cultures. But if the free act requires the past, it also prepares and continues into the future. Here one also finds a lack in Sartre’s ‘exoteric’ doctrine. It is clear from the mass of Sartre’s novels, plays, speeches, interminable interviews that the projects in which he hopes to involve his readers go rather beyond

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single dramatic upwellings. To run the Germans out of France or bathe the French happily in the elixirs of Marxism – Sartre’s two best-known projects – would require a continuity of effort, coupled doubtless with increasing comprehension, which Sartre’s single anarchic bursts of protest can hardly support. The moral burdens that Sartre imposes cannot possibly be sustained by such paltry existential structures. It is no wonder, then, that he should have moved on to write the massive Critique of Dialectical Reason: to provide sustaining structures for historically significant projects whose achievement is far from instantaneous.14 The picture that arises in the course of this chapter is one of the gradual intrusion into Sartre’s bleak dualism of elements that subvert both dualism and bleakness. The unity and dynamism of the for-itself, joined to the productive function of memory in the creation of projects, already approximate familiar Bergsonian themes. When these are added to the ‘oscillating’ stream of consciousness, varying between limits, and when each Sartrean consciousness is declared individualized, we are confronted with a Bergsonism within a Sartrean ontology: a Bergsonism which arguably undermines Sartre’s intent. At the very least, such a situation calls for severe qualification of Sartre’s concept of human-being, if not significant reconstruction of his system. Neither, in Being and Nothingness, is forthcoming.15

Notes 1. J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H.E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Hereafter cited parenthetically with the abbreviation BN. 2. Any present moment contains aspects of the past for Sartre. Hence even the immediate past (a ‘deposit’ of the for-itself ) will contain some aspects taken from remote pasts. 3. In Sartre’s spirit, perhaps we should describe personal memory as a grey tapeworm stretching, diseased and de trop, into the past. 4. That is, to the loss or damage not of memories per se but to segments of the personal past from which memories are coined. 5. A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology, ed. D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 18–36, esp. 22. 6. But, as will be discussed in greater depth in section 4 of this article, not all memories display the bleak abstractness of absence. Explaining Proustian reminiscence will be difficult for Sartre. 7. For a convincing analysis of Sartre’s difficulties here, see M. Natanson, A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 82–7. 8. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans A. Mitchell, intro. K. Ansell Pearson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 129–30/666. 9. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), 166/109–110. 10. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton with H. Horsfall Carter (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1935), 299–300.

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11. H. Bergson, Laughter, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 99–200/418–82. 12. For some recent appreciations of this side of Bergsonian psychology, see: L. Lawlor, ‘Asceticism and Sexuality: the Trumpery of Nature in Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,’ Philosophy Today (SPEP Supplement) 46(5) (2002): 92–101; J.C. Mullarkey, ‘Duplicity in the Flesh: Bergson and Current Philosophy of the Body,’ Philosophy Today, 38(4) (1994): 339–55. 13. H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 80–4/223–9. 14. J.-P. Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith and Q. Hoare (New York: Verso, 2006). 15. Additional resources consulted in preparing this essay include: Perry Anderson, Ronald Frazer, Quinton Hoare and Simone de Beauvoir, Conversations with JeanPaul Sartre (London: Seagull Books, 2006), 10, 21–2; Henri Bergson. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T.E. Hulme, intro. John Mullarkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 64; Pete A.Y. Gunter, ‘Bergson and Sartre: the Rise of French Existentialism,’ in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 230–44; Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 92; Frédéric Worms, Introduction à Matière et mémoire de Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 329.

8 Life as Vision: Bergson and the Future of Seeing Differently Alia Al-Saji

In Creative Evolution,1 Henri Bergson depicts a ‘cinematographic illusion’ in philosophical thinking that has vision as its basis (EC 306/753). Aiming at utility, vision does not follow the articulations of the real but condenses, solidifies and immobilizes reality in order to better manipulate and act upon it (EC 300–3/749–51). Vision sees neither the moving continuity of the material universe, nor the qualitative heterogeneity of life, rather it projects behind these temporal realities a homogeneous spatializing net that allows their decomposition and reconstruction according to abstract and empty schemas. Vision thus renders the world in terms of objects. More importantly, since visual perception is tied to the teleology of action, this objectification is naturalized as a reductive yet necessary structure of visual relations (EC 306/754). At best, vision could be understood to be adapted to the order of inert materiality, abstractly conceived in terms of artificially isolated systems; at worst, vision would be so structured by the needs of utility as to perpetually overlook what is novel and unpredictable, to misperceive what lives, endures, ages and invents. The role of vision in Bergson’s philosophy of life is, however, at once more complex and more ambivalent than this theory of its ‘cinematographic’ function allows. For vision arises within the evolutionary movement of life as part of its tendency to act on matter, but vision can also dilate and be transformed within creative endeavors (Bergson uses the example of the painter in ‘The Perception of Change’).2 Moreover, though visual perception – in its proximity to matter – tends to objectification, vision can also supply the means for its critical overcoming, moving in the direction of intuition. How are we to understand these adventures and reversals of vision? Since the vision that concerns us here is sensible and bodily, two sides must be held together in the story of vision. On the one hand, there is the potential or power of vision to see more, to go beyond (or beneath) the frame of utility that engendered it. For this, vision must be more than action; it must also be memory and creation. On the other hand, the materiality of vision needs to be acknowledged. In this vein, to see more is not the acquisition 148

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of a spiritual sense, but a transformation and dilation that must also belong to the body and the eyes. To trace the opening to vision and the formation of eyes within duration requires that we attend to Bergson’s philosophy of life in Creative Evolution. Starting with the genetic account of the evolution of the eye in that text, I show the ambiguity that haunts vision at once conceived as canalization and organization (section 1). If vision arises for a body as ‘zone of indetermination,’ as Matter and Memory shows, then it is by exploring the phenomenology of indetermination and its temporality that both life and vision can be rethought beyond the initial frame of utility that limits life to action and vision to objectification (section 2).3 Moreover, uncovering the ontological ground for vision as bodily sense, and for eyes as living matter, requires that we interrogate Bergson’s image of élan vital in order to explicate the internal relation of life to materiality (section 3). Only in this way can we come to recognize the memory that resides in the eyes and the materialization that is generative of vision, allowing us to imagine other ways of seeing (section 4). Once these unthought aspects of Bergson’s philosophy become explicit, other visions at once philosophically and ethically more robust than the cinematographic perception described above – come to view. In sections 3 and 4, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reading (or misreading) of Bergson to reveal one such vision: intuition or philosophical vision. Hence my question in this chapter: is there within the Bergsonian philosophy of life a phenomenological opening to, and ontological ground for, seeing differently?

1 Bergson and the evolution of the eye At the end of the first chapter of Creative Evolution, in attempting to defend his hypothesis of an immanent impetus to life, a psychological principle he calls élan vital, Bergson introduces a now well-known and controversial example: the example of the genesis of the visual apparatus – the eye – in different lines of animal evolution. This example can be read as exemplary of Bergson’s metaphysics of life, though for reasons that go beyond the explicit position it is employed to support. Bergson takes the case of the eye to reveal the subsistence of an original, albeit virtual, unity that must characterize the élan vital. In Bergson’s hypothesis, the élan vital holds a multiplicity of tendencies that, insofar as they are virtual, coexist in complementarity and mutual implication. These tendencies, however, cannot grow beyond a certain point without becoming incompatible (EC 53/540). This means that the unity of the élan is retrospective. Its movement is one of dissociation and division whereby tendencies are actualized through continual divergence (EC 89/571). This divergence stems, in part, from the internal multiplicity that characterizes life as tendency and, in part, from its need to work with matter and take material form as it actualizes itself

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(EC 99/579). The push of the élan is therefore neither serial nor cumulative, so that evolution cannot be understood to aim at a harmonious whole as in the finalist picture (EC 117/595). Nevertheless, according to Bergson, if there is a virtual unity to the élan, then its immanent force must continue to be shared and felt within the ever-forking movement of life, so that resemblances may be found there. In this sense, similar organs would arise by dissimilar means on divergent evolutionary lines (EC 54–5/541). For Bergson, the formation of eyes in mollusks and vertebrates instantiates such resemblance (EC 88/570); for the complexity of material structure and the simplicity of function incarnated in the eye point beyond any resemblance achievable by mechanistic or teleological composition to an immanent principle that diverges into, but continues to be shared among, evolutionary lines (EC 89/571). There are two threads within this argument that need to be disentangled, if we are to retain what is powerful about Bergson’s notion of élan vital. First is Bergson’s claim that convergent evolution along divergent lines of life – as witnessed in the example of the eye – requires the hypothesis of an initial, common élan. But second is Bergson’s appeal to the image of an immanent élan in explaining the correlation between complex form and simple function found in organic bodies (in whichever evolutionary line we consider) so that the structure of the eye proves irreducible to the coordination of parts. It should be noted that the first thread of Bergson’s argument has raised considerable criticism in the literature. This is due not only to its inability to discharge other factors that may explain convergent evolution,4 but also because of the ambiguous status of the élan vital in Bergson’s text as both causal evolutionary principle and analogy or metaphor for the duration of evolution.5 Moreover, the appeal to cases of convergent evolution, and specifically to resemblances between organs, is complicated by the ambivalence that haunts Bergson’s description of the process of materialization in Creative Evolution. Matter is sometimes presented as expressive of life, sometimes as an external obstacle or accident that life encounters on its way. If material forms are the remainder deposited outside life’s movement as it grows – rather than integral components of life’s actualization – then it is difficult to understand how resemblances between organs can be reflective of unity within life. These resemblances may speak to the ways in which matter sediments and takes form when it is deposited, but not to the organizational movement of life that issues from the initial élan. What is needed is an account of how materialization – especially material organization – stems from the virtual structure of the élan. My concern in what follows will be with this question of materialization, which constitutes the second thread in Bergson’s story of the formation of the eye.6 Beyond the élan as cause of convergent evolution, there is the image of élan, an image that has its limitations but also its power (EC 257/713). This is the power, as Keith Ansell Pearson notes, to make us think differently

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about evolution beyond both mechanism and finalism.7 It is, paraphrasing Bergson, to think evolution sub specie durationis (PM 158/1392). In the context of the story of the eye, Bergson uses the image of élan to initiate a temporal reflection on the relation of life and matter – a reflection which, in its ambiguity but also its richness, anticipates the ontological working-out of this relation later in Creative Evolution. How does this reflection unfold? The eye is a solution that life develops in response to the problem of light (EC 70/555); more precisely, it is a way of ‘making use [tirer parti]’ of light (EC 70–1/555). For Bergson, this does not simply mean that eyes are sensitive to light, or have the capacity to see, but rather that the eye is integrated with the movement of a living body, so that seeing must be understood in the verbal and active sense as bringing forth movement (EC 71/556). Life is, then, at once receptive and active in relation to its circumstances. In order to make use of its context, life must passively follow its incline before inflecting it in another direction: ‘Life proceeds by insinuation’ says Bergson (EC 71/555). It is in this double sense – as two directions or movements – that Bergson understands the adaptation that characterizes ‘living matter [la matière vivante]’, distinguishing it from the passivity of inert matter that is merely affected by its surroundings (EC 70/555). The problem of light therefore broaches the question of life’s relation to materiality – a problem that is defining of life for Bergson. It asks that we attend both to living and inert matter, as well as to their interrelation. Moreover, recalling the convergence between light and matter elsewhere in Bergson’s texts, especially in Matter and Memory, it is not only light that can be read as a metonym for matter (MM 36/186), but matter that appears indistinct from light. For once matter is seen as a moving continuity, a network of vibrations (MM 208/343) – and the material universe is understood to have its own duration irreducible to the static schema of space – matter is found to share something of the qualitative heterogeneity of light (MM 41/191), a richness that is contracted and reduced to measurable properties through the vision of the eyes. In the context of Creative Evolution, the problem of light can be understood to symbolize the problem of matter in at least three ways: life is the tendency to act on, to make use of, matter; to do so, life sees matter (contracts and objectifies it, ‘cinematographically’); and, for this, life espouses materiality (it becomes living matter, eyes and bodies that make use of light). It is this genetic dimension of Bergson’s story of the eye – the insinuation of life into matter – that I will examine in what follows (the other two dimensions will be discussed in section 2). I find within Bergson’s account in chapter one of Creative Evolution two schemas for the formation of the eye: the image of canalization and the notion of organization. These schemas, which Bergson presents as fitting together, come apart under close reading; for the relation of life and matter appears to shift from one schema to the other, reflecting different ontological commitments.

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In order to explain how the materialization of élan vital is a simple activity irreducible to the construction of an assemblage – and how vision as a drive cannot be grasped by studying the eye as a composite machine – Bergson resorts to an analogy. The vital effort that forms the eye is compared to the movement of one’s hand as it passes through iron filings, a medium that is compressed and resists in proportion as one’s hand advances through it (EC 94/575). When the hand will have exhausted its effort, the iron filings will be juxtaposed and coordinated in such a way as to reflect the imprint of the hand that has stopped. The form of the filings is not, then, the result of a work of assemblage (whether mechanistic or teleological), but of resistance to the effort of the hand: it is the negative expression of a positive and simple movement, or élan (EC 94/576). This corresponds to the following image of ocular vision: ‘it is a vision that is canalized, and the visual apparatus simply symbolizes the work of canalizing’ (EC 93/575). As with the structure of the canal and the form of iron filings, the materiality of the eye represents ‘a sum of obstacles avoided [obstacles tournés]: it is a negation rather than a positive reality’ (EC 93/575). This reference to canalization points both to the temporal process by which the canal is dug (the effort of the élan) and the course, usually considered a negative space, through which the water flows (the élan become vision). Bergson wants to show that it is this invisible movement that has positive reality, whereas the visible structure of the canal, its banks and floor, should be seen only as the present sediment of that digging effort and the limits of that canalized flow. Bergson’s aim in this discussion of the canalization of vision appears double. It is to point to the immanent élan that divides and materializes within evolution, giving rise to organic forms along divergent evolutionary lines. This echoes the generative, though invisible, movement of duration operative in the digging of the canal and the gesture of the hand. But his aim is also to show how such materialization is not the composition of an aggregate by the addition of pre-given parts, so that an organism could be analyzed or decomposed without remainder. The materialization of life is, rather, the creation of bodies by an immanent (insinuating) process that gives these bodies as organized ‘wholes,’ not fractionable into parts (EC 95/576). Bergson’s images of the canal and of the hand in iron filings belie, however, this aim. This is due, at first view, to the way in which matter, whether living or inert, is relegated to negativity in these images. But since this negativity could be read as a tendency within life, so that materialization would belong to the élan itself (as we shall see in section 3), I would claim that the problem is not that of the negative as such but of the way in which the negativity of matter is presented in these images. Two problems converge here. (i) On the analogy with the canal and the imprint in iron filings, organized matter appears as an inert sediment deposited along the trajectory of life’s movement, seemingly extraneous to the workings of life. Canalization is, in this vein, the clearing-away of debris rather

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than the internal working-over of matter. We seem to be confronted with a dualism of life and matter – without interpenetration or interaction of terms – and Bergson’s project of tracing their internal, ontological implication later in the text is undermined. Significantly, the immanence that Bergson claims for the élan – and which distinguishes his philosophy from problematic forms of vitalism that evoke a transcendent life-force – becomes questionable. On this account, though the élan may be immanent to evolution, it must at least begin by being transcendent to matter, a matter that figures as absolute outside into which this élan must canalize and descend.8 (ii) Correspondingly, since living matter is represented on the model of inert material things (the canal and the iron fillings), the activity that defines adaptation is elided.9 Organized bodies become equivalent to passive imprints. This belies Bergson’s insistence on living matter as responsive, in unpredictable and creative ways (whether successfully or not), to vital problems. But it also misses the singular form of passivity that must go along with such response: not the passivity of an effect that exactly mirrors its cause, but a sympathetic receptivity that embraces its circumstances before inflecting them in a new direction. What is missed, in other words, is insinuation. There is, however, another schema by means of which Bergson explains the simplicity of the drive to vision and the complexity of structure in the case of the eye. Just before he introduces the image of canalization, Bergson discusses the difference between two forms of vital effort, or work, that can characterize life’s relation to matter: organization and fabrication.10 Organization is the process by which life insinuates itself into materiality, taking material form and at once drawing matter into the creative movement of life. To fabricate, in contrast, is to work on matter from the outside, accumulating and assembling material elements in order to compose an object or machine that can serve as an instrument, even prosthesis, in life’s quest for utility (EC 182–3/650). Organization is, then, an effort that moves outward – an effort that Bergson describes as ‘explosive’ (EC 92/574). It works by differentiation, splintering and propagation within matter. The complexity of organized matter stems from this proliferation of divisions, from the divergences and zigzags by which life makes its way through materiality, a process that leaves its sinuous trace in the complication of organic matter. Fabrication is, in contrast, additive. The components artificially cut out of inert matter are not transformed by the work of assemblage, which remains external to them. The manufactured object is, for Bergson, only the sum of these inert and pre-constituted parts (EC 92/573–4). In comparison, the organized body or organ – in this case the eye – is more than the sum of its parts (EC 91/573). This is not simply because, as with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a Gestalt whole, it is a complex structure of internally articulated relations, irreducible to parts. It is rather because the parts are external and static views taken on the eye, whereas the organ is the dynamic

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sedimentation or incarnation of a tendency that is becoming differentiated, the movement of life becoming vision (EC 89/571). In this sense, the eye is also less than its parts, since the eye is given with the tendency to vision, whereas the parts are retrospectively and reflectively constituted as a result of a supplementary operation – both conceptual and perceptual (Bergson calls this ‘cinematographic’) – that decomposes and recomposes the eye as if it were a fabricated object. It is in terms of organization that we can understand the eye as at once material and living organ of vision, at once complex in form and simple in activity. Here, the élan is not separable from its materialization, so that ‘living matter’ is not a badly-posed problem that must be evacuated, but a mixture that defines experience and that the Bergsonian ontology of life must try to account for. It is in terms of this second schema, running through Bergson’s story of the eye, that his hypothesis of élan vital appears productive.

2 A phenomenology of indetermination: vision between action and the need to create Bergson’s use of the example of the eye should not be read as arbitrary. This owes not only to the convergence between the problem of light and that of matter, but correspondingly to the way in which the very sense of life calls forth visual perception for Bergson. In a highly suggestive passage that closes his account of the eye, Bergson notes that: life is, more than anything else, a tendency to act on inert matter. The direction of this action is not predetermined; hence the unforeseeable variety of forms which life, in evolving, sows along its path. But this action always presents to some extent, the character of contingency; it implies at least a rudiment of choice. Now a choice involves the anticipatory [representation] of several possible actions. Possibilities of action must therefore be marked out for the living being before the action itself. Visual perception is nothing else: the visible outlines of bodies are the design of our eventual action on them. (EC 96/577; translation corrected) Here, Bergson connects life as action to the structure of visual perception as it was discussed in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. The relation of vision to life is more than an analogy; they are not only parallel movements or tendencies, but enjoy a relation of part to whole. Bergson finds within the movement of élan vital itself the need for vision. This ‘march to vision [une marche à la vision],’ as Bergson calls it, is not a renewed finalism (EC 96/577). Vision is not the end intended by life but the structure through which life works out its relation to matter, its attempt to act with and upon matter. This structure hinges on a key feature of life’s relation to matter, implicit in

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the reference to contingency in the above passage. If life is to act in response to the world, rather than simply be affected by the world, then its relation to the world must include indetermination. As Bergson notes elsewhere in Creative Evolution, ‘the role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter’ (EC 126/602). I find in Bergson’s text two senses in which this indetermination is deployed by, and within, life – permitting us to see how the drive to vision and the organization of eyes, the moving, seeing, living body, are two sides of the same movement of life. On the one hand, and drawing on the above passage, there is an ‘outer’ indetermination whereby the world appears to the living body as articulated in terms of different virtual actions among which that body can choose. This is visual perception: the things surrounding my body present to me the sketch of my possible actions upon them (MM 22/172). Indetermination becomes, in this sense, visible within the material universe. Since my (pure) perception is part of that universe, this indetermination is not simply a projection or construction, but belongs to the structure of the material world as it includes living bodies (MM 43/192). In this sense, although it is through the perceiving and acting body that indetermination finds its way into the world, indetermination is neither limited to the body, nor alien to the world. The determinate tissue of materiality is not fully woven (EC 10/503); for the material universe has its own duration, Bergson insists, albeit infinitely faster and more repetitive than the rhythms of life (MM 207/342). This makes it possible for life to take matter in different directions: to unravel its quasi-repetitive and deterministic thread, propelling it in an inverse direction toward indetermination, or to fabricate machines and divide matter into objects that weave the mesh of causality more tightly, pushing matter further down the incline of necessity. This latter tendency requires some explanation. The paradox is that the push of life to insert indetermination into matter can become a tendency to objectify – one that represents and treats its material surroundings in more and more determinate and predictable terms. Bergson appeals here to the intentional teleology of action. In acting, intelligence is concerned not with the process or means employed, which remain implicit or unconscious, but with the goal to be accomplished (EC 299/748). Action is prospective rather than being reflective; what it projects on the world is the fulfillment of its interests and needs.11 The way the world appears is therefore a function of the discontinuous (kaleidoscopic) projection of ends upon it (EC 306/754). It is in this sense that the world is cut up according to our needs, contracted and immobilized according to our attention, and solidified for the sake of utility.12 By means of this ‘cinematographic’ structure of concrete perception, the fluidity of the material universe is rendered as objects (EC 306/753). Between this representation (which is more than pure perception, for it arises from the work of mind on matter) and the action that motivates it, there remains a crucial difference. For while materiality

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comes closer to this representation – the more it is seen, acted upon, and fabricated into objects – action itself (whether organization or fabrication) is an interval of duration, a concrete movement or passage that introduces indetermination into the material world. Thus objectification should not be understood to be absolute, despite the dominance of the ‘cinematographic illusion’ for Bergson, since the very movement that grounds this representation contains the possibility for its interruption and critique. On the other hand, ‘outer’ indetermination mirrors an ‘inner’ indetermination that exists within the material structure of the organized body.13 This material indetermination corresponds to the complexity of organized matter, permitting a different temporality to take place. In this vein, Bergson notes that the complexity of the animal nervous system represents a ‘reservoir of indetermination’ (EC 126/602), and he describes the brain in higher vertebrates as a ‘central telephonic exchange’ (MM 30/180). What Bergson means to show in appealing to the complexity of the sensory-motor system is the way in which a complication of material structure can proliferate the routes by which an excitation may develop, at once delaying the immediate reaction and permitting a different motor response. By means of this delay, immediate activity is not only suspended, it is at once symbolized and differentially displaced. The mechanism of reaction is replaced with a feeling or sensation that prefigures the reaction without necessitating it (affect), while divergent lines of action appear as virtual articulations of the world for the living body (perception) (MM 32/182–3). For Bergson, the complication of living matter does not cause indetermination, rather it is indetermination in bodily form. Such complication is not simply measurable in terms of degrees; it is experienced as difference in kind between living materiality (which tries to delay the tendency to determinism) and inert materiality (which follows the incline to necessity).14 What counts here is the delay, the hesitation, that is affectively experienced by the organism and visually perceived by it in terms of a world of virtual action. It is through this delay that a different temporality is opened up, irreducible to the (quasi-)repetition of the same that defines inert matter for Bergson. Specifically, it is no longer the immediate past that determines the present, but the past as a whole that pushes on each present, directing it to actualizations ‘incommensurable with its antecedents’ (EC 27/517). Bergson describes this past as ‘tendency’ in Creative Evolution, for it is memory whose weight is felt without being conscious and whose dynamic sense need not be recollected in order to make a difference (EC 5/498–9).15 To delay immediate reaction is to interrupt the seamless continuity of past-present actuality in favor of a virtualization of the past that allows it to ‘act’ differently in the present – to suggest and create rather than simply play out and repeat. This subjectless power of the past is more akin to an élan than an act. Though it can be traced to the past as an interpenetrating whole, an inextricable web, its actualization is neither linear progress nor seamless

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intentionality. To take seriously the image of élan as requiring both effort and resistance against which this effort sets itself in motion, the past as tendency can be understood as both taking its élan in the moment of hesitation that the complication of living matter opens up and as grounding this moment. Material indetermination functions, in other words, as pivot rather than cause. It is the point of support, or resistance, from which the past as unconscious latency and weight lances itself through matter and becomes (vital) élan.16 This reflection on the meaning of indetermination for Bergson should allow us to deepen the sense of life with which we began: life as a tendency to act on matter. Bergson often resorts to the teleological framework of utility – of survival, vital interest, and the satisfaction of need – as shorthand for this tendency of life to act. This framework, I would argue, unnecessarily narrows the scope of what life – and its indetermination – mean in Bergsonism.17 More precisely, how should ‘need’ as a guiding principle for action be interpreted in Bergson’s texts? On the one hand, ‘need’ can be read as a preformed lack aiming at fulfillment. In this sense, to see the world in terms of need would be to see it as a world of possible actions that could satisfy those needs. Since action, however, is represented not as an interval of duration but by the accomplishment of a goal, what would be seen is a world of objects projected as the fulfillment of needs. Here, the future designates a field of actions and objects circumscribed by the present (or immediate past). But it is unclear that the time that inscribes living bodies – bodies that desire, want and act (EC 5/498) – could have such predictability and closure. Such a reading of ‘need’ seems to imply two interrelated illusions. First, that vital activity is modeled on the realization of a plan – ‘[a] plan is a term assigned to a labor: it closes the future whose form it indicates’ (EC 104/584). Here, the future appears to mirror the present and, in this sense, is given along with it. But such futurity can only (and then only abstractly and approximately) be found in the artificial systems of inert matter for Bergson; the futurity of life is both open and unpredictable in a radical sense. For it is not only that, as Merleau-Ponty notes, ‘life ..., beneath us, always solves problems in a different way than we would have solved them,’18 so that the ‘dialectic’ of life would be one of problem and response rather than predefined lack and circumscribed fulfillment.19 It is also that life creates both the solutions and the terms of the problem in the course of its evolution; a vital problem cannot be understood to be fully defined in advance (EC 103/582). This is the radical sense of newness that Bergson attributes to life: ‘its future overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein in an idea’ (EC 103/582). But from the point of view of the actualized present, we are confronted with a second illusion that touches on the nature of ‘need’ itself. To be conceived as a pre-given need of the organic body, the past must be seen, at once negatively and retrospectively, as that which the organic body lacked

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but has come to possess (in the objectified form of a quality, state or thing). It is from the experience of present useful action that this demarcated need is projected back into the past as possibility; the past is reconstructed on the image of utility in the present. Here, we encounter a version of what Bergson calls the ‘retrospective illusion’ (PM 22/1263–4). Accordingly, the present would be a positive fullness (the possession of something) and the past a negative cliché of that fullness (both the possibility and lack of that something) projected backwards. Bergson would criticize this illusion both for its retrograde movement and for its construction of a negative. But the problem should be understood to lie deeper in the way in which the true ‘negativity’ or power of the past is elided, to be replaced by an emaciated representation of the past as need. The past is not a thing or a representation (even in negative form), but a virtual tendency calling forth actualizations. As tendency, the past both creates activities that may succeed or fail and provides the context within which those activities become useful. It is life that creates utility and that can redefine it. Need, then, is neither pre-given nor determined in itself, but should be understood within the context of life as the creative movement of problem and response. Though this reading extends Bergson’s notion of need almost to its breaking point – since ‘need’ seems to connote pre-formation rather than tendency in many places in his texts – my purpose is to indicate another direction in which need can be understood, a direction opened up by the temporal structure of indetermination discussed above.20 Indeed, it is as tendencies that the ‘needs’ of life – to accumulate, store and discharge energy, to individuate and reproduce, to conserve and create – are read by Bergson in Creative Evolution. What I wish to suggest is that the needs, perceptions and actions of organic bodies be read in a similar light. Bergson envisages just such open transformations in what utility means when he sees life fabricating prostheses that make possible new uses hitherto unforeseen; so it is with language that can become the medium for reflection and interiority, or with intelligence whose resources intuition both relies on and subverts. Beyond (or beneath) life as action in view of utility and need, there is a second sense of life in Creative Evolution: ‘The impetus of life [l’élan de vie], of which we are speaking, consists in a need of creation [une exigence de création]’ (EC 251/708). This need to create provides the ground for the definition of life as action, which appears in this sense to have been preliminary. What allows us to understand life in this more fundamental way is the structure of time that indetermination reveals. This is a time of hesitation and delay, a temporalization that is indetermination itself: ‘time is what hinders everything from being given at once. It retards, or rather it is retardation [retardement]’ (PM 93/1333). But, in hesitating, time is also creation and invention (EC 341/784). For hesitation is searching, elaboration and choice; it opens up routes for acting differently or not at all. Most importantly, hesitation feels its way tentatively and receptively;

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it is ‘tâtonnement’ says Bergson, that is, a search without finality or teleology, a hesitant experimentation that does not dictate the future it will find (PM 93/1332–3). Such a search neither takes the form of linear progression, nor is its success guaranteed; it forks and diverges continually, so that the futures it encounters were not those initially anticipated, being incommensurable with and irreducible to the representations of the past. This time of hesitation and invention describes the temporality of life for Bergson. It is in this way that the adaptation Bergson attributes to living beings can be understood as creative response rather than mechanistic effect; organization cannot be predicted or modeled on the given, but presents solutions to problems in ways that intelligence cannot imagine or grasp in advance. Significantly, this structure of time makes visible aspects of Bergson’s élan vital hitherto implicit, reconnecting it with the need to create. As we have seen, the image of élan expresses the weight of the past as tendency. If time is invention, then this tendency cannot be understood to be given once and for all as a completed reality (EC 13/505).21 Though it is the past as a virtual whole that pushes on each present, actualizing itself there, this past is not a self-same idea, but is reconfigured through the passage and virtualization of events – so that the past is always an ‘original history’ (EC 6/499). This is the import of Bergson’s image of the past snowballing on itself (EC 4/498): not the accumulation of events in a container, enlarging the past as thing, but the continuous immanent transformation of directionality and force that is the past as tendency. From this follows the irreversibility of the élan (EC 6/499); for the past not only makes a difference in each present as actualization, it also makes a difference for itself virtually. It is in this sense that the unity of the élan lies behind us for Bergson (EC 53/540). As duration, tendencies do not simply repeat (EC 46/533), they change as they age and grow, diverging to give different actualizations and evolutionary lines (EC 99/579).22 Since the élan is, to a certain extent, what it does (EC 7/500), this differential creation is not exterior to the élan but modifies it internally. This means, I would argue, that the effort of creation, which is élan vital, must be understood as at once material and memorial, at once actual and virtual creation. As Bergson notes, ‘in duration, considered as a creative evolution, there is perpetual creation of possibility and not only of reality’ (EC 21/1262). I believe that this follows from the way in which Bergson identifies pastness and élan with tendency (indeed with multiple tendencies). Tendency connotes not simply directionality, but ‘nascent change of direction’ (PM 188/1420). It implies, in Deleuze’s formula, that the whole is not given, that there is no completion or closure for an enduring reality.23 This applies both to the future in Bergson’s philosophy (EC 339/782) and, I argue, to the past and to life as such. Life makes or unmakes itself, to use Bergson’s terms, but cannot be posited or grasped once and for all. It is this nature of tendency that is central to understanding evolutionary movement for Bergson.

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But in order to be invention, time is also hesitation. Is Bergson’s élan vital a hesitating, stuttering, zigzag movement or a continuous, direct and fluid flow?24 Moreover, if there is hesitation (and finitude) in the élan, is this a result of its own temporal and tendentious structure or, as Bergson sometimes implies, due to its encounter with materiality? Before turning to the ontological implications of this question, we must re-examine the phenomenology of indetermination presented above. Bergson makes clear that, in its need to create, life proceeds by introducing indetermination into the material universe (EC 251/708). We have seen that this indetermination takes hold both in terms of the perception and fabrication of things and through the organization of bodies. Significantly, these two senses of indetermination are intertwined for Bergson; though the second is the material and structural condition for the first, it would remain blind without the first. While the first sense of indetermination contracts the creativity of life to that of action upon matter, and vision to objectification, the second sense of indetermination implies that life, in its need to create, proceeds by insinuation into matter – through a form of materialization that is also selfcreation (EC 264/719). As insinuation, to live is not only to act upon matter, but also to see and create within and through matter and to be transformed by this materialization. Vision is, in this sense, inseparable from the seeing and moving body to which the eye belongs. Life may be vision in view of useful action, but it is, in a deeper sense, vision as insinuation and creation. Though Bergson sometimes presents this insinuation as accidental or regrettable, as a detour or zigzag in what could have been a direct route, I would claim that taking seriously the temporality of creation as hesitation means that the need to create must be understood as a tendency to indetermination and as a need to materialize that is not simply reducible to objectification. Inscribing vision in this sense of life as creation makes it possible to imagine ways of seeing beyond, or beneath, the turn to utility.

3 An ontology of life and matter I have argued that life, and hence vision, take place within matter. If life is to act upon matter from within, then it must initially, at least, espouse the direction of materiality. Insinuation requires that we question the external duality between life and matter, which Bergson’s work initially seems to present, in favor of an internal and ontological relationality. It is thus important to ask not only how life insinuates itself into matter, but also how the tendency to materiality may already be virtually inscribed within life. The account of indetermination developed above suggests one route to this question. Although from a phenomenological point of view indetermination may be viewed as a negative experience, one of hesitation and delay, Bergson will insist that ontologically it should be seen to be a positive movement. It is in this sense that Bergson’s philosophy cannot be seamlessly

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assimilated to phenomenology. This points to two directions in which Bergson can be read (both of which are to be found in Merleau-Ponty’s texts). On the one hand, in Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures, Bergsonism is read as a positivist metaphysics that overlooks the phenomenology of lived experience. In particular, Bergsonism elides the negativity that structures and is felt in experience by translating this negativity into positive terms (Nature 64/94). As a texture of positivity without fissure, the very possibility of lived experience (perception, temporality, thought) is belied. Further, it becomes difficult to account for the experiences of affectivity, sociality and action that Bergson locates at the root of the illusory mechanisms of thought at play in the idea of nothingness and in the cinematographic illusion (EC 295/744). Are these negative experiences, which serve to naturalize such illusions, not themselves temporal articulations that at once destabilize the positivity of the world and make a difference in the texture of the real? A different reading is thus called for, one more generous to the nuances of Bergson’s critique of negative ideas. In ‘Bergson in the Making,’ MerleauPonty points to a temporal form of the phenomenological reduction at stake in Bergson’s work: to learn to see sub specie durationis (Signs 184/232, citing PM 158/1392). What is bracketed by this reduction is the idea of nothingness that metaphysical speculation projects beneath being – as the ground against which that being must subsist (EC 298/747). It is according to this conceptual schema that the metaphysical demand for full and positive, atemporal essence is formulated.25 What changes and hesitates, what is never completely given, cannot count as being in this picture; duration is hence systematically overlooked (EC 298/747). Within the frame of this Bergsonian reduction, the import of the phenomenology of indetermination becomes evident. Indetermination is not simply the interruption of a pre-given and self-sufficient order of determination – abstractly identified with materiality – rather it appears as a positive power on its own terms, the power of duration as tendency to create.26 Only when it is perceived within a conceptual schema that defines being as unchanging and fully given positivity (a deterministic being without interval or passage) does indetermination appear privative. Were we to bracket these conceptual blinders, the primacy of indetermination would become visible, and it is determination that would need to be understood as lacking such openness, as tending to closure. There is in Bergsonism an ontological reversal of the terms according to which positive and negative are defined,27 a reversal with phenomenological repercussions for vision. It is important to ask after the form that this Bergsonian phenomenology takes. Bergson is not simply proposing a phenomenological description of experience, but a phenomenological conversion (or destabilization) that would reconfigure that experience, would allow us to see and feel it anew. His reduction is a method not only for thinking and perceiving differently, but also for living differently

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(PM 157/1392). Bergson takes what he proposes to be a philosophy of joy that renews our contact with the creative effort of life (PM 105/1344) and hence is a ‘true evolutionism’ (EC 370/807). His ontology is thus central to his ethics. What does this ontological vision involve? In line with his critique of positivism, Merleau-Ponty describes the Bergsonian appeal to joy as a form of ‘tranquility’ or ‘quietism,’ since it implies an elision of the tension and ‘non-coincidence’ constitutive of living (Signs 191/241 and 189/238). To this criticism, we can respond by drawing on Vladimir Jankélévitch’s reading of Bergson.28 Bergson’s philosophy is neither positivism, nor lacks a dialectic (as Gaston Bachelard claimed).29 It performs, rather, a reversal of metaphysical polarities, for it is materiality that takes on the role of the negative. Negativity is not phenomenologically erased, but ontologically reassigned. There is more, however, to this metaphysical reversal than meets the eye. For simply inverting metaphysical categories does not necessarily destabilize them, and if Bergson remained at that level of analysis, then Merleau-Ponty’s accusation of positivism would become applicable. It is not the valence attributed to life or to materiality that Merleau-Ponty finds problematic, but the mutual exclusion of terms – of being and nothingness, life and matter – that makes their internal relation impossible to conceive (Nature 70/101).30 What is elided, in other words, is the mixture – living matter or material life – in which the two leaves of positive and negative interpenetrate (Bergson’s term) or intertwine (Merleau-Ponty’s).31 Although Merleau-Ponty is right to see a certain Bergsonian ambivalence in this regard (we witnessed such ambivalence, above, in the two schemas by which the formation of the eye was explained), I believe that Merleau-Ponty ultimately misses the way in which the mixture is constituted in Bergsonism by means of tendency.32 For Bergson, insofar as the mixture is viewed as a composite thing, its nature will be misperceived. To follow its ‘natural articulations,’33 the mixture must be seen sub specie durationis; it must be seen as movement, rhythm, tendency (in a plurality or multiplicity that does not exclude interpenetration). The ontological movement of life as need to create provides a positive point of departure: life is a tendency to ‘make itself,’ an effort to become, encapsulated in the French verb ‘se faire’ (EC 248/705). From this dynamic understanding of life, Bergson derives a genetic (and equally dynamic) theory of materiality. The difficulty and originality of Bergson’s solution stems from his attempt to articulate the internal relation and difference between life and matter while avoiding two theoretical extremes: that of reducing materiality to an epiphenomenon of life and that of positing matter as an external and independent substance.34 How does Bergson understand the genesis of materiality? In the difficult third chapter of Creative Evolution,35 Bergson sets out to show how materiality – and, in parallel, intelligence as the way in which mind sees,

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conceives and acts on materiality – are generated from the creative temporalizing movement of life. Central to Bergson’s genetic account is the insight that materialization is not a simple continuation of life, but arises through interruption of its movement. Despite the image of the movement of the hand through iron filings coming to rest, the interruption in life should not be understood as inertia or stoppage; rather, it takes the form of an inversion in directionality or movement (EC 210/674). As movement, materiality belongs to duration and hence partakes of life (EC 186/653). But as inversion, materiality must be a different kind of movement from life – a movement that unmakes or undoes itself (in the sense of ‘se défaire’ (EC 245/703)). Interruption, or inversion, thus functions as a difference that connects.36 It is significant, as Jankélévitch has pointed out, that the vital reality so interrupted is a tendency and not a substance or thing;37 for tendencies or movements may reverse one another while continuing to interpenetrate and imply one another, whereas opposed substances mutually exclude one another. The difference in kind between tendencies is, in other words, nonoppositional difference. Although tendencies divide as they are actualized, becoming incompatible in becoming things, they continue to carry the memory or trace of other tendencies in virtual coexistence (EC 119/596). Materiality is hence tendency. But it is, paradoxically, a tendency to become something – thus a tendency that elides its own movement and change as tendency, that undoes itself, giving an image of itself as static object. The operation of this material tendency is twofold according to Bergson: matter tends toward extended existence, while intelligence is itself a tendency to immobilize, solidify and spatialize, which extends the tendency of materiality farther down the incline of objectification (EC 201/665–6). As tendency, however, materialization is neither completely given, nor is it identical with the formation of objects; the perception of static bodies or things is a representation that covers over inverse tendencies which coexist in partial equilibrium or tension.38 Moreover, materiality cannot simply be understood as an obstacle external to life. Genetically, materiality finds its seed within duration as tendency, while virtually it coexists and interpenetrates with vital tendencies in a tension that can be seen as leading to their actualization, to their division into evolutionary lines and their individuation into material forms. As John Mullarkey notes, it is in this actualized form that matter appears external to life, while in virtual form materiality is implicated within the élan vital which must hence also be an ‘élan matériel.’39 What appeared as ambiguity in Bergson’s account of matter – an ambiguity that Merleau-Ponty criticizes in his Nature lectures (58–64/86–94) – begins to be dispelled if materiality is understood in this way. Is materiality necessary for the evolution and actualization of life (EC 239/698), or is it an accidental detour with whose sinuosities life must contend but without which it would have been pure and direct creation (EC 245/703)? The latter option recalls Bergson’s image of the route winding through the mountains to the next

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town, a route that would have wanted to be a straight line (EC 102/582). Central to addressing this ambiguity is the question: whence does the interruption or inversion of life, which forms material tendency, arise? I would claim that materialization, as interruption, is a nascent directionality implied within life as tendency (not preformed possibility but virtuality). This is what Bergson’s thought experiment in chapter three of Creative Evolution conveys: to feel oneself to be duration whose effort is winding down – a duration that relaxes so that its moments spread out in mutual exteriority – is an experience that allows us to imagine the ex-tension of matter analogously to the dis-tended and scattered structure of dream (EC 200–1/665–6). Though Matter and Memory imagined the structure of matter in much the same vein – as a more relaxed rhythm of duration (MM 208/343) – Creative Evolution endows this dis-tension with an additional sense, that of interruption and inversion. This introduces a dynamic and internal relation between life and matter, while inflecting materiality with a negative direction or sense.40 This negativity is not, however, a hole or pre-defined lack, but a counter-tendency that resides within and weighs down the movement of life, neither being assimilated to it nor canceling it out. It is in this way that life can be understood as a duality of interpenetrating tendencies (or ‘polarities’ as Jankélévitch says)41 – a mixture in dynamic tension that makes itself or undoes itself but is never fully given (EC 272/725). Notably, materiality may be ‘negative tendency’ (EC 218/680), but it is not, for all that, nothingness or disorder. It is felt and makes a difference within life, albeit as diminution of effort, winding down or dis-tension (EC 210/674).42 To read Bergson’s ontology in this vein is to ask how material tendency is not an external impurity with which an otherwise pure and infinite creativity is infected, but a negativity that stems from the very structure of life as élan. I find two senses of interruption in the élan vital. First, interruption is implied by the finitude that Bergson attributes to the élan in Creative Evolution (EC 142/615, 254/710) and which, as Florence Caeymaex has noted, attaches to the very sense of an élan.43 As finite effort, the activity of the élan can be seen to be discontinuous in several ways: its activity is not only divided along different evolutionary lines, diverging as tendencies grow (EC 99/579), but also distracted from its creative effort, along any given line, by its fixation on what has just passed (EC 129/604). Finitude should not therefore be read as a mere quantitative limitation on the momentum of the élan. Rather finitude belongs to the structure of tendency as splitting between creative effort (in an open, futural directionality) and the need to create and act from somewhere (from the present and immediate past). The structure of time as jet, moving into the future while falling back into the past, can be seen to prefigure this fission (EC 247/705). What is noteworthy here is that Bergson points to two different, yet interrelated, structural tendencies within life, two temporal ways of being that coexist in tension: one

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winding toward novelty (se faire) and the other unfolding as materialization (se défaire). The link that Bergson makes between finitude and distraction is significant in this regard (EC 127/603, 129/604 and 218/679). For the distraction of the vital impetus means not only that it becomes scattered into individuated material forms, but also that this materialization corresponds to the diminution in the intensity with which the past pushes upon the present. Instead of the open and unpredictable futurity that arises from the push of the whole past on the present, life focuses on the trajectory it has traversed and the actions it is accomplishing (the immediate past). Its effort becomes absorbed into this narcissistic and self-objectifying circle of the present, deviated from creation into continuation of the same, into quasirepetition and closure (EC 128/603–4). What is interrupted, then, is the nascent change of direction that characterizes life (and pastness) as tendency. Though the movement of the élan does not cease, its transformative plasticity and constant divergence are suspended in favor of the relative uniformity of movement and stability of form that can be extrapolated from the immediate past. Tendency, in other words, becomes habit; its differential curvature becomes tangent or line. The élan is no longer an impetus that renews and makes itself at every turn, but the momentum that remains along a single and foreseeable direction.44 It is in this sense that Bergson describes the interrupted tendency as ‘a creative action which unmakes itself [un geste créateur qui se défait]’ (EC 247/705). This highlights a form of passivity that is movement rather than rest, a passivity that follows from the very effort of the élan as momentum that automatically unwinds when its impetus has been interrupted. This bears on the sense of inversion that belongs to materialization for Bergson. For despite his images of change in direction, of a falling weight or a backwards glance (EC 11/503), what I believe is at stake is not spatial inversion but temporal interruption – specifically, an inversion in the structure of time as hesitation and invention. Thus materialization should not be understood to give rise to hesitation, but follows in a sense from its suspension: the effort of hesitation is interrupted, giving rise to a movement of elaboration through which a particular trajectory unfolds, through which something materializes. Instead of virtual futures that vary according to the non-linear tendency of the past, the future is projected as that which will have been should elaboration continue in the direction inflected by the immediate past (an inverted version of Bergson’s retrospective illusion). Significantly, it is the structural discontinuity and intermittent effort, which characterize hesitation, which make elaboration and materialization possible. Rather than equating hesitation with a visible halt, hesitation should be seen as an effort to delay future elaboration, to keep open the indetermination of the present, and to allow as much of the past as possible to inform that present. This effort tries to hold within an interval of duration (contraction) the weight of the past as tendency (dilation); it is structured by an internal tension that imposes on it a staccato

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form. As such, hesitation falters. It becomes distracted from its effort to generate indetermination by the material forms this indetermination takes; it forgets itself and unravels as materiality. Second, once materialization has occurred, another sense of interruption becomes visible in the élan vital. For effort implies working against resistance. Materiality offers the resistance from which the élan can spring forward, the pivot or support for its force (EC 256–7/713). In this sense, the image of élan is indissociable from materiality; it is ‘in its contact with matter [that] life is comparable to an impulsion or an impetus’ (EC 258/714). Indeed, the resistance of materiality is twofold. On the one hand, as the inverse movement against which life applies itself, materialization is that which the vital effort to make and create attempts to delay – that into which life attempts to insinuate hesitation and indetermination. Thus material tendency can be understood as the resistance within élan vital that makes possible its undoing and actualization.45 On the other hand, actualized matter can be read as an obstacle that acts as concrete pivot or foil for the work of the élan (EC 98/579), just as the mountains at once deviate and provide the ground needed for the route. Matter is hence an outside that is constitutive of life as élan, an outside whose trace as tendency and difference in kind lies within life. It is because it already carries this material trace that life can insinuate itself into the habits of matter and exert its effort to wind up that which is being undone, inflecting materiality in the direction of life (EC 99/579). What is at times insufficiently emphasized in Bergson’s account is the way in which materiality, in its tendency toward relatively stable forms and uniform movements, is not just a distraction or resistance to life but an anchorage that allows life a ground from which to leap forward. Materiality, in other words, is needed for life to become élan – as the jumper in Bergson’s analogy needs to look back at herself as she is clearing the obstacle and moving ahead (EC 129/604), and as the eyes are needed for vision. Whether virtual or actualized, materiality is more than diversion or ‘debris’ (EC 100/580). It must be understood to make a difference not only in the course that life takes, but in how life makes itself – a becoming that is life itself. For ‘a real evolution, if ever it is accelerated or retarded, is entirely modified within ... Its content and its duration are one and the same thing’ (PM 20/1261). It is in this sense that materialization is more than actualization, in my view, since materialization as differentiation within and interruption of vital tendency makes a difference for the virtuality of life. Materialization is part of the history of life as tendency, a history of sinuosities and windings that are the irreversible trace of a movement which is inseparably activity and passivity, which unceasingly makes and undoes itself, ‘a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself [une realité qui se fait à travers celle qui se défait]’ (EC 248/705). This mixturism, which constitutes living matter as a modus vivendi of organization (EC 250/707), is life as duration and aging.

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4 Vision that makes and undoes itself: the eyes of intuition What routes does this ontological account of the materiality of life offer for rereading the Bergsonian theory of vision? And what possibilities does it open for eyes to see differently? We can map the theoretical extremes of which eyes are capable in Bergsonism through two readings offered by Merleau-Ponty. In his Nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty offers a critical reading of Bergson’s image of the canalization of vision through the eye: such canalized vision is a reduction in life’s power [puissance] to see; the eye is a compromise of adaptation without which vision would have been a seamless ‘I can,’ capable of infinite reach (Nature 62/92). In this sense, the materialization of vision in the eye is not creation but limitation. Yet this limitation is needed to make vision efficacious for Bergson (EC 93/575). More importantly, this is the vision that belongs to life both as action and as finite and creative élan. Bergson notes that an infinite vision would not be the concrete seeing of a living being, but the vision of a ghost (EC 93/575). This can be read in two directions. As a purely spiritual vision, a vision from nowhere, such seeing would have no hold or interest in the material present; it would be a vision of nothing. But in the context of Matter and Memory, such infinite vision would be the vision that Bergson imagines to belong to an ‘unconscious material point,’ a vibrating ‘image’ of light (MM 38/188). This purely material vision would be a ‘vision’ of everything, since it ‘gathers and transmits the influences of all the points of the material universe’ (MM 38/188). Such extension, however, comes at the cost of indifference, so that this ‘vision’ does not see anything in particular; it lacks the ‘discernment’ that would make it perception (MM 38/188).46 It is not by coinciding with spirit, or with matter, that vision becomes more expansive for Bergson, for we would lose thereby that which makes it vision. As the point of contact where life insinuates itself into and works on matter, concrete vision is at once spiritual and material, memory and body.47 I would claim that a Bergsonian vision that could come to see more, or see differently, must already be a living and moving vision. This is the concrete seeing that has passed through the turn of experience (MM 184/321) and which, only by already being the vision of bodies and eyes, can be the basis for the effort of reversal and dilation that is intuition. Thus, a second description of Bergsonian vision can be found in The Visible and the Invisible and in ‘Bergson in the Making.’ In contrast with the ideal of immaterial vision that Merleau-Ponty criticizes in Nature, here MerleauPonty finds a way of seeing that is at once bodily and intuitive, material and temporal. For Merleau-Ponty, this is an ontological vision that sees sub specie durationis (Signs 184/232, citing PM 158/1392). It is a vision that sees for the sake of seeing, neither immobilizing the visible between the forceps of utility, nor grasping it as a collection of objects, but rejoining, from within, its temporal rhythms.48

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The roots of this ontological vision, or intuition, can be traced to life as the site of split vision. Life, we saw, is at once action and the need to create. It is an activity that contains its structural undoing, for the stability of form and predictability of movement, which action desires, prescribe an intentionality that disregards processes and aims at objects. Life is distracted from its open futurity by a tendency to closure that is at once materiality and objectifying vision (intelligence). Since materialization is tendency, however, and not acquisition, a trace of the vital tendency continues within it, winding up what is being undone, insinuating openness and indetermination into closure, and holding on to the memory of what has been forgotten. Materialization is hence not only fabrication, but organizational structuring; vision is not only objectification but has the indetermination of living bodies as its ground, permitting its transformation. The eye, the body, live in this tension of inverse tendencies – without resolution or nullification – so that their structure reflects a becoming that is being unwound, and an undoing through which creation takes place. Such winding and unrolling do not, however, result in a reversibility whereby the effects of duration can be effaced (PM 164/1397). These are, rather, irreducible tendencies that coexist and interpenetrate in a dynamic structure of activity-passivity. Indeed, both tendencies are felt within the temporal passage, the interval of duration, that defines a living being. It is in this sense that ‘living consists in aging [vivre consiste à vieillir]’ according to Bergson (PM 164/1397; translation my own). To age is to experience time in at least two ways. The weight of time is felt as material trace, so that the tendency that is the past becomes visible in its very dis-tension and tangential elaboration. Aging registers the passivity and unwinding of duration. In this vein, and to the degree to which ‘materiality begets oblivion,’ to age is to forget (MM 177/316; citing Ravaisson). But if this forgetting were absolute erasure, then material bodies would simply repeat the present (or immediate past), replay it as it was, without alteration. That living bodies mature and age (EC 15/507), however, means that their materiality is a forgetting, or unconsciousness, that holds at once an ‘organic memory’ (EC 19/510). Aging, then, is also memory. This memory does not only, or primarily, take the form of a conscious recollection of the past as image (PM 179/1411), but expresses the way in which ‘all the past of the organism ... its heredity – in fact, the whole of a very long history’ pushes into and makes a difference for its present (EC 20/511). In this context, ‘the life of the body [should be seen] just where it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit’ (EC 269/723). The body does not simply receive the impetus of the past, which unfurls as material form and winds as organic memory; the life of the body – its movement, affectivity and aging – also makes a difference for the tendentious and winding movement of time. The living body is inscribed within time just as duration is registered in the body (EC 16/508).

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Thus the eye should be read neither as object nor deposit (recalling the image of the canal or the imprint in iron filings), but as ‘hyphen [trait d’union]’ of duration (EC 22/513). If the formation of the eye is understood as the organic trace of memory, then it becomes possible to see how the eye is part of a dynamic and material history that is not finished – a history in which the response to the problem of light, the work of organization, but also social and individual habituation, action and expression all play a role. The eye is an organ that lives, that makes itself as it unfurls; this is the ontological sense that can be attributed to the eye as ‘zone of indetermination.’ The eye is the cinematograph through which life as vision may objectify and immobilize in view of utility, forgetting its inscription in duration. But since this forgetting is also an unconscious and organic memory that punctures the seeming closure of the present – since the interval of duration is never instantaneous – the eye also offers the means for imagination and creation (hence the importance of artistic vision for Bergson, EC 90/572 and PM 135/1370). The objectifying function of the eye may therefore be ‘natural’ without being inevitable or ahistorical. More importantly, it is on the basis of the temporality of this nature, because of their roots in the split vision of life, that eyes can come to see differently. Although the eye as organ of intelligence sees the world in terms of a teleology of fabrication – decomposing and reconstituting it into objects – the eye can, like language and other prostheses of intelligence, diverge from this objectifying tendency. As tendency, divergence and reversal are virtually implied within vision. Indeed, intuition is just such a ‘conversion’ or ‘torsion’ of vision upon itself, as Bergson makes clear at several points in his work (PM 138/1373–4, EC 237/696, see also EC 250/707–8). In conclusion, I find three senses in which Bergsonian intuition carries through a reversal in vision as tendency. The first sense of reversal refers us back to the Bergsonian reduction – to see sub specie durationis – which in bracketing the exigencies of action and need allows us to see for the sake of seeing (EC 298/747). The potential for this reversal is based on the figure of the artist, whose vision Bergson describes as ‘detached’ from the attention to life, from habit and utility (PM 138/1373). Such inactive vision Bergson takes to be the model for philosophical seeing. But how are we to understand this detachment? For it is not a detachment from life, as need to create, that Bergson intends, but a detachment from life in the narrow sense of utility, and thus from the material tendency within life that inverses its vital movement. This detachment is not adequately understood if it is posited as disinterest or removal from life; it is rather a return to life and, as Bergson also says, a ‘revivification of our faculty of perceiving’ (PM 142/1377). This revivification evokes a second sense of reversal, that of effort. Intuition, Bergson notes, is difficult (PM 87/1328), since it goes against those habits of seeing that have become natural to us (PM 142/1377). It requires a violent and ‘painful effort’ (EC 237/696), an effort that can only be intermittent

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and fragmentary, that begins to unwind as soon as it has taken place. The effort of intuition is hence necessarily hesitant. This difficulty and hesitancy reside, however, not simply in the resistance and recalcitrance of habit to intuition, but in the reality that intuition seeks to make visible. For the effort of intuition reattaches to the effort of élan vital, to the time of invention and hesitation that makes itself, as life, within an unwinding reality. In this vein, intuition can be read as performative.49 Intuition is the very reality it seeks to recall, the reality of living being as effort and hesitation (PM 93/1333). Hesitation is not only the suspension of action, but also the reinstitution of the duration of life. If the tendency of vision to objectify corresponds to, while extending, the material tendency within life, then its reversal not only puts vision into contact with life as creation, or the élan vital, it also reconfigures vision’s relation to the past. In this third sense of reversal, intuition becomes dilated vision (PM 134/1369). Should we understand intuition as a faculty that sees more, as Bergson often describes it (PM 135/1370)? Such a quantifier is insufficient, I believe, to explain the torsion that intuition implies. Rather, the dilation that characterizes intuition points to a difference in kind, for dilation is reversal in at least two ways. On the one hand, intuition is the reversal of the tendency of objectifying vision to condense the enduring reality before its eyes into qualities and states, to immobilize movements into objects. A dilated vision sees according to temporalities other than its own, resisting the tendency to reduce and contract reality to its own rhythm. On the other hand, such a dilation cannot be obtained without a deeper connection to the past as a whole – the past as tendency. To see other rhythms and durations is to allow vision to go beyond the perceptual present and to avoid the reduction of the past to the immediate past that takes place in objectification. In this sense, intuition is a temporally dilated vision; we could even say that it is a memorial vision. For if, as Bergson maintains in ‘The Perception of Change,’ the field of the present varies with our interest and attention, then intuition will be the effort to dilate this aperture so that the present itself appears as tendency, as movement rather than punctuality, making visible the force of the past (PM 152/1386). To see in this way, however, cannot be to see more of the same, to make the past into a representation or objectified presence. Rather, it is to feel the power of an unconscious memory (PM 32/1273), or creative élan, that makes and undoes itself in us, and that is revealed in those moments of hesitation. To see more must therefore be to see and to live differently.

Notes 1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998). Hereafter cited parenthetically as EC. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of Henri

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2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). In Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: an Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), translation of La pensée et le mouvant. Hereafter cited as PM. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Hereafter parenthetically cited as MM. Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), 91–3. Frédéric Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 181. Although this second thread can be read as a response to the deficiencies of the first, there is not room to explore the first thread further in this chapter. Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, 137–8. See also Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 201–3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers such a critical assessment in Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, comp. Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 62–3; La Nature: Notes, Cours du Collège de France, établi et annoté par Dominique Séglard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 92. (Hereafter cited as ‘Nature’ with English pagination followed by French.) The magnetism of the iron filings should evoke this spontaneous power (EC 99/579). However, this remains a mechanical and predictable, repeatable, reaction to the movement of the hand and not a vital response. Although the image of canalization is supposed to deepen the ‘superficial differences’ initially presented between organization and fabrication (EC 92/574), it represents a shift: it is one thing to recognize the surplus of organized matter to fabricated machine, another to identify that surplus as invisible movement, separable in principle from matter. Bergson’s sense of ‘canalization’ should thus also be distinguished from the biological use of the term, introduced by C. H. Waddington later in the century. This utilitarian teleology includes a ‘retrospective illusion’ (see below), so that action goes from one represented state to another without attending to the interval of duration in between. Bergson speaks of the condensation of qualitative movement into qualities, the solidification of evolutionary movement into forms, and the translation of extensive movement into immobile schemas or discontinuous acts (EC 300–3/749–51). ‘Inner’ and ‘outer’ indetermination should not be read as a return to the subjectobject dichotomy. Rather, both forms of indetermination take place within the material universe: by insinuation into material structures, or projection onto matter in the form of possible action. Even plant life has a kind of consciousness for Bergson, albeit nullified or asleep (PM 92/1332). Recalling ‘pure memory’ in Matter and Memory. And ultimately consciousness. Renaud Barbaras, Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2008), criticizes Bergson for holding a double concept of life that fails to think the intransitivity of survival together with the transitivity of creation; life is either a transcendent principle adverse to matter, or a utilitarian adaptation to matter (145–56). I aim to show how this tension can be reconciled in Bergson.

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18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making,’ in Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 187; Signes (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1960), 235. Hereafter cited as ‘Signs’ with English pagination followed by French. Merleau-Ponty is drawing on EC 105/584. 19. Despite Bergson’s rejection of dialectic, both Jankélévitch and Merleau-Ponty find an implicit dialectic, without synthesis, in Bergsonism. See Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 170. 20. These two senses of need are reflected in Bergson’s terminology. In Matter and Memory, Bergson describes the futurity in terms of which perception sees the world as ‘possible’ or ‘virtual’ action, taking these as equivalent. The critique of the idea of the possible, as retrospective illusion, comes in the later ‘Le possible et le réel’ (PM). The question of which term applies in the context of Bergson’s theory of visual perception is significant: do we see the world in terms of ‘possible’ actions, which mirror past situations and habitual schemas, or ‘virtual’ actions that would create new openings for conduct, hitherto unforeseen, where the past makes a difference for the future? 21. See Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, 80, 95–6. 22. There exists a subtle ambiguity in Bergson’s account: is life a multiplicity of tendencies (EC 53/540) or a tendency that multiplies, creating divergent directions (EC 99/579)? The answer must be both. This is due not only to the difficulty of applying a numerical framework of unity and multiplicity to life (EC 258/713–14), but also to the nature of tendency (and pastness) as virtual difference within itself and actual divergence from itself, as developing ‘in the form of a sheaf [gerbe]’ (EC 99/579). 23. Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 108. 24. This question recalls Bachelard’s famous critique of Bergson’s philosophy as continuism. See Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la durée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 7, 24–5. It is Jankélévitch who describes Bergsonian creation as ‘stuttering [bégaiement]’ (Bergson, 176). 25. Renaud Barbaras has shown the importance of the Bergsonian critique of the idea of nothingness for the later Merleau-Ponty. See Le tournant de l’expérience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1998), 49. 26. See Florence Caeymaex, ‘Négativité et finitude de l’élan vital. La lecture de Bergson par Jankélévitch,’ in Annales bergsoniennes IV: L’Évolution créatrice 1907– 2007: épistémologie et métaphysique, ed. Anne Fagot-Largeault and Frédéric Worms with Arnaud François and Vincent Gullin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 630. 27. See Jankélévitch, Bergson, 173–4; Caeymaex, ‘Négativité et finitude,’ 634. 28. With which Merleau-Ponty was familiar (Nature 62–3/92–3), though he draws from it a more critical reading of Bergson than I find there. See Jankélévitch, Bergson, 166–81. 29. Bachelard, La dialectique de la durée, 23. 30. Thus the same critique applies to Sartre’s negativism as to Bergson’s positivism, according to Merleau-Ponty (Nature 70/101–2). 31. For the importance of ‘mixturism’ in Merleau-Ponty, see Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 71–9. While the Merleau-Pontian mixture is based on nondifference or indivision, as Lawlor shows, I find the Bergsonian mixture to be based on the immanent movement of tendency, generative of difference.

Life as Vision: Bergson and the Future of Seeing Differently 173 32. The notion of ‘tendency’ is surprisingly underdeveloped in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Bergson. 33. See Bergson’s reference to Plato’s Phaedrus, EC 156/627. Deleuze makes this into a central methodological principle of Bergsonian intuition (Le bergsonisme, 11). 34. To avoid the dichotomy of spiritualism or materialism – and that of vital monism without outside or dualism of substances without interaction – Bergson proposes a monism of duration with a duality or multiplicity of tendencies (as both Deleuze and Jankélévitch have shown). 35. This chapter has given rise to a number of famous commentaries. In addition to Jankélévitch and Merleau-Ponty, see Deleuze, ‘Cours sur le chapitre III de L’évolution créatrice de Bergson,’ présenté par Anne Sauvagnargues, in Annales bergsoniennes II: Bergson, Deleuze, la phénoménologie, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 167–88. 36. To borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty. 37. Jankélévitch, Bergson, 173–4. 38. Thus Bergson replaces the image of the hand in iron filings, from chapter one of Creative Evolution, with two images in chapter three: jets of steam from a pressure cooker condensing and falling, while some droplets remain partially suspended, and the creative gesture of a raised arm, coming undone (EC 247/705). 39. John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 80–1. 40. See Jankélévitch, Bergson, 175. 41. Ibid., 174. 42. This follows from Bergson’s argument, in the same chapter, that the interruption of order leads not to disorder but to another kind of order. Although Bergson’s argument also states that the two orders are mutually exclusive, this should be understood to apply to actualized orders not tendencies. 43. Caeymaex, ‘Négativité et finitude,’ 635–8. 44. To recall the sense of the French word élan as both impetus and momentum. 45. If materiality is also tendency, then we can reconcile two causes that Bergson provides for the division of life into evolutionary lines: the resistance of matter and the unstable multiplicity of tendencies (EC 98–100/578–80, 259/714). 46. In ‘Bergson in the Making,’ Merleau-Ponty calls this ‘that imminent or eminent vision Bergson glimpsed in things’ (Signs 187/235), equating it with perceived being or phenomenality. Unclear, however, is whether Bergson meant the vision of an ‘unconscious material point’ to be more than a thought experiment, revealing precisely the non-indifference of perception. 47. Distinguishing concrete perception from the theory of pure perception in Matter and Memory. 48. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 128; Le visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail, établi par C. Lefort (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), 170. (See also Signs 184/231 and EC 298/747.) 49. See John Mullarkey, ‘Breaking the Circle: Élan Vital as Performative Metaphysics,’ in Annales bergsoniennes IV, 596.

9 Miracles of Creation: Bergson and Levinas Nicolas de Warren

There is more than one paradox in the fortunes of Bergsonism. Merleau-Ponty

1 Bergson’s elusive proximity In Totality and Infinity, Levinas remarks that ‘the impossibility of treating life in function of being is manifested compellingly in Bergson, where duration no longer imitates, in its fallenness, an immobile eternity, or in Heidegger, where possibility is no longer referred to ergon as a dunamis.’1 This and other scattered attestations to Bergson’s significance, from The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology to God, Death, and Time, stand in sharp contrast to the critically sustained engagement with Heidegger’s thinking and that of others (Husserl, Rosenzweig, Buber) who populate the philosophical constellation from and against which Levinas elevated ethics to first philosophy. The brevity of this Bergsonian evocation is not unique in Levinas’ writings. In the preface to its German translation, Levinas claims for Totality and Infinity ‘a faithfulness to the innovative work of Henri Bergson, who made many of the essential positions of the masters of phenomenology possible,’ and stresses the seminal concept of duration.2 Tantalizing as this might be, the sense and degree of this professed ‘faithfulness’ remains without further explication; indeed, aside from this ex post facto revelation, absent are the indications within Totality and Infinity that would distinctly reveal such ‘faithfulness.’ That Bergson is said to anticipate the masters of phenomenology is reiterated in a 1988 interview in which Levinas speaks again of his proximity to certain Bergsonian themes, with a rare stress on The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Bergson’s presaging of the phenomenological masters is here presented in tighter overlap with Heidegger, many of whose key insights, decisive for the propulsion and formation of Levinas’ own thinking, are said to find equivalents in Bergson: the ontological difference 174

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of being and beings; the verbal sense of being as event in contrast to its nominal sense; the metaphysical critique of technology.3 This convergence of Bergson and Heidegger, each standing in relation to Levinas on separate, but nonetheless, parallel planes, would further seem to implicate a shared vulnerability to Levinas’ encompassing critique of the philosophical tradition and its ontological horizon of thinking. Bergson and Heidegger each reveal the ‘impossibility of treating life in function of being’ – shorthand for the thrust of Levinas’ own thinking – yet both succumb to the same ontological entrapment that prevents a genuine championing of ethics as first philosophy. The repeated entwinement of the brevity of Bergson’s evocation with the avowal of ‘proximity’ – a term that Levinas could only have employed conscientiously given its weight for his thinking – should give pause for thought. This term provides an initial clue to my aim in this chapter of defining and assessing Bergson’s unique standing for Levinas’ thinking. It is as if this combination of brevity and proximity expressed a special form of respect held exclusively for Bergson and only befitting that rarest of teachers whose generosity remains discreetly accepted and subtly fruitful; Bergson, to whom Levinas never dedicated an individual study (as is the case with Rosenzweig, Buber and Marcel) or with whom Levinas never engaged in a comparable degree of discussion in his principal works (as one finds with Husserl and Heidegger). Although substantial in presence, Bergson only receives mention in passing. This Bergsonian murmur has been replicated in much of the scholarly scrutiny devoted to Levinas’ thinking and its multiform relationship to contemporary philosophy. As a case in point, one need look no further than an interview in which Levinas offers his most synoptic assessment of Bergson’s writings. Surprisingly, these suggestive comments are immediately arrested in mid-flight by the interviewer himself, who abruptly deflects Levinas’ Bergsonian reflections with the imperative: ‘Let’s get back to phenomenology’ (EN 24). As if to say, that’s all well and good, but let’s get back to what’s really (and only) significant for your thinking. Ironically, one need look no further than Levinas himself for a fitting response. In signaling Bergson as ‘one of the great moments in the history of contemporary philosophy,’ Levinas speaks of ‘a work whose revolutionary and glorious repercussions at the turn of the century (influencing all forms of intellectual activity and spiritual life both in France and throughout the world) the new generation seems – or wants – to forget.’4 If to welcome the Other is to submit oneself to the Other’s critique, to receive the Other’s speech and follow it beyond oneself, no better example of inhospitality can be found than this interviewer’s lack (refusal?) of hearing. This ‘forgetfulness’ of Bergsonian repercussions is even to be found in a study ostensibly presenting itself as an intellectual history of the

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genealogy of Levinas’ thinking. In Origins of the Other, Samuel Moyn forcefully contends: The point is clear, then: if Bergson helped prime Levinas for Husserl, Bergson drew the moral consequences of his thought only after Levinas had left him behind. If Bergson influenced Levinas, it is through his general theory of perception and knowledge, rather than because of any rigorous distinction between things and people or in the development of this distinction into a moral theory.5 Moyn’s claim is oddly myopic given his otherwise well documented – if provocative – study, and, in fact, is directly refuted by Levinas’ evocations of the diverse and enduring significance of Bergson’s writings, especially The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. As Levinas states, ‘in the Two Sources of Morality and Religion, intuition, i.e., life itself or the lived of “profound time”, consciousness, and knowledge of durée, are interpreted as a relationship with the other and with God’ (EN 224). One cannot miss the telegraphing of Levinas’ central preoccupation in this reference to Bergson’s interpretation of ‘life’ as an openness to the Other and God. Revealingly, this professed affinity with the Two Sources betrays Levinas’ silent reversal of the relation between ‘the Other’ and ‘God’ in Bergson. As explored below, for Bergson the movement of transcendence passes through God to the Other; for Levinas, the movement rises through the Other to God. One can here already perceive that Levinas’ claimed faithfulness to Bergson turns on a constitutive unfaithfulness, thus planting the suspicion that Levinas’ self-professed proximity to Bergson need not entail any reciprocal Bergsonian proximity. Nor does Moyn do any better with Bergson’s Two Sources in grossly misrepresenting its arc of reflection as turning on the development of a ‘rigorous distinction between things and people’ – a distinction quite remote from the axis of its essential distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open,’ between egotism and other-directed ethical life. Yet even the explicit recognition of Bergson’s wider significance for Levinas’ thinking can still perpetuate a silence on the Two Sources, of which Levinas speaks in terms closest to his own. In Bergson and Philosophy, John Mullarkey proposes that ‘Bergsonism may best be read as an ethics of alterity fleshed out in empirical concerns,’ while cautioning against the hasty conclusion that, for Bergson, ethics is first philosophy.6 As Mullarkey notes, ‘Bergson does not say that ethics is first philosophy with Levinas: life is a type of emotion, but its essence remains more metaphysical than moral.’7 Once again, this proposed reading of the Two Sources is far from satisfactory as it presents an over-simplification in establishing that ‘life is a type of emotion’ and understates the increasing entwinement of the ‘metaphysical’ and ‘moral’ over the progression of the work. While Mullarkey grants that ‘Levinas has been clearly influenced by Bergson in a good deal,’ he

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arrests his own suggestion, opting not to pursue this line of reflection; as an inverse of the interviewer’s arresting of Levinas’ evocation of Bergson noted above, Mullarkey claims that ‘TSMR would be too obvious a starting point to begin exploring this inspiration: as a work in proto-ethics which argues that morality does not equal reciprocity, it is clearly a forerunner to much in Levinas thought.’8 Whereas the 1988 interviewer does not pursue Bergson’s presence because he does not (or cannot) see it for what it is, Mullarkey does not pursue the presence of the Two Sources because it is too evidently visible. Instead, Mullarkey prefers to focus on Bergson’s metaphysics, which, ‘it is said’ influenced Levinas. Remarkable is this decision to forgo what is deemed ‘too obvious’ (that the Two Sources ‘obviously’ ‘influenced’ and ‘inspired’ Levinas) especially when all that we are given is a generality (‘morality is not reciprocity’) that reduces the Two Sources to a formula, and which could also be said of Rosenzweig (among others) to whom Levinas emphatically draws attention in the Preface to Totality and Infinity. Rather than specifically illuminating the ways in which the Two Sources might be present in or shadow Levinas, one is given a generic shine of ‘obviousness.’ What does it mean to claim that, ‘certainly, what Levinas has done is to take Bergson’s philosophy of novelty and moralise it: “the absolutely new” becomes the Other’? The rhetorical use of ‘clearly,’ ‘certainly’ and ‘obviously’ betrays a certain evasion of Bergson’s said proximity – a formula that echoes the brevity of an original Levinasian indication without rendering transparent the depth and breadth of the proximity and transformation here invoked. One should certainly never trust the repeated use of the term ‘certain’ and its transparent surrogates as revealers of what is to be seen, let alone understood.9

2 The liberation of Bergson How, then, are we to assess the claimed ‘faithfulness’ of Totality and Infinity to Bergson’s ‘innovative thinking,’ as well as Levinas’ startling remark that ‘Bergson is the source of an entire complex of interrelated contemporary philosophical ideas; it is to him, no doubt, that I owe my modest speculative initiatives’ (EN 224)? More specifically: how are we to uncover the significance of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, a work that Levinas characterizes in terms echoing most closely the axis of his own thinking, and yet which has received the least and/or least charitable attention in efforts to fathom Bergson’s presence for Levinas? Let us return to Levinas’ remark with which this line of reflection was first introduced: ‘the impossibility of treating life in function of being is manifested compellingly in Bergson, where duration no longer imitates, in its fallenness, an immobile eternity, or in Heidegger, where possibility is no longer referred to ergon as a dunamis.’ This pairing of Bergson and Heidegger could be taken as suggesting an underlying parity, or equivalence, between

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these two fonts of thinking – crucial differences notwithstanding – insofar as both would succumb to the same vicissitudes of a fundamentally ontological conception of thinking, in other words, to an incapacity to promote the radical transcendence of the Other, despite the respective and converging contribution of each to Levinas’ enterprise. Broadly speaking, Levinas positions his own ethical initiative against two contrasting alternatives: a ‘philosophy of transcendence that situates elsewhere the true life to which man ... would gain access in ... moments of liturgical, mystical elevation, or in dying ...,’ and a ‘philosophy of immanence in which we would truly come into possession of being.’ Whereas a philosophy of transcendence fails to welcome the presence of the Other as a result of a falsified conception of elevation (arising from a mystification of the mystery of the Other) a philosophy of immanence fails to assure the genuine transcendence of the Other as a result of a fixation with being (arising from an egocentric notion of openness, that is, collapsed openness). Both of these alternatives espouse a form of totalization, and each necessarily entails a reduction of alterity to the identity of the same as well as the coincidence of thinking and being. If we turn to consider Bergson’s thinking, we cannot help but recognize that, short of uncharitable interpretative liberties, Bergson cannot unambiguously be identified as belonging to either of these paradigmatic alternatives. The Two Sources assumes in this regard an unparalleled significance for it is in this last work that Bergson most compellingly fractures the philosophical tradition as encompassed within Levinas’ two groupings of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence.’ Of course, such a substantial claim requires a developed presentation; it suffices for the moment to note that Bergson’s evaluation of mysticism in the Two Sources, the axis for the openness of ‘dynamic religion,’ cannot be subsumed to a ‘philosophy of transcendence.’ The ‘true life’ is not elsewhere nor is Bergson’s philosophical distillation of the experience of mysticism to be conflated with the kind of mysticism glossed in Levinas’ characterization, which, in fact, proves nearly identical with Bergson’s own characterization of ‘contemplative mysticism’ in contrast to the fully formed (and authentic) mysticism of action that is the focus of Bergson’s attention. Equally, Bergson’s thinking in the Two Sources – and already in Creative Evolution – can be seen as formulating a comparable Heideggerian critique of metaphysics (as Levinas himself recognizes); moreover, it can also be seen as effectively articulating what can be taken as an anticipatory critique of Heidegger’s own Seinsdenken. Indeed, the surpassing of Heidegger through Bergson is explicitly suggested by Levinas’ recognition of the significant development of Bergson’s conception of élan vital in the Two Sources, where ‘the duration that Creative Evolution considered as vital impulse becomes interhuman life’ such that the ‘sympathy of time is not a drama of being qua being; not because it is a question of a philosophy of becoming but because the to-be does not exhaust the meaning of duration’ (GDT 55–6).

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This Bergsonian sympathy of time, by which Levinas understands the ‘interhuman’ interpolation of the ‘saint’ and the ‘hero,’ central to Bergson’s ‘open religion,’ is clearly set against – and beyond – the ontological adventure of Heidegger’s thinking. Already in Creative Evolution, the metaphysics of creative evolution critically hinges on rejecting the pairing of being and nothingness as stipulating the fundamental horizon of all philosophical problems. As Deleuze astutely observes in Bergsonism, duration is a method of analysis tasked with the dissolution of questions and the posing of precise problems; the problems of being and nothingness are revealed as ‘false’ questions, philosophical mirages.10 If these indications were not enough to sketch the curve of Bergson’s destruction of the ontological tradition, one can further invoke Bergson’s conception of evolution and the rejection of any totalizing notion of history on the strength of a two-pronged critique of determinism and teleology. Evolution – in the broad meaning granted by Bergson – is fundamentally open, unexpectedly creative. In pairing Bergson and Heidegger, it would appear that they would seem to stand on parallel planes vis-à-vis Levinas’ critique of the philosophical tradition. Yet, whereas Heidegger’s Seinsdenken can be formulated and so captured in terms of Levinas’ construal of the philosophical tradition (itself largely construed in terms adopted from Heidegger) the same cannot unambiguously be stated of Bergson. A suspicion begins to take hold that Bergson cannot be identified or located within the alternatives of a philosophy of transcendence or a philosophy of immanence with which, however, Levinas seeks to compass the entire philosophical tradition. In fact, a degree of slippage between Bergson and Heidegger is already detectable in the passage from Totality and Infinity with which my line of reflection first began. In Levinas’ assessment, Bergson’s liberation of life from being takes the form of a liberation of duration from eternity. In truth, this liberation of life can be stated in many ways: as the liberation of becoming from being, of duration from space, of the verb from the noun. Yet, in whatever way the essence of Bergson’s thinking is to find expression, its achievement should not be regarded as a simple inversion of conceptual priorities within an otherwise unchallenged framework of philosophical thinking; as if Bergson merely replaces the priority of ‘being’ with a hypermodernism of ‘becoming’ (or ‘process’ as championed by some of Bergson’s earliest enthusiasts). On this score, it is imperative to guard against a naive reading of Bergson’s significance as a reversal of being and becoming, eternity and time and so on, which would still remain beholden to an underlying ontological difference of being and beings. Rather, the entire philosophical thrust of Bergson’s brilliance crystallizes in a critical rejection of any singular ontological difference as such. A differentiated notion of difference breaks with a monolithic casting of difference, as arguably could be said of Heidegger’s ‘ontological difference’ of being and beings.

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The movement of differentiation – expressed through a series of differential concepts: duration, evolution, becoming and the like – is neither dialectical nor moves exclusively around the axis of substantial identity and secondary difference. There are different senses of difference, as many as there are (or have been) vectors of duration. Ontological differentiation becomes itself metaphysically differentiated – this is the sense in which Bergson’s thinking aspires to becoming truly metaphysical. And as Levinas himself offers, this Bergsonian rupture with the thinking of being re-situates the understanding of ‘the “to-” [à] of “to-be” [à-être]’ as the ‘appeal to the interiority of the other man,’ or, in other words, of the ethical (GDT 56). In the passage from Totality and Infinity under consideration, this emancipation of Bergsonian thinking from the horizon of ontology is also tacitly endorsed, but only in part. Levinas’ further comment on creation as ‘above’ or ‘more than’ being should be read as silently marking the presence of Bergson – and yet only to steer away from Bergson, as if marking a point of deflection: ‘That there could be a more than being or an above being is expressed in the idea of creation which, in God, exceeds a being eternally satisfied with itself’ (TI 218). Lest we think that Levinas is here still speaking of Bergson, he is quick to qualify that ‘this notion of the being above being does not come from theology’ but from Plato’s idea of the Good. Even though the concept of life in Bergson is inseparable from the concept of creation, such that the evolution of (human) life comes to express the duality of natura naturans and natura naturata, Levinas turns instead to Plato’s Good and the idea of God in order to fix a set of bearings for his own liberation of life, as beyond being and otherwise than essence, yet not as long as either the idea of God remains thought in metaphysical terms as a ‘being’ or Plato’s Good remains impersonal.11 Bergson’s liberation of life from being falls short, and precisely for the reason that it remains entrapped within an ontological mode of thinking; such is the compressed critique of Bergson that we are meant to read between the lines of this passage, and yet which stands in tension with the Levinasian pronouncement of Bergson’s rupture with Heidegger signaled above. However, as Levinas writes elsewhere: To be sure, the Bergsonian conception of freedom through duration tends towards the same end [that is, toward the same Levinasian end]. But it preserves for the present a power over the future: duration is creation. To criticize this deathless philosophy it is not enough to situate it within the whole drift of modern philosophy, which makes creation the principle attribute of the creature. It is a matter of showing that creation itself presupposes an opening onto a mystery.12 The concept of creation is here joined with two equally critical terms mobilized in unison against Bergson’s thinking: ‘opening’ and ‘mystery’ – both

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of these concepts will, however, play their own critical role in Bergson’s proposed liberation of life from the closed systems of morality and religion in the Two Sources. Nonetheless, this line of critique becomes further sharpened in Levinas’ remark that ‘Bergson’s notion of élan vital, which merges artistic creation and generation in the same movement – what I call ‘fecundity’ – ... tends towards an impersonal pantheism ... .’ (TO 92). Thus, even if Levinas grants Bergson an extra-territorial status vis-à-vis the philosophical tradition, Bergson’s unique standing only calls for a unique form of critique. Bergson appears to be positioned half-way, neither fully recumbent within the ontological tradition culminating in Heidegger nor fully elevated to the heights of Levinas’ ethical stance. The characterization of pantheism would, in this light, represent an attempt to determine Bergson’s identity and location within a history of philosophy that places Bergson at a certain distance while retaining his proximity. This act of naming allows Levinas to take possession of Bergson so as to dispossess of him in good conscience.

3 The question of Bergson’s pantheism Levinas’ characterization of Bergson’s thinking as ‘tending towards an impersonal pantheism’ is intriguing, but far from transparent.13 The adjective ‘impersonal’ possesses a precise meaning and function within Levinas’ thinking, whereas the noun ‘pantheism’ is both less frequent and less rigorously defined – and can thus be said to lack its own indigenous meaning – in the thinking of Levinas, whose modus operandi consists in a pervasive re-minting of traditional philosophical vocabularies. If for no other reason, the peculiarity of this combination (‘impersonal pantheism’) is striking in this imbalanced conjunction of a term (‘impersonal’) that benefits from a precise and indigenous meaning (non-generic) with a term (‘pantheism’) that exploits, and thus benefits in a different sense from, a latitude of imprecision. In this precarious equation, ‘impersonal’ would be a personal concept whereas ‘pantheism’ would be impersonal. The concept of the ‘impersonal’ figures prominently in Levinas’ critique of the philosophical and theological traditions of Western thought. Levinas argues that the idea of philosophy as ontology coincides with the destruction of transcendence, that is, with the collapse of the Other into being – the inability to think the Other as Other, as otherwise than being and beyond essence. Indeed, the terms ‘being,’ ‘the same’ and ‘impersonal’ are nearly synonymous in the conceptual economy of Levinas’ thinking. This ontological heritage culminates in Heidegger’s fixation on thinking the ‘there is’ of being in its ontological difference with beings. For Levinas, however, il y a names the essential anonymity and destitution of ontology: being itself is bereft of meaning and determinate content – faceless. Being itself can neither be specified (any positive determination of being reverts to beings) nor does it mean anything in itself. The hermeneutical circle that Heidegger poses at

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the beginning of Sein und Zeit thus becomes turned against Heidegger into an amphiboly: being as such is impersonal and indeterminate, whereas beings (‘entities’) are determinate.14 Yet, since beings are revealed on the horizon of being – since being itself is that in terms of which beings are at all given – any individual difference and determination between beings becomes reduced to being itself, to the il y a devoid of meaning or movement. Framed in such terms, the reign of ontology is equivalent to the domination of the ‘the neuter’ or ‘the impersonal.’ As Levinas writes: We have thus the conviction of having broken with the philosophy of the Neuter: with the Heideggerian Being of the existent whose impersonal neutrality the critical work of Blanchot has so much contributed to bring out, with Hegel’s impersonal reason, which shows to the personal consciousness only its ruses. With a surprising turn, Heidegger’s thinking of being is thus deemed a materialism: ‘To place the Neuter dimension of Being above the existent which unbeknown to it this Being would determine in some way, to make the essential events unbeknown to the existents, is to profess materialism’ (TI 298–9). ‘Materialism’ has here taken on an indigenous meaning within the framework of Levinas’ critique of the philosophy of the ‘impersonal.’ Given this developed conception of ‘impersonal,’ minted in the coinage of Levinas’ critique of Heidegger (and Hegel, of course), does Bergson also succumb to the same fate of impersonality? In essence, to pose this question within the horizon of Levinas’ thinking is to ask whether Bergson’s thinking is at all recognizable as a philosophy, given Levinas’ equation of philosophy with the destruction of transcendence and the impersonal coincidence of being and thinking. Bergson’s thinking can arguably be said to have itself proposed a comparable critique of the ‘philosophy of the impersonal’ under the heading of what Bergson formulates as ‘closed’ and ‘static’ morality/ religion. Moreover, Bergson develops a double-indictment of ontology in Creative Evolution and the Two Sources: a critique of an ontological frame of thinking, fixated on the presumed centrality of the question of ‘being’ in Creative Evolution, and a critique of a traditional conception of God, both the philosopher’s notion of God as stemming (in Bergson’s view) from Aristotle and the theologian’s God, anchored in the framework of ‘closed religion’ and a false (and/or incomplete) notion of mystical experience. Especially with a view to the latter, it thus becomes paramount to expose the way in which the argument of the Two Sources positions itself beyond the philosopher’s God and the theologian’s God, against the backdrop of the critique of ontology initiated in Creative Evolution but only achieving full fruition in the Two Sources and its vision of ‘dynamic religion.’ In sum, one can not only contest the characterization of Bergson’s thinking as impersonal from Bergson’s own standpoint – if impersonal stands for

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the philosophy of the neuter and the primacy of the horizon of being, then Bergson can be seen as defining his own thinking on the basis of a critique of ontology (that is, metaphysics of substance); Levinas himself suggests as much, insofar as he regards Bergson as liberating life from being, as thinking life otherwise than being. How, then, does Bergson’s liberation of life from being nonetheless fall short of ‘beyond being’? Given that the Levinasian conception of the impersonal is lacking in the requisite robustness with which to capture and so indict Bergson’s thinking, it consequently falls to the term ‘pantheism’ to fix the sense in which creation in Bergson still falls short of the Other and of God, and thus of whether and how Levinas can dispose of Bergson within the ambit of his critique of the philosophical tradition. Yet, the term ‘pantheism’ presents its own set of difficulties. To my knowledge, this term appears exclusively as a characterization of Bergson’s thinking; and whereas the term ‘impersonal’ is outfitted with its own indigenous meaning, the term ‘pantheism’ is less precisely defined and lacks a comparable indigenous inflection. Levinas does, however, provide a clue to what he has in mind when he speaks of pantheism when he writes that Bergson ‘does not sufficiently note the crispation and isolation of subjectivity, which is the ineluctable moment of my dialectic’ (TO 92). This emphasis on the dialectical form of Levinas’ argument is significant in its own right, as it marks a methodological transformation of the phenomenological method: phenomenology is but one moment in the dialectical progression of Levinas’ argument. The dialectical movement of transcendence passes from the ‘enchainment of the ego to itself’ to the ‘liberation of the ego with regard to the self,’ a liberation of the Other from the captivity of being through the fecundity of paternity (to take my bearings from Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity). As the openness to the stranger whom I have created, whom I am not, and over whom I relinquish power (and, indeed, myself), paternity is ‘not simply the renewal of the father in the son,’ but the ‘father’s exteriority in relation to the son.’ It would appear in this light that the limitation of Bergson’s duration as creation consists in ‘[preserving] for the present a power over the future.’ Duration remains synchronic given that Bergson presumably falls short of attaining diachronic temporality, which requires, among other features, ‘showing that creation itself presupposes an opening onto mystery’ (TO 92, 80). We will return to this question of whether durée – and the form in which it becomes cast in the Two Sources – remains beholden to a synchronic form of temporality. Leaving this issue to the side, one could here justly insist that nothing in this Levinasian critique of durée gives any actual determinate meaning to the term ‘pantheism.’ Nothing inherent in this proposed defect of durée implies anything meaningful – as opposed to being just a name – about the term pantheism in its Levinasian attribution to Bergson. The sense in which Bergson ‘tends towards pantheism’ still remains unclear, since this

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term suffers from an under-determined meaning within Levinas’ thinking; it lacks the precision of an indigenous meaning as is the case for terms such as ‘materialism,’ ‘atheism’ and ‘impersonal.’ We are thus placed in a situation where we need to reach for a meaning of pantheism that is not indigenous to Levinas’ thinking. We are, in other words, left with a commonplace. Levinas is not the first to have raised the specter of pantheism against Bergson. Anxiety over Bergson’s alleged ‘pantheism’ (coupled with the specter of monism) emerged immediately in response to Creative Evolution and the extent to which Bergson’s conception of God was or was not compatible with Catholic doctrine. Numerous were the critical voices, including from the Vatican, claiming that, in Charles Corbière’s words, ‘Bergson’s conception [of God] leads to pantheism.’15 Yet, this vigorous debate was fueled more by Bergson’s silence on the question of God in Creative Evolution than by the presence of any developed view. Indeed, Bergson only postulates a view of God once in Creative Evolution – but once was enough to provoke a storm of controversy. In the concluding section of chapter 3 in Creative Evolution, Bergson turns to consider the ultimate source of creation. Having argued at length against the obscure idea of creation as entailing ‘things which are created and a thing which creates’ (in other words, in terms of a metaphysics of ‘being’) Bergson hazards the thought of a continuous activity of creativity as a ‘center from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a firework display.’16 This center of perpetual creativity is defined as God, as unceasing ‘life, action and freedom,’ which we experience ‘ourselves when we act freely’ (CE 271/708). Thus conceived, God is a not ‘ready made’ or a ‘thing,’ but an infinite source of élan vital, which becomes differentiated into a multitude of created world-lines of evolution. Given this brief evocation of God, commentators’ anxiety concerning pantheism turned on the perception of an implied foreclosure of a personal and transcendent God. As the origin of all creative evolution, God is immanent to, and so continuous with, the world of created beings. Further confirmation of God’s immanence to creation was seen as apparently signaled in the contention that ‘the absolute’ becomes revealed ‘in a certain measure within us,’ a view that rattled Catholic critics as renouncing any unique significance to the revelation of God in Christ. When coupled with a pervasive methodological insistence on the primacy of experience, Bergson’s foreclosure of a transcendent God seems complete; any revelation of God must have the form of an experience within the expressive continuum of creation. Bergson’s presumed pantheism hinges on accepting this interpretation of God’s immanence in the manifold of creative evolution. This strong identification of God with the vital impulse, shared (implicitly) by Levinas and (explicitly) by Bergson’s Catholic critics such as Joseph de Tonquédec, also surfaces in Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson’s Two Sources. As Deleuze writes: ‘Servant of an open and finite God (such are the characteristics of the Élan Vital), the mystical soul actively plays the whole of the universe, and

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reproduces the opening of a Whole in which there is nothing to see or to contemplate.’17 And yet, in two letters to Joseph de Tonquédec, Bergson came to clarify the admittedly ambiguous image of God in Creative Evolution, which, indeed, lends itself in its textual isolation to identifying God with the vital impulse (élan vital). In these letters Bergson distinguishes more clearly between God and the vital impulse in a manner that evinces his neo-Plotinian leanings. In a letter of 1908, Bergson stresses that in speaking of God in Creative Evolution as the source from which the ‘currents’ or ‘élans’ flow, God is meant to be ‘distinct’ from these flows of vital energy.18 Bergson further contends that his argument against nothingness, developed in the final section of Creative Evolution, is not, as de Tonquédec presumed, directed against the idea of a transcendent cause – God – but only against Spinoza’s conception of being. Even though transcendence is not foreclosed, Bergson insists that nothing can be positively determined regarding this ‘something’ [quelque chose] from a philosophical point of view; this ‘il y a’ that has always existed without thereby implying nature as this ‘something.’ In this fashion, Bergson rejects both an immanent and a transcendent God, if ‘God’ indeed is properly to be spoken of as the source – the eternal ‘there becomes’ – of creative evolution. In response to another publication by de Tonquédec, Bergson stresses once again the philosophical ambivalence of any pronouncement on the question of God. Philosophical method remains solidly welded to experience, thus prohibiting any presumed knowledge that would exceed the given. In reviewing the development of his writings, Bergson refutes any direct implication of his thinking regarding the idea of a creative and free God. Indeed, this phenomenological suspension of the idea of God in favor of a return to the given, when coupled with the concrete analyses of freedom, spirit (or ‘mind’ [l’esprit]) and creation (the three respective themes of Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution) amounts to a concerted ‘refutation of monism and pantheism in general.’19 Beginning with Time and Free Will, the course of Bergson’s thinking operates under the umbrella of a suspension of the question of God; this suspension is in truth a postponement, since addressing the question of God would require addressing ‘problems of an entirely different nature’ – the ‘ethical problems’ that would come to preoccupy the Two Sources. These revealing qualifications intensify the suspense at the heart of Bergson’s thinking by, on the one hand, refuting the attribution of pantheism (and monism) while, on the other hand, hazarding a God as neither immanent nor transcendent.20 Of God, a central ambiguity remains, but not as pertaining to the various terms most familiar for the framing of God in the history of philosophy. Faced with this ambivalence, Ghislain Waterlot’s recent interpretation of ‘Bergson’s hesitation’ between a transcendent and immanent God offers a promising clue for further advancing

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in the direction of my present concerns. In Waterlot’s astute judgment, ‘one can neither say that the élan vital is God nor that it is not God.’21 On this reading, God renounces (himself) ‘to infinity’ so as to give way to the richness and diversity of creation (the manifold of world-lines, or ‘durations’). As Waterlot writes: ‘God must in some manner renounce – the reader will excuse this anthropomorphic language – in a certain sense without end (à l’illimité) and his nature seems to be to produce in an unlimited manner élans of finite lives.’22 The manifold of created durations is not the expression of God’s immutable essence or being. In this crucial respect, Bergson is not Spinoza, even if Spinoza remains a significant figure for Bergson.23 Extending Waterlot’s proposal further, it is not expression that is central to the perpetual creativity of Bergsonian creation, but generosity, as exemplified in the image of God as infinitely ‘renouncing’ ‘himself’ (and thus not as expressing him/itself ) so as to infinitely give time without expectation or demand.24 The upshot of this extended scrutiny of the issue of pantheism – a necessary loop of reflection if we are to make any headway with assessing Bergson’s standing for Levinas – reveals the degree to which Bergson remains elusive to Levinas’ critical mappings of the philosophical tradition. This elusiveness is clearly at play in Levinas’ vacillation in his appraisal of Bergson; his (later) characterization of the Two Sources offers an image of Bergson that is incongruous with the (earlier) image of Bergson as an ‘impersonal pantheist.’ In order to pursue more fully the trajectory of these reflections, it is therefore critical to demonstrate that the experience – or event – of mysticism and the passage – transcendence – from ‘closed’ to ‘open,’ around which the argument of the Two Sources turns, not only avoids the alternatives of ‘philosophy of transcendence’ and ‘philosophy of immanence,’ but, more substantially, formulates on its own terms an alternative to Levinas’ ethical thinking – an alternative that at once confirms Levinas’ attested ‘proximity’ and ‘faithfulness’ to Bergson while also issuing a counter-proposal in terms of Bergson’s own ethical overture.

4 Bergson’s ethics of ethics Under the rubric of ‘dynamic religion,’ Bergson does not propose an ethical theory in any traditional form as a set of prescriptive rules, moral imperatives or guidelines for the flowering of natural sympathies; these he includes under the rubric of ‘closed morality,’ from which the genuine (ethical) openness of dynamic religion institutes a radical departure. Derrida’s observation that Levinas does not seek ‘to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general’ serves as an equally apt characterization of Bergson’s ambition in the Two Sources. Both thinkers conceive of their efforts in terms of an ‘ethic of ethics.’25 This similarity in spirit extends to a formal similarity in the exposition of their respective arguments: each

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traces an arc from the enclosed totality of egotism to the openness of a transcendence towards the Other that coincides with a movement from the metaphysical condition of perpetual war (Bergson’s closed morality) to a genuine humanity à venir. Additionally, the ethical enterprises of both lean on a sturdy return to experience, where the structure of experience is conceived as the event of transcendence, grasped dynamically as an openness and movement towards the Other. The thinking of transcendence is metaphysics; and metaphysics centers on an ethical transcendence, as displaced from the horizon of ontology. The direction along which the ethical inflection of the question of God takes shape in the Two Sources is already traced in Creative Evolution. The ambivalence of God as neither identical with the élan vital nor as entirely distinct from the élan vital – as neither immanent nor transcendent – resolves into an image of a God as a renouncement without limit, so as to give way to the richness of creative evolution, to which God does not belong. The creativity of God is of a generosity without end or expectation. This vitality as divine generosity resurfaces in Bergson’s vision of ethical transcendence in the prism of mystical experience. The experience of mysticism cuts across and, indeed, undercuts the traditional divide between religion and philosophy. This ambivalent status of mystical experience reflects, on the plane of experience, the ambivalent status of God as neither immanent nor transcendent. In seizing on the experience of mysticism as the basis for his ethical reflections, it would seem that Bergson discovers a metaphysically unique form of experience on the basis of which to overcome his own suspension of the question of God, from a philosophical point of view, for an ostensible lack of positive experience.26 And yet, with this turn to mystical experience, the ambivalence of God as neither transcendent nor immanent does not become resolved but re-inscribed into the texture of an experience and disseminated into the identity of Bergson’s thinking itself, as becomes most apparent in the methodological precariousness of the analysis of mysticism. On the one hand, as Bergson remarks, ‘mystical experience, left to itself, cannot provide the philosopher with complete certainty.’27 Mystical experience requires philosophical clarification of its metaphysical privilege of allowing ‘man [to] get in touch with a transcendent principle’ (TS 248/1183). Yet, the way of philosophical reflection leads on its own account to the edge, so to speak, of recognizing the metaphysical content of mysticism. As Bergson comments, and thinking immediately of Creative Evolution: ‘Now it so happens that a thorough study of a certain order of problems, entirely different from religious problems, has led us to a conclusion which makes probable the existence of a singular privileged experience, such as mystic experience’ (TS 256/1193).28 Intuition is the central fixture of Bergson’s conception of philosophical thinking: ‘Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable

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from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.’29 Prior to the Two Sources, Bergson had already speculated on whether ‘there is not also an intuition of the vital, and consequently a metaphysics of life, which might in a sense prolong the science of the living’ (CM 33/1274). As Bergson notes: and if, in a first intensification, beyond which most of us did not go, it [intuition] made us realize the continuity of our inner life, a deeper intensification might carry it to the roots of our being, and thus to the very principle of life in general. Now is not this precisely the privilege of the mystic soul? (TS 250/1186) Without mystical experience, the method of philosophical intuition could not itself arrive at the ‘transcendent principle’ of creative evolution. Mystical experience presents a surplus to the method of philosophical intuition, while, for its part, philosophy ‘reflects back on to the mystical experience something’ of its own objectivity. This metaphysical privilege of mysticism should not be hastily regarded as exclusively ‘religious,’ since Bergson is keen to underline that the experience of mysticism has historically become veiled, or suppressed, in adopting prefabricated forms of expression representative of closed religion and morality. Mysticism must necessarily ‘borrow’ its language from religion (much as the content of any intuition must be articulated in established language and concepts) but the ‘original content,’ that is, the ‘unalloyed experience’ of mysticism, remains ‘independent of all that religion owes to tradition, to theology, to the Churches’ (TS 250/1187). As Bergson remarks, ‘Let us leave aside, for the moment, their [the great Christian mystics’] Christianity, and study in them the form apart from the matter’ (TS 227/1168). On the other hand, even if the unalloyed mystical experience, purified from its borrowings from closed religion, lends itself to philosophical reflection, mystical experience does not offer an answer to the problems of philosophy: ‘Religion, whether static or dynamic, confronts the philosopher with a God who raises totally different problems’ (TS 243/1180). Mystical experience is a method of intuition that, in a precise Bergsonian sense, ‘ignores what we have called “false problems”’ (TS 251/1187). Bergson thus provocatively claims that questions surrounding the existence or non-existence of God, of his being or nothingness, ‘simply do not exist.’ Such questions are ‘optical illusions’ arising in the ‘inner world from the structure of human intelligence.’ Mystical experience already accomplishes the dissolution of the metaphysics of substance, in its supreme manifestation in terms of the question of God that Bergson’s philosophical method painstakingly undermined over the course of his writings from Time and Free-Will to Creative Evolution. God, as revealed in mystical experience, is

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otherwise than being, beyond essence, but also, otherwise than nothingness. As Bergson notes: It is none the less certain that they [the mystics] supply us with an implicit answer to questions which force themselves upon the attention of philosophers, and that difficulties which should never have perplexed philosophers are implicitly regarded by the mystic as non-existent. (TS 251/1188) Indeed, impatience with the traditional ways of philosophy is noticeable throughout the Two Sources. This impatience reflects Bergson’s critique of the lack of precision in the posing and handling of problems. A critique of the ontological grammar of traditional metaphysics can be discerned in outline. Bergson rejects the traditional philosophical construction of the idea of God as a Being possessing various predicates. The ontological structure of subject-predicate (substance-accident) is unmasked as a spatialized conception of God, of a God who remains immobile, impermeable and static, a God who is. If the God of the philosophers, as the God of ‘being,’ of God as Being, succumbs to this Bergsonian critique, so does the wholehearted negation of being that lies at the source of a ‘negative theological’ conception of God as nothingness. Nothingness is not a lack or privation but an addition or surplus, according to Bergson’s notion of the retrograde movement of truth and his critique of the notion of nothingness. In both instances, as either the highest Being or the darkest non-Being, Bergson implicitly understands this span of philosophical Gods as predicated on the notion of God as a transcendent being. Against this philosophical notion of a transcendent God, Bergson contrasts what he takes to be a religious notion of a God essentially defined in ‘communication with us.’ In dissolving the false problem of the philosopher’s God, does mystical experience answer the problem posed by the theologian’s God – that is, of God as ‘communicating’ with us? The answer to this question is less transparent in Bergson’s text than might be anticipated from his clearer attitude towards the philosopher’s God. Bergson proposes to extract the pure experience of mysticism from Christianity; yet apart from this one reference to God as ‘communicating,’ the parsing of the truth of mysticism does not seem to take up this aspect of communication. As will be noted, Bergson’s own evocation of God as ‘calling’ the mystic beyond herself remains inextricably ambiguous in its significance as a possible instance of such a communication. Yet Bergson equally insists on the presence of God in mystical experience: ‘the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort which life itself manifests. This effort is of God, if not God himself’ (TS 220/1162). While

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Bergson insists that in mystical experience the ‘nature of God,’ that is, ‘God himself,’ is ‘immediately apprehended,’ he at once adopts a critical distance and espouses a mildly sarcastic tone in switching into the voice of philosophy, as if he were here making philosophy speak, but from afar, in an act of ventriloquism (TS 252/1189). As Bergson writes: The philosopher could soon define this nature, did he wish to find a formula for mysticism. God is love, and the object of love: herein lies the whole contribution of mysticism. About this twofold love the mystic will never have done talking. His description is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable. But what he does state clearly is that divine love is not a thing of God: it is God himself. (TS 252/1189; my emphasis) The tone of this passage is unmistakably derisive of the philosophical (read: intellectual) convenience of formulas with the ontological form, ‘S is p’ (God is x, y and z), that would immediately collapse the truth of mysticism into the closed frame of substance metaphysics: as if love were a predicate of the substance or being of God. Bergson’s voice is here monotone, without inflection, mechanical. Indeed, who is here speaking? And from where does Bergson himself speak? At this moment in the text, his position is neither that of the philosopher nor that of the mystic. This rhetorically complex passage is exemplary of Bergson’s method in the Two Sources, which tacks back and forth between different lines of approach (or ‘lines of flight,’ in Bergsonian terms), while also anticipating and responding to possible critiques. The method is nomadic without being adrift; a simplicity of vision refracted through the density of its medium. This ventriloquism of philosophy becomes transformed into a lesson for philosophy, as signaled in Bergson’s shift in his own manner of speaking; he now addresses the philosopher directly rather than, as above, speaking for him. ‘It is upon this point [that divine love is God himself ] that the philosopher must fasten who holds God to be a person, and yet wishes to avoid anything like a gross assimilation with man. He will think, for example, of the enthusiasms which can fire a soul, consume all that is within it, and henceforth fill the whole space’ (TS 252/1189). The ambivalence of God as neither transcendent nor immanent is here re-affirmed, but with the additional twist of implicating the dissolution of the distinction between the philosopher’s God and the God of religious experience. We are left with Bergson’s own elusive presence as neither purely philosophical nor purely religious in profile. We are, in other words, witness to the dawn of a ‘new intelligibility’ in which intuition, as embodied in mystical experience, is not a vision but a movement – an action – towards an alterity, whose radical exteriority becomes present from within, yet the significance of which eludes the grammar of ontology.

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Mystical experience and openness

In mystical experience, contact is established with ‘the creative effort which life itself manifests’ or, in other words, with ‘God himself’ (TS 220). Given the inherent complexity of Bergson’s established context of reflection, it is not surprising that the analysis of mystical experience is not fashioned as merely a psychological analysis (for example, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which Bergson knew well), as merely of historicalreligious interest, nor, indeed, as merely a philosophical investigation. The juxtaposition of different perspectives – sociological, biological (in Bergson’s expanded sense), religious and psychological – is evidence less of the precariousness of Bergson’s method as it is of its vitality. Each approach on its own proves insufficient for grasping the complete truth and promise of mystical experience. This heterogeneous handling of mystical experience further orchestrates a displacement of both philosophy and religion with the resulting ambiguous image of Bergson’s thinking as neither strictly speaking philosophical nor religious.30 The choice of mysticism as the experience in and through which closed morality and religion (the closed sphere of violence and egotism or in other (Levinas’) words, atheism) is overcome and transformed through dynamic religion is based on a conception of experience qua intuition as a ‘movement towards the Other.’ This represents a significant modification of Bergson’s own conception of intuition: whereas philosophical intuition injects ‘inward’ in the sense of a perfect fusion of intellect and object (that is, contemplative), mystical intuition projects ‘outward’ as action, and as culminating in a creative generosity towards Others. Bergson’s description condenses a multiplicity of different historical testimonies and discerns different stages within the mystical movement of transformation and transcendence. As a first moment, the mystical experience involves suspension and eccentricity: mystical experience throws the self off its own axis. This de-centering of the self also entails a disjunction of the mutual conditioning of species and individual that defined one of the essential structures of static (closed) society. In a ‘closed society,’ morality is a function of a system of rules and social cohesion in which each member is subsumed to impersonal obligations, and through which each member is defined in relation to a totality. The source of moral obligation is ultimately socio-biological: obligations produce social cohesion in becoming internalized, in the form of habituation and social mores, by each member of society; deviance from social and moral obligations produces a disjunction between our (internalized) social ego and our (externalized) self. The transition from closed to open turns on a dislocation of the individual from this nexus of social conditioning and individual responsiveness; Bergson likens such a transformation of our species nature to a discontinuous transition from ‘city’ to ‘humanity,’ from the impersonal totality of social obligation

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to the recognition of Other as Other individual through the mutual appeals and exhortations of charity, generosity and sacrifice. Mystical experience ruptures the continuous fabric of closed society through transformative openness to the Other. Significantly, the opening of subjectivity in mystical experience responds to a call from elsewhere that produces transcendence and transformation in the twofold sense of ‘effectuation’ (event) and being ‘brought to light’ (disclosure) – to adopt a set of entirely appropriate Levinasian terms. Yet, the mystic ‘does not perceive the force that moves [him],’ even though one might expect that it is God who calls forth the mystic, as in fact expressed in numerous historical testimonies from which Bergson culls his own description. There is, however, an intriguing lapse of silence in Bergson’s description since he never explicitly identifies God as the source of the call nor indeed as the call itself, opting instead for the cautious formulation, ‘as though to listen to a voice calling,’ thus capturing without immobilizing the ambiguity of whether a call is made and heard. The transformation of the self beyond itself irradiates the mystic in a ‘boundless joy’ and ‘rapture.’ ‘God is there, and the soul is in God’ (TS 230). In assessing this culmination point in the first stage of mystical experience, it is crucial to remain mindful of Bergson’s earlier distance vis-à-vis the philosophical (that is, intellectual) tendency of reductionism to generic formulas. The statement ‘God is there, and the soul is in God’ serves as a placeholder since the full meaning of such a statement only becomes manifest once we have followed the dynamic of mystical experience to its terminus ad quem, which resides not in the relation to God, but through God in relation to the Other, or more precisely to Others – to other human beings. The rapture of joy as the expression of the surplus of vitality does not mark the end point of mystical transcendence and transformation. If this were the final resting place, we would have the form of contemplative mysticism that Bergson identifies as pre-Christian, and for which Plotinus stands as exemplar, a simplicity of vision without motion, immobile in a temporary fusion with the transcendent One and eternity. This intimacy with God has the form of a coincidence of ‘the thought’ and the ‘object of thought’ without any distance between the mystic and God, between the lover and the beloved. Yet, given this simplicity of vision, an intuition of the whole into which the mystic becomes absorbed ‘in God,’ an exteriority nonetheless remains, or rather, is opened from within the sheer and immense immanence of God. Immanence contains an inner multiplicity, that is, an inner agitation or stirring of movement. What characterizes ‘complete mysticism’ is an agitation within its simplicity of vision; an unceasing vitality within its boundless joy that moves outwards towards other human beings. As Vladimir Jankélévitch observes, this triumph of joy is comparable to beatitude in Spinoza, as beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’: ‘The philosophy of élan vital paradoxically rediscovers Spinozism’s Generositas.’31

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Joy is the passage towards a greater perfection – and this greater perfection is not in our relation or love with God, but in concert with others. In this second stage of mystical experience, the inner agitation of the will ‘displaces’ and dissipates the ecstasy of joy – the mystic finds herself alone and feels a stirring within herself of a ‘profound metamorphosis’ that announces the final act in the drama of mystical experience. Bergson proposes a curious and not entirely transparent metaphor of a machine of ‘wonderfully tempered steel’ in the process of production, its various parts being assembled, with each part submitted to stress tests; he imagines what such a machine would feel and speculates that such a machine would feel the vague and impressive sense of ‘something lacking here and there, and of pain all over.’ Yet this superficial distress would only need to be ‘intensified’ so as to become passed over into the ‘hope and expectation’ of becoming a ‘marvelous instrument’ (TS 231/1171). This image is meant to illuminate the transformation of mystical experience into a yearning to become an ‘instrument’ of God: the agitation throws the mystic back onto herself, thus introducing a separation, but it is in terms of this distance that the mystic not only passes from contemplation to action, but can also, in this openness, become open to God’s action within herself. Bergson quickly grants that the image of instrument and machine at this point ‘evoke images which are better left alone,’ yet he holds fast to the thought of a ‘superabundance of life’ and ‘boundless impetus.’ Misleading and unsuccessful as this metaphor might be, the point to be made is the transformation of the self into a vital source of love for others. As Bergson writes, ‘For the love which consumes him is no longer simply the love of man for God, it is the love of God for all men. Through God, in the strength of God, he loves all mankind with a divine love’ (TS 233/1173). This love of mankind is not fraternal sympathy that would have its origins in reason or in natural sympathy; moreover, this love is ‘more metaphysical than moral in its essence’ in its striving to ‘complete the creation of the human species’ – its ‘direction’ is that of vital impulse and this impulse itself becomes ‘communicated’ to all men, and thus transformative of all men (TS 234–5/1175). This passage to humanity is a passage from self-preservation and social demands of obligation (natural obligation) to charity and sacrifice, in a word, to love. As Bergson is quick to note, this passage to charity is not an expansion of the self but nor is it a love or movement directed towards a definite object ‘mankind’ since it is a love whose movement is both too intense and too expansive to be contained and absorbed by an object. Thus, on the one hand, Bergson writes of the open soul: ‘Suppose we say that it [the open soul] embraces all humanity: we should not be going too far, we should hardly be going far enough, since its love may extend to animals, to plants, to all nature.’ This pronouncement might invite a renewed charge of pantheism (its specter never being far off). On the other hand, it is immediately qualified in a revealingly significant way, for

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no one of these things which would thus fill it [the open soul] would suffice to define the attitude taken by the soul, for it could, strictly speaking, do without all of them. Its form is not dependent on its content. We have just filled it; we could as easily empty it again. ‘Charity’ would persist in him who possesses ‘charity,’ though there be no other living creature on earth. (TS 38/1007) Does this mean that charity intends nothing? As Bergson himself asks, ‘Has it [love], strictly speaking, an object’ (TS 29/997). Lest we think that the dynamism of love, as released through the rare appearances of ‘heroic’ individuals (saints, mystics and martyrs), becomes dissolved into an ethereal openness, the transformative force of its released vitality contains an equal measure of political consequence in initiating a ‘profound change in the material conditions imposed on humanity by nature.’ This ‘profound change’ would require ‘a vast machinery such as might set human activity at liberty, this liberation being, moreover, stabilized by a political and social organization which would ensure the application of the mechanism to its true object’ (TS 235/1175). The momentum and communication of mystical love moves towards the realization of a universal democracy à venir. It is in this sense that one recognizes the true meaning of the passage from the love of God to the generosity towards humanity. As Jean Nabert is right to point out, it is this solidarity, if not identity, between ‘political consciousness and religious consciousness’ that is ‘magnificently affirmed’ in the Two Sources and that constitutes indeed the magnificence of Bergsonian generosity.32

6 In praise of generosity Though much remains in need of further development and refinement, my hope is to have at the very least succeeded in demonstrating that Levinas’ thinking cannot be seen as surpassing Bergson along the lines in which Levinas understands himself as breaking with the philosophical tradition. As Levinas himself partly recognizes, Bergson’s own philosophical initiatives, at least since Creative Evolution, institute a comparable rupture with the Greek origins of Western thinking. This uniqueness of Bergson’s standing does not therefore preclude the possibility of a critical confrontation, even if, as I have further argued, Levinas’ commonplace charge of pantheism falters; one would have to find a new terrain of contestation in terms of ‘the ethical’ itself, as sketched in my interpretation of the Two Sources as an ‘ethic of ethics.’ In this respect, I have shown how one can meaningfully consider Bergsonian ethics as ‘first philosophy’ without thereby attributing to Bergson an ethics of height; indeed, although Levinas admits a proximity to ‘certain Bergsonian themes,’ Bergson himself does not share in this proximity, as I hope to outline by way of a conclusion to these reflections.

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Aside from the scattered attestations to Bergson’s significance that have provided the coordinates for my weave of reflections, the closest that Levinas ever comes to endorsing explicitly the kind of interpretation of Bergson here developed can be found – revealingly – in a short text on Vladimir Jankélévitch. Levinas prefaces his remarks on Jankélévitch’s ethical thinking with what is undoubtedly his strongest characterization of Bergson’s philosophical significance: ‘With the advent of Bergson – in opposition to the entire tradition, issuing from the Greeks, of reason isolating and identifying the categories of being – it is the human, free time of duration that is declared to be first philosophy’ (OS 87). This ‘advent’ of Bergson, which, on another occasion (already cited) is characterized as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘glorious,’ breaks with the tradition of ontology, the identification of being and reason, and the philosophy of the Neutral. We find here a further, and indeed stronger, confirmation of the interpretation proposed in Totality and Infinity of Bergson’s liberation of life from being. If this is the revolutionary force of Bergson’s thinking – to have declared the duration of human freedom as first philosophy – what is its glory? For Levinas, the gloriousness of Bergson’s thinking is reflected in the graciousness of Jankélévitch’s ethics: ‘his [Jankélévitch’s] work is an extraordinary way of remaining true to the new intelligibility and new understanding of duration, emphasizing its ethical meaning through extremely subtle analyses’ (OS 87). In Levinas’ description, this faithfulness (‘remaining true’) to Bergson’s new intelligibility of the ethical centers on A generosity without recompense, a love unconcerned with reciprocity; duty performed without the ‘salary’ of a good-conscience-for-a-dutyperformed, without even the good conscience of being the badconscience-of-the-duty-not-performed! That is the dis-inter-estment of duration and summary … of Jankélévitch’s ethics. It is an ethics without eudemonism, and one that would be the very ‘temporalization’ of time, so to speak. And yet it includes joy and a way of being open to art and the beautiful, but not as pleasure or self-satisfaction resulting from its own virtues! (OS 87)33 The reader will clearly adduce that the very terms in which Levinas characterizes Jankélévitch’s ethics are those of Bergson’s dynamic religion. In Levinas’ brief appraisal of Jankélévitch’s work, we are to hear a discreet appraisal and appreciation of Bergson’s thinking in the Two Sources, as seen through its repercussions in another medium of thought, Jankélévitch, that, in turn, shadows the medium of Levinas’ own thinking. For both Bergson and Levinas (and Jankélévitch), ‘the miracle of creation lies [in] creating a moral being’ (TI 89). As Levinas explains, this miracle of creation consists in ‘a being capable of receiving a revelation,

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learning that it is created, and putting itself in question’ (TI 89). For Bergson, mystical experience is equally a manifestation of the élan vital, which culminates in an overcoming of egoism and revelation of creation in its creative activity: ‘It might be said, by slightly distorting the terms of Spinoza, that it is by getting back to natura naturans that we break away from natura naturata’ (TS 58/1024). The specter of pantheism is, indeed, never far away. But despite any faithfulness on the part of Levinas’ ethical thinking towards Bergson, whether via Jankélévitch or directly, Bergson’s ‘ethics of ethics’ represents in truth a counter-proposal. There is something dour about Levinas’ thinking from a Bergsonian perspective. In my brief discussion of mysticism and its transformation of egotism, I conceived the movement from God to Others in terms of a radicalization of generosity. In addition to the political dimension of this opening of dynamic religion, centered on the universal promotion of a democracy à venir, generosity is primarily oriented towards the Other. Whereas, for Bergson the movement of transcendence passes through God to the Other, for Levinas the movement rises through the Other to God. The openness of generosity is not a posture of receiving the Other, but a movement of reaching towards the Other. As Jankélévitch observes, ‘With respect to generosity, it is its own proper self that is denied indirectly, in self-forgetting; the you is affirmed directly, towards which it moves, in face of it.’34 By contrast, the ethical relation is repeatedly described by Levinas in terms such as ‘mastery,’ ‘imposition’ and ‘domination’ – all of these meant to characterize the nature of responsibility towards the exteriority of the Other. As Levinas writes, ‘The interlocutor is not a you [un Toi], he is a You [un Vous]; he reveals himself in his lordship. Thus exteriority coincides with a mastery. My freedom is thus challenged by a Master who can invest it’ (TI 101; translation modified). This Levinasian emphasis on receiving the Other, in the figures of the orphan, the widow and the stranger, belies the underlying attitude of humility that structures the transaction and openness towards the Other. Yet, the vitality of generosity stands in contrast to the passivity of humility, whether before God or Others. In Jankélévitch’s words: ‘Generosity is aligned towards the Other, not in humility in order to welcome this Other and to open itself to her but to go on searching for the Other there where she is, in order to bring oneself to her encounter’ (TI 101; my emphasis). In Bergson’s ethics, vitality is the premium of the Good; generosity is an activist and militant vocation, as exemplified in the exhortation of the final pages of the Two Sources in its call to ethical awakening and responsibility. It is this call to which Levinas himself responded and whose origin he dignified with a majestic silence, only befitting the truest kind of generosity that occurs when no one is looking and which one does not merely receive, but embraces.

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Notes 1. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 218. (Hereafter: TI.) 2. E. Levinas, Entre Nous, trans. M. Smith and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 197. (Hereafter: EN.) 3. For example, the lecture ‘Inside Heidegger: Bergson’ in E. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). (Hereafter: GDT.) Given the weight that these Heideggerian motifs played for Levinas, one may well wonder whether, in light of this avowal, one could not hazard an overt Bergsonian re-casting of Levinas’ thinking, thus reversing the established relationship between the explicitness of Levinas’ Heideggerian engagement and the implicitness of his Bergsonian faithfulness. In fact, these and other gestures towards Bergson suggest a certain degree of equivalence and even interchangeability between Bergson and Heidegger, a fit that equally affords a forum in which one becomes played against the other, as, for example, with the Bergsonian critique of Heidegger’s conception of death which surfaces in a number of Levinas’ writings. 4. E. Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. M. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 86. (Hereafter: OS.) 5. S. Moyn, Origins of the Other (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 38. 6. J. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1999), 107. 7. Ibid., 123. 8. Ibid., 108. 9. Aside from this representative cross-section, J. Delhomme, ‘Savoir Lire? Synchronie et diachronie,’ in Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: François Laruelle, 1980), II, 151–65, argues against any strong connection between Levinas and Bergson, despite Levinas’ occasional signals; P. Trotignon, ‘Autre voix, même voix,’ Cahier de L’Herne (1991): 295–305, argues on the contrary for an essential bond between Levinas and Bergson; M. Mauer, ‘Lévinas, lectuer de Bergson,’ in Henri Bergson: Réceptions (Paris: Hermann, 2009): 113–32, steers a prudent middle-course and astutely argues that Bergson’s relation to Levinas’ thinking comprises ‘diverse modalities’: ‘influence, interpretation, application and pure coincidence’ (129); L. Lawlor, ‘Dieu et le concept: une petite comparison de Levinas et Deleuze à partir de Bergson,’ trans. D-O. Gougelet in: Annales bergsoniennes, II (Paris: PUF, 2004), 441–51, repeats an idea first suggested by Mullarkey in claiming: ‘La destruction de la phénoménologie à laquelle Levinas et Deleuze participent tous les deux fraye un chemin par lequel nous pouvons revenir à Bergson ... le divergence que nous trouvons entre Dieu et concept chez Levinas et Deleuze est déjà une divergence chez Bergson lui-même’ (449, 450). Compare, however, to Mullarkey (180): ‘In that both these thinkers [Levinas and Deleuze] were historically indebted to Bergson, one can also regard their separate philosophical trajectories as partial readings of Bergsonian themes: they isolate tensions and tendencies that remain necessarily intertwined in Bergson’s thought.’ Yet, one could argue that for Deleuze immanence is not primarily manifest in the creation of concepts but, in true Bergsonian manner, as creative life; concepts express the virtual planes of life’s ‘movement’ (compare Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence, trans. J. Rajchman (New York: Zone Books, 2001)). Equally, greater caution is required in hazarding the claim that God in the Two Sources is transcendence; as I argue presently, God

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10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

Bergson and Phenomenology is neither transcendence nor immanence; genuine transcendence moves through God towards other human beings. G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 13–37. One must also add the coordinate of Descartes’ idea of the Infinite in the Third Meditation, thus forming Plato-Descartes axis. E. Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 80. (Hereafter: TO.) Pantheism is the familiar charge raised against Spinoza and Spinozism. Even if Hegel is the principle target of Levinas’ critique of totality, one could as legitimately characterize Levinas’ thinking as (yet another) response directed against Spinoza. As Levinas remarks (crucially, as the final sentence of the first section of Totality and Infinity): ‘Thought and freedom come to us from separation and from the consideration of the Other – this thesis is at the antipodes of Spinozism’(TI, 105). E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 38–42. (Hereafter: OB.) C. Corbière, ‘Le Dieu de M. Bergson,’ Revue de thèologie (1910). H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1944), 271 (hereafter CE). Pagination in Oeuvres, 708. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 112 (my emphasis). Letter of 12 May 1908, in H. Bergson, Mélanges, ed. A. Robinet (Paris: PUF, 1972), 766. Letter of 20 February 1912, in Bergson, Mélanges, 964. Even when it is recognized that the charge of Bergson’s pantheism may lack the traction it is thought to possess, vacillation still occurs. Leszek Kolakowski remarks: ‘[…] it may be argued that the label of “pantheism”, which Christian critics have so often tagged on to Bergson’s philosophy is unjustified: this God [in Bergson] cannot have all his future creative work embedded eternally in his immutable essence; by creating the world he creates himself, he is as it were a living and growing God. Unlike the Christian God he faces various options instead of unfolding in time the ready-made archetypes from his spirit. He lives like each of us’ (L. Kolakowski, Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 62.) Yet, Kolakowski still admits a degree of purchase to the charge of pantheism given Bergson’s position that we cannot conceive of God independently of creation, and thus, that God is not a transcendent and self-sufficient being. Kolakowski, however, succumbs to the familiar conflation of God with élan vital, as comes to the fore in his treatment of Bergson’s presumed monism (compare 63). G. Waterlot, ‘Dieu est-il transcendent? Examen critique des objections du P. de Tonquédec adressées à l’auteur de L’Évolution créatrice,’ Archives de philosophie, 71(2) (2008): 269–88, 285. Ibid., 284. God is not an omnipotent creator who creates at will nor such that the world is the actualization or unfolding of the potentiality of God’s essence; in this sense, Kolakowski’s reservation against the labeling of Bergson as a pantheist, noted above, is on target. Compare Bergson’s letter of 7 July 1928 to Jankélévitch in V. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: PUF, 1959), 253. Caution is required in speaking God as ‘himself’ given the complicated issue of whether God is a person for Bergson; an issue that cannot be addressed in these reflections given the limitations of space.

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25. J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 111. 26. Recall the letter of 1912 to de Tonquédec in which Bergson expressed his philosophical caution against any positive statement regarding God for lack of any experiential basis (see note 19 above). 27. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and C. Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 247–8 (my emphasis). (Hereafter: TS.) 28. More explicitly: ‘No doubt we are here going beyond the conclusions we reached in Creative Evolution. We wanted then to keep as close as possible to facts. We stated nothing that could not in time be confirmed by the tests of biology [...] But we cannot reiterate too often that philosophical certainty admits of degrees, that it calls for intuition as well as for reason, and that if intuition, backed up by science, is to be extended, such an extension can be made only by mystical intuition. In fact, the conclusions just set out complete naturally, though not necessarily, those of our former work.’ 29. H. Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. M. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 2002), 33. (Hereafter: CM.) 30. We may profitably characterize Bergson’s analysis of mystical experience as a ‘phenomenology’ of mysticism, if under the heading of ‘phenomenology’ we understand the capacious meaning developed by Anthony Steinbock in Phenomenology and Mysticism (in which, regrettably, Bergson’s the Two Sources is barely referenced). Steinbock’s preferred term ‘verticality’ (instead of ‘transcendence’) with which to fix the sense of mystical experience (in contrast to ‘horizontality); the distinction between givenness along an horizontal axis as ‘presentation’ (as ‘provocation’) as opposed to givenness as ‘evocation’ (in Bergson’s terms: ‘aspiration’); a conception of mystical experience – in the fold of the distinction between mystical and religious (in Bergson’s terms: distinction between dynamic and static) – ‘characterized by special intimacies of the presence of the Holy,’ intimacies that take the form of ‘union,’ ‘immediacy,’ ‘movement’ and ‘dynamic,’ lived experience of ‘Personto-person’ (where the capitalization of the first ‘Person’ must imply ‘the Holy’ or ‘God’); each of these distinctions is also present in Bergson’s conception of mysticism. A. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism. The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 7; 13; 24 ff.: ‘Verticality is the vector of mystery and reverence; horizontality is what is in principle within reach, graspable, controllable.’ Significant differences nonetheless obtain since Steinbock does not operate with the Bergsonian distinction between pre-Christian contemplative forms and the perfected Christian form of action. A further point of difference is Bergson’s hesitation regarding the attribution of any kind of personhood to God. 31. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 249. 32. J. Nabert, ‘Les instincts virtuels et l’intelligence dans Les deux sources,’ in L’expérience intérieure de la liberté et autre essais de philosophie morale (Paris: PUF, 1994), 313–48, 345. 33. Here is not the occasion to further develop this attested proximity between Levinas and Jankélévitch. It is remarkable the degree to which Levinas can be said to see much of his own thinking, if not in detail and philosophical vocabulary (Jankélévitch remained unimpressed by the phenomenological movement and mistrustful of existentialism, as was Levinas), at least in its principles, in Jankélévitch; and that Levinas does not propose any distance between the two,

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but in fact, looks for an increased rapprochement by way of stressing a fidelity to Judaism in speaking of Jankélévitch as that ‘astonishing magician’ who divined ‘the words of the Talmud.’ Levinas further remarks: ‘It seemed important to me to point out the tie – and precisely on the basis of that ethics rigorously conceived as first philosophy between Vladimir Jankélévitch and Judaism.’ The implication is, as Levinas draws clearly, that ‘the ethics of Judaism could be familiar to him only in the forms it had taken in Christian and lay texts’ (OS, 89). I am unaware of any remarks by Levinas on the relationship between Bergson and Judaism; yet it is intriguing to note that Jankélévitch speaks of Bergson’s historical significance in nearly the exact terms in which Levinas speaks of Jankélévitch’s connection to Judaism: ‘Bergson retrouve l’accent des Prophètes et de l’Apocalypse. La déification the l’humain – n’est-ce pa là, en somme, le dernier mot du livre des Deux sources et comme le testament d’une philosophie ‘atragique’ qui, partie de la durée personelle, a retrouvé la vocation de l’histoire et de l’evolution cosmique?’ ( Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 248). Not surprisingly, Jankélévitch is also the author of an extremely fine essay ‘Bergson et le Judaisme’ (ibid., 255–85). 34. V. Jankélévitch, Les vertus et l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 315.

10 The Psycho-Physics of Phenomenology: Bergson and Henry John Mullarkey

1 A phenomenology of influence For most, it is beyond question that Michel Henry is a philosopher of life. And in this he belongs to a peculiarly French philosophical tradition that mixes metaphysical, biological, psychological, and sometimes even theological elements of thought. Pierre Maine de Biran is clearly at the head of this vitalistic trend, with Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze being its most renowned recent incumbents. Of course, there remain sharp differences between these figures, but making a connection between any of these three and Henry is a respectable and rewarding prospect. But what of Bergson? What of the most important of the French philosophers of life – surely here we have another key thinker to compare with Henry? Indeed, a few have suggested such a rapprochement, yet it is equally beyond question that Henry himself would not have welcomed this possibility.1 In the construction of his own theory of life, it has always been against Bergson that he has pursued this enterprise, whether in his earliest works or his last ones. In Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (published in French in 1963), Henry writes that the interior life analyzed by him and Maine de Biran has nothing to do with Bergson.2 Likewise, the Bergsonian unconscious is a crude idea when compared to a proper Biranian understanding of memory as potential, ‘capable of being produced by a power that can produce them’ (EM 62). Even further, claims Henry, if Maine de Biran must be separated from Bergson’s vitalism, then he is best seen as a true founder of phenomenology, like Descartes and Husserl, rather than at the head of a French tradition leading to Bergson (EM 8–9). As late as Incarnation (2000), Henry charges Bergson with being duped by his own writing style with the result of replacing ‘philosophical analysis with systems of metaphors.’3 Nevertheless, for some, the possibility remains that Henry can be read through Bergson’s influence. For, just as The Essence of Manifestation (1963) takes special care to show how un-Bergsonian it is, it makes its distancing gestures at the same time as it reproduces the critique of Gustav Fechner’s 201

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psycho-physics from Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889) in almost its entirety, as we will see below. Even further, the ‘excesses’ of Bergson are dissociated from the material phenomenologies of both Henry and Biran, even though a very similar phenomenology of matter and the body are wholly evident in works like Matter and Memory (1896) too. In terms of appearances at least, that is, in terms of the phenomena themselves, Henry looks very like Bergson. Despite his efforts, therefore, it is not so surprising that in 1963, after the publication of The Essence of Manifestation, Jean Lacroix described Henry as ‘the new Bergson,’ albeit a ‘Bergson who had read Heidegger.’4 The questions surrounding this (non-)relation of Henry and Bergson take us into various issues – psycho-physics, corporeality and affectivity in particular, as well as immanence, process ontology and vitalism in general. Moreover, these areas need to be treated as parts of a broader question, that of phenomenological method. Though we could question the contentious status of such overarching themes as the divine, language and representation in both Henry and Bergson, because Henry rejects Bergsonism in the name of the prevailing method of phenomenology, it is on this front that two key questions will arise. On the one hand, we must ask why Bergson cannot be taken seriously by Henry as a phenomenologist. Other phenomenologists, such as Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, were happy to see the evidence of a proto-phenomenology in Bergson’s writing without that threatening their own positions. On the other hand, however, the question has often been raised as to whether Henry was himself a phenomenologist.5 Having discarded what for many is its core tenet – intentionality – doubts arise as to whether Henry can be rightfully placed in any kind of Husserlian lineage. If Henry is a phenomenologist, he is one of the strangest hue, for he claims to be radicalizing phenomenology by materializing it. According to Henry, phenomenology is materialized by being based on immanent, embodied affectivity rather than the transcendent, specular structures of intentionality, be it in its original Husserlian guise, or any of its variations in Heidegger’s In-der-welt-sein or Merleau-Ponty’s être-au-monde. Yet without intentionality, Henry, for most, is barely recognizable as a descendant of Husserl’s thought. Admittedly, the politics of philosophy must not be ignored when looking at Henry and Bergson, and it is certainly true that many thinkers of Henry’s generation (and before) rejected Bergson partly in order to create the impression of belonging to a unified school of thought, when in fact very little else unified them at all: one can add Sartre and Bachelard to the list of anti-Bergsonian mavericks who proclaimed themselves phenomenologists despite the yawning gaps between their doctrines and their Husserlian ‘source.’ Yet the real question of ‘Henry and Bergson,’ of whether or not Henry might have been a ‘new Bergson,’ may be both a matter of the ‘anxiety of influence’ – to create something new one must first kill one’s

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philosophical forebears – and an identity crisis for his philosophy in general: for if Henry is not a phenomenologist, what could be worse for a young philosopher in the 1960s than the prospect of being considered a Bergsonian instead? As Deleuze for one noted, where Husserl rendered consciousness intentional (consciousness is of an object), Bergson made it material (consciousness is its object).6 So, given his own material phenomenology, who is Henry really closest to now?

2 A common foe: the critique of psycho-physics We mentioned Bergson’s critique of Fechner’s psycho-physics in Time and Free Will, the essentials of which Henry reproduces, seemingly unawares, in The Essence of Manifestation. Time and Free Will’s French title Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience reveals the aspect of Bergson’s protophenomenology straight away, for the book attempts to validate the reality of human freedom by an analysis of the immediate ‘givens’ (données) of time. And this is where the famous of idea of ‘spatialization’ arises. Behind the notion of spatialized time is the erroneous modeling of the mind upon the material world. Specifically, psycho-physics is strongly criticized for its attempt to measure an intensive sensation via the quantitative changes of its external stimulus.7 The book’s first chapter deals at length with the ways in which we quantify our intensive states, before then attacking the psycho-physicists’ assumption that our intensive states are quantitative in the first place. In Bergson’s view, there are no relations of ‘more or less’ between our affects: anger is not a stronger feeling than satisfaction, nor is it more intense than ‘a little anger.’ ‘Anger,’ or a ‘little anger’ or ‘satisfaction,’ are not on the same scale at all. It is a certain type of spatializing and homogenizing language that is partly responsible for the impression that our individual, discrete affects are really variations on the one theme termed an ‘emotion scale.’ In reality, they are intrinsically different, having only their names in common. Henry echoes this view in his own idiom within The Essence of Manifestation when he writes that ‘the dismembering of the essence of affectivity into states and meanings leads only to their impossible juxtaposition in this essence’ (EM 585). Like Bergson, Henry wants to reject any general substrate for affect, yet this is what he sees at work in any scientific theory of affectivity: this is why the proposition such as ‘I feel in me a great love’ or ‘a profound boredom’ is equivocation at its highest degree. For there is not, there never is, as far as love or boredom is concerned, something like the power of feeling different from them which would be ‘commissioned’ to receive them, namely, to feel them as an opposed or foreign content. Rather, it is love or boredom, it is the feeling itself which receives itself and experiences itself in such a way that this capacity for receiving itself, for

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experiencing itself, of being affected by self, constitutes what is affective in it, this is what makes it a feeling. (EM 464) Henry’s Bergsonian attack on psycho-physics extends even further when he not only questions whether profound affectivity can be reduced to empirical sensation, but even whether sensation itself is an appropriate object for scientific enquiry: …the isolated sensation is but an abstraction which is never realized even in the abstract conditions of the laboratory. […] Considered itself, every sensation, even a representative one, comprises an element irreducible to representation properly so called; it contains a subjective and ‘impressionist’ content, impossible to analyze or describe, which can only be experienced and sensed, one which is homogeneous with every other sensation, even an internal one, and consequently susceptible not only of uniting itself with this other sensation by an external bond of association, but becoming fused with it in the consubstantial unity of the same tonality. (EM 498–9) According to Henry, analyzing any feeling, even following Husserl’s phenomenological method, modifies the feeling by giving it another tonality through the intervention of an objectifying gaze. Or rather, the analysis is the appearance of a new and real feeling (EM 547). Hence, analyses of affects are not of or about other affects without also being a new affect. The intentional relation is, in truth, an affective and transformative one. When Henry looks to the fundamental source of the homogenizing effect on the affective content of sensibility, he finds it in a relationship between that affect and ‘the extended body as the object of physiology’ (EM 500). We refract or mediate our internal states through the objective milieu of the external body. This idea, too, owes much to Bergson.8 As with Henry, it is Bergson’s contention that you can neither divide nor join affects together without changing them qualitatively. Equally, psycho-physics becomes possible only when it comes to affects clearly linked with objective causes: pulling teeth or hair, bending metals and so on. In these situations we are happiest to quantify the pain or felt resistance in terms of the spatial configuration of the bodies involved, including the muscular disposition of our own body. Our affects are refracted through the objective body in space (TFW 211–18/139–43).9 Bergson’s critique of spatialization represents, in essence, his philosophical relegation of all things quantitative, homogeneous and static. Too often, however, this domain of homogeneity is the very medium through which we interpret our actions: we define ourselves in terms of external phenomena, interpreting our inner affects through the external dimension

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of our existence where all objects, our own bodies included, appear in a tight chain of determinate causal relations. By a ‘kind of refraction,’ as he puts it, we become machines through making nature mindless (in a first form of spatialization) and ourselves natural (through a second form we might dub ‘reductive naturalization’) (TFW 217/142, 223/146). Scientific theory and method are predicated on this axiom of mechanism: the world is a machine that can be studied, quantified, predicted, and so somewhat controlled. Bergson has no quarrel with that assumption if it is necessary for the pursuit of scientific knowledge of the ‘external world’: but it is wholly illegitimate for explaining our inner, affective life. Within the vocabulary of The Essence of Manifestation, this is how Henry repeats the Bergsonian critique of spatialization, while also pushing it even further: The division of our feelings into different categories and, if you wish, according to the diverse levels of ‘depth’ rests on their manifest content and is founded on it; it has to do merely with the scope of these feelings, their respective importance, their possible consequences for existence; it does not and cannot have an axiological meaning. (EM 615; my emphasis) What Henry means by ‘scope’ refers to what Bergson means by ‘refraction’ or ‘spatialization’: the foundation of the ‘reciprocal exteriority’ of feelings does not reside ‘in themselves or in their affectivity, but precisely in exteriority as such’ (EM 616). Where Henry and Bergson will continue to differ, however, is in the ontological status of this exteriority, this objective milieu. Writing about Henry and Bergson, Camille Riquier refers to the latter as the initiator of a ‘phénoménologie matérielle’ in his own right. How does Henry’s compare with this Bergsonian material phenomenology, then? Again, a key term is spatialization. Though Henry does not use the phrase himself, it remains at the heart of all his criticisms of transcendent and transcendental philosophies as well as psycho-physics. The classical phenomenological language of ‘views,’ ‘horizons’ and ‘milieus’ is infected with space, with a transcendence that stands outside the phenomena in order to observe them. So when classical phenomenology thinks of itself as an objective method transcending and observing its datum, it is oblivious to its own immanent process, failing to see itself as part of the phenomenon, as a ‘method’ that is immanent to its world.10 Such a phenomenology is no longer in the phenomena, part of them, immanent to them. In fact, for Henry, the rationale for a distinction between transcendent and immanent is itself interior to an (erroneous) ‘transcendent ontological milieu of the horizon.’ Husserlian phenomenology in particular is characterized as seeing the meaning of the finite phenomenon refer to an infinite ‘horizon’ of potential phenomena (such that the real object transcends any one

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perception of it with an infinite richness of future profiles, or Abschattung). In contrast, Henry argues that the distinction itself between transcendent horizon and immanent object is wholly contingent. The infinity of profiles (the horizon) is never given a positive ontological characteristic – it is simply an in-finite, a negation of the immanent and actual (EM 230, 231; PM 26). Henry wants to take this outside world back inside, only as concrete and moving, and not as an abstract and eternal essence: ‘because understanding is affective, what it understands is also affective, namely, the world itself and its horizon. […] It is the world itself, this external and “real” world of things and objects which is affective and must be understood as such’ (PM 80; EM 486–7). And this is where Henry and Bergson do start to differ. Where Bergson will increasingly leave the extended world some reality after Time and Free Will, Henry will leave it nothing. Take, for instance, the following claim from Henry regarding pain: …if the pain were really in the place of the organic body where it is situated, we could withdraw from it as the sea withdraws from the beach, we could leave it there in front of us, innocuous and taken note of by us as by a foreign spectator, by a universal Spirit. The pain would be ‘true’ as Lachelier understands it. Let us speak of it in a strict sense: the pain would be transcendent. (EM 621) ‘Pain’ in the abstract can be referred to a part of the body; but the actual painfulness itself, as phenomenologically reduced, reveals itself only to itself and not to an objective place. So far, this sounds like an argument against localization of the kind found in Time and Free Will. But there is a problem with this argument that Bergson, at least, came to realize subsequently. Contrary to Henry’s depiction of the impossibility of a ‘transcendent’ pain, one can in fact withdraw from one’s own pain (this is empirically exhibited through meditative practice, for instance). Painfulness too is localizable, but it is not any the less affective by being so because its locality is not an inert space so much as a partial affect. Pain can be other to me, an other mind within my mind, a part-mind. And this is something that Bergson does precisely allow for in Matter and Memory. There, pain is described by Bergson as a local effort. In any complex organism, the individual parts seem to have abrogated their right to move individually in favor of the movement of the whole they constitute. Yet in an attack upon themselves (and thus also upon the whole), they still have the ability to attempt to move as if they were the whole, that is, to set things right for themselves and by themselves. However, this attempt must always fail simply because it is only a local effort against a cause that is targeted against more than they are alone (that is, the whole).11

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‘A part trying to be the whole’ – this is Bergson’s description of pain. And this, as we will see, also comes close to his view of intuition – a part trying to think the whole.12 Bergson makes this clear throughout the Introduction to Metaphysics: intuition is mereological, a thinking that is a part of ‘the real’ rather than an element, rather than a point of view that represents the real. And this intuition is also affective, painful. Intuition takes a violent effort, a huge and difficult struggle that common sense would ironically dub ‘counter-intuitive’: it is the effort to bend thought back towards its object. The part tries to participate all the more in the world, to expand itself, to return itself to the object. This is not the Husserlian epoché that would bring thought back to an immediate representation of the Ding an sich, but rather the Ding itself coming to realize that the thought ‘about it’ is in fact part of its own actuality, its own process. In other words, Bergson allows for the plurality of the inner self, not through a transcendence of the self by an outside, but through a complication of the inside, a theory of parts or levels. But this complication of immanence is something that Henry cannot accommodate in his own thinking, despite the need to do so if he is to stay faithful to the appearances.13

3 Phenomenology as method Let us move to the terrain of method now, for there is certainly a methodological resort to some kind of phenomenology in Bergson’s critique of psycho-physics. In Time and Free Will Bergson asks us to come ‘face to face with the sensations themselves,’ and even asserts that the self is ‘infallible when it affirms its immediate experiences’ (TFW 47/34, 183/120). Similarly, Matter and Memory begins with an attempt at coming face to face with the immediate: We will assume for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter and theories of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world. Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. (MM 17/169) The term ‘image’ is employed by Bergson to designate ‘a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the “thing” and the “representation”’ (MM 9–10/161). Here, the image is Bergson’s phenomenon before it has been tainted by ‘theories.’ Yet this return to the ‘presence of images’ is not some kind of simple impressionism, for there is an effort required. Bergson is never naive as to the self-evident purity of these phenomenological data; gaining access to the immediate

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demands effort and is in no way naturally given: as he himself warns, ‘the immediate is far from being that which is easier to notice.’14 After 1903, this effort will be called ‘intuition,’ and will involve the painful struggle to reverse the normal direction of our thinking. By turning itself backwards in intuition, the mind attempts to reintegrate itself with the absolute, with what Henry regards as the divine absolute, but which Bergson openly names as the absolute of process.15 This is a method that Bergson will maintain throughout the rest of his work, to the extent that even his most cosmological and metaphysical study, Creative Evolution (1907), has been described as a ‘super-phenomenology for life itself.’16 Clearly, intuition has a modern pedigree going back long before Bergson (be it to the Rationalists on the one hand, or the Romantics on the other), but what is noteworthy about it in Bergsonism is a usage that is neither fully rationalist nor fully romantic but accommodates aspects of both. This is where phenomenologists like Henry get Bergson particularly wrong. Bergson is not a simple romantic. Though intuition is taken as a sympathy with, or attention to, the object that approaches an immediate consciousness, it is also described as ‘supra-intellectual’ or ‘ultra-intellectual’. In other words, affect and intellect do not reside in any simple opposition. Indeed, affect is opposed to neither reason nor representation, but overcomes the duality of rationalism and emotivism. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) for instance, Bergson looks at the non-philosophical origin of ethics: alongside of the emotion which is a result of the representation and which is added to it, there is the emotion which precedes the image, which virtually contains it, and is to a certain extent its cause … an emotion capable of crystallising into representations and even into an ethical doctrine.17 This ‘creative emotion’ is another name for intuition (TS 46, 64/1014, 1029). There are, of course, ‘natural’, easily recognized emotions, ones which are inspired by thought, social convention and even nature itself; but a genuinely new, creative emotion is not caused by a representation or inspiration; it is ‘pregnant’ with its own representations – it is supra-rational. That our emotional repertoire is not tied down by physiological constraint or socio-linguistic convention seems difficult to contemplate, but Bergson is making a metaphysical point here too: morality is linked to a certain type of emotion precisely on account of the creative nature of emotion itself: ‘creation signifies, above all, emotion’ (TS 43–4, 45/1011, 1012–13). Out of such affectivity can even come new philosophical doctrine: Antecedent to the new morality, and also the new metaphysics, there is the emotion … neither has its metaphysics enforced moral practice, nor

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the moral practice induced a disposition to its metaphysics. Metaphysics and morality express here the self-same thing. (TS 49/1016) Of course, phenomenologists often compare Bergsonian intuition negatively with Husserl’s phenomenological intuition as a ‘vision of essence.’ Bergson’s method is merely one of ‘sympathy’ with its object, it is said, and is consequently too woolly to be of any use to a rigorous science in search of clear and distinct (apodictic) essences.18 And certainly Henry is a thinker in search of essences. Yet, Henry’s distinction between the felt clarity employed in his own phenomenological method and the geometric clarity of the sciences is a wholly Bergsonian trope from Time and Free Will as well (EM 545–6; TFW 141–2, 83, 87, 121–2/93–4, 56–7, 59, 80–1). Conversely, of course, Henry’s prioritization of affectivity over intentionality in his method has not been without controversy amongst phenomenologists. Henry himself claims only to be pushing phenomenology to its true destiny. By distancing affectivity from any science (psycho-physics being only the most reductive), Henry places phenomenology squarely within the realm of affect instead of representation, and so deviates from Husserl’s epistemological philosophy. He does this because epistemology is too worldly for him: Henry wants a purely immanent phenomenology, that is, one without the concept of intentionality. This had to be done because, from his perspective, an intentional phenomenology will always remain a transcendental phenomenology. This amounts to ridding phenomenology of its cornerstone, the ‘of’ in ‘consciousness of’ that makes consciousness intentional; it also explains the controversy surrounding his philosophical status. The notion of ‘being conscious of’ must instead, says Henry, be repositioned in the internal, immanent aspect of the cogitatio, namely, its reflexive relationality or its ability to ‘relate itself to itself’ through autoaffection (PM 25–6, 107). In Henry, there is no intentionality, no transcendence, no external world at all: if the world phenomenologizes itself in the original revelation immanent to the act of imagination, it is because consciousness of world is effective only upon the foundation in it of a consciousness to which the world does not belong. Consciousness of world is also always a consciousness without world. (EM 265) And this is precisely where Henry takes Bergson’s critique of spatialization to its limit, and even further than Bergson himself. Bergson’s conception of intuition is also affective and immanent, a part that feels itself participating in the whole, a part that is the whole, in part. But Bergson, especially after Creative Evolution, as we’ll see, also found a place for the material world as a part of this enduring whole.

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4 From phenomenology to phenomenalization: the affects of process Phenomenology remains for Henry, of course, the ‘principle movement of our time.’ But it needs to be radicalized. If it is to be the ‘fundamental discipline of knowledge,’ it must no longer concern itself with ‘phenomena but the mode of their givenness, their phenomenality, not that which appears, but the appearing.’ Doubtless, a tenet of phenomenology from the start is that being is appearing; but Henry wants to push this idea to its limit: ‘I carry this precedence of phenomenology over ontology one step further by saying that it is only if the appearing appears in itself and as such that something … can in turn appear, can show itself to us’ (PM 5, 6).19 For Henry, consequently, we must clarify what appearing is, that is, the pure phenomenological matter in which phenomenality phenomenalizes itself – and this matter is auto-affection. As The Essence of Manifestation puts it: ‘to be affected by itself, to affect itself, is to constitute itself as auto-affection’ (EM 233). This emphasis, not only on affect, but also on the process of auto-affection, is another strain pulling against Henry’s attempt to distance himself from Bergsonism. Certainly, it is highly arguable that Henry’s is a process phenomenology. Throughout his critique of classical phenomenology, Henry tries to put to flight any specular substrate (datum, ego or view) that would hypostatize this process of phenomenalization. Henry can be thus seen as a process phenomenologist who posits a wholly immanent (and affective) process, where ‘classical’ phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, MerleauPonty) posit a partly transcendent entity (Ego, Being, Flesh). To do this, Henry looks to the constitution of phenomenality, that is, to the process by which what appear to be ‘phenomena’ (plural noun) are actually phenomenalized (verb). And this process of appearing, its how or manner, is an affect. To think of affect as a thing, therefore, is to reduce its process to a state and miss its essence as an appear-ing. However, Henry does not want to take an abstract notion of process to be the savior of appearances, for this would be just another reduction (that ‘x’ is really ‘x-ing’); he wants the appearance, qua actual manifestation, to be as it is, or rather, to be what it is like to be, how it actually feels to be. From Bergson’s point of view, it is clearly right to characterize this immanent process as intuition. Intuition is the power by which one subject is able to adjust itself to the alterity of the object (a changing process) by re-creating its movement within itself. But this re-creation is not a representation. Intuition is non-representational: it is a thinking that is a part of the ‘real’ (as Bergson also calls it), rather than a point of view that represents the real. This is possible because intuition and the real are both processes, and as such can participate with each other without representation. That is why Bergson made the claim that metaphysics is a form of knowledge without

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symbols. By ‘symbol’ he meant ‘representation.’ Hence, intuition dispenses with symbols in favor of a kind of presence of images (over re-presence), a material, processual, partial coincidence with the object (though it is never a perfect, complete coincidence).20 The painful effort to intuit the object in itself is also the effort to sympathize with or attend to its movement. And in doing so, we integrate our movement into its own: we participate in its becoming. This integration, though, is always dynamic, being the attempt to enter into the flux of another durée rather than to discover an eternal supersensory essence. Indeed, Bergson is adamant that his notion of intuition is non-Platonic and non-Kantian, for he states clearly that ‘in order to reach intuition it is not necessary to transport ourselves outside the domain of the senses.’ Intuition exists as the ‘perception of metaphysical reality.’ It is a form of attentive perception – not the faculty for producing ever newer genera, but a superior empiricism that illuminates every ‘detail of the real’ by ‘deepening,’ ‘widening’ and ‘expanding’ our perception.21 And this widening is an affective process as much as an intellectual (or ‘cognitive’) one.

5 Philosophies of the body Of the various ideas that might heal any rift between Henry and Bergson, the body is a crucial one. Obviously, though, it is the phenomenal body that is central for both. But once again, Henry’s take on this most phenomenological of categories is highly unusual. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the pre-objective body, for instance, is criticized by Henry for not being radical enough, for still being residually objective. Merleau-Ponty’s turn to the Husserlian Lebenswelt puts too much stress on Welt and not enough on Leben: his portrayal of phenomenology as ‘...the determination to bring the world to light as it is before any falling back on ourselves has occurred,’ is anathema to Henry. The ‘prejudice of the world’ haunts Merleau-Ponty’s concepts, such as the ‘phenomenal field,’ wherein consciousness is ‘nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action,’ or the notion of the body as a ‘schema’ or ‘diagram’ of the logic of the world. There is still far too much ek-stase for Henry’s taste.22 Merleau-Ponty’s category of bodily intentionality remains infected with transcendence, ‘falling back into the dualism of this and that’ with a spiritualization of the body that constitutes a ‘mysterious incarnation.’ As such, his bodily intentionality is a hybrid, botched concept for Henry – an impurity. Avoiding this impurity, Henry bases his own philosophy of the body on the work of Maine de Biran (EM 326). In his approach, the body is activated through the wholly subjective ‘I can.’ None of it is left in the world (that would then only receive subjectivity – as the ‘body subject’ or the ‘flesh’ – mysteriously). The ‘I can’ is radically subjective and radically immanent, completely denuded of any possibility of being a ‘constituted body’ (PM 149).23

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And this ‘I can,’ the affectivization of the body, goes all the way through to ‘immaterial’ thought itself, the ‘I think.’ The cogito is firstly a felt certainty because there is a pathos to all thought. Henry’s proposal, then, amounts to a materialization of the idea after Biran rather than an intentionalization of the body after Merleau-Ponty. Biran’s idée force is rendered as forceaffect. But Henry is insistent that this idée force has nothing to do with any unknowing power or élan vital. Despite being non-representational, it is a kind of knowing all the same. ‘I think’ = ‘I can,’ and ‘I can’ is an affective, knowing movement: ‘to say that the most profound intentionality of the life of the ego is movement is to say that the world which is originally given to us is precisely this world of the body… .’ That which I feel is also that which I see or I hear, because movement is immanent to the exercise of each of the senses.24 The objective body (or any variation thereon, including Merleau-Ponty’s) is only where ‘world’ and affect appear to meet, but behind this body that is ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ there is a second body, a transcendental body, ‘which feels it, which sees it, which touches it, which hears it, etc, thanks to the powers of its different senses’ (falsely deemed intentional by many phenomenologists).25 Any reader of Matter and Memory will immediately see the significance of Henry invoking this second, transcendental body. For Bergson also felt that the only way to explain hearing or sight, for example, involved postulating organs of ‘virtual sensation’ such as a ‘mental ear’ or ‘virtual retina’ in parallel with the organs of the objective body (MM 129–30/274–5). There is a second, virtual body that explains the ‘first’ one, doubling each of its objective functions with an affective analogue – objective hearing requiring a virtual, non-representational, felt hearing and so on. But this is only the start of what can be said about Bergson’s philosophy of the body with respect to Henry’s. (Indeed, we should straight away note that Henry’s rejection of Bergson’s élan vital as unknowing and impersonal by comparison with his Biranian body of the ‘I can’ is far from fair: the élan manifests itself personally as creative emotion, which is supra-intellectual rather than some form of dumb, impersonal feeling.) Moreover, the Bergsonian body is also a functional process, an ‘I can’ for him no less than for Henry. Amongst Bergson’s criticisms of atomistic psychology is a rejection of those theories of recognition making recourse to supposedly objective processes of association and recollection. By contrast, in Matter and Memory Bergson places the subject’s body at the centre of recognition. There is a type of recognition consisting of bodily action without any representation. To recognize an object is firstly to know how to use it – an ‘I can’ rather than an ‘I think’ or an ‘I know.’ The habit of utilizing an object organizes various bodily movements together such that any one of these movements ‘virtually contains the whole.’ Re-encountering one automatically results in bringing back the memory of the others. Thus, for example, one’s familiarity with a town would be composed more of a ‘well-regulated

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motor accompaniment’ acquired during repeated walks through it rather than of any set of representations in one’s head (MM 90–8/235–44). As one interpreter described it: ‘one’s body knows this city; one’s body recognizes this city … One’s body does not picture or imagine or think: it acts out, plays out, and this is its memory.’26 And Bergson is here equally following in the tradition of both Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, while also modernizing them. The lived body is the affective center of each individual; even further, it is the means by which our own sense of individuality is engendered. Returning to the ‘presence of images’ outlined in the opening pages of Matter and Memory, one image stands out amongst all the others – that of the body. Or rather, the image of the body is an image of felt ownness, of being my body. It is, ‘a privileged image, perceived in its depths and no longer on the surface ... it is this particular image which I adopt as the center of my universe and as the physical basis of my personality’ (MM 61/209). Ownness is the product of an individuating movement-image, an act of nature rather than of an autonomous subject. The body has even more than this passive function for Bergson, however, for it is also a center of action, of indeterminacy and choice. The ‘I’ is given a ‘horizon’ of possible interests that is constituted through the spatial relationship that other images have with my body: ‘the objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them’ (MM 21/172). The body continues in importance in Bergson’s work, from Matter and Memory, as the basis of recollection, all the way to The Two Sources, and its idea of a ‘logic of the body’ as an ‘extension of desire’ (TS 167/1117). Time and again this lived body, based on movement, affect and action, is contrasted with an objective, geometrical body, the body seen from the outside. The first, Bergsonian body is a true body-subject with its own consciousness, Bergson writing explicitly of an ‘intelligence of the body’ and a ‘logic of the body’ as well as bodily memory. In fact, for historians of phenomenology like Richard Zaner and Edward Casey, it is Bergson who was the first thinker to see ‘the genuine significance and peculiarity of the body,’ as well as the earliest modern philosopher fully to realize ‘the body’s pivotal position ... as a continual “center of action”.’27 And while Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray are especially in Bergson’s debt here, Henry cannot be excluded from the number of French philosophers who inherited his theory of the body, whether or not he acknowledged it.

6 Philosophies of life The larger context for all these similarities between Henry and Bergson concerning affect, process, immanence and embodiment, is, of course, a philosophy of life. Or rather, if Henry is to be allowed his separate identity, two different philosophies of life. And on the face of things, Bergson’s is

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indeed a more biological notion of life, given the context of its emergence in Creative Evolution. Yet, all the same, the élan vital is also a metaphysical principle, a principle of change: it does not represent an alternative type of (living) substance (which would only beg the question of biological origins anyway). It is a type of time, open and unpredictable. The values built into Bergson’s philosophy of time are ones of openness, of open-ended creativity and attention to life. And these values are all immanent within life, for the mark of the living is simply to continue evolving rather than to stay fixed in one form of species. ‘Attention to life’ is always described by Bergson in terms of openness. Indeed, attention to life can appear in Creative Evolution as life’s sole (immanent) imperative, for the only hierarchy found in life is not one based on complexity or rationality (though these may be correlated phenomena), but one that is created immanently within life when each species falls into self-absorption and a disregard for ‘almost all the rest of life.’28 Against both Lamarck and the neo-Darwinians, Bergson argues for a non-teleological, dissociative life, and the élan is simply a principle of this endlessness, this constant dichotomization without synthesis, this continual creativity. The élan has no end, or, if you prefer, its only end is to creatively end all ends, to break all moulds of speciation. To think of it as a ‘stuff’ is ridiculously unBergsonian, given that his is a meticulously processualist philosophy. Life is movement, a resistance movement, struggling against whatever does not allow it to move, and that is its immanent value. No less than Nietzsche before him, or Henry after him, creative Life is the supreme, self-positing or immanent value, once it is understood as that which remains open, moving or creative. Certainly, one could contrast this Bergsonian bio-metaphysics with Henry’s claim that affective life is not the object of biology, that it is autonomous of any science.29 Yet this would miss the shared emphasis on life as process between Henry and Bergson, a process of felt creativity in the latter, and of auto-affection in the former. Henry’s notion of affect is part of a larger scheme: our feelings are actually Life’s own self-affection. Our own ‘living present’ is an ‘arché-donation’ from Life itself. Life is variable, but ‘in such a fashion, however, that across its variations it never ceases to be Life.’ It is the same experience of itself that never ceases to test itself. Every new impression is a ‘modalization’ of this self-experiencing. Life, understood as ‘phenomenologically actual life,’ is process, a ceaseless happening that never ‘is’ in the substantive sense of the word (PM 11, 54; EM 324).30 The fact that Henry sees Life as wholly ‘actual’ leads to a crucial corollary – that life is not ontological. Life, he claims, is not a region of ontology (the ‘ontic’) because there are no separate realities (of possible and real, potential and actual, or Being and beings). Moreover, Life is not a region of any ontology – it is not delimited in as much as ‘all possible reality, that of Nature or of the cosmos, that of Others, that of the Absolute and thus of God

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himself only receives its effectivity from being situated in Life’ (PM 7, 127).31 There is only one actual reality of life: there aren’t two realities whose correspondence would be a problem, but one alone, a sole living force that we experience in us under the form of this pathos that acts to express itself… .32 For Henry, Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology (of Being) is particularly inadequate because it remains neutral or indifferent as regards different phenomena’s modes of appearing. This indifference is due to the fact (or is the fact) that the generality of ontology (monistic Being as such) cannot create specificity: it cannot confer existence on anything real; it ‘unveils, uncovers, “opens”, but does not create.’33 ‘Creation’, another Bergsonian trope, is lacking in Being, according to Henry. Instead, processual, actual Life is the only adequate starting point for him. Processual Life overtakes Being: What we must steadfastly rule out of the analysis of life – at least if we want to grasp life as coming forth in itself and, moreover, to understand the manner in which it does so – is the concept of being. […] Life ‘is’ not. Rather, it occurs and does not cease occurring. This incessant coming of life is its eternal coming forth in itself, a process without end, a constant movement.34 Indeed, because ‘life is at the heart of being’, this ‘original phenomenalization’ is what makes Being seem to be. The abstract univocity of Being is replaced by the multiple singularities of phenomenalization as a process (how things, plural, appear). But to say that affective Life – how things feel – is not reducible to ontological monism (Being), is not to say that it is the object of biology instead. Life is its own (self-relating) object.

7 The actual over the ontological The ultimate significance of Henry’s critique of Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology is that, behind the ek-static time that is supposed to be the essence of Being, there is the more fundamental ground of affective process (EM 364ff.) This doesn’t yet match the biological ‘super-phenomenology’ of Bergson’s Creative Evolution, but it does accord with the more Cartesian emphasis in Time and Free Will on temporality being the essence of conscious life alone. Of even greater interest, however, is Henry’s actualism here. In as much as Jean Lacroix described Henry as a ‘Bergson who had read Heidegger,’ one might say that he takes Bergson’s process thought and applies it to Being by ontologizing the phenomenalization of actual phenomena. There is no need for an ontological difference that would

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install a Being subtending particular beings, when the how (auto-affection) of each being’s actual appearing is itself the only true reality. In Bergsonian terms, Henry processualizes ontology through actual affect. What Henry calls phenomenology (the focus on the how or affect), Bergson calls metaphysics, which is why he says that the ‘true empiricism’ (experience, affect) is the ‘true metaphysics’ (process, creative emotion).35 Contra Deleuze’s excessive ontologization of Bergsonian process as seen in his obsession with the ‘virtual,’ a more Henryian emphasis on actual affect is more in line with the whole of Bergson’s work. Indeed, the Bergsonian virtual is best regarded as an optical and psychological concept derived from actual processes rather than the analogue of Being that Deleuze makes it out to be. Though parts of Matter and Memory can lead one to think of the virtual as ontological, most of Bergson’s work, and certainly texts like ‘Philosophical Intuition’ and ‘The Perception of Change’ take a more actualist approach, pointing in a direction beyond the virtual. Looking at these works, it is possible to see a dimension in Bergson’s thought whereby the virtual is grounded by a play of actualities: it is a well-founded psychological phenomenon – an emergent product formed through the refractive interplay between a multiplicity of actual entities.36 Being ‘well-founded’ here means that the virtual, while a function of the actual and an emergent creation, has real effects on the actual rather than being merely epiphenomenal. And this is certainly to give it more value than the Deleuzians offer the actual, given their view, on the one hand, that the actual is a synonym for the phenomenological, and on the other, that ‘phenomenology must be epiphenomenology.’37 In Bergsonian language, this actualism means that we have to reject the Wolffian hierarchy of ontology over metaphysics. Christian Wolff defines ontology as that which deals with possible things (whatever can be thought without contradiction), and metaphysics as that which deals with actual things.38 For Bergson, however, the possible comes after the actual, and so ontology must come after a metaphysics understood as the promotion of empirical perception. We might call this a metaphysics without Being, for after all, did not Bergson’s critique of nothingness in Creative Evolution actually counter Being as well, and consequently, as Jacques Maritain charged, strike a blow at all ontology?39 With regards to Deleuze’s attempt to ostracize the psychological, and so the affective, from Bergson’s process thinking (through his ontologization of the virtual), Deleuze shows himself to be, in this respect, closer to Heidegger than even Henry. Paraphrasing Lacroix, we might describe Deleuze as a Heideggerian who had read Bergson. Indeed, Deleuze is that other ‘new Bergson’ who, like Henry, also wants to forward an absolutely immanent philosophy. Doubtless, Deleuze has inherited much from Bergson’s thought too, such that a comparison between Henry and Deleuze

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is highly warranted.40 The principles of immanence and affect are shared between them. Moreover, all three share similar problems of representation, as might be expected when privileging immanence over transcendence. If the process of auto-affection is invisible, how can it be seen? If durée is nonsymbolic, how can it by expressed in language? And if the virtual is wholly naturalistic, how can it represent a norm? Yet there is a difference between Henry and Deleuze that comes not from Bergson but the differences they take from another figure altogether, one of immense influence on them both – Spinoza. To be sure, the two are highly influenced by Spinoza’s immanent thought, even as they read it in very different ways. One might say that Spinoza’s double name for reality, ‘Deus sive Natura’, is split and taken in separate directions by Henry and Deleuze respectively: where Henry forwards an immanent theism, Deleuze follows an immanent naturalism. So, perhaps it is somewhere between Henry’s putatively ‘phenomenologist’ rejection of Bergson and Deleuze’s naturalistic (and ontological) appropriation of him that we will find the real philosopher. What is most ironic about this link to Spinoza, however, is a strange fact that refers back to Bergson and Henry’s shared critique of psycho-physics that we examined at the outset. For the founder of psycho-physics, Gustav Fechner, had no wish to reduce affect to physical matter as is presupposed by both critiques in general. Rather, Fechner only wanted to demonstrate a universal parallelism of body and spirit very similar to Spinoza’s double aspect theory of thought and matter.41 As an animist, moreover, Fechner also wanted to show that not only mind, but also life was ubiquitous in the universe. That Bergson and Henry both share this valorization of life, yet could not include it in their engagement with science (to allow the possibility that life and mind might be quantifiable yet still not reducible to matter), shows, perhaps, a rather traditional assumption lurking at the heart of their otherwise radical philosophies. Or at least it does so for Henry; for when Bergson did finally evolve his cosmic superphenomenology in Creative Evolution, he showed that physics is simply ‘reversed psychology’ or ‘psychics inverted.’42 In doing so, he took a step away from the more anthropocentric dualisms of Time and Free Will and even Matter and Memory. Such a step was one too far for Henry, however, seeing in psycho-physics a relation that could never be countenanced within the purity of auto-affection.43 Where Henry remained faithful to a thoroughgoing phenomenology of psycho-physical data, reducing physics to psychics in the process, Bergson rethought psychics and physics as mutual inversions of each other’s movement, and so as aspects of a cosmic conception of time (hence, neither are subject to the recent critiques of a spurious ‘correlationism’): his ‘super-phenomenology’ was one that went beyond how things appear to the human towards things having vital interactions amongst each other that transcend the human condition.

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Notes 1. See C. Riquier, ‘Henry, Bergson et la phenomenology matérielle,’ Studia Phenomenologica, IX (2009): 157–72, and Y. Yamagata, ‘Cosmos and Life, According to Henry and Bergson,’ Continental Philosophy Review, 32 (1999): 241–53. 2. M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. G. Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 8–9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as EM. 3. M. Henry, Incarnation, une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 166. 4. See R. Maggiori, ‘Michel Henry ravi à la Vie,’ Libération, 8 July 2002, 34, cited in A. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (London: Blackwell, 2006),137. 5. See D. Janicaud, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: the French Debate, trans. B.G. Prusak (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2000). 6. See G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986), 56. 7. See H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), 1–7; Œuvres. Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1–10. Hereafter cited parenthetically as TFW. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of the Œuvres. 8. Obviously, we are not accusing Henry of ‘excessive dependence’ here. In virtue of the fact that it was rare for any major post-war French philosopher to acknowledge an influence from Bergson, it is almost impossible now to pursue lines of enquiry outside the authorized version of intellectual history. Yet, even without a clear expression of lineage, we know that Bergsonism was the dominant philosophy when Sartre, Levinas and Bachelard started out; and it remained, if not dominant, still highly present in the time of Henry’s philosophical education as well. 9. See also John Mullarkey ‘Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism, and the Refraction of Reality,’ Continental Philosophy Review, 37 (2005): 469–93, for more on this ‘refractive’ process. 10. Henry cites Being and Time section 7 approvingly: there is a relation between the object and the method of phenomenology. But Heidegger gets this immanence wrong, making it an identity when in fact it is a self-relation, or non-logical reflexivity. See M. Henry Phénoménologie matérielle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 112, 117. Hereafter cited parenthetically as PM. 11. ‘When a foreign body touches one of the prolongations of the amoeba, that prolongation is retracted; every part of the protoplasmic mass is equally able to receive a stimulation and to react against it; perception and movement being here blended in a single property – contractility. But, as the organism grows more complex; there is a division of labour; functions become differentiated, and the anatomical elements thus determined forgo their independence. In such an organism as our own, the nerve fibres termed sensory are exclusively empowered to transmit stimulation to a central region whence the vibration will be passed on to motor elements. It would seem then that they have abandoned individual action to take their share, as outposts, in the manoeuvres of the whole body. But none the less they remain exposed, singly, to the same causes of destruction which threaten the organism as a whole; and while this organism is able to move, and thereby to escape a danger or to repair a loss, the sensitive element retains the relative immobility to which the division of labour condemns it. Thence arises pain, which, in our view, is nothing but the effort of the damaged element to set

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12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

things right, – a kind of motor tendency in a sensory nerve. Every pain, then, must consist in an effort, – an effort which is doomed to be unavailing. Every pain is a local effort, and in its very isolation lies the cause of its impotence; because the organism, by reason of the solidarity of its parts, is able to move only as a whole.’ H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 55–6/204. Hereafter cited parenthetically as MM. See my ‘The Very Life of Things: Reversing Thought and Thinking Objects in Bergsonian Metaphysics,’ introduction to Henri Bergson: an Introduction to Metaphysics (Bergson Centennial Series), ed. John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), ix–xxxiv. For more on Henry’s need to complicate immanence with greater internal structure, see my Post-Continental Philosophy: an Outline (London: Continuum, 2006), 78–82. H. Bergson, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1148. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 262, 315/705, 747. F.T.C. Moore, Bergson, Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. In Matter and Memory, for example, the resolution of the mindbody problem stems from first restating the problem in reversed terms, going from the periphery (the world) to the center (the brain) and from time to space, before then constituting the appearance of a mind that is born from within the brain and a temporality that is created by spatial objects. H. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R.A. Audra and C. Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1977), 47/1015–16. Hereafter cited parenthetically as TS. See for instance D. Janicaud, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’, 88, 89. And compare M. Henry, ‘Phenomenology of Life,’ trans. Nick Hanlon, Angelaki, 8(2) (2003):100–10, 100. See my ‘The Very Life of Things: Reversing Thought and Thinking Objects in Bergsonian Metaphysics.’ H. Bergson, The Creative Mind: an Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. M. L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946),127, 139, 140, 134/1364, 1374, 1375, 1370; and Bergson, Creative Evolution, 229–30/799. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), xvi, 327, 426, 430; and M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, trans. A.L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 169. There is an ‘original body’ presupposed by this constituted body, an original body that always assumes the ultimate donation – one with this sensibility of ‘I can.’ It is this body that enables my experience of the world, and of others, not a body for my sensibility but my sensibility itself. Henry, ‘Phenomenology of Life,’ 105, and Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, trans. G. Etzkorn (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1975), 55, 73, 82–3; PM 170. Henry, ‘Phenomenology of Life,’ 107. A. Tallon, ‘Memory and Man’s Composite Nature According to Bergson,’ New Scholasticism, XLVII (1973): 483–9, 487. R. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body ( The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1971), 243. See also, E. Casey, Remembering: a Phenomenological Investigation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 179.

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28. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 83–4/604. 29. See M. Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. S. Emanuel (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 33–52. 30. See also, Henry, I am the Truth, 159; and Henry ‘Phenomenology of Life,’ 104. 31. Henry cites Didier Franck approvingly on Heidegger’s inability to account for his ontological categories, and Henry says that the life he regionalizes is biological life. 32. M. Henry, Voir l’invisible. Sur Kandinsky (Paris: Bourin-Julliard, 1988), 91. 33. See Henry, ‘Phenomenology of Life,’ 101, 102, 103; EM 35; and PM 117, 118. 34. Henry, I am the Truth, 55. 35. H. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T.E. Hulme (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 22. 36. See Mullarkey ‘Forget the Virtual.’ 37. See, for instance, K. Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: the Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), 87. 38. See Christian Wolff, Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia (1729). 39. J. Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. M.L. Andison and J.G. Andison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 316; he uses the phrase ‘strikes a blow at all metaphysics,’ but it is clear that it is Being and so ontology that is at issue. 40. See my Post-Continental Philosophy for more on this. See also J. Williams, ‘Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrasts in the Deduction of Life as Transcendental,’ Sophia, 47(3) (2008): 265–79. 41. Though Fechner himself was influenced by variations of German Idealist thought in this; see Gustav Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 1860. 42. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 219, 213/672, 666. 43. Perhaps Henry’s work on Kandinsky’s art (Voir l’invisible), where the material point, line and plane become both cosmic and vital forces, allows one avenue for a redemptive image of the material world in Henry; see my Post-Continental Philosophy, 75–7.

Part III Life-World and Life: the Fundament of the Bergson/ Phenomenology Debate

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11 From the World of Life to the Life-World Pierre Kerszberg

The experience of life is particularly problematic for the phenomenologist. Unlike living creatures, life itself cannot be seen or experienced directly as a phenomenon in its own right. Is there a phenomenality specific to life, apart from the manifestations of life exhibited by living creatures? At first it seems doubtful that what is specific to life as such is describable as a phenomenon. Rather it seems that life is felt from within, going beyond any form of life in particular. If an absolutely original intuition of life existed, how could it be construed as relative to a constitutive consciousness, as the phenomenological method requires? In his later career, Husserl tried to bypass this difficulty by coining the concept of life-world (Lebenswelt). Understanding life means, first and foremost, understanding the life of spirit (Geist). Spirit shares at least two significant features with life felt from within: (i) it is creative beyond all predictability; (ii) it exemplifies an immediate presence to self. Indeed, the main source that Husserl drew on in developing his concept of life-world was Dilthey. Husserl acknowledged, moreover, that however significant it may be, the concept of life-world is intrinsically obscure and vague.1 Arguably, Husserl’s life-world is an echo of the fashionable Lebensphilosophie of the early twentieth century, of which Rickert said ironically that its main character was Prinzipienlosigkeit, the unscrupulous absence of principle which was thought to do justice to the inherent, immediate and concrete dynamism of life. Though instructive in its radicality, this parallel is probably somewhat far-fetched: Husserl is more interested in the absence of firm presupposition within the abstract, rational sciences themselves. The parallel is nonetheless sufficiently suggestive to serve as a reminder that, for the life-world, the risk is never far away of falling into a metaphysics of life which claims to capture the essence of life without taking into account the phenomenal data of life itself (that is, those data which can be collected and examined by biological science). This risk points to a much broader issue, namely whether and how far the rational requirements that phenomenology sets for itself can be maintained. The parallel between Husserl and nineteenth-century Lebensphilosophie takes 223

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on particular significance when phenomenology’s requirements of rationality are set against Bergson’s metaphysics of life. Although, historically speaking, Bergson was largely or even completely ignored by Husserl, this comparison is significant for us, insofar as Bergson, who has been loosely associated with a form of vitalistic philosophy, did not for all that refrain from using the teachings of biology to support the central concept of his metaphysics of life, namely the élan vital. To a large extent, these teachings are used by Bergson in much the same way that the phenomenal material is used by the phenomenologist to account for the life-world. Bergson is unique as a philosopher of life. Husserl occupies a similarly unique position within the phenomenological tradition. Bringing these two figures together is thus all the more instructive as they are both difficult to situate within a tradition. Strangely enough Heidegger’s emphasis on the essential mobility of life would certainly make him a better candidate for a fruitful dialogue with Bergson than any other thinker inspired by phenomenology. This emphasis occurred early in his career under the influence of his readings of Aristotle, and culminated in an attempt to think of nature as an internal power surpassing any possible natural science, whether Aristotelian or modern. Heidegger spoke of phusis as ‘a “going” in the sense of a going-forth towards a going-forth, and so it is a going back into itself, i.e., towards itself as always going forth. The merely spatial image of a circle is fundamentally inadequate because this going-forth which goes back into itself precisely lets something go forth from which and to which the going-forth is on the way.’2 For Aristotle, nature in the true sense of the term was the complete determination of the natural thing, which culminates with its coming into bloom. In blooming, the natural thing emerges from within itself to meet with its nature. This, however, cannot be understood by means of the ready-made exteriority of the homogeneous space of modern natural science. Homogeneous space supposes the mathematical possibility of connecting two mutually exclusive points via a path. This implies the possibility of a synoptic overview: once one point is given, all the other points are necessarily given with it. We are therefore left with a sort of bloom always already accomplished, constantly available – the exact contrary of what is expected from a bloom. What is essential is the progression. This progression does not indicate a ready-made path, as if it were a geometrical figure. The path carves itself out because it opens up that which it goes through: it is a progressive opening which generates its own origin and destination. But insofar as the going-toward-the-self is at the same time a going-backinto-the-self, phusis does not simply coincide with itself; rather it can only tend to do so. By denying nature the capacity to coincide with itself in some absolute, Heidegger provides the schema for all dynamical or evolutionary conceptions of nature. Bergson’s metaphysics, with its opposition between spatiality and duration, finds its place within this schema. Heidegger warns moreover that, as a matter of principle, the well-ordered going of the

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mathematical science of nature (its so-called ‘method’) is improper to reveal phusis in its own true going. However, Heidegger never developed this view of nature into a systematically coherent conception. Apart from indicating a general frame of mind which could have been taken up by others, the view which has just been presented could, at most, set the stage for a fully Heideggerian metaphysics of living nature; but such a metaphysics has yet to be written.

1 Oblivion and sense Both Bergson and Husserl seek to reclaim for philosophy a level of life that is more primitive and original than biological life in the narrow sense of the term. Although they are different in essential ways, Bergson’s élan vital and Husserl’s life-world are both concepts that accomplish this task, each in its own way. Is the seemingly similar finality of these concepts sufficiently fruitful to justify a closer examination of their essential differences? On the one hand, Bergson provides the concept of creative impulse constitutive of life and in defense of this concept shows that such an impulse can be experienced in our own existence at several levels, for instance in free actions (the duration of which parallels the inner duration of life) or as perceived motion in space (which reminds us of the fluidity and continuity of being in the otherwise static juxtaposition of points external to one another). Husserl, on the other hand, seeks to redirect life to its most basic roots, which have been covered over by the model of inert matter in modern mathematical physics. This covering over began when the Greeks developed the theoretical attitude, and with Galileo and modern science it was pushed so far that mathematical nature was simply substituted for the life-world. The life-world appears somewhat similar to the élan vital in that an effectively vital foundation is presented by Husserl as counteracting the inert world of matter according to mathematical physics. Arguably, this vital foundation takes phenomenology away from the constraints of the so-called ‘Cartesian way’ into phenomenology whereby a transcendental subject supplies the apodictic certainty needed for the allegedly absolute starting point of all possible reflection. To be sure, as a world that stands over against the quantified world of modern science, the life-world is still a subjective realm of experience: beyond the core of pre-cultural, primitive perceptions, this is the world in which things appear in terms of their experiential qualities, values and uses, and are integrated into our larger concerns on the basis of their integrity. But in addition, the life-world is also the world from which the world projected in the natural sciences arises, and as such it includes those realities that give themselves ‘in straightforward experience’ and ‘the ways in which their validity is sometimes in suspense [in Schwebe]’ (Crisis 156). This characteristic vacillation of the life-world impregnates subjectivity with irresolution. Our cognitive activities are thus redirected to something other

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than the transcendental subject, which contemplates the world at a distance but does not act in it in harmony with its own vital forces. It is tempting to see Bergson as supplying a rigorous conceptualization of the realization of these forces. However suggestive, the comparison between Husserl and Bergson is made problematic by the problematic character of the life-world itself. For Bergson, life is more primitive than the world of nature because it supplies the creative force of nature of which we are traces. Even though it exceeds us, life can be captured by means of certain relevant experiences in which our attention is directed to the forces from which they originate. For Husserl, on the other hand, life is associated with the world, that is, with a ground of pregiven evidence which does not exceed us, and yet is not accessible to experience because, as ground, it provides the a priori structure out of which cognitive activities grow. While, for Husserl, lived experience includes vacillation or fuzziness, which requires stability in some a priori structure, for Bergson what is lived has, as it were, always already been lived, since it is pushed forward by life in such a way that any thinking effort aimed at grasping it hides it as a moving totality. Husserl goes on to point out that the a priori structure of the life-world is itself the product of socially and historically determined subjects, that is, the world in which life comes to develop is not naturally given and simply ‘received’ as it is: the pregivenness of this world belongs entirely to us as a form of human production, and does not reflect some ontological property of nature which makes it move forward. Nevertheless, this world is still inaccessible to experience because it is overburdened with the sedimented layers of meaning accumulated by humanity since its origins, so much so that the original meaning of the pregiven has become wholly unrecognizable. Has it ever even existed? The effect of history was to hide the original vital foundation, and that is why Husserl suggests that this foundation, if it is to become accessible in some way, requires a reflective method which breaks off completely from the naturally given and the entire stock of pregivenness in the world. This method is the transcendental epoché, in virtue of which the pregiven loses its seemingly but deceivingly objective impact on us. Conversely, in Bergson’s account of history, the original vital foundation has become exceedingly present because it has, as it were, gone out of control. So long as it remained close to the élan vital, our intelligence was manufactorial and extended our body into an enlarged technical body encompassing all humanity. But, due to an ‘accident [d’aguillage]’3 this body became so large that the soul it contained remained ‘now too small to fit it, too weak to guide it [trop petite maintenant pour le remplir, trop faible pour le diriger].’4 That is why, according to Bergson, it is now incumbent on intelligence, which has since become scientific intelligence, to correct this accident and to catch up with the disproportionate technical progress that it made possible. This amounts to requiring of science that life be intensified in accordance with

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its own inner creative tendencies. Because of the need to readjust its alliance with technology, science must draw a powerful moral thrust from those tendencies, which Bergson calls a ‘soul supplement.’ According to Husserl, it is doubtful whether this moral addition will ever be realized, precisely because from the very beginning, well before the alliance of the theoretical attitude with technology, it did not and could not be realized. This was the consequence of an accident that was, as it were, bound to happen. Husserl’s philosophical stance is to claim that the pregiven cannot be equated with a given in the sense of a gift: on the contrary, it requires searching for a still more original giving, which, however, is not guaranteed to be successful. It is the prescientific component of the world, whose ambition to be promoted to the scientific level of discourse is not preordained nor guaranteed by any definite teleological means. In his investigations concerning the origin of geometry, Husserl does not deny that the methodologically guided transformation of the life-world in terms of quantifiable measurement occurred because the first geometers who dealt with land surveying were motivated by the ethically-grounded need for ‘just distribution.’5 But this sense of the good dissolved together with the transformation. To be sure, ‘every spiritual accomplishment proceeding from its first project to its execution [such as geometry] is present for the first time in the selfevidence of actual success’ (Crisis 356). This ‘first time’ is not quite first, however, since prior to it there was ‘a more primitive formation of meaning [Sinnbildung]’ which had to include some kind of presupposition in virtue of which the project was accomplished successfully. Following a long and detailed analysis of the effect of such a presupposition on the constitution of geometry, Husserl reaches the conclusion that the more primitive condition of sense ‘has in fact never been fulfilled.’ This is due to a certain fuzziness in the material at hand. By the nature of things, the first inventors of geometry could never distinguish firmly between ‘raw materials’ and materials which are ‘already spiritually shaped’ (Crisis 366, 355). The interpenetration of the material and the spiritual is the original mark of any given or constructed form. Now, if this is true for geometry, what about the other spiritual productions of mankind? If, as pregiven, it might never raise itself to the level of fulfillment as given, what is the life-world? Where is it and what function does it fulfill if it is supposed to justify acts which are at first empty intentions, and which thereafter, for essential reasons, can remain empty? Husserl suggests that the reawakening of what has never been effective in the first place is the condition without which any spiritual production would remain meaningless. At a definite time in history, namely at the beginning of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, Galileo spiritualized nature by means of the mathematical method, but this specific spiritual production had the effect of blocking any access to the original life-world from which it proceeded. Paradoxically, then, this renewed spiritualization of nature could pass itself off as the first step toward its complete objectification.

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The élan vital has this much in common with the intentionality of the first geometers: the faculty of oblivion, the need for reawakening. Indeed, life was not all-powerful against materiality. Some superior harmony prevailed at the start, but it has vanished in the diversity of its developments, which remain complementary to one another, much like the echo of an opening chord. The animal has forgotten the torpor of the plant, but it sometimes falls back into it in parasitic life; the evolution of the animal kingdom has constantly been held up or blocked, set back by the tendency it conserved toward vegetative life. The creative impulse is regularly slowed down by an external hindrance which it ends up internalizing. An inner tendency of life is precisely to feed itself from the obstacles which must be counteracted. If creative life thus carries the obstacle, as it were, within it, it is because intelligence is the flip side of life. That is why, at any time in the course of history, life generates higher personalities capable of apprehending and following the otherwise hampered continuous act of creation, thereby pointing to the original act of creation as a morally powerful source of renewal. From this viewpoint, the comparison between Bergson and Husserl is significant because both argue that the experience of life is the privileged medium for demonstrating the narrowness of the scientific worldview at large, and they both argue for the need to enlarge it, not with respect to its method or its purported ontology, but with respect to its sense. Bergson and Husserl take two very different routes towards this demonstration, but it is precisely from their difference that a fruitful philosophical lesson can be drawn.

2 Duration in action The rise of modern science is characterized by the growing significance of the attitude of preparation toward nature. Thus, Galileo does not wait for empirical confirmation to see that a stone thrown from the top of a ship in motion will fall, not behind, but directly beneath the mast. Seeing the actual phenomenon is not necessary to prove the validity of the law of free fall, nor can it undermine it in any way. In his theory of general relativity, Einstein goes a step further. His famous principle of equivalence states that, in a windowless cabin in free fall, the phenomenon of gravity naturally observed on earth is reduced to zero, and therefore, since the force of gravity is not a natural reality as it was thought to be, the purely geometrical curvature of space-time can be substituted for the causal operation of a force acting in space and time. As far as gravity is concerned, the real world is no different from a controlled simulation of its ‘being,’ justified by means of mathematical tools. In quantum mechanics, the whole of natural reality now depends on its prior manipulation, so that the real world is the outcome of a certain decision regarding its ‘being.’ The preparation of nature is reinforced in the form of a measurement project, which itself defines an observation protocol.

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The observation protocol constitutes an antechamber to reality in which the ‘being’ of nature is essentially defined. To be sure, in this theory, the relation of preparation to the objective phenomenon is interpreted in terms of probability. The measurement process induces the phenomenon within the indivisible whole constituted by the physical system and the experimental apparatus, but the recorded observations are statistical regularities, in which exactness is lost in a fuzzy cloud which can be fixed again by measurement, after the fact. The fuzziness of the original phenomenon is the price to pay for including the operations of the observer within those of nature. The fact that all quantum states are mixed together before the measurement procedure has made it necessary to set up an imposing control apparatus for the preparation of a system and its environment: this preparation alone will ultimately allow the physicist to distinguish the two, that is, to affirm with certainty what can be predicted and known in practice. Now, the attitude of preparation has already been reflected upon by purely philosophical means. Its ultimate significance is at the core of Bergson’s critical examination of science. Because of the method specific to the exact sciences, Bergson conjectures that nature beyond any preparation yields completely to our demands. The overlap is not something like an ideal limit. On the contrary, there are many ways in which this overlap can and has effectively been reached. At each moment in the history of mathematical physics the agreement between symbolic tools and nature is effectively achieved, but each time in a different manner. How is this possible? In fact, mathematical physics only deals with the preparatory terrain which is the manipulated experience of things. Being mere preparation, it never enters – and in fact has never entered – into the being of nature, which is never grasped in its inner depth; this is why it succeeds within the order of reality with which it is concerned. Science’s fundamental illusion is precisely that by more completely staking out the preparatory terrain, by means of abstractive methods, it will further enter into being. But different levels of abstraction only lead to different systems of laws, each of which is a priori just as far removed from being as another. Consider, for example, Boyle’s law. Bergson asks: ‘can we suppose that nature has related all the modalities of heat to the expansion of the same mass of mercury, or to the change of pressure of the same mass of air kept at a constant volume?’6 But we have learned since Boyle that the law is not absolutely exact. Moreover, how can we ever be sure that the law exhausts the totality of the phenomenon under consideration? The prior choice of other variables would have led to a different law, possibly just as ‘successful’ as Boyle’s law. The physicist is likely not to be overly disturbed by these open possibilities: either there is nothing to say about as yet unknown laws, or existing alternative laws are discarded on account of being merely empirical (they are usually complicated and uncertain because they deal with ill-defined beings). Bergson’s

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point is different: the greater or lesser exactness of a law with respect to another does not discredit one or the other, since matter is by itself merely approximate mathematical order. In the final analysis, exactness holds between two approximations. What could it mean to say that greater exactness in the formal expression comes closer to an order which by itself is approximate? In Bergson’s interpretation, the step undertaken by modern science toward the mathematization of nature was an inevitable one, since it is the most accomplished expression of an essential feature of human intelligence. Science, however, has a deluded image of itself when it believes that it can thereby get hold of the depth of material things in nature. Intelligence is spontaneously drawn to space and geometry because it primordially relates to objects by cutting out the contours which serve to orient our action upon them. Our own body is solicited by intelligence, and before carrying out real actions it already projects onto matter the sketch of its virtual actions. There is thus a latent geometrism in intelligence, which has its own natural logic, prior to action in nature but also with a view to it. However, when it takes its tendency to geometricize nature to be the only way of entering into contact with nature, intelligence deludes itself as to the extent of its power, and the world of forms, rendered autonomous, thereby becomes as vast as the real. So long as sovereign intelligence and mathematization prevail, matter surrenders itself to us without resistance – it hands itself over without reserve to our intelligence, which can then manipulate it as it pleases according to the functional relations which it believes to correspond to its order of reality. The mathematization of the real is therefore not a triumph over its supposed opacity: it stops where a resistance of matter unknown to intelligence begins, the resistance which corresponds to action proper, after the phase of preparation which imprints its forms. The inner aspect of nature which matters to intelligence and science is not its opacity, which seemingly presents itself as an initially impenetrable block in space. This opacity does indeed arise, as a sort of wall which is set up by our contact with things. But it is merely an artifact of the way physicists think so long as this way of thinking defines itself as the search for exact mathematical laws; an obstacle that it sets up in response to the difficulty involved in carrying out this investigation to completion; a difficulty which in fact translates the impossibility of keeping indefinitely to a given system of laws. What is the order of reality which corresponds to action? It reveals an opacity pertaining to the being of things which intelligence dodges. Since intelligence’s aim is to make matter fit into the framework of spatiality, and since it succeeds so brilliantly in doing so when it discovers physical laws which have a hold on matter, Bergson attributes to matter itself the ‘intention’ of letting itself be dragged onto the path of geometry. In the absence of such an intention, there could be no meaningful dialogue between nature and us. To say that a system of mathematical laws different from the one with which

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we are familiar would have done the trick, while in fact we might be forever completely ignorant of it, is equivalent to claiming that the mathematical order grasps matter at the moment in which its ‘intention’ is fixed, but without recognizing itself. Prior to this fixing, or ‘interruption’ as Bergson calls it, there exists an order of reality in which being recognizes itself. This is the order of the inextensive – duration – the slackening of which into the extensive makes the extensive itself a form of slackened being, thus a priori compatible with several mathematical systems. In other words, the success of mathematical physics – the fact that our framework of thought finds an echo in matter – is determined by the parallel effort undertaken by matter to emerge from the depths of being and to join up with the methods used by our intelligence at the surface of things. Being responds to our preparation with a view to acting upon things and, becoming materiality, prepares in turn to give us satisfaction. This vantage point onto another order of being is not at all arbitrary according to Bergson. Is it not attested by a certain type of lived experience? When we act freely, outside of the framework imposed by intelligence, we gain an inner awareness of a task which is not that of thought, but of creative power; matter thereby returns to its origins, lived experience projects us into the inner dynamism of things, into the power of creation inherent to nature itself, a constantly renewed creation which is accomplished by the whole of reality without ever fixing itself – the becoming of being. Emanating from this incessant dynamism of being, matter appears as an interruption of the inner becoming of things. Thus, contrary to what is asserted by modern science, nature is not the total system of objects connected to one another by means of a network of forms, but a power (élan vital ) akin to the potencies of will; a will that is paradoxical from the point of science, since it is completely contrary to the intellectual procedure of forcing nature to respond to our demands. Rather, duration in its most accomplished form becomes manifest to the self, which inwardly exerts effort to preserve its own life [se laisse vivre] and which abstains from selecting or deducting anything from reality in order to let it be. Bergson’s strategy is understandable: while the view of things in ancient science was too narrow to distinguish their sensible appearance from their being, modern science separated them so sharply as to make them foreign to each other. The reunion with being thus involves the disavowal of exteriority. The analogy between, on the one hand, the power of creation in us (which exists, Bergson says, since we have an inner awareness of it, at the very least when we act freely) and, on the other, incessantly renewed creation (which the whole of undivided reality accomplishes in moving ahead) allows us to go from the interior of consciousness to the interior of things, spanning in one stretch their reciprocal exteriority. By this short-circuiting of exteriority, the lived experience of duration and the undivided whole of the universe reciprocally mirror one another.

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Now, the question is whether there is anything reliable enough to certify the validity of such an analogy. And granting that the analogy is adequate, from what does the extension of our inner life to the inner dynamism of things effectively draw its legitimacy? Is it certain that to act freely is to become aware of a creative power comparable to that of nature? All this is only possible if our voluntary experience is another absolute, along with the other absolute constituted by the whole of reality for intelligence. The élan vital is of course not an actual absolute; it is a virtuality which actualizes itself in confrontation with matter. But this virtuality advances and makes things advance. Why is advancing duration a constantly renewed creative power, creating itself at each moment, if not by mere opposition to intelligence whose hinges stiffen and lock exactly around those of matter? Without this opposition, Bergsonian duration would be quite simply a metaphysical transposition of the Cartesian god; but the Cartesian god is an infinity in action, which the human subject certainly is not. What prevents us from considering intelligence in turn as creative power that is a lived experience in its own right? If space is merely an imaginary schema tacked onto duration by the body when it plunges into duration or when duration relaxes, does this schema not in turn indicate a level of nature other than that of duration? Perhaps this other level is denatured by its contact with duration. Bergson indeed acknowledges that the framework of intelligence is sufficiently elastic as to be able to leave matter and to penetrate into the domain of spirit; thus our spirit receives sensations from certain movements of matter.7 But these sensation-inducing movements of matter are superficial, and the sensations are themselves a superficial expression of spirit. Nothing, however, would prevent us, by dint of a special effort, from pushing intelligence deeper, until we obtain what Bergson calls a physics of spirit. In this effort, intelligence would still nonetheless operate as intelligence and would never be equivalent to voluntary action, for the physics of spirit would still mimic the physics of bodies. Indeed, the two physics taken together, that of spirit and that of matter, would constitute a complete system of reality, therefore a metaphysics. And indeed, because it is based on the physics of bodies, this metaphysics is condemned to disregard what is truly spiritual about spirit. But if the possibility exists in principle of extending to spirit what belongs to matter, why wouldn’t intelligence, losing its precise contour in leaving matter and entering spirit, in turn become a lived experience worthy of standing out in the depths of being? As soon as it is given a place within spirit, it is neither possible to tell how far mathematics can go nor where it may stop, except by arbitrarily fixing the threshold of interiority. There is indeed a life of intelligence, which is manifest in its inventiveness and which, like reality, is borne and produced by life; but intelligence works in movement contrary to that of life. Why would spatialized matter be an interruption which coincides exactly with

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the advent of mathematical intelligence? A question going back to an Aristotelian theme can be posed here with respect to Bergson. According to Aristotle, mathematics, like physics, is a partial science in that it doesn’t envision being as being; it singles out a part of being and constructs the theory of this accident.8 But the concepts used in this theory are also those used in first philosophy. Thus, all partial theories are also in their own way, but quite enigmatically, accounts of being. Bergson opposes the freedom of duration to the necessity of the mathematical order: in considering the diversity of alternative mathematical systems as a merely apparent freedom the exact coincidence between spatialized matter and mathematical intelligence is thus justified by the fact that it starts quite precisely at the very point at which freedom and necessity balance out. Beyond the fact that this point itself can be grasped neither by thought nor by intuition, isn’t duration, although freely self-creating, also equally forced to slacken in order to satisfy the human activities which solicit it and take it in? The border between the extensive and the inextensive, the cognitive and the intuitive, is either fixed by interruption, in which case the point of fixation is arbitrary, or else it is blurry and we are unable to tell where it stops. Far from inhibiting thought concerning nature, Bergson sees this apparent impasse as an opportunity to try to understand how the most subtle differences in nature are degrees of intensity to be grasped via distinctions which do not trace clear limits. The ultimate problem raised by this strategy is that it is no longer easy to tell what nature we are talking about. Duration and space are perceived through what stands behind them: on the one hand, an inner life animated by memory and unitary flux, on the other, an exterior life attested by a consciousness which cuts out and selects for the needs of organic life. Action creates a rupture between these two levels, although we can never tell where and why this rupture occurs. When the split takes place, space is denatured. But then what assures the ‘nature’ of duration, besides its purely negative counterpart? The only way to obtain a positive view of it is to declare that life is more primitive than nature, that life is creative of nature: ‘another’ nature. However, the creative impulse is also simultaneously denaturation of this ‘other’ nature. Examining life in and for itself, Bergson indeed discovers that it loses its self-consistency through its contact with matter so as to adapt to it and allow the development of various species. Incessantly held back by exterior obstacles, the élan vital remains self-consistent in a rather paradoxical way, carrying the obstacle within it. But what could confirm this movement? Bergson writes: ‘In order that our consciousness shall coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself from the already-made and attach itself to the being-made,’ even though it can only undo, while on the other hand the universe is being made continually. The unity between consciousness and life requires no less than ‘a painful effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence to nature.’9 Didn’t Bergson

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begin by saying that consciousness grasps duration in its form when the self lets itself live passively in it, forgetting the constructions of intelligence, which it manages to do by doing violence to itself and not to nature? The universe which creates itself is inaccessible to the mathematical techniques of science, insofar as the laws of mathematical physics are characterized by their temporal reversibility: all constituents of nature are marked by repeated identity. This is why Bergson thought that, of all the natural laws, the second law of thermodynamics, which can be interpreted as orienting the arrow of time at the cosmic level, came closest to capturing the form of an essential irreversibility. Now the inner life of our consciousness does not merely approach irreversibility, it is essentially irreversible, since the totalities that are contained in it are fused into one another so that repetition is impossible for them. But what is it that allows us to assert in the first place that the irreversibility of time is an immediate evidence, one that bears witness to a meaning of time inaccessible to common or physical sense? Much progress has been accomplished in this direction which was first opened up by what is now classical thermodynamics. Today, it is possible to say that there exists a kind of space-time which is specific to living forms, and thus it is possible to retrieve Bergson’s argument via a very different route, which does not require the evidence alleged by consciousness. This space-time specific to life is still connected to a physical viewpoint, namely an extended critical situation. Whereas phase transitions in physics are infinitesimal points enveloping the actual infinite, life is the manifestation of the possibility for these transitions to last in a portion of space and in a limited interval of time. This is the consequence of the new intelligibility brought to the function of anticipation at the global level, that is, in the space-time where action exerts itself within a given environment. The space-time specific to life must remain compatible with the future environment that the organism is in the process of inducing by transforming it now. There is a sort of ‘impredicativity’ to the relationship of the organism to its environment, which accounts for the total unpredictability of the transformations of the organism over the course of time (a phenomenon that S.J. Gould has called ‘latent potentials’). Whereas in physics the present and future of a system depend solely on its past situation (even in the case of irreversible processes), another temporality is at work in biology, such that time is really an observable parameter, over and above any transformation (whether past, present or future): time does not flow in one direction, as was assumed in classical science, but actualizes compossibles. The force field responsible for the emergence of living creatures is not given, but rather is the process of self-constitution itself. Hence its intrinsic duration does not result from an optimality calculation: as two eminent scientists and natural philosophers write today, ‘living creatures not only constitute a field of given physical forces: no physical principle of minimality, no geodesic completely predetermines their evolution. As for Darwinian

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evolution ... they are at the most “compatible” with the situation which will be given and not that which is given.’10 Even though it seems possible to reproduce the physical system pertaining to a living phenomenon, we are compelled to conclude that this reproduction will only be an instantaneous snapshot of its form, not an account of its evolutionary dynamics, which is globally unpredictable. Though Bergson would certainly find the new biological laws still closer to irreversible time in his own sense than any other law, he would still wish to go a step further and give this time a new status as an evident truth within a metaphysical vision of consciousness as memory and as life. Memory: a psychical impulse that is temporal continuity whose past does not pass; an activity that preserves itself without dividing itself, continually fattening its past with its present, swelling as it moves forward. Thus, a surplus of spiritual energy haunts each present before it even occurs: intelligence and the body search within this volume left behind for the plans which interest it now with a view to some action. Consciousness unconcerned with action can take hold of this surplus, and if it does so, according to Bergson, it retains the image of the situations it consecutively went through, and aligns them in the order in which they succeeded one another. As for the teachings of life, they are, at their own level, the same as those of memory: all creatures seek to realize themselves and only manage to do so by abandoning a part of themselves along the way, leaving this part in the state left behind. But why, in this quest for self, should the incessant calling into question of the past by the present occur via a continual and crushing increase of the past which doesn’t pass? Isn’t the invitation to take up the past also the result of a certain erasure of traces, or a jumbling of plans? Aren’t this erasure and this jumble closer to a certain lived primordiality of familiar experience, so that the absolute order of irreversible time is an ideal target for it and not the habitus which it uses as a reference? Beyond the particular case of the irreversible flux of time, this overturning carries the seeds of a total conflict between habitus and ideality, so that one is no longer even the unequivocal tip of the other. As Merleau-Ponty writes, rejecting inner intuition in favor of perception which maintains its grip on the external world: ‘The perceived world … is the ensemble of my body’s routes and not a multitude of spatio-temporal individuals – the invisible of the visible.’11 From the ideal point of view of individuals or moments carried over onto an abstract spatio-temporal scale, the familiar experience of the perceived world is a void (the invisible part of visible things). But in what way are these paths of my body that weave through the perceived world actually something invisible? If they do indeed contrast with an ideal representation, then I don’t remember them, insofar as I am not in fact conscious of ever having lived through them (as I could be conscious of a point tracing a line). They only have meaning for me as kinesthetic potentialities, only certain of which have become a habitus. And yet this actual void,

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punctuated by a few scarce traces of the visible, of which my body bears the mark, acts upon me to such an extent as to make me perceive a world.

3 Life in the life-world The integration of mechanics into the organic order of being has become natural philosophy’s last resort.12 A technical activity is nowadays conceived as organic in its essence, and only secondarily as the result of a calculation. Beyond the framework habitually bestowed upon the technical manipulations of intelligence, all of natural thought now appeals to the testimony of life’s originality. The becoming that contemporary physics and biology are appropriating for themselves indeed speaks to a possibility inherent to being, off-centering itself with respect to itself in searching for solutions to the problems posed by life. This off-centering, this relative incompatibility of the individual with respect to itself, is the key to conceptualizing becoming as a dimension of being. Out of phase with respect to itself, being has the capacity to ‘resolve by dephasing,’ which places the harmony of self with self back into preindividual being.13 Anticipating this result, Bergson understood that science and consciousness could here sign a new pact, in which the unveiling of interior evolutions in matter would echo the continuous movement of life: when consciousness sounds its own depths, it thereby penetrates into the interior of all forms of reality; each stratum of nature (matter, life, consciousness) will thus correspond to a certain degree of difference with the self. Going all the way back to the conditions of possibility of living behavior, MerleauPonty pushes even further in this direction. He discovers that before the ego, there was an X which concluded a pact with the things of nature, tracing out in advance all the meanings they could ever have, so that they come to me in such a state that I cannot do otherwise than to coexist peacefully with them. Together, all the pre-traced meanings refer to a nature before nature (a savage nature before substantial or causal nature). This is an originary presence which burdens my life without overburdening it, since however little it has to do with the realm of what others perceive, this realm is sufficient to exercise a ‘traction’ on my subjectivity. Nature thus understood is no different from the world; there is only one world, the natural one, the ‘inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn.’14 A primordial phusis drags the perceptive experience of the natural body into the universal harmony which otherwise appears either as an attribute of the object or a decree of the subject. Thus conceived, coexistence with the real can mean nothing other than being inherent to it. If the subject is carried beyond itself and swallowed up by the world, it is precisely because the worlds that are possible for it (such as the ideal world, the world of others and so on) are all projected against the inalienable background of the natural world. This background is a constant and invincible presence which does not give

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rise to any questioning because it is a primordial encounter with being, and in this respect it does not mislead. If, for example, a perception is not the same thing as a hallucination, the responsibility is entirely incumbent on the subject off-centered with respect to itself, never truly coinciding with itself. One of the first examples of barbaric and archaic (acausal) essence was the Form, which Merleau-Ponty presents as the ‘synthèse de la nature et de l’idée.’15 How could one think about idea without hypostasizing it into the cause of existence? The answer is that form is not composed of parts: it is an idea embodied in a piece of extension, a meaning adhering to a sensible content. Such a form exists: it defines the living organism. The living creature’s being is entirely reabsorbed into the depths of its phenomenality, and it is ideality to the extent that it carries consciousness. As a result, the living totality is less interrogative – life as a problem to be resolved – than inventive; it seeks itself each instant in a series of variations of possibilities; it has the power to invent visibility in response to the depth of its own phenomenality. It is not the apparition of a product, but an event impossible to map out in advance alongside a series in the process of constituting itself.16 Yet, reinterpreted in turn from the point of view of a phenomenology of consciousness, one may wonder whether Merleau-Ponty’s argument doesn’t re-establish the same relationship between the phenomenal and the objective as idealism established between the constitutive mind and the constituted object in which it mysteriously risked alienating itself; the only difference being that alienation itself becomes a schema of constitution and not a possible consequence of constitution. If, therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature takes into account the implications of the living phenomenon at the limit of the powers of reason, the life-world of Husserl remains attached to consciousness, and the phenomenological description of this world is the ultimate bastion of reason. The recourse to the power of life as a model for the idea of nature betrays an innate weakness of the physical sciences, which easily descend into the depths of the elementary without managing to climb back up to the familiar experience from which they originate. Shouldn’t the power bestowed upon the depth of life, which seeks and invents itself, be able to untangle this aborted movement of return? Transposing onto a mathematical index the qualities of a world whose objects are given to an inadequate perception, modern science – inspired by mathematical physics – infinitely projects its end. It is not, however, bothered by the apparent impossibility of ever getting to it. As Husserl says, it confuses its object with its method in order to neutralize the effects of this impossibility on its concrete results; the infinity of its task is what guarantees the truth of its partial conquests. But life is an object in which unrealizability re-establishes a positive vision of the world. Indeed, life is unrealizable through mere physico-chemical processes, and yet biological science affirms that all the living processes it studies are physicochemical. The divergence between the object and the method becomes the

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source of biological knowledge. Insofar as phenomenology holds the overlap between object and method responsible for the loss of meaning in the physical sciences, does this knowledge bring the life sciences closer to the critical demands of thought? The answer is yes, but on the condition that the foundations of biology be conceptualized in accordance with the genuinely phenomenological method. Faced with the distress caused by the risk of deviation of meaning in physical mathematics, Husserl is perfectly conscious of the fact that the primitive foundation, the touchstone of all veritable philosophy, presents us with a choice: we need to decide between the general proposition ‘the world is,’ construed as containing the universe of indefinitely renewable experiences, always awaiting further determination, and the proposition ‘I am’ as the guarantee of absolute apodicticity.17 The first seems to contain the second as a contingent element, but Husserl inverts the relationship and takes the defense of ‘I am’ as primitive foundation. The world then appears in a completely new light: ‘the’ objective world valid for all is in fact ‘my’ world, since it is valid for me, with the meaning I give to it, but ‘the’ world in question is no longer the only one. The ‘I am’ is the foundation of all that is present to consciousness as existing: it can just as well be the real world as any ideal world, but equally it can be myself or my life or my own activity of thought, which are so many worlds whose foundation is the ‘I am.’18 It will thus be constituted by such an overflowing self that it will be able to present itself as ‘a realm of something subjective which is completely closed off within itself’ (Crisis §29, 112). Husserl maintains right to the end the questioning abilities of the transcendental subject in the life-world by means of its unitary ipseity, even when the life-world is life itself.19 As science, biology is a concrete theory of the life-world, because this theory is already inscribed in the world as an event of this world (konkrete lebensweltliche Theorie). The task of phenomenologically interpretating the phenomenon of life consists in figuring out how biology can carry out the additional step which would allow it to give a theoretical treatment of the transcendental constitution of the life-world. This step is forbidden so long as biology remains lured (as it effectively was at its beginnings) by the appeals of reducing life to the mechanical or energetic processes which are the prerogative of mathematical physics. Inversely, trapped by a mathematical ontology of nature ready-made in ‘idea,’ mathematical physics is in principle deprived of the possibility of opening up to the transcendental constitution of the life-world. Biology must be as it were given back to itself, removed from the logico-symbolic forms which would close it off in a sort of extended ontology of nature. In this respect, biology is a special science, since its object, life, is originarily given in the way I experience my own humanity. Out of my own capacity to live, I constitute a biological a priori (instincts, impulses and so on) whose intuitive fulfillment has the particularity of being total (eating,

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reproducing and so on) for the satisfaction of these elementary functions. The biological a priori is the most elementary level of life in which no lack is felt. At the beginning, the individual is not confronted with an off-centering with respect to itself, an off-centering that it would then take advantage of in order resolve the problems posed by life; on the contrary, individuation at the heart of life is a necessary condition for life to have meaning, although what ‘life’ is in the most general sense remains unknown. If the meaning of life is thus restricted to the meaningful totality of an individual life, the question arises as to how it should be situated with respect to life in general. Avoiding metaphysics, Husserl tackles the question of the presence of life in general within one’s own life by means of the encounter with the other organic life deprived of human psyche, such as the animal. Does this encounter threaten the original harmony of self with self? Husserl thinks that the biological a priori is sufficiently unitary to be transmitted to the other by a sort of contamination of the self. To be sure, in this case there is no constitution of intersubjectivity in the sense of another human being. When I presentify the being of the other from my primordial sphere in which everything belongs to me, this being transcends my own being, in the same way that my past transcends the living sphere of my present to present itself as present past, that is as an intentional modification of the present. The other is an intentional modification of the self of a special kind, where my ego constitutes the other as a being foreign to it. But the analogy of this constitution of the other with the experience of remembering my own past shows that the other is a sort of remembrance of the self: the example of what I could have been if the flux of my life-stream had been different from what it effectively was.20 Instead of revealing a closure, a withdrawal into the self which upholds the radical alterity of others, the other organic life points to an opening onto the totality of that which is alive [du vivant] and the meaning of life in general. Husserl argues that there is enough ‘sympathetic flow’ with animals for my biological a priori to become a generative a priori. From this point of view, the harmony of self with self is not a pre-individual matter but an inter- and trans-individual one. Faced with the other animal, I generate meaning for another life-world which is not human, once again out of the instincts and impulses of my own ego, but without off-centering myself; beyond the individual, this generation can then immediately reach the community to grasp a social horizon specific to animals; finally, the same generation is capable of making contact with a community which is itself monadic, a passive product of tradition by transposition or inheritance of meaning. However, if, like the horizon of meaning specific to nature in the sense of physical nature, this generation of meaning knows no limit, it differs from it in that it does not operate by projecting the already known onto the infinite. On the contrary, it starts with the unitary plenitude, impossible

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to repeat or transpose. The ontology of life in the life-world opens directly onto an infinite horizon: namely, that of an unknown ontology prefigured in advance as infinite. Let us emphasize once again: ‘unknown’ does not mean that the eidos of the biological a priori is to be found in a divergence or dephasing with respect to the self. Even though its unitary plenitude is not yet touched, my own biological a priori already reveals to me (by the pressure of instincts and impulses) the expanse of unknown which runs through me, although I cannot thereby connect it to my own past. The contact of the other unknown with my own, which seems better known to me, leads me to an eidetics of this a priori, which will in turn lead me to ‘ontological generalities yet to be opened,’ that is, generalities of being that I can generate without having to constitute them as another self, since they are not yet already constituted from above as belonging to me: their meaning remains open. I constitute them according to an egoical community which includes all that lives together: starting from the unity of one life, this community extends to the unity of a tradition, the unity of historicity related to specific geographic territories. Together this biological world and the other worlds which belong to me are so many instances of the one vastest world possible, the life-world (Lebenswelt). From the point of view of this universal life-world, the concreteness of the world’s concrete unity extends further than that of things which are purely and simply given in empirical experience and has the ambition to extend all the way to a universally operating ultimate subjectivity, not by way of a substratum specific to nature, but by way of the totality of the concrete world, which is a mixture of known and unknown, where the unknown still has meaning as radically unknown. If biology always proceeds by a knowledge of laws, it will never have the possibility of conceiving these laws as having the same meaning all the way to infinity. In this sense, biological science is indeed the privileged trampoline toward an authentically universal philosophy. It is located as close to the sources of evidence as possible, in that we understand life from within ourselves; it cannot understand anything without going back to the sources of understanding by a reductive method which suspends its object, not so as to constitute it, but so as to expose it to the meaning which is still unknown. The absence of the meaning of life in general is not insignificant; on the contrary, it is ultimately the only meaning capable of carrying the life of each individual toward horizons impossible to anticipate, all the way to death itself, which is the quintessential unknown. To the question concerning the relation of ‘my’ life to ‘life in general,’ Bergson responded that this relation is governed by duration, which divides itself between the two levels of life: the individual, temporal, conscious and creative dimension of my life sends me back to the essence of life in general, which is equally individual, temporal, conscious and creative. Life in general is immediately and completely meaningful because it is equivalent

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to the ‘incalculable number of lives,’ something to be distinguished from an abstract kind. How, then, does my own life as something individual, concrete and historical integrate or recognize itself within this whole? I do not need the living spectacle of the other in order to find other persons within myself: ‘Each of us,’ Bergson goes on to say, ‘glancing back over his history, will find that his child-personality, though indivisible, united in itself various persons, which could remain blended just because they were in their nascent state: this indecision, so charged with promise, is one of the greatest charms of childhood.’21 The virtual in my past life is that which was nascent in it, and which died without maturing or generating anything; Bergson speaks of the debris left behind on the route of our lives. Thus the identity of myself with myself means nothing – it is totally illusory – because it is an act, not a thing. If I try to represent this act, I will only discover fuzziness between different personalities in the process of forming themselves. Life being a tendency which develops in the form of a sheaf of divergent directions, the selected direction itself could have been other than it actually was. Not the actual presence of the other, but the mere flow of duration narrows down this multiplicity to one direction, which happens to be mine; the other life is another direction confined to this other life. Under the charming spell of childhood, it seems as if Bergson failed to see that a nascent personality in my past is intractable or even meaningless for a fully-developed state of adulthood. As if to warn against such daydreaming, Husserl emphasized that the originary biological being (biologische Urwesen) cannot be other than the mature human being.22

4 Conclusion: life and spirit Although the truth of nature according to the natural sciences cannot be denied, Husserl nevertheless states that nature ‘is only apparently selfsufficient [eingenständing] and can only apparently be brought by itself to rational knowledge in the natural sciences.’23 A fatal appearance has made it seem that the self-sufficiency of nature is an emanation of nature with which natural science is concerned. This attitude brings about the collapse of reason into an enormous parody of rationality fringing on or sometimes even making pacts with irrationalism. Thus, in response to the distress caused by the heady success of positive science, and well before the return of the sciences to the elementary conditions of life, an eminent form of universal spirituality remained the only path of access to nature. Science neglects the questions relative to the value of our existence and in fact does not even pretend to resolve them, as if the only rational mode of discourse was science’s exclusive property. Hence, the collision between scientific ideology and the slackening into various forms of irrationalism that combat the monstrosities of reason with its belief that it only relies on itself when it invests itself exclusively in the sciences of fact. What was needed, in the face of

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this collision, was to rediscover in all its breadth the old Greek project of reason, where reason gains in stature over fact as it itself posits its own rules of conduct. Can the self-normativity of reason be instituted without falling into the trap of the sciences of fact? This self-normativity is an invitation to the paroxysm of spirituality into which Husserl dared to venture. Undeniably the sciences of spirit which developed at the end of the nineteenth century, in particular according to Dilthey’s approach, had already given a stable form to this paroxysm. But in demanding that any axiological stance on the comparative value of our spiritual experience with respect to other cultures be excluded, this method made the spiritual world another factual world, next to the physical one; by its historical relativism, it also refused to decide between reason and the multiple forms of unreason in humanity (Crisis § 2): the spiritual world to which it appealed is that of a spirituality which becomes fragmented into so many singularities revealed by the facts of history and culture. Bergson himself belongs to this school of thought, because if the metaphysics of duration assures the link between individuality in general and life in general, it doesn’t assure singular individuality (its contents, its history) a place in being; whence the privileged role that it grants the great creative personalities, such as the mystics, who concentrate within them an uncanny force of singularity in service to being. To this line of thought Husserl, while maintaining the ideal of scientificity, seeks to oppose a non-fragmented spirituality, which cuts across all human efforts and defines a common plan of rationality going beyond all singularities. To the spirituality of a vital impulse on a cosmic scale, concentrated within a few singular personalities who regularly appropriate and repatriate it, as Bergson thought, Husserl opposes a spirituality of terrestrial humanity, which towers over and cuts across all singular humanities and which resists fragmentation from the blows of our inveterate spirit of analysis. Finally, nature having proven unfit, only spirit can be said to stand on its own (eigenständig). The life which flows from the power of being alive is not sought after but on the contrary arises in the form of the spirit to be accomplished. It will henceforth be impossible to know what ‘is’ the natural thing independently of the question raised about it. Nature understood in this way is the life-world, not phusis in the traditional sense as internal power. Thus, when the life-world is life itself, beyond the works accumulated by history and culture, the concept of nature undergoes its greatest possible enlargement, as a result of which it loses its ontology to the benefit of the life-world’s. Still more than inanimate nature, organic life bears witness to the fact that when consciousness examines itself, it is still far from moving forward into the interior of reality in general. Thought emerges from its depths, neither by way of natural law nor by way of the self-organization of nature, but by way of the experience of other living creatures – first the other man, then the other organic life, and finally the other life-world. The depths of thought thus opened up are considerable, for biology became a theoretical

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science on its own account precisely when it denied that life is correlative to a thinking soul. For Bergson, the human problem is resituated beyond human history, in the entirety of Life which is prior to human existence; it is incumbent on reflection to surpass itself so as to recover that which it left unreflected. For Husserl, that which is prior is not life but spirit; that which is unreflected is the life of reflection, and this life is that of the life-world. The life-world is a ‘universal framework’ which includes all our activities, whether practical or theoretical, ‘into which all accomplishments flow [einströmen]’ in every way (Crisis 138). The mythical harmony at the outset – this original fusion beyond every individual – which first gathers together and then scatters – whether life in Bergson’s sense or the ordered interplay between being and appearing, subject and object, individual and world in the sense of Cartesian-oriented phenomenology – is done away with.

Notes Translated by Joseph Spadola. 1. E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §33. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Crisis. 2. M. Heidegger, ‘On the Being and Conception of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B,1,’ trans. T. Sheehan, Man and World, 9 (1976): 263. 3. H. Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion, trans. R.A. Audra and C. Brereton (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), 309; Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1238. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of Œuvres. 4. Ibid., 310/1239. 5. E. Husserl, ‘The Origin of Geometry,’ Crisis, 376. 6. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), 239/680. 7. H. Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant, trans. M.L. Anderson (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), 35–7/1281–3. 8. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003a. 9. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 259/697. The translation says ‘violence to our nature’ for ‘en violentant la nature’ (my emphasis). 10. F. Bailly and G. Longo, Mathématiques et sciences de la nature. La singularité physique du vivant (Paris: Hermann, 2006), 126. 11. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 300; English translation by A. Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 247. 12. See G. Canguilhem, ‘Machine et organisme’, in La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 2006). 13. See G. Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Grenoble: J. Millon, 1995). 14. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 344.

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15. M. Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), 147. 16. See M. Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. Notes. Cours du Collège de France (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995). 17. E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, ed. R. Boehm, Husserliana VIII, vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 42. 18. E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), § 95. 19. E. Husserl, Appendix XXIII, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften and die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 482–4. This appendix to §65 of the Crisis is not contained in Carr’s translation. 20. E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns, (Dordrecht : Kluwer Academic, 1997), §5 2. 21. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 111. 22. E. Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften and die Transzendentale Phänomenologie: Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937, ed. R.M. Smid, Husserliana XXIX (Boston: Kluwer, 1993), 157. 23. E. Husserl, ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of Humanity,’ Crisis, 297.

12 Consciousness or Life? Bergson between Phenomenology and Metaphysics Frédéric Worms

It is understood that it is important to determine the place of consciousness in our life, and that at the turn of the twentieth century this was a problem common to both Bergson and ‘phenomenology,’ that of Husserl at least. For both these philosophers, to return to the ‘things themselves’ is neither to escape from our consciousness nor from our lives, but to criticize a false conception of each (and through them of all things), and to return to them in their immediate and intimate connection, the principle of access not only to a rigorous philosophy in general (of all things), but also to a double unity, to the meaning of life for consciousness and to the role of consciousness in our lives. However, no sooner do we attempt to bring these two philosophies together on this central point, than we see them oppose each other – to the point of contradiction – at the risk of opposing, through them, consciousness and life itself. Do we not, in effect, have to choose? Can life and consciousness both be first? The radicality of Husserl, far from uniting them, seems to hold precisely in the break that he maintains – even in the pure ‘flux’ of lived experiences – between these lived experiences and the consciousness that ‘intends’ them; that of Bergson, on the other hand, lies in the immersion of consciousness in temporal life, not only interior and psychological, but also organic and even cosmic. Far from relating consciousness and life to one another, do they not each opt for one against the other: the one to return to a pure consciousness, against all fusion or confusion with life (even pure), the other to return to an immediate life, against all conscious distance from it (even pure), at the risk henceforth, for one, of ‘reducing’ (first of all in a phenomenological sense) life to consciousness, and for the other of reducing (in a more traditional sense) consciousness to life? Far from growing closer, does not the opposition widen still further over the course of the century, between a phenomenology turned increasingly toward ontology and a Bergsonism apparently more and more connected to ‘philosophies of life’? It would then be necessary to take one side or another. The true, inevitable alternative would be held in the question, 245

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‘consciousness or life?’ – seemingly simplistic and brutal, set like a knife to the neck in the corner of a wood by a philosophical coup de force! Our aim is to show, from one side of this apparent alternative, the ‘Bergsonian’ direction, that the situation is quite otherwise; in the sense that if the relation between ‘Bergson and phenomenology’ rests on an opposition, it is not on a shallow opposition between consciousness and life, but rests rather on two opposite ways of understanding the connection between consciousness and life, which are indeed primarily together, or not at all. More precisely, one must show that the fundamental aim of Bergson is not to reduce ‘consciousness as such’ to ‘life as such,’ but instead to distinguish between two senses of consciousness and also between two senses of life – this distinction by itself accounting for its opposition to, and for its profound relation with, phenomenology. Indeed, not only is ‘life,’ with which Bergson must renew consciousness, still defined by a form or act of consciousness (even if it opposes itself to that which phenomenology describes as fundamental), but in addition, starting from this sense of life and consciousness we must be able to rejoin or even engender this other form of consciousness, which is described precisely by phenomenology as fundamental! Once again, not only does this double task of distinction and unification of two senses of consciousness and life belong properly to philosophy, but this distinction and this unity must manifest itself first of all in our experience itself. What are the points of rupture, not between consciousness and life, but between two senses of the one and of the other, in our consciousness and our lives themselves? How does this division or tear arise and express itself, and what unity does it reveal in return? Far from being abstract and academic, such are the questions to which a confrontation between ‘Bergson and phenomenology’ could lead. But first we should return to the distinction between two senses of consciousness and life in the thought of Bergson: why did it give rise to such a profound misunderstanding, particularly with phenomenology? On what does it rest and, if it is really on the fundamental distinction between duration and space, are there really two sides – consciousness and life? How in the end to surmount it, to think at once consciousness ‘of’ life (is it intuition?) and consciousness ‘in’ life (is it an action, or a creation?)? It is to these questions, then, that we will try to respond.

1 Consciousness or life? Beyond a misunderstanding The principal thesis on consciousness that makes the difference between ‘Bergson and phenomenology,’ as well as the misunderstanding or misinterpretation that most often concerns it (and that prevents one from seeing there not only an opposition but an essential relation), can be concisely presented.

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It is that, contrary to what we all spontaneously believe from the start about consciousness, and contrary to that which (Husserl’s) phenomenology attempts to carry to the dignity of a pure principle, for Bergson consciousness is not only, and also is not from the start or above all, a gaze or an intention; it is not even primarily an ‘appearing,’ giving the lie to the word even of the later Merleau-Ponty, according to whom philosophy always begins with an ‘it appears to me that…’ Quite the contrary, beyond the pseudo-evidence according to which consciousness would be consciousness ‘of…’ – in a reflective or even ‘pre-reflective’ way, according to the instructive distinction of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – or rather before relating back to this indisputable experience of consciousness as ‘consciousness of…,’ consciousness would be related back to something else and even to something prior, to a reality anterior to the gaze and to appearing, and even in a sense contradictory to it. What might make this so? How could consciousness be something other than an appearing, or vice-versa? Before answering this question and in order to understand the answer correctly, it is important to state – and at the same time to avoid – the principal misunderstanding perpetrated against this subject; to be precise, perpetrated most often by the ‘phenomenological’ readers of Bergson, who are perhaps surprised to note that in spite of the title of his first book (Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness [Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience], of 1889) if Bergson is the philosopher of the immediate data ‘of’ consciousness he is not for all that the philosopher of the immediate data ‘to’ consciousness; again, he aims less to describe the data that would be given to a consciousness that would set itself apart from them right away (as consciousness ‘of’ these data) than to describe the data of consciousness as such. Consciousness is thus manifested in its immediate reality, but it is also ultimate (as being), and this all the way up to the freedom that manifests it in the world, in the last chapter of this first book! This misinterpretation, essentially, is the following: it consists in believing that a reality anterior to consciousness as gaze (intention, or appearing) is necessarily a reality outside consciousness (act, or subjectivity) in general. One could believe, in effect, that if there must be a reality anterior to consciousness that we have or that we take up (understood as intention or gaze, appearing or intentionality), then it cannot but come from a substance or a thing independent of our experience in general and be definitive in the strict sense; an absolute or ‘metaphysical’ principle (‘metaphysical’ in the most traditional sense of the term). From his first book onward, according to this misinterpretation, Bergson would thus fall back into the most crude realism, which claims to go beyond our consciousness or our experience to postulate and to reach the things in themselves. What is more, ‘spiritual’ realism would be nothing but an aggravating circumstance: far from bringing us closer to consciousness, ‘the vital impulse’ or ‘the spiritual energy’ of the subsequent books would do nothing but show that which would already be in reality

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duration, that is to say, a thing or a force, physical or biological, though more than a subjective act. Then there would be nothing to consciousness but the name, a masking of a new kind of natural reality; in the same way, the freedom that it pretends to found would be nothing but the mask of a new kind of psychic determination, which its dynamism or vitalism does not make less restrictive! From Politzer and Nabert to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, how many lectures from the 1930s onward were based on such a critique? And yet, this is due to a misinterpretation or a misunderstanding. If Bergson, in effect, declares himself to be the philosopher of the ‘immediate data of consciousness’ (a fair title according to us) – and this up to the end of his oeuvre, up to the vital impulse of Creative Evolution and the mystical experience of Two Sources of Morality and Religion – and even if quite a metaphysical or realistic risk is run, perhaps even always avoided by him – still it is not by accident or by mistake that he declares it. On the contrary, it is that the reality anterior to the gaze or to appearing itself arises within consciousness and experience, that is to say, in experience or the sensible data, on the one hand, and from a subjective act on the other, from which these data are inseparable; this doubly prohibits making it a thing independent of us! Let us say it straight away: this act that is designated by the notion of duration and implied by duration, that is to say, by the sensible data insofar as they follow one another temporally, is nothing other than the act of retaining this succession, an act immanent to this succession itself and which cannot exist detached. Such an act is needed, or the sensible data would disappear ceaselessly, such that there would no longer be even sensible data without duration and without memory; but this act must be immanent or, as Bergson shows, it would detach itself from the succession and would set itself in the space of a gaze or a representation, denaturing it in the same stroke. Our experience, insofar as it is temporal, implies a subjective act that is not a gaze and that is absolutely without distance. Such is consciousness in duration; such is also what makes all duration consolidate with a consciousness; such is the act that prohibits making it a thing. Contraction and not contemplation – contraction even contradictory with contemplation – this cannot but come after; after the fact, responding to a completely different necessity. But if this is so, a double task follows from it. First this hypothesis must be confirmed, to show in what way duration arises indeed within a consciousness not reduced to life, but immanent to it (life); or again, not embedded in it as in a thing or a force, but present in it as an act and a meaning, certainly contradictory with the gaze, distance, space, which defines another form of consciousness and of life, but nevertheless distinct in form from the pure sensible data, which have need of this act to exist, and to change its nature, becoming not only the ‘impressions’ of something in general but of someone always singular and even individual. So the duality must be deepened, not between life and consciousness, but between two senses of life and two acts of consciousness.

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But in a no less essential way, this duality must be overcome to show how the contradiction between these two aspects of our life or of our being can be overcome, how it is precisely in this going-beyond that perhaps the most profound meaning of Bergson’s philosophy consists, assuring his connection with phenomenology, or again assuring the connection between phenomenology and metaphysics. This surpassing will itself be double: • First of all, the contradiction between consciousness understood as duration or as act, or again as drive and will, and consciousness understood as intention or gaze, as appearing or as seeing, must be overcome to produce a vision of this will, an appearance of this act, in other words an intuition, which this surmounted contradiction truly defines with precision! • But this surpassing is accompanied by another surpassing, symmetrical with the first and crucial, though less often emphasized. In effect, the intuition that sees duration can no longer be a gaze outside its object – it is no longer an ‘object’ but an act! It can be nothing but an ‘immanent’ gaze (as Bergson says it himself) or inside a doing, or again more precisely, a gaze that is itself a doing. Intuition, even and above all philosophical intuition, is never only a gaze, a description or a ‘theoretical’ construction; it is on the contrary a contact that manifests itself by an action and a full-fledged creation. This is why Bergson can say of philosophy, or rather of the fact of philosophizing, as of the free act or of aesthetic and moral creation, that it is a ‘simple act’! The difference between the two forms of consciousness, then, leads one to oppose two conceptions of philosophy as well, as description or as creation, knowledge or experience, which alternate elsewhere in the history of philosophy (and in the history, more radically, of humanity). Through his manner of posing but also of overcoming this duality, Bergson here takes a central place: between a philosophy like that of Husserl, which criticizes life in the name of consciousness, and a philosophy like that of Nietzsche, which criticizes consciousness in the name of life. No consciousness without life, but no life without consciousness, which also means no purely theoretical philosophy and philosopher-scholar, but also no purely creative philosophy and philosopher-artist. Intuition is the name of this surpassing; it is gaze and act at once, and in both senses: as the immanent light of intense drive, never purely obscure or mysterious, but also and to that extent as the creative works produced by all true sight, thus certain by not being imaginary or visionary – a double manifestation. As for philosophy, it is at once theory and practice, an accomplishment in its way like that which art or religious and moral action accomplishes. It is one method of resolving the tension that animates our being; it is one among others, and perhaps it is not even the highest resolution. Before the artist or the mystic, for Bergson as for

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Merleau-Ponty and Nabert later on, the philosopher fades. Philosophy is more than ‘phenomenology’ and comprises a part of ‘metaphysics’; but it is not work or pure creation, and implies a phenomenology. Complete philosophy is a combination of phenomenology and metaphysics, since our complete being is a mix of knowledge and of creation, of consciousness and of life. But to confirm it, these two points must again be insisted upon: the reformulation of the fundamental opposition, not between a thing and an act, between life and consciousness, but between two acts of consciousness and two senses of life; then on the double unity that this reformulation makes possible and calls by the name of intuition.

2 The two acts of consciousness and the two senses of life Bergson’s whole philosophy is founded on a distinction or on an intuition that implies a further distinction: the distinction between duration and space. But what precisely is the sense of this original distinction? Is it about disengaging the reality of time ‘in itself’ from the relative forms of our knowledge, which are all reduced to space, and which is itself deduced from the constraints of action, or from life in a sense limited to need? Or is it rather about seeing in duration not real time or a substantial life independent of us, but a time or a life inseparable from an act of consciousness, and about seeing in space, not an abstract form issuing from a purely external life, but the principle of a gaze and of an intentional distance with all things? Is the distinction between duration and space a distinction between two things, or rather a distinction between two acts of consciousness implying two senses of life? Such is the first question, by asking which one sees the central place in the whole philosophy of Bergson. To respond to it, it is necessary to start again from the first definition of duration, in a famous passage from Time and Free Will: Completely pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between present states and prior states.1 The interpretation of this phrase leaves us, in effect, facing a double alternative: • Duration seems at first to be attained when all acts of consciousness cease, when one ‘lets oneself live,’ and it would be in some way traversed by it, as by a thing or a force: how could one see in it any act of consciousness? Does not Bergson claim instead that in a quasi-contradictory manner we achieve a thing in itself at the heart even of our being, as though in entirely ceasing to be conscious (is this even possible or thinkable?) we attain the ultimate reality of our consciousness?

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• But what does it have to do with space? It seems that this time there really is an act, of ‘separation’ between states of consciousness. But is not this precisely a purely psychological act, or is this too based on a ‘pure’ principle, space, which may account not only for the division of duration into states, but also for the perception of external objects, or even of ‘distinct’ intention and of ‘the appearance’ of every thing? Is there here only a secondary deformation of reality or as well and before all an originary act of knowledge? We would, further, maintain that duration and space are both based on originary and opposed acts of consciousness in which the opposition must be pushed to the limit before thinking the surpassing or rather the unity of it in the combined movement of our conscious life. On duration, from the start, three points must be emphasized: the act that is the principle, its sensible effect, its extension to all of reality. Duration is certainly ‘the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes,’ but what does ‘to assume form’ mean? If it is not about the inscription of what happens in an abstract ‘form’ of passage, in homogeneous ‘time’ – a confusion Bergson will show with space – then does this form-taking happen ‘all alone,’ in a purely passive manner? In reality, pure succession would be nothing but a pure disappearance; states of consciousness would not be ‘our own,’ belonging to someone, if there was not an immanent and individual act of conservation to give them form and in them make a ‘me.’ Duration as form – heterogeneous multiplicity – supposes, therefore, duration as act – dynamic integration, continued passage, memory. Many are the later texts in which Bergson will insist on this, right up to Duration and Simultaneity (1922).2 We cite here the beginning of Consciousness and Life (1911): Consciousness signifies memory first of all. Memory can lack amplitude; it can embrace only a small part of the past; it can retain nothing but what happens; but memory is there, or consciousness is not there.3 In this text, moreover, to ‘conservation of the past’ Bergson adds ‘anticipation of the future’ as a primitive function of consciousness. But even without insisting on this point, here is what we understand: that duration presupposes an act, explicitly designated by Bergson by the name of ‘synthesis,’ and even regarding the movement of ‘mental synthesis,’ it is an act without which we could understand only that the passage of time is a succession or a conservation. But why is this act imputed to ‘consciousness’? To this the response must be simple and clear: because without this act there would be nothing but ‘unconsciousness.’4 In other words, to have ‘consciousness’ of anything supposes two conditions: the primitive fact of the passage of time and the

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primitive act of its conservation. To have consciousness is first of all to feel the effect of a succession, something like a change, of which consciousness itself was the principle: if the succession of the sounds of the clock affects me, it is because my consciousness retained them. That is to say, the most apparently passive effect, sensitivity (up to sleeping) again supposes a minimal act. All sensation is the effect of a duration: there is no sensation without duration, no impression that is not from the start, as Bergson says, the impression of the exterior on the interior, as on soft wax! The immediacy of the sensible effect is the criteria for the originality of the temporal act just as the mediation of distinct consciousness – the sounds of the clock, when I count them to know the hour – will be the sign of the second character of the spatial act. But understood well, this quasi-passivity that is already an activity relates back to an act, the unfurling of which goes as far as a real liberty: from sensitivity to decision, it is a single act that is at work – an act, we emphasize, that is immanent to the effects and not transcendent to the objects. Consciousness here is sensible and temporal synthesis and not spatial and objective intention. One cannot detach it from its effects without changing its nature. Or to put it otherwise, it cannot see its objects without ceasing immediately to make them. There remains, then, a last and decisive remark that divides in two: namely, if consciousness is in this way a temporal and individual act, a being or a life, conversely all being and all life will not be accessible, according to Bergson, except through a consciousness, or by a difference with a consciousness: our own. If in going back to the act of duration I seize an ultimate reality, behind which there is no more to seek, in turn it responds to the primitive fact of the passing of time; conversely, then, all reality cannot be seized, according to Bergson, except through the proof of my duration. So matter in its difference of temporal ‘rhythm,’ attested to in the experience of movement, proves at once its duration and its difference with our own; so too life itself, the creation of which could only be comprehended by analogy with that by which we make experience; so too, finally, the mystical act, the novelty of which can only be manifested by the opening of my closed consciousness and the echo that this stirs up in each of us. Never does Bergson make of duration a thing in itself independent of an act and an effect of consciousness: duration is neither something independent of us, nor an object intended or constructed by us; it is an act inseparable from us and by which we are inseparable from everything. One understands the temptation and the impossibility of all ‘phenomenology’ in the face of duration: one would want to describe its structure or effects, heterogeneity, multiplicity! But it is impossible. In effect, we can only live them. To describe them is to transform them straightaway, and lose the connection with the change and the act that are their source. If one uses concepts to think them, rather than to describe them, it is precisely by distinction or by opposition with that which deforms them, by opposition, then, with

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this other meaning of consciousness and of life that hides itself behind the spatial decomposition of time. Duration is seized by criticism and not by intention, by distinction and not by description, by concepts or by images (in the sense of the ‘figured’), and not by variations or by essences. So we come to it precisely by that to which it is opposed. If it is necessary here to start again from the act of separating that which is precisely unified and undivided in duration, it is necessary too to go further: why do we separate it, and in which sense is this because of life? How do we separate it, and to what extent does this imply space? To what does it lead, and in what way is it a condition of perception, of knowledge, and of language? It is important first of all to understand that if duration relates back to a primitive act, and thereby to the ultimate reality of our life, no less does the act that divides it or separates it also relate back, according to Bergson, to an ultimate need: that of living or acting. It is even, starting with Matter and Memory, a definition of life, this ‘selection’ of objects or useful images, in contrast with the strict belonging of a physical body to nature and to its laws. Life entails, then, with need, its own necessity, which is distinct from physical necessity, and which paradoxically implies choice or freedom (even if, conversely, at its lowest degree this liberty is entirely preoccupied in some way with need). But this necessity to choose in order to move (which will involve perception of distinct objects) will always also be described by Bergson as a form of consciousness. It is even, in Consciousness and Life, the second ‘line of facts’ that allows us to define consciousness and to understand why, if consciousness is directly and by duration ‘coextensive with life,’5 it is not in fact as though the intensities of its choice were also the intensities of consciousness itself, from automatism to freedom! Nevertheless, the necessity to choose is a genesis of consciousness; consciousness signifies choice and duration just as originally. There is even a link between the two: The variations of the intensity of our consciousness do seem, then, to correspond to the more or less considerable sum of choice, or if you like of creation, which we distribute in our conduct … If consciousness signifies memory and anticipation, it is because consciousness is synonymous with choice.6 But the consequences of these two original directions of consciousness in its connection with life are opposed. While the one is preservation, the other is distinction. And, for man at least, it is in this necessity to distinguish that space as the pure form of distinction or as the ‘schema of division’ finds its justification. More precisely, everything happens as though Bergson was brutally beating two deductions of space against one another: one empirical deduction starting with the needs of life, and one ‘transcendental’ deduction as the condition of possibility of number in Time and Free Will, of pure

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perception in Matter and Memory, of logical and fabricating intelligence in Creative Evolution. The function of distinction, connected to life and to choice, finds, then, its most perfect instrument, the purity in human intelligence that mathematics, external perception and logic prove to us. The purity of space, which profoundly links Bergson with Kant, is thus not only compatible with its practical function, it is its achievement, the source of language, calculation and the technique of men. But this purity is that which makes of space the condition of a pure appearance. It is this pure appearance – with its own structure on the ground of the needs of life or of the body – that the first chapter of Matter and Memory describes precisely, not coincidentally, in the pages that offer the most profound point of convergence between ‘Bergson and phenomenology.’ Bergson shows in effect how the selection of useful objects manifests itself in a spatial distance between body and world: the body makes a void around it to ‘perceive’ only the objects that interest it. This ‘void,’ which we mistake for a mental or interior distance, is then nothing other than a practical discernment, a sensory tamis7 accentuated in man by the intellectual schema of pure space, but which leaves the object ‘there where it is’ in the world. All animals distinguish what their instincts point out to them, but with man this takes the form of a cutting out of material in objects in space. Only movement calls this cutting into question, showing us its relativity, reminding us of the indivisible unity of ourselves and of the world. Otherwise we cannot overcome the spatial tearing-away. But before overcoming it one must know its nature: it is pragmatic and pure at the same time, phenomenological and concrete, ideal and real. Doing here takes the shape of a perception that has its own purity, to the point of masking the life that is its origin, and in the same blow also its opposition and its connection with temporal and individual life, which it masks more profoundly still. The force of appearance conceals from us equally well its reason (as organic life), and its contrary (as internal life). Or rather, it would conceal them from us if we let ourselves walk into its trap. But once one starts from duration and from its distinction with space, not only can one no longer confuse them, but one also can and must unite them. If there are really behind duration and space two acts of consciousness that relate back to two senses of life, and not two external forms that would relate back to two mysterious things, it remains to us to understand how these two acts of consciousness and these two dimensions of our life meet.

3 Consciousness and life: unity and rupture It is not enough here to describe a theoretical unity that is the summit of Bergson’s entire philosophy, that was intended since the start and fully attained, without any doubt, in Creative Evolution. It is also necessary to show its practical import; for the sake both of the unity itself between the

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two parts of our life and for the rupture that intervenes in our life itself and that, starting from Bergson, leads us further. Yet one should first emphasize, however briefly, the unity attained between the two senses of life and the two acts of consciousness. In effect, following the Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, the question remained in suspense: there are sights, behind duration, of an internal life animated by the act of memory, behind space an organic life manifested in distinct consciousness. But how to relate them? Matter and Memory does not suffice, even if the life of the body and the life of the spirit in us are indeed related by degrees of intensity of memory and ‘conscious planes,’ even if the life of matter and the life of spirit outside us are related by the degrees or the rhythms of duration itself. The duality of nature between the life of the body and that of consciousness remains on the contrary more profound than ever: action introduces an unjustified break that, in addition, leaves space with no profound reason to be, a pure imaginary schema for a body related to duration, but also doomed to denature it. Bergson is, then, led to study life itself in Creative Evolution. One sees there how life splits in two from the interior on contact with matter that opposes it: an impulse analogous to our consciousness and to duration, it becomes species, need and action, going to the point of self-contradiction (to work better on the matter to which they adapt) in intelligence and space, which define man as a singular species. The duality of our consciousness is, then, the result of a genesis in life itself. The proof will be in the unity attained in a double effort. In effect, if man is capable of ‘sight’ and of reflection, even if this ‘sight’ opposes the impulse and the will of life itself immanent to the instinct of other species, he is, then, the only being capable of seeing this sight, of transforming this instinct into ‘intuition’: instinct becomes conscious of itself. Such is the effort needed to meet what has become a challenge, to think life: So that our consciousness may coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself from the already-made [tout fait] and attach itself to the making itself [se faisant]. Turning back on itself and twisting on itself, the faculty of sight must be made one with the act of willing…8 That which the Introduction to Metaphysics had already described as an ‘inversion’ of the ‘natural slope of intelligence’ becomes now a return of consciousness to its principle and to its unity – not only possible but necessary, not only a problem but a necessity for philosophy. But is precisely this unity only philosophical in the sense of a ‘theoretical’ contemplation? Is intuition only a ‘seeing,’ still at a distance from the act that defines consciousness or duration as will? The phrases that follow could lead us to believe, to the contrary, in appearance at least, in two ways of attaining this unity of sight and will, which

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presuppose a ‘painful effort which we could make suddenly in assaulting our nature, but cannot sustain for more than a few moments.’9 The first unity is practical in effect and seems restricted: In free action, when we contract our whole being to hurl it forward, we have a more or less clear consciousness of the motives and the moving things [mobiles], and even, in a pinch, of the becoming by which they organize in action: but the pure will, the current that runs through this matter in communicating life to it, is a thing that we hardly feel, that at most we brush in its passing.10 Only philosophy seems to go farther: To arrive at the principle of all life, as of all materiality also, we must go further still. Is it impossible? Certainly not; the history of philosophy is there to bear witness. There is no durable system that is not, at least in some of its parts, quickened by intuition.11 But one must not deceive oneself. This ‘intuition’ that is indeed the effect of sight or at least the feeling of this will, can only show itself through acts, creations that are themselves new and singular philosophies. In this sense, as we indicated above, and as Bergson emphasizes in 1911 in Philosophical Intuition,12 philosophy is, like art or moral and religious creation, ‘a simple act’: ‘the spirit that one will bring back to real duration will already live the intuitive life and its knowledge will already be philosophy’ (TFW 140/1364). The vision of will cannot manifest itself except in an act that is itself a life, and, moreover, an act that renews the vision of life sub specie durationis (TFW 142/1365). We say also: all the acts do not merge on this plane here; the most profound will be the creations of open morality and not the alleged ecstasies of a fusion without standards, which have nothing to do with Bergsonian intuition. It is then, indeed, a double unity that is attained in consciousness from the start: genesis of spatial consciousness from temporal consciousness, intuition of consciousness by spatial gaze. But also in life: genesis of organic life by temporal life, but also renewal of organic life by temporal life, and this notably in human life by history, moral and religious above all, but also aesthetic and philosophical history; it adds, so to speak, to nature, thus retrieving its own history. However, rupture remains when we brutally feel unity, not when we manage to restore it, but when it breaks. In the perception of change the two aspects combine: the sensation of change itself, the surprise in the face of that which it changed, the two forms of consciousness. Exclamation is still in the event, even in retrospection. We can think that our life is, in effect, double: double between movement – which punctuates it with changes,

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births or bereavements – and surprise or speech – which punctuate it with sense, pain or joy, welcome or farewell. Perhaps here is the most profound unity between the two senses of life, in their very difference, which is also the difference between life and its sense for us, between metaphysics and phenomenology. We exclaim, taken in a reality that we feel is ours, and in a sense that we know is real! Thus, life and consciousness must not be opposed but be a consciousness in life and a consciousness of life, which unite in our actions and our highest thoughts and which break, too, in our thoughts and our most intense actions. If there were but one of the two senses, our life would be mutilated; if there were both there would be a chance, not to be complete, but to know the points of unity, of rupture and of relation.

Notes Translation by Mark Sentesy of Frédéric Worms, ‘La conscience ou la vie? Bergson entre phénomenologie et métaphysique,’ in Annales Bergsoniennes II: Bergson, Deleuze, La Phénoménologie, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 191–206. 1. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans, F. L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover Publishing Company, 2001), 100. Hereafter cited parenthetically as TFW. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of H. Bergson, Œuvres, Édition du Centenaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 67. 2. H. Bergson, Durée et simultanéité, 1922; Duration and Simultaneity, trans, L. Jacobson and M. Lewis (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000). 3. H. Bergson, La Conscience et la vie, 1911; in English in Mind Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt: 1920), 5/818. 4. Ibid., 5/818. 5. Ibid., 7–8/820. 6. Ibid., 11/823. 7. A tamis is a circular sieve with a flat surface for sifting, but not for draining [translator’s note]. 8. Henri Bergson, Évolution créatrice; in English as, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), 238/696. 9. Ibid., 237/696–7. 10. Ibid., 237–8/697. 11. Ibid., 239/697. 12. The French text is L’Intuition philosophique.

13 The Failure of Bergsonism Renaud Barbaras

1 Life and consciousness A long discussion of the phenomenologies that either directly or indirectly confront the question of life has clarified our initial problem. Our starting point was the a priori of the correlation and the question of the meaning of being of the subject as a condition of appearance. We concluded from the analysis of the correlation’s own constraints that the subject’s meaning of being must be sought in what we have characterized as living, emphasizing the indistinctness or positive ambiguity of the term, which refers both to being alive and the capacity to undergo, to sense, and to perceive. This meant that what defines the subject consists in the fact that its vitality envelops a dimension of openness to the exterior, and moreover, that the subject’s perceptual relation to the world cannot be thought outside of vital activity. But it was not a matter of returning to the naive evidence that claims that one must first be alive in order to know what vital activity is, the perceptual activity being the prerogative of certain living beings that are said to be ‘superior’ on account of the configuration of their nervous system. The concern was rather to affirm, more radically, that the subject is both a subject of the world, and, in virtue of its life, the condition of its appearance, and that as such, its life as such is an opening to the world or knowledge. Accordingly, the concern was to recognize that all experience and all activity of knowledge remains a vital activity, and the question we confront now is ultimately that of knowing how perception raises itself up from life, or of knowing in what way, in what sense of life, perception is a vital activity. The analyses have forced us to acknowledge that the most demanding phenomenological enterprises are marked by a tension between the recognition of the constraints to which the subject’s meaning of being is subjected – a recognition that leads us to see a being [étant] conjoining its belongingness to the world and its phenomenalization – and a characterization of this meaning of being that remains a prisoner of the polarity between Leben and Erleben, or between life and consciousness. The unity of belongingness and 258

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of the phenomenalizing function is not reflected in a unitary conception of living. On the contrary, it is as if the cleavage between life and consciousness, or the corporeal and the psychic, re-emerges within the very heart of the philosophies that are conscious of the double condition of the subject but which nevertheless claim to overcome the polarity. Consciousness ends up transcending life, even if it is in the very sophisticated form of a third movement of existence, and the phenomenologies most concerned with breaking from metaphysical humanism ultimately end up re-establishing it by thinking the human as a being whose difference exceeds life, as a being for whose essence ‘life’ is not sufficient. We have advanced the hypothesis according to which this thought of division – the ultimate avatar of the metaphysical dualism instituted by Descartes – is rooted in an ontological prejudice underlying all classical ontology and science. This prejudice consists in thinking death qua return to the state of inert matter as a privileged ontological testimony that delivers the meaning of being of all beings. It follows from this that the living being is approached from the viewpoint of its belonging to a lifeless universe within which it is the exception, and thus it is understood as fundamentally exposed to the threat of its negation and to the return of it to the inert. Its life is itself therefore defined as the negation of this negation, namely, as survival or self-conservation. Within the framework of the ontology of death, life appears as the ‘ephemeral’ attribute of a being that, as such, remains foreign to death and is doomed to return to the inert: the univocity of being as a material substance prevails over the difference that life inserts. This means that life does not designate a specific meaning of being. Life is the set of properties or aptitudes that certain beings manifest on account of the complexity appropriate to their organization. The living being is living not because it is alive or because it receives life. On the contrary, it is alive because, as a living being, it is characterized by a certain organization. The ontology of death is obliged to refuse to life a specific meaning of being since, as Jonas has shown, matter is the ontological norm while life is a mystery that we attempt to resolve by relating it to a certain organization of its matter. Within this ontological framework, life appears as entirely subordinated to and completely turned toward living being, oriented precisely toward the restitution of what is necessary for its own conservation. Its mode of being is exhausted in the negation of this massive negation represented by the exterior world. Life is riveted to itself, subordinated entirely to the living being whose manifestation or attribute it is. Life is perennialization, self-repetition or survival. Life cannot turn itself toward anything other than itself, unless this other redirects it back to itself, satisfying its needs, allowing it to conserve itself: life is closure and intransitivity. We must note that this closing up on itself and this repetition characterizing life manifest themselves in the strangely tautological nature of life’s definition. To the question ‘What is life?’ we invariably respond: ‘It is

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the activity of maintaining oneself in life, conserving the living,’ thereby including the defined in the definition. Life refers to the activity of conservation of a living being which in turn can be defined only as this power to conserve itself. Within the framework of the ontology of death, life can never be grasped according to its specific meaning of being. Life is the conservation of a being [étant] which is always ignorant of its meaning of being and is thereby inevitably brought back to this very power of conservation. Its tautologous definition responds, so to speak, to its tautologous mode of existing: life is always what necessarily presupposes itself. It is therefore not surprising that a philosophy that at least implicitly adheres to this determination of life (thereby refusing to grant its own meaning of being to it) is led to introduce another dimension in order to account for the life of relation, for the transitivity which, moreover, characterizes our life. Human life, insofar as it transcends mere survival, will be redirected to a dimension of existence or to a consciousness for which ‘biological’ life will appear as an interior moment or as the bedrock. The implicit consequence of the determination of life from the viewpoint of the ontology of death is indeed the impossibility of integrating the transitive or phenomenalizing dimension of existence to its living. Nevertheless, the meaning of being of life must be determined within the perspective of living, understood in an extended sense or according to a fruitful ambiguity. In effect, our question is the following: what must life be so that something like human existence would be possible? Or again, what is the meaning of being of life insofar as life is susceptible to becoming conscious of itself ? From this derives the necessity of suspending the fundamental ontological presupposition that, having restrained a priori the field of life, leads us to think of human existence or consciousness as transcending this field. Hence the necessity of an epokhe of death. This epokhe serves the purpose of allowing life to be understood on its own terms and not on the basis of a relation to what threatens it. This opens a path to a characterization of life’s proper meaning of being. In effect, as soon as we approach life on its own terms, as its own mode of existence, and no longer from the perspective of a threatening exteriority, then it is no longer required that life be referred to a living being for which it would inevitably be the act of perennialization. The function of this epokhe is to permit us to approach a living being on the basis of its life, rather than approaching life on the basis of a living being, which is the only way to escape the tautology we mentioned above. To disentangle life from death is ipso facto to separate the question of the meaning of its being from that of its conditions of existence (survival) of the always threatened subject of this life. To approach life on its own terms therefore means both and indissolubly to approach it neither on the basis of death nor on the basis of the living being. It follows that life’s meaning of being will have to be sought in an affirmation rather than a negation, an opening rather than a closure, a creation rather than

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a repetition. On the other hand, we suspect that by approaching life on its own terms we will be given the means to understand how life goes beyond itself in existence or consciousness, or rather how this existence and this consciousness are life’s overcoming – in short, how the unity of Leben and Erleben is based in life. To say that life is not related to its own negation is to recognize that it is able to open itself to a genuine Other. To say that it is not riveted to self-conservation is to recognize that its action can, in a way, be disinterested. The suspension of death, the determination of life as a specific meaning of being or a specific mode of existence, the integration of the dimension of consciousness (understood in a broad and yet indeterminate sense), that is, the recognition of the vital meaning of consciousness – these are the three tightly interwoven demands delimiting the framework of a rigorous phenomenology of life. At first sight, it seems that Bergson’s philosophy responds to this triple demand. In effect, by thinking life on the basis of the duration and, consequently, as that which is assimilable to a consciousness, he puts the specificity of life’s meaning of being first. Unlike material systems, wherein every transformation arises from a rearrangement of parts, and wherein the whole is calculable, life is characterized by its creative dimension: the future gathers up the past but in a form that is irreducible to the past, and the future is forever unforeseeable. Far from being exhausted in the reproduction of individuals (both in the sense of self-conservation and conservation of the species) faced with material adversity, life must be understood as a unique current or creative impulse (élan vital) for which mortal individuals are, so to speak, merely fulcrums permitting it to perennialize its creative energy.1 Life is not an attribute of the living being, but rather, the living being is a production of life. Insofar as the soma is only the occasion for the birth of a new germen where the creative energy gathers itself and bides its time, the living being appears in the service of a life that transcends it. Ultimately having no other function than carrying a new seed, its ineluctable death is like the inverse of, and condition for, the perpetuity of the vital current. Thus, under no circumstances is life’s own dynamic to be understood on the basis of death, or as the resistance to the threat of death. On the contrary, death is grasped from the viewpoint of life, as the destiny of a living being with no function other than to allow the pursuit of the creative impulse. Death, which could be characterized as the negation of life only insofar as life is reduced to the living being, now reveals itself to be the condition of life’s affirmation within the living thing. Defined in this way, however, life is not merely capable of consciousness: it is consciousness. In truth, if in Creative Evolution life is assimilated to consciousness on account of its duration, distinguishing it from closed material systems, then the order that Bergson’s thought follows is inverted. In Time and Free Will, duration is grasped in the heart of the I, as the mode of being proper to the ‘deep ego,’ in the service of what must be called an introspection.

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The discovery of life in its irreducibility thus proceeds from a widening of the mode of being discovered on the personal plane, from a passage from the psychological to the ontological: this duration, which is attested to in the experience we have of ourselves, testifies to a type of being that is just as suitable for living beings as it is for the totality of the universe. Whatever it is, as soon as we grasp life on its own terms and not from the viewpoint of the living individual, we discover a mode of being that is nothing other than consciousness, namely, the duration. To approach life in and for itself, according to its own meaning of being, is to understand life in its identity with consciousness: ‘The more we fix our attention on this continuity of life, the more we see that organic evolution resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the emergence of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents.’2 But we have yet to know whether this perspective truly advances our understanding of living such as we have defined it, and whether this metaphysical approach to life has a genuine phenomenological scope. Does life, understood as duration, allow for the clarification of living being in its double dimension of belonging and phenomenalization, and thereby ground their articulation? Is it sufficient to define life as what is assimilable to a consciousness in order to be able to integrate it with human existence, taken in its full sense?

2 The two meanings of life It is incontestable that Bergson brings to light what in life is irreducible to our habitual schemas of thought, which themselves arise based on the activity of fabrication. In this sense, Bergson’s criticism of finalism and mechanism is indisputable. There is a singular style of life that can neither be led back to a mechanical arrangement of parts nor understood as the realization of an end posited in advance. Bergson really seems to be situated beyond the divisions upon which phenomenology most frequently remains dependent, and as a result, he at least negatively circumscribes the space of a phenomenology of life. But that is only an appearance. We must not forget that the discovery of duration takes place within a critical method that aims at denouncing a cluster of false problems. Many of these problems inherited from the philosophical tradition are based on a confusion between two types of multiplicity, and the goal of Time and Free Will is precisely to distinguish between temporal multiplicity and spatial multiplicity. Now, with matter being hastily assimilated to space, it follows that, at least at the level of Time and Free Will, the critical and, so to speak, transcendental distinction between a continuous, heterogeneous duration and a discontinuous, homogeneous space eventually overlaps with the metaphysical division of mind and matter. The determination of life inevitably inherits something from this initial decision: insofar as life is duration it could not be placed on the

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side of matter, and the meaning of its being can only be confounded with the mind’s. The identification of life with consciousness does not so much signify the discovery of a specific mode of being that consciousness would be a product of, as it does the dissolution of life into consciousness; consciousness is not so much inscribed in life as life is reduced to consciousness. It then follows that the proper dimension of belonging, for which the body is another name, cannot be constitutive of life and becomes eminently problematic. This is evident in Matter and Memory, where the body, which is the central object of the book, is never grasped as an autonomous mode of being, but is reduced to a pure role of mediator between the material plane of images and the spiritual (or mental) plane of memory. Understood as a simple organ of action (representation being realized, so to speak, in advance in the things insofar as they are images), the body has the job of circumscribing images within the totality in accordance with its vital requirements, then of calling forth and selecting the memory-images that will come to rest upon perceptual images, thereby making recognition possible. This amounts to saying that the body is an instrument of subjectivity – that is, of memory or mind – rather than subjectivity itself. As an organ of action and never of representation, the body is deprived of intentionality. In Matter and Memory the analysis of living activity, in the figure of the body, remains fundamentally dependent on the division between an essentially extensive matter and a memory foreign to space, so much so that its properly vital dimension is ultimately ignored, or in any case reduced to its minimal meaning. One falls short of life in the positing of a body that limits itself to selecting images within a totality whose being is already representation, and one overshoots life in the highlighting of an ontologically autonomous (because it is essentially temporal) level that the body is limited to actualizing. This thought of the body can in no way ground within itself the unity of belonging and phenomenalization, or of acting and seeing. If we look more closely at the first chapter in Matter and Memory, we find that the theory of pure perception is dependent on a limited conception of life as the evasion of danger or search for prey. In short, life is conceived as self-conservation through the satisfaction of needs: the action of living being is fundamentally directed back toward itself – it does not unveil a world but rather circumscribes what is meaningful in the world from the sole viewpoint of survival.3 We thus finally have the feeling that life itself ultimately splits in two: there is the limited life of the body, as the action of selection and actualization, and the ‘true’ life, corresponding to the development of duration. In sum, the metaphysical cleavage of matter and memory prevails over the phenomenological unity of life. This ‘true’ life is at the center of Creative Evolution. However, due to its assimilation to duration, and consequently consciousness, life remains essentially foreign to matter, and the dimension of belonging, that is, the body, cannot be constitutive of it. On the contrary, materiality and

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corporeity appear as profoundly foreign to life. As the famous analyses of the constitution of the eye and its comparison with a hand advancing through iron filings demonstrates, organization must be opposed to fabrication, and the sciences of life come to pose their insoluble questions only by confusing these two. In contrast to fabrication, which arranges the parts around and in view of the action that the parts will serve, the act of organization has something explosive to it, going from the center to the periphery, propagating itself around a point. Thus, the vital impulse can be described as an undivided movement that opens, so to speak, its pathway within matter in such a way that the organ, the eye for example, must not be understood as the result of an assemblage of parts, but rather as the form taken by matter’s resistance to life’s progression toward vision, just as the configuration of the iron filings corresponds to the point where the effort of the hand penetrating it must have stopped. As Jankélévitch wrote in a suggestive passage, ‘the animal sees in spite of its eyes rather than because of them,’ and, in addressing another of Bergson’s comparisons, he adds, Matter does not sustain life any more than the mountain causes the tunnel. Clearly if there was no mountain, there would not be a tunnel […] But the tunnel itself is nothing: it only represents a conquered mountain, just as each of our organs represents a defeat of matter. The body is thus only there in order to be conquered. Life has no need for the body. On the contrary, life would rather be on its own and go straight to its goal without having to go through the mountains. But the body is there. It was necessary to get around it, elude it, and sublimate it through all sorts of tricks.4 Life is at first this current foreign to matter attempting to make its own way, making its creative energy endure in an element hostile to it. The initial distinction of duration and space now takes on the metaphysical meaning of a duality between a creating impulse and a material extension foreign to it, a duality that necessarily takes the form of an opposition. But to the extent that life, in its essence, indeed escapes from matter, its effective confrontation with matter will necessarily take the form of an adaptive activity, entirely oriented toward the survival of the individual that serves as the fulcrum for the creative impulse. Because life does not belong to matter, because it is not ‘on its side,’ life will relate to it only in an unstable conflictual mode limited to adaptation. Matter will not be anything other than a costly mediation, to which life must resign itself, and whose contours life must follow so as not to lose itself entirely. Matter is only that with which life must compose and never what it must reveal,5 even if this adaptation leads to a form of unveiling. Thus, as in Matter and Memory, albeit in a more explicit manner, the notion of life is destined to split itself in two: there is life ‘in itself,’ the pure creative impulse, and there is life as the effective

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realization of this impulse, life at odds with matter. The metaphysical and spiritualist conception of life as a positive principle has for its counterpart a strictly adaptive conception of life in its effective movement. As Frédéric Worms has shown,6 the initial distinction of duration and space leads to a distinction within the very heart of life, to a distinction between two meanings of life: one is temporal and creative, the other is corporeal and pragmatic. However, we still need to give a meaning to this duality. We might consider – and this is no doubt Worms’s position – that this duality is constitutive of life itself, such that its dual essence is what would be proper to life. But truthfully, this position is meaningful only within a Bergsonian framework, that is, only on the condition of accepting as a premise the initial distinction between duration and space, as well as all of the distinction’s avatars throughout Bergson’s work. But as we shall soon see, it is not certain that this distinction is valid, that the multiple is dual, and that space in particular can be described in terms of a discontinuous and homogeneous multiplicity. With Bergsonism, such a distinction is ordered by the sole critical concern of resolving the problem of freedom by highlighting the confusions on which the classical formulation of the problem rests. This distinction is in no way put to the test by the phenomenon of life, which makes its appearance much later in the work only then to find itself immediately divided by this distinction. It will indeed seem that life, considered in its own sense of being, instead leads to the denunciation of this partitioning of multiplicities. As we shall soon see, the primary merit of Raymond Ruyer’s thought lay in showing that in light of an understanding of life in its originary identity with consciousness, the genuine boundary passes between multiplicity and unity, and this unity is indifferent to the division of space and time – or rather, it is trans-spatial and trans-temporal, and refers to domains that are viewed as if from above [se sont survolées]. Thus, the cleavage is no longer between duration and space, but rather between the domain-based unities, which are perfectly suited to living being and consciousness, and the aggregate-based unities of increasingly contiguous causality, which are those of heaps, crowds and so on. This amounts to saying that the real cleavage is between the true unity, which is both spatial and temporal, and the true multiplicity, which is unique. Whatever the case, it is only within the Bergsonian framework that this duality of life’s meanings can make any sense. We see in the duality the mark of a failure of thought in the face of life. To think life as double is to renounce thinking it as life; to think life as double is not to think life on its own terms but rather under the metaphysical constraint of a cleavage whose contestation life could perhaps be implying. Contrary to appearances, Bergson does not attempt to reform metaphysics at its point of contact with the phenomenon of life, which is grasped in the form of duration: he subordinates the essence of life to the cleavage of duration and extension, and

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this cleavage is a radicalized avatar of the old distinction between mind and matter. That is why the meaning of life is not unveiled for itself, but is instead led to the two meanings of being foreign to life. Life is first defined as a creative force transcending living beings, which are nothing more than supports for the creative force. However, this triumphant ontology of life, which does not take into consideration any dimension of belonging, is destined to revert to an ontology of death. In fact, to the extent that life is understood in and through itself as foreign to matter (which is ultimately to understand life as consciousness), its own vitality will be able to be described only as a battle against this foreign element, and life will be considered only from the viewpoint of its possible negation. We therefore find a strict thought of life as adaptation aimed at survival and reproduction. Because belonging, as an originary and constitutive relation to the world, is not allocated to life as what takes part in its essence, the encounter with the world will only be able to take on the negative meaning of a threat from the world, and life will be the active negation of this potential negation that matter represents. Insofar as life is a positive principle of creation, it is primarily split from living beings, and life will be able to realize itself in them only in the negative form of an adaptation: a form of biological pragmatism appears here as the counterpart of a meta-biological metaphysics. In other words, Bergson understands that it is necessary to grasp life as a proper mode of being, and that life is not to be confused with the bio-chemical functioning of the living being, but he also remains prisoner of a naive ontology that makes him incapable of thinking this propriety as anything other than the positivity of a principle. Thus, far from appearing as a certain meaning of being that we could grasp at the heart of living being, life can only be a dynamic entity that transcends living beings. The recognition of the specificity of life does not go as far as an ontological reformation. It nevertheless seemed that the seeds of this reform are in the philosophy of duration, which expresses a radical and explicit protest against the metaphysics fascinated by the principle of sufficient reason and led thereby to approach being on the basis of nothingness, namely, as fully determinate and thus foreign to becoming.7 The criticism of the essentialist and static conception of being would thus have been able to open the path to a recognition of life in the specificity of its mode of being. But Bergson ultimately remains dependent on the ontology of metaphysics that he refutes due to the fact that duration itself is understood on the basis of the ontic mode as a substantial reality: life, whose essence would be duration, will then be able to be only a creative energy, a life above living beings and not a life of living beings.8 The duality of life’s meanings in fact means that life is missed twice. Life is missed the first time by going too far, in life’s identification with consciousness – which is actually a supra-consciousness because it is consciousness of nobody and of nothing – since it is above all a principle of indetermination, from which its belongingness and its constitutive

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relation to the world are absent. Life is missed a second time by falling short, when life is reduced and limited to the simple adaptive activity as soon as life finds itself within the concrete living being, at odds with an adversarial matter. Because life is first thought as transcendent to the living being, that is, as transcendent to exteriority, it could be grasped in its effectivity within the living being only as threatened by this exteriority, in short, within the horizon of its own death. The unity of the living is dismembered in this dual thought of life which is able to see in it only a sovereign creative power or a laborious adaptation: the fundamental intransitivity of a life that is pure creation and non-relation, ignoring the world instead of being affected by it, leads to the intransitivity of a vital activity that is only an ‘exploitation’ of immediate surroundings in view of its commodities, in short, in view of the satisfaction of needs. We already see what consequences we must draw from this: we will truly escape the ontology of death only on the condition that we do not ground the specificity of the living on a positive and transcendent principle destined to deteriorate into pure survival when it encounters matter. Therefore, our only chance to think life as something other than survival is by apprehending life in living being, even if life is not simply a property or an attribute of it. It is on the condition of conferring to life a fundamental transitivity, and thinking life as an originary relation to material exteriority, that this relation will truly be able to signify something other than a simple exploitation for the purpose of survival, and will be susceptible to enveloping a dimension of openness or phenomenalization.

3

Human life

These remarks naturally lead us to the question of the human’s place among other living beings. At first it seems that the philosophy of creative evolution must allow the human to be placed at the heart of life, that Bergson’s philosophy overcomes the idea of the rational animal in order to have the human appear as included in the movement of life, as a difference within life and not a difference in relation to life. In short, it seems that the Bergsonian perspective permits an account of the human’s humanity on the basis of its vitality instead of defining it as what transcends vitality. In effect, where life does not lock itself in torpor but instead follows its path within matter, it develops under two forms, which are radically different but equally ‘elegant’ in terms of how they solve the problems of matter: instinct and intelligence. Human existence is in this way profoundly inscribed in vital activity, to the extent that the intelligence characterizing human existence is entirely a product of the activity of fabrication, which is itself one of the solutions life has found for adapting itself to matter. The activity of fabrication is not so much an activity of the human; rather, human activity is a production of the activity of fabrication as a singular manifestation of life. But while life remains somehow interior and therefore closed in itself in instinct (which

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has as its counterpart the very limited character of what it can relate itself to), in intelligence, on the contrary, life is resolutely turned towards matter and committed to the sense of spatialization, thereby alienating itself from its own essence. In the spatializing intelligence required by the activity of fabrication, life adopts and even extends the constraints of matter, and in so doing is separated from itself, splitting itself from its own origin. There is thus a kind of essential incompatibility between knowledge and life to the extent that intelligence, turned as it is toward material exteriority, is not able to take for an object what constitutes its subject and finally its very being, namely, the life from which it comes. Life becomes knowledge only by escaping it, and knowledge refers to life only as a source that it can never appropriate. Humanity’s belongingness to life henceforth takes the form of a rupture or separation, and we can relate the human to life only as that which secedes within itself. Life is accomplished in the human only by losing itself in it, and the human is dependent on the vital impulse only in becoming estranged from it.9 Now, if the essence of life is lost in intelligence, it becomes difficult to give an effective account of humanity on the basis of life except in the form of an observation of reversion: the inscription of the human in life takes the form of a negation that, even if it is life’s self-negation, nevertheless puts the human in the situation of being the exception. This rupture or negation refers specifically to the duality of life we invoked above. It is a duality that refers to the fact that life is life only by penetrating matter. Human intelligence is only the most advanced point of this scission inherent to life. In the human, the vital impulse takes on the contours of exteriority and is separated from itself. In this sense, the duality of life’s meanings are eminently represented in the form of the separation between life as such and humanity: continuity makes room for rupture, and unity gives place to scission. Thus, due to this reversion or bifurcation within life, the affirmation of the human’s belonging to life does not in any way afford an account of the specificity of the human on the basis of life itself. On the contrary, this specificity can be described only on the basis of a rupture or a negation: the human is this living being who precisely does not act like the other living beings. The human is that point of evolution where life is no longer next to itself but instead loses itself by relating itself to inert matter. In the end it is impossible to say how human activity is a vital activity except by affirming that it is one mode of adaptation among others, or in short, by leading it back to the minimal sense of life understood as action aimed at conservation. Inversely, we achieve a positive qualification of the human only by appealing to intelligence, that is, by turning away from life. The affirmation of the human’s belonging to the vital current ultimately teaches us nothing about the human, which, on the contrary, can be understood in its specificity only through what in the human escapes from the style of life. We thereby find ourselves in the position of classical metaphysical humanism, which has humanity begin where mere life leaves off, or which in other words defines

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humanity by a supplement or a difference in relation to life. The particularity of the Bergsonian position obviously lies in the fact that the human is ontologically situated on the side of life (which is to say, the human is a living being, a fact that no one has ever contested) but the specificity of its existence is not thinkable on the basis of the specificity of life: thought must surrender to the evidence of a fact, the fact of a turn taken by evolution. Let us note however that whatever its results, there is perhaps something to be retained from this approach: the idea that the specificity of the human must be thought on the basis of a loss or a privation within life. Perhaps it is not zoology but anthropology that must be characterized as privative. However, the suggestion stops there. In fact, it would still be necessary to position a meaning of life that allows one to give an account of the privation and to describe the specificity of the human on the basis of this privation. Whatever the case, in spite of the fact that he takes life as his starting point, Bergson does not truly manage to overcome the idea, coming out of metaphysical humanism, of a humanity (of intelligence) that, as such, is foreign to life: nothing, in life, heralds anything like the human. This is largely confirmed by the end of the second chapter of Creative Evolution. Through a kind of ruse of life, life’s alienation into fabricating intelligence is at the same time the achievement of life as consciousness. Life is nothing other than ‘consciousness thrown into matter,’ and the human is distinguished by the fact that it is in him that life is turned toward the matter that it traverses rather than toward itself. This means that life is exteriorized in relation to itself. Yet this exteriorization, through its very radicality and due to the efficacy of the instruments it is given, is precisely what allows for the sudden appearance of consciousness: [ J]ust because it adapts itself thereby to objects from without, it succeeds in moving among them and in evading the barriers they oppose to it, thus opening itself to an unlimited field. Once freed, moreover, it can turn inwards on itself, and awaken the potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it. From this point of view, not only does consciousness appear as the motive principle of evolution, but also, among conscious beings themselves, the human comes to occupy a privileged place. Between him and the animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but of kind.10 Here we are very close to the classical idea that thinks the difference of the human as a difference of nature based on the presence of consciousness. Life in itself is indeed conscious but it only truly becomes conscious in the human, through the mediation of intelligence. In truth, in the consciousness to which life is assimilated on account of its temporal and creative dimension there is not much of a precursor to human consciousness, understood not only as a hesitation but also in its unveiling dimension.

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Consciousness is indeed prepared in life, or as life, but this rupture that the human represents is nevertheless still necessary so that a truly conscious existence advents. It is therefore not surprising that Bergson ultimately goes back to the finalist perspective he resolutely opposed at the outset, most notably the Aristotelian version. Consciousness was able to liberate itself only from the side of intelligence ‘by a sudden leap from the animal to the human. So that, in the last analysis, the human might be considered the reason for the existence of the entire organization of our planet.’11 This finality indeed remains hypothetical and it is only a figure of speech. It is significant nevertheless that this figure of speech imposes itself rather than another and seems to correspond to the best of the human’s situation. Following the examples provided by traditional conceptions of life, Bergson finishes by instituting a teleological and hierarchical relation between humans and other living beings. Life takes place in a conscious existence that nothing truly heralds from the side of the vital impulse. It is only within the human that knowledge makes its appearance in being, thanks to the emergence of intelligence. We would of course be able to retort that instinct knows its object, but then we would be forgetting that this ‘knowledge’ is confused with an action and it misses the dimension of objectivation and of reflection that is constitutive of a genuine knowledge. We will also argue that human consciousness is integrally premeditated in life, since life is consciousness. Yet, in truth, the identification proceeds rather from a passage to the limit thanks to the discovery of the essentially temporal character of life: insofar as it is evolution and creation, life exists in the manner of a consciousness. However, this consciousness is the consciousness of nothing. It excludes any relation to an exteriority, since matter is just as foreign to it as space is to duration. Therefore, to say that life exists in the manner of a consciousness is simply to affirm that evolution is creative. But within this evolution, consciousness as such emerges only with the intelligence whose advent was, by definition, unforeseeable. In short, by assimilating life to consciousness, Bergson does not uncover a meaning of being for life that explains the sudden appearance of consciousness; he instead dissolves life into a consciousness that is nothing more than a force or a positive, spiritual principle. It follows that, when it is a matter of thinking the effectivity of life within living beings, which is quite simply the vital activity, Bergson falls back onto this general conception of life that only sees an activity of conservation and reproduction in it. In short, he falls back into an ontology of death. The only difference between these similar perspectives is that this individual life, which is nothing other than survival, is at the service of the pursuit of the vital impulse, or of the development of the mind in matter. It is clear that by adopting this restrictive conception of life as conservation and reproduction instead of interrogating the proper meaning of its being, Bergson prohibits himself from giving an account of the difference of human existence as well as of the consciousness that characterizes that existence.

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Contrary to what we had believed at the start, Bergson’s philosophy does not meet the conditions of an authentic phenomenology of life. Despite appearances, Bergson does not approach life on its own terms but instead approaches it solely from the viewpoint of the metaphysical division between mind and matter, coming out of the distinction between duration and space. This is the reason why he never ultimately gets to the question of the meaning of life’s being. Yet we have seen that this meaning of being is submitted to a condition: it must integrate both the dimension of belonging and the dimension of phenomenalization. The phenomenology of life must allow consciousness to be founded in the heart of the vital activity as an activity within exteriority. In sum, the phenomenology of life must make a transitive living appear within being-in-life.

Notes This text is an English translation of a chapter from Renaud Barbaras, Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 141–55; the earlier chapters examine and critically discuss the values of different phenomenological approaches to the question of life, concluding that they all inadequately pose and think through the question. The translation of this chapter was undertaken by John Nale and Leonard Lawlor, and reviewed by Robert Vallier, who is preparing a translation of the book to be published by Indiana University Press in 2011. 1. Bergson says, ‘Life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism. It is as if the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the form germ endeavoring to continue itself in a new germ. The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible progress, on which each visible organism rides during the short interval of time given it to live’ (Bergson’s emphasis). Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, Michael Kolkman and Michael Vaughan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17–18; in French as L’evolution Creatrice, Œuvres, Édition du Centennaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 517. All page references to Bergson’s work are to the English translation followed by the pagination of Œuvres. 2. Creative Evolution, 18/517. 3. Merleau-Ponty is therefore right to say that if perception outlines the zone of our possible actions, ‘the action of which Bergson is thinking is always vital action, that by which the organism maintains itself in existence.’ M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1983), 163; in French as La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 176. 4. V. Jankélévitch, Bergson (Paris: Félix Alcan), 235–7 5. For example: ‘This contrast between life in general, and the forms in which it is manifested, has everywhere the same character. It might be said that life tends towards the utmost possible action, but that each species prefers to contribute the slightest possible effort. Regarded in what constitutes its true essence, namely, as a transition from species to species, life is a continually growing action. But each of the species, through which life passes, aims only at its own convenience.

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

Bergson and Phenomenology It goes for that which demands the least labour. Absorbed in the form it is about to take, it falls into a partial sleep, in which it ignores almost all of the rest of life; it fashions itself so as to take the greatest possible advantage of its immediate environment with the least possible trouble. Accordingly, the act by which life goes forward to the creation of a new form, and act by which this form is shaped, are two different and often antagonistic movements’ (Creative Evolution, 83–84/604). F. Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). The ontology of death, which can approach life only on the basis of the laws of matter, is in this sense an avatar of what we might call the metaphysics of nothingness, for which matter is foreign to life because life is thought on the basis of the principle of sufficient reason. That is, it is thought as what could not be, and thus as what is only on the condition that it is fully determinate and incapable of creation. See G. Lebrun, La patience du concept (Paris: NRF, Gallimard, 1972), 240: ‘Without doubt Bergson recognizes that true mobility – duration – is a difference with itself; but this recognition grants movement the substantial dignity from which Hegel had congratulated Zeno for freeing movement. Bergsonism is thus less a criticism of metaphysics than a displacement of its topic: Being has only changed its contents.’ Compare Worms, Bergson et les deux sens de la vie, 174: ‘It is in effect a matter of first understanding that life, as evolution, overcomes our intelligence and must be thought as creation; but it is also a matter of not only thinking this creation, but understanding how this creation has been able to lead to this intelligence that is opposed to life at the same time that it is the effect of life!’ Creative Evolution, 117–18/650. Ibid., 119/652.

Index absolute, the 9, 72–3, 177, 184, 208, 214, 223–5, 232, 247–8 absolute knowledge 26–7, 75–6, 123, 238 see also consciousness; God abstraction 30, 46, 68 affection 209–10, 214, 216–17 affectivity 202–5, 208–9 Agamben, Georgio 86, 88–9 aging 166, 168 alterity 58, 176, 178, 190, 210, 239 see also Other, the analysis 26–7, 31–2, 37, 123–4, 162, 179, 242 Ansell-Pearson, Keith 6, 19n7, 20n22, 150 Aristotle 4, 52, 60–1, 66, 182, 224, 233 art 78, 83–5, 104, 109–10, 195, 249 associationism 50, 110–11 attitude 87, 145, 196, 228–9 natural 10, 27, 104–7, 113 phenomenological 107, 113 symbolic 82 theoretical 225, 227

Sartre’s reading of 1, 4, 134–5, 142–6, 247–8 Bergsonism 2–3, 5–6, 19n7, 25, 29, 92–3, 131, 142–6, 157, 161–2, 167, 176, 245, 265 Bernet, Rudolf 20n23 biology 214–15, 238 blindness, psychic 4, 36 body 4, 45, 72, 83–4, 89, 149, 151, 153, 155–7, 167–8, 202, 204, 206, 211–13, 226, 235–6, 253–5, 263–4 lived-body 4, 155, 168, 213 brain 45–8, 55–6, 71, 92, 136, 144 and choice 45, 48, 154, 158, 253 and indetermination 4, 45, 48, 149, 155–6, 160 and lesion(s) 131, 136 and telephonic exchange 45, 156

Bachelard, Gaston 162, 202 bad faith 140, 143 Badiou, Alain 86, 93 Barbaras, Renaud 21n46, 115n1, 171n17, 172n25 Bergson, Henri Deleuze’s reading of 5–6, 9, 12, 25–6, 36, 79–80, 131, 179, 184, 203, 216 Derrida’s reading of 25–6 Foucault’s reading of 25–6 Heidegger’s reading of 3–4, 125 Henry’s reading of 201–2, 207–12, 215, 217 Husserl’s reading of 3, 115n2 Merleau-Ponty’s reading of 1, 4, 9, 11, 18, 70, 72–4, 160–3, 167, 236, 247–8, 271n3 Natorp’s reading of 122–4 Russell’s reading of 3–5, 93

Casey, Edward 19n16, 213, 219n27 change 8, 27, 66, 132n29, 159, 165, 214, 252, 256 cinematography 64, 80, 88, 148, 151, 154–6, 161, 169 comedy 79–80, 84–6, 93 comedian 82, 95 see also laughter cone, image of 34, 47, 49–50, 56 see also memory; time consciousness 4, 25, 29–31, 34–5, 42–59, 73–5, 102, 106, 118–24, 126–30, 208–9, 233–4, 237–8, 266 absolute 102, 114, 129 constituting 102, 114, 128–9 and freedom 108–11 immediate data of 25–6, 69, 75, 101, 108, 129, 203, 208, 247–8 impersonal 4, 120, 180–4, 191, 212; see also intentionality and life 245–57, 258–63, 269–70; see also time of the past 46–7, 73, 156–9, 165, 168, 170

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consciousness – continued stream of 112, 118–19, 123–4, 139–46 subjective 26, 122–3, 126, 225, 238, 248 transcendental 102, 114 contemplation 33, 46, 193, 248 coping, tacit 8–10 creativity 51, 54, 160, 184, 186–7, 214 Critchley, Simon 83, 94, de Biran, Pierre Maine 201–2, 211–13 death 44, 60, 259–61, 266–7, 270 ontology of 259–60, 266–7, 270 Deleuze, Gilles 5–6, 9, 12, 25–6, 36, 80, 93, 95, 131, 159, 179, 184, 203, 216–17 Derrida, Jacques 25–6, 186 Descartes, René 63, 66, 201, 259 Cartesian(ism) 9, 130, 215, 225, 232, 243 Dilthey, Whilhelm 125, 223, 242 dogmatism 66 dream(s) 47, 143, 164, 241 drive 42–62, 152–3, 249 dualism 3, 63, 67, 134–5, 153, 259 duration 28–37, 50–1, 54–5, 65–9, 73–4, 101–3, 110–13, 119, 124, 142–4, 149–52, 161–4, 168–70, 178–80, 195, 231–4, 248–56, 261–2, 265–6 durée 3–4, 25, 32–3, 176, 183, 211, 217 Eastwood, Clint 87 Einstein, Albert 228 ego 104, 105, 112, 113, 114, 120, 183, 191, 196, 210, 239, 261 elan vital 35, 44, 50–61 difference from elan of life 53–5, 61 emotion 126, 203, 208, 212 epoché 8–9, 85, 104–5, 107, 207, 226 eyes 149, 151, 155, 166, 169, 170, 264 ethics 175–6, 186–90, 194–6 evidence 226, 234, 240, 247 adequate 105 apodictic 105, 113–14, 209, 225, 238

evolution 7–9, 51–2 creative 43, 53–5, 58, 60, 148–55, 159, 162–4, 166, 179–80, 184–8, 267–70 in Darwinism 51–2, 234–5 existential 72, 137, 139, 146, 199n33 faith, bad 140, 143 Fechner, Gustav 217 finitude 58–9, 61, 81–2, 86, 92–5, 160, 164–5 flesh 210–11 forgetting 44, 50, 168–9 self-forgetting 196 Foucault, Michel 25–6, 92 freedom 102, 105–6, 109–15, 142, 145, 184–5, 195–6, 233, 247–8, 265 Freud, Sigmund 43, 49, 60, 81, 137 future 29, 31, 111, 135, 145, 157, 165, 261 Galileo, Galilei 65, 225, 227–8 generosity 186–7, 194–6 givenness 104–7, 210, 226 God 58–9, 66–7, 91, 176, 180, 182–94, 214, 232 habit(uality) 9–10, 26, 81–3, 107, 113, 169–70, 235 Hegel, G.W.F. 182, 272n8 Heidegger, Martin 3–4, 11, 25, 33, 52, 81, 94, 125, 128, 130–1, 174–5, 178–82, 202, 215–16, 224–5 Henry, Michel 201–17 Hobbes, Thomas 79 Hume, David 74, 139, 141 Husserl, Edmund 3, 8–9, 11, 25–6, 28, 33, 70, 101–8, 111–14, 124, 127–8, 130, 202–3, 223–8, 237–9, 241–3, 246–7, 249 idealism 69, 72, 237 image 29–31, 35, 45, 49, 82, 167–8, 207–8, 211, 213, 263 immanence 25–6, 34–5, 72, 153, 178–9, 184, 186, 192, 207, 213, 217, 255 plane of absolute 26 impersonality 4, 120, 180–4, 186, 191, 212

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individuality 45, 113, 121, 145, 213, 242 Ingarden, Roman 3, 128 instinct 3, 10, 51–2, 69, 76, 238–40, 254–5, 267, 270 intelligence 9–10, 26, 28, 43, 51–2, 55–6, 58–61, 67–9, 77, 108, 155, 158–9, 163, 168–9, 226, 228, 230–6, 254–5, 267–70 intentionality 11, 16, 130, 157, 168, 202, 209, 211–12, 263 inter-subjectivity 129, 239 intuition 10, 25–9, 31–7, 43, 52, 56, 68–9, 72–4, 101–9, 111–12, 115, 123, 125–6, 128, 148–9, 167–70, 187–8, 190–2, 207–11, 223, 233, 249–50, 255–6 eidetic 28, 35, 114, 240 and sympathy 20, 27, 36–7, 109, 178–9, 208–9

as a function of being 174, 177–80, 183 and God 58–9, 190 mechanistic theory of 50, 150, 159 and method of intuition 52 and mysticism 189, 193 and negativity 164 and nothingness 44, 58 and novelty 44 ontological difference 53 practical imperatives of 47, 158, 160, 163, 169 and temporality 157–60, 163–5, 170, 176, 215, 225, 231, 234–5, 240–1 and the virtual 53, 56, 166 see also elan vital life-world (Lebenswelt) 129, 223–7, 237–43 Locke, John 139 love 93, 190, 192–4

James, William 141, 191 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 162–4, 172n19, 172n24, 173n34, 192, 195–6, 199n33, 264 Jonas, Hans 259 joy 162, 192–3, 195

materialism 4, 182, 184 matter 34, 66, 68–9, 109, 163, 166, 217, 225, 230–3, 239, 259 and life 9–10, 43–4, 53–5, 57–60, 255, 262–70 and vision 148–57, 160, 162, 167 McLuhan, Marshall 85 memory 82, 89, 135–7, 140–1, 144–5, 168, 170, 212–13 and brain 46, 136, 144 duration as 26, 30–1, 34, 248, 251 frozen-memory 30 habit-memory 46–7, 81–2, 144 and image 34, 263 image of cone 34, 47, 49–50, 56 motor-memory 212–13, 263 and the new 34–5, 52, 111 pure 34, 47–50, 56 and recognition 26, 46, 81, 86, 138–9, 212, 263 and recollection 46–7, 82, 144–5, 213 and subjective consciousness 45, 46, 48, 235, 251, 255, 263 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 4, 9, 11–12, 18, 41n35, 70–6, 101, 161–3, 167, 172n31, 173n46, 202, 211–13, 235–7, 247–8, 271n3 monism 54, 57, 60, 184–5

Kant, Immanuel 3, 26, 67–8, 123, 254 see also neo-Kantian Kierkegaard, Søren 87 language 81–2, 89–90, 120–2, 124–6, 158, 203, 217, 253–4 laughter 78–96, 143 see also comedy Lawlor, Leonard 131, 172n31, 271 Leibniz, Gottfried 51, 67–8 Levinas, Emmanuel 102–3, 111, 174–96, 202 life 34, 43, 44, 69, 78–9, 82–4, 106, 119–22, 125, 128, 131, 201, 213–15, 217, 223–4, 243 and art 169 consciousness, spirit 42, 44, 50, 245–56 continuous memory of 34 creative force of 43, 50–2, 54, 56–8, 149–54, 225, 237 and drive 42–60

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morality 172, 181–2, 186–8, 191, 208, 256 Mullarkey, John 163, 176–77 multiplicity 25–6, 30–1, 35–7, 73, 118, 126, 192, 251–2, 262, 265 see also unity mysticism 124, 178, 184, 186–96, 242, 248, 252 Natorp, Paul 122–5 nature/Nature 3, 64–5, 68, 94–5, 134, 224–42, 253, 255 negativity 42–4, 49–50, 59, 152, 161–62, 164 negation 59, 259–61, 266, 268 neo-Kantian 69, 122–3 nervous system 4, 55, 156, 258 Nietzsche, Friedrich 54, 57, 60, 249 nothingness 58–9, 161–2, 164, 188–9, 266 obligation 191, 193 ontology 180–2, 214–16, 259–60, 266–7, 270 Other, the 177 see also alterity pantheism 181, 183–6, 193, 194, 196 past 29, 32–3, 35, 46–50, 73, 135–45, 156–9, 164–5, 168, 170, 235, 239–41, 251, 261–2 past in general 35, 82–3, 89 pure past 47–50, 53–4, 56, 82 perception 71–2, 74, 81, 83, 109, 126, 156, 235, 237, 254, 258 attentive 43, 211 concrete 44, 46–7, 49–50, 107, 155 and memory 46–7 minute 34 phenomenological 104–6 pure 4, 45–6, 144, 155, 263 visual 153–5 personality 32, 110–11, 241 phenomenological reduction 101–2, 104–7, 111–12, 114, 124, 128, 161 Bergsonian equivalent 8–9, 161, 169 see also epoché physics 65, 217, 225, 229, 232, 234, 238 psycho-physics 203–7, 217

pity 36, 86 Plato 3, 26, 173n33, 180 Plessner, Helmuth 89 positivism 3, 57, 63, 74, 161–2 power 35, 37, 61, 183 creative 44, 49, 52, 57, 59, 231–2, 267 powerlessness 37, 48 pragmatism, pragmatist 18n5, 266 process philosophy 18n5, 137 Proust, Marcel 137, 141, 145 psychoanalysis 43 psychology 8, 31, 50, 212, 217, Ravaisson, Félix 168, 213 realism 74, 247 recognition see memory recollection see memory reflection 32, 70, 104–6, 123, 126–8, 139–40, 187, 243 religion 182, 186–8, 191 Ruyer, Raymond 265 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 130, 134–46, 247–8 Scheler, Max 71 Schopenhauer, Arthur 43, 53–5, 57, 60–1 science 8, 51, 52, 64–75, 89, 214, 217, 223, 228–31, 237–8, 241–3 ancient 65–7, 224 modern 65–8, 225, 228, 231, 237–8 phenomenology as 6, 114, 209 scientism 8, 76 self 28, 31, 33, 60, 113, 121–2, 126, 128, 130, 143, 145, 183, 191–3, 196, 207–9, 214–15, 236, 238–41, 250 deep-seated 121, 126 self-consciousness 142 self-intuition 26, 33, 106 society 6, 79, 126, 143, 191–2 Socrates 10 space 8, 27, 29, 34, 37, 73, 118–22, 129, 204–6, 228, 230, 232–4, 248, 250–1, 253–5, 262, 263, 265, 270–1 Spencer, Herbert 7 Spinoza, Benedict de 12, 43, 67–8, 185–6, 192, 196, 217 spiritualism 5, 51

Index subjectivity 26, 71, 102, 106–7, 113–14, 122–3, 127–30, 225, 236, 240, 247, 263 symbols 27–8, 30, 211 sympathy 10–11, 27, 33, 36–7, 69, 79, 178–9, 208–9 see also intuition synthesis 27, 251 temporality 4, 73, 128, 137, 140–3, 156, 159, 169, 183 see also time theology 124, 180, 188 thinking 37, 92, 125, 178, 187, 210–11 time 4, 29, 33, 65–6, 82–3, 90–1, 118–19, 122–9, 134–46, 158–60, 164–8, 203, 215, 217, 234–5, 250–3 Bergson and 7–8, 33, 73, 118–19, 124, 128–9, 142–6, 158–60 164–8, 178–9, 195, 203, 215, 217, 234–5, 250–3 consciousness of internal 134 Husserl and 33, 124, 127–9 Sartre and 134–48 see also durée

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tragedy 94 transcendence 72, 73, 178–9, 181–3, 184–5, 185–9, 191–2, 196, 205–7, 209, 217, 267 see also absolute, the; God unconscious, the 34–5, 49, 157, 168–9, 201, 251 unity 30–1, 44, 53, 56–8, 73, 123, 233, 240, 245–6, 254–6, 265 see also multiplicity utility 10, 148–9, 153, 155, 157–8, 160, 169 virtual, the 32, 37, 43–50, 53–60, 149–50, 155–6, 159, 163, 165–6, 212, 216–17, 232, 241 vision 34, 148–9, 152–5, 160–2, 167–70 vitalism 5, 153, 201, 248 will 54–5, 60 Whitehead, Alfred North 18n5, 137, 141 Wood, James 79, 80 Zeno

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