(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life: Duration, Intuition and Organism in Bergson
Þessi ritgerð var skrifuð fyrir áfangann “Bergsonism” við Warwick-háskóla vorið 2020. Hún fjallar um og skýrir tvö meginhugtök franska heimspekingsins Henri Bergson; nefnilega hugtökin um líðandina (la durée/duration) og innsæið (intuition). Eins og segir snemma í ritgerðinni var Bergson ákaflega frægur á sínum tíma—svo frægur, raunar, að hann (kann að hafa) olli(ð) fyrsta umferðaröngþveiti í sögu Broadway-breiðstrætis þegar hann hélt fyrirlestur í New York árið 1913 á vegum Columbia-háskóla. Í ritgerðinni er leitast við að skýra þessi mikilvægu hugtök hugsuðarins með stöðugri tilvísan í hugmyndir Bergson um lífið, þróunina, og lífveruna, sem eru að mati höfundar lykilatriði þegar kemur að því að skilja heildrænt yfirbragð heimspekilega verkefnisins sem Bergson tók sér fyrir hendur: endurlífgun frumspekinnar. Líðandin, eitt frumlegasta hugtak Bergson, er ný sýn á það hvað tíminn er—líðandin er hugtak um óviðsnúanlegt flæði tímans sem ekki er hægt að brjóta niður í einingar á við sekúndur, mínútur, klukkustundir eða ár. Innsæið, aftur á móti, sem er beintengt hugmyndinni um líðandina, er heimspekileg aðferðafræði sem gerir tilraun til þess að þekkja viðfang hugsunarinnar að innanverðu frá í stað þess að líta á það að utanverðu frá mörgum mismunandi og afstæðum sjónarhornum. Það er margt sem læra má af Bergson, og vonandi getur þessi litla ritgerð verið einhverjum stoð og stytta í því flókna verkefni sem það getur verið að lesa og skilja heimspekinginn. Vert er að minnast á það að í neðanmálsgreinum mínum er að finna margar skýringar sem ekki komust inn í megintextann. Þær er að finna næst-neðst á síðunni, rétt fyrir ofan heimildaskrá.
Ljósmyndin í haus heitir Photo 51 og er fyrsta ljósmyndin sem mannkynið tók af DNA-sameind, tekin árið 1952. Ljósmyndina tók Raymond Gosling, framhaldsnemi undir umsjón Rosalind Franklin. Myndin þjónaði sem tilvísunarpunktur þegar Watson og Crick þróuðu kenningar sínar um formgerð sameindarinnar síðar meir. Miklar deilur hafa átt sér stað um þátt Franklin í þessu öllu saman, en víst er að hún verðskuldar meiri athygli fyrir þátt sinn í þessum rannsóknum og uppgötvunum en henni hefur verið veitt hingað til.
1. Introduction
French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is an intriguing figure in the history of philosophy. Although he enjoyed enormous celebrity while he lived, his philosophy became passé shortly after his death. Bergson was a marvelous writer, employing a lucid and illustrative style to captivate his readership even at his most abstruse. His argumentative style is one imbued with an appealing modesty, concealing the fact that the content of his arguments can often be radical and even groundbreaking. For this reason, his novelty and originality can easily be misinterpreted, even as one strives to read his work carefully and charitably. As one immerses oneself in his writings, one finds that there are two essential ideas which must be kept in mind while reading and interpreting Bergson: the idea of duration and the method of intuition. Without a clear idea of what they entail and how they intertwine, it becomes much too easy to lose one’s way in following his arguments, which could lead the reader to resort to oversimplification and misconstrual.[1]
My aim in this essay will thus be to grasp the twofold essence of Bergson’s thought—firstly through his method of intuition and secondly through his concept of duration. I will argue that in order to reach a holistic understanding of the two, it is imperative to ground them in a philosophical conception of organism and life. I will aim to show that duration is most clearly and intuitively grasped within the domain of the living organism: in short, it is only when life is at stake that duration first becomes meaningful, and we must strive to understand duration intuitively through a mindful attention to the movements and tendencies of life.
The essay has a quadripartite structure. The second part following these introductory remarks will be expository. I will endeavour to reconstruct Bergson’s arguments regarding intuition and duration in my own terms. In the third part, I will argue that duration is best understood alongside and through the concepts of life and organism. I will contend that the very passage of time itself is made possible only through the retentive (or mnemonic) patterns of creative repetition found in the process of life: it is the appearance of the recursively intelligible formal sequence as such which marks the origin of duration. Fourthly, I conclude by evaluating Bergson’s philosophical project as a whole in terms of a positive conception of incompleteness.
2. Duration and Intuition—In Sync With the Rhythm of Life
To begin with, we will consider Bergson’s essential arguments. We cannot hope to understand Bergson if we do not understand the core of his philosophy: his twofold doctrine, simultaneously metaphysical and epistemological, of duration and intuition. From his earliest writings onward, Bergson argues forcefully and convincingly that the nature of time has been thoroughly and consistently misunderstood throughout the history of philosophy, a misunderstanding which leads to the posing of erroneous and aporistic problems—false problems, so to speak.[2] According to Bergson, when time is properly understood as duration, it cannot be thought of as a homogeneous, quantitative multiplicity, and it is precisely this misconstrual which has caused a great deal of unnecessary confusion and fruitless metaphysical dispute throughout the centuries. Furthermore, Bergson argues that philosophy must abandon the relativistic epistemological approach which properly belongs to the domain of science in order to be able to grasp duration as such. In its stead, he proposes a method of his own, which he dubs intuitive, a sympathetic method which seeks to instal itself within the thing considered and understand it philosophically as a unified and absolute whole.
2.1 — The Inseparability of Knowledge from Life
First, let us discuss his epistemological method of intuition. Bergson’s argument on this front, as with almost any other stance he is inclined to take, is informed by a crucial evaluation of the ways in which knowledge is a function of living organisms, limited by and given significance through the mode of life which characterizes any given organism. To begin with, Bergson argues in tandem with the Darwinian theory that life is a product of a grand process of becoming we call evolution. It is a selective process in and through which particular forms of life appear and disappear—lifeforms which are each more or less capable of surviving in a given environment. Evolution thus means adaptation and change over time—change which results from the orientation of these organic bodies towards action (as opposed to disinterested speculation).[3] Were they not oriented in such a manner, they would die and fail to beget offspring. Action, then, is the mainstay of the organic body.[4] The fact that organic bodies have evolved in this manner means that they will always have a minimal and maximal range of perception. Any given species’ perceptive range has been specifically adjusted through the partly contingent selective process of evolution, a process spanning eons, to accommodate only that sensory data which is most vital to the preservation and continuation of the species. This means that any given species has a range of experience which is always limited in a certain manner. The experience of an organism is thus structurally limited in the same way that horse-blinders keep an equine animal on track by limiting its field of vision and narrowing its focus. That which the organism can possibly experience is necessarily bound up with its way or mode of life—and Bergson himself says as much when he asserts that a “theory of knowledge and theory of life seem [...] inseparable.”[5]
Now, evolution has brought forth the development of a particularly complex set of neurological systems in some species, systems which we call cognitive. Like any selectively produced organ, cognitive systems are oriented towards action. The range of capability of these neurological systems varies from species to species, and like any other biological organ they operate by provide the organism with options which they can act upon. The most useful feature of human cognition, for example, is the capability to artificially break an otherwise immediate and heterogeneous flux of experience down into mediated, discrete and homogeneous chunks.[6] Human intelligence then utilizes these chunks to pre-simulate future states of affairs by a certain broad and historically fluctuating combinatorial ruleset commonly referred to as “science,” branching off into subsections which have been called “logic,” “mathematics,” “physics,” and so on. Because of how the cognitive organ constantly orients their attention towards action, humans are wont to believe in an evolutionarily practical metaphysical narrative which understands reality to be composed of a myriad discrete and homogeneous units—units of space, time, matter, etc.—when in actuality this is a practical simplification. Bergson would claim that any discreta is always an abstraction made from the primary unity of experience, where borders between one thing and another are blurred and unclear, with one thing melting into another in a never-ending process of becoming, in a real movement which can only be broken down into discrete parts by a kind of violence.[7] One of Bergson’s most innovative ideas must be his critical assessment of human cognition: it is indeed pragmatically enabling, but its very enabling is itself a limitation of sorts. Just as horse-blinders enable the horse to be driven effectively, intellectual cognition has enabled humans to perform amazing scientific feats—but in each case, the enabling factor does so by limiting the organism’s access to great chunks of experience.[8]
This does not mean, of course, that the sciences of mathematics, physics and logic deal in falsehoods. They are true within their own spheres—but they do not have any rightful claim to possess the absolute whole of reality.[9] Their domain, in which they rightfully rule, is that of practical relativity—they are true only within this abstract, theoretical world in which human intellectual cognition resides insofar as it is an instrumental organ oriented towards action. Nor does this argument imply, Bergson would insist, that human experience must be limited to the relative and phenomenal, as a Kantian might perhaps conclude. Bergson is adamant: experience can be broadened, and philosophy is capable of achieving absolute knowledge.[10] This is where we would like to explicitly introduce the methodological conception which he termed intuition.
To this end, Bergson argues that knowledge can be approached in two ways: on the one hand, through the aforementioned analytical approach which breaks up the original unity of experience, and on the other, through an intuitive and sympathetic approach which instals itself immediately within the thing to be known and recognizes it as a whole. These approaches can be thought of as relatively from without (analytical) and absolutely from within (intuitive). The first approach renders the objects of knowledge divisible and makes of them quantitative multiplicities. It takes place in an ideal space of abstraction where time and space are composed of discrete, homogeneous and entirely fungible units—and it proceeds as if the objects of experience could be ordered with total exactitude onto a multidimensional grid-like schema. While the positivistic analytical approach ignores the rhythmically beating inner heart of durational time which the object to be known is caught up in, Bergson’s method of intuition seeks instead to grasp the absolute unity of the object from within—by embracing its unique confluence of becoming, its passage through time—its duration.[11]
In order to contrast the two, we might take Bach’s Goldberg Variations as an example. One might purchase a copy of the sheet notation in order to learn it by heart, obsess over the woodgrain and string-tension of the clavichord set to play the piece—one might even have a complete understanding of the wavelengths each note consists of as it is played. All this serves for naught, however, if one seeks to understand the piece itself, which one must simply listen to and appreciate as an irreversible and lived temporal event: as each note flows into the next it creates a melodic harmony which sweeps its listener off their feet and into a whirling movement of feeling and sensation.[12] We may make similar observations when it comes to fiction. As an aspiring novelist, my main struggle with the craft has precisely to do with getting to the heart of the characters I create. I can delineate a plethora of factoids about their lives; they were born in a particular year, they were raised in a specific location, they had such-and-such an upbringing, and so on—but if I cannot reach to the core of how the character experiences its own rhythm of life, it will remain an empty, forgettable and soulless husk which moves no-one, inspires nobody and is ultimately unbelievable and uninteresting.[13]
In each example, the true content must be approached from within the artwork itself as it unfolds temporally—the particular sequential, ordered succession of notes and their confluence with regard to Bach, the development of the character as she acts upon her world and the world acts upon her. And precisely here lies the charm of great art—it moves in its own way and inspires movement within onlookers, movements of which we otherwise would not have been capable.
However, as should be clear by now, Bergson’s epistemological innovation already presupposes a novel idea of temporal experience—one that does not make a homogeneous, quantitative multiplicity of time.[14] Intuition, then, would never have been possible as an approach without the extra-analytical experience of a nonquantitative time—without the primary experience of pure duration, there would be no intuitive method.
2.2 — Philosophical Duration and Physical Time
The concept of duration is deceptively simple. From Bergson’s earliest philosophical publications onwards, it has formed the core of his philosophy. Simply put, duration is the passage of time, an irreversible one-way flux of qualitative experience, irreducible to a quantitatively discrete combinatorial multiplicity. We briefly made mention of the quantitative multiplicity above, a multiplicity composed of discrete, homogeneous and fungible units identical in kind yet differing in degree—which just means that each quantum is identical to any other qua quantum, while their quantity (or number, if measured with exactitude) may differ. We are taught to constantly measure time in this way from an early age onwards—one of my first memories of kindergarten, for example, consists of learning to tell the time along with learning to tie my shoelaces—a fact that speaks volumes about its practical value.
Bergson argues that this idea of time as measurement—in essence, a counting of simultaneities—is indeed very useful, but that it does not exhaustively capture the entire experience of time. Indeed, it leaves out the most essential aspect of time: the lived experience of passage or movement in and through time. His concept of duration remedies this lack—duration is time conceived of as a qualitative multiplicity, a multiplicity which is, in a sense, identical in degree yet differing in kind. That is, a qualitative multiplicity is singular (it is an unbroken flow) and yet constantly differs from itself (or it is change itself). The qualitative multiplicity is betrayed as soon as one speaks of it—it does not allow for logical description, it overflows any discrete combinatorial structure. Quality must be felt—it cannot be described or counted. The qualitative multiplicity is a nonspatial and singular flux of differential multitude, a steady process of alteration from itself—if one can even rightly speak of an original identity from which it differs in the first place.
Duration consists of a fleeting present which is at all times passing into the past—each moment differs from the next if only for the fact that every passing moment becomes knowledge of the past and contributes a novel element to every moment of the unwritten future. The simple fact that we remember having done something before makes of an otherwise identical experience a completely new one. Even though I have often brewed myself a cup of Earl Grey before, I remember having done so before—which in and by itself qualitatively transforms and colors my experience of brewing myself a cup in the present. The essence of duration is that it passes by in an irreversible direction, albeit at variable speeds as it would seem, but pass it will in any case.[15]
Bergson himself best illustrates the nature of the qualitative flux of change that is duration early on in his Time and Free Will:
“Below homogeneous duration, which is the extensive symbol of true duration, a close psychological analysis distinguishes a duration whose heterogeneous moments permeate one another; below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a qualitative multiplicity; below the self with well-defined states, a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole.“[16]
Perhaps we should supplement this quote with an example of our own. Let us imagine ourselves to feel at first a serene calm which is then followed by intense anger for some infuriating reason or other; getting cut off in traffic, for example. What has taken place? On the most immediate level of description, our conscious state has undergone a seemingly binary transformation: that which previously was the case is no longer the case. Thinking it through—or rather, mindfully or intuitively feeling it through—we discover that what we have experienced was not quite as clear-cut a transformation as the rupture between the two words “calm” and “anger” might indicate. That which may have followed our calm state could have been an emotion of surprise, which is then followed in turn by disappointment, which could then lead into a feeling of vulnerability, which might turn into a feeling of anger, which then leads into a new feeling, and so on and so forth. What seemed to be a simple disjointed transition has turned out to be more fine-grained than we initially expected. The further we “zoom in” (to use a spatial expression) the better we can see how the multiplicity in question is, in fact, a singular flow of qualitative difference.
Our experience—which we designate with discrete words such as “anger,” “calm,” “surprise” etc.—always exceeds the combinatorial verbal unit with which we identify it. In reality, what we feel is never simply a single, discrete emotion—we undergo a steady flux of change which is always to some extent violently dismembered upon the slaughter-bench of language each time we attempt to verbalize it. We might attempt to characterize this flux by attributing to it an infinite range of degree—but even so, as soon as we do, we have implicitly quantified it: in fact, there is no actual quantity to be spoken of in an unbroken flow of pure change in which each abstracted discreta actually turns out to form a constitutive part of any other discreta. There is unity without there being any one—multiplicity without there being several.
In a sense, then, duration is time conceived of as a singular multiplicity which contains no absolutely defined units which are truly discrete or fungible. Although we may pry this multiplicity apart and form from it various sections, we cannot do so without changing the metric principle at each instance of measurement—any given abstracted “moment” or “instant” of experience is different in kind from any other, and there is no adequate common standard of measurement by which we can relate the two.[17] Pure duration is flux itself—a flux which we violently break apart, forming the artificial units of which and with which we speak. Perhaps pure duration can be described as the experience of a simple awareness of the ephemeral nature of being as change; a pure being-in-passing-through, a oneness with becoming itself. Here we return, albeit in a roundabout way, to the method of intuition, a method which emphasizes a knowing “from within,” an absolute kind of knowledge which might in fact be called a “oneness”.
3. The Intuition of Duration and the Time of Life
Now that we have explored duration and intuition unto themselves, it might be helpful to sum up by briefly thinking them through together as an integral experience. To experience pure duration is to have an intuitive and mindful awareness of the simple quality that is the irreversible passage of time. As the present passes, unfolding itself into the past and actualizing a hitherto virtual future, a burgeoning memory of the past grows ever larger, permeating our experience of the future and informing our actions in the present. An inescapable feature of duration is its essentially con-sequential nature: to intuit duration means to put oneself into or to follow along with a particular and concrete order of events. This intuition of duration is really nothing more than awareness of time as it passes by—an awareness of the concrete being of becoming, of change.
Now, this is all well and good, but why should we pay any attention at all to this purely speculative awareness of durational passage? Are we not, as Bergson argued, fundamentally oriented towards action in a manner which renders this “intuitive essence of time” practically meaningless? Well, in a sense, we are. Duration by itself is practically void of meaning, but only because πρᾶξις needs not concern itself with pure duration. However, even if the intuition of duration seems practically useless, it might very well be philosophically true—and this is precisely the point Bergson wishes to make.[18] The intuitive approach, presupposing and disclosing the idea of duration, was always supposed to be a revitalization of metaphysics—the very discipline Kant sought to transform into an exact science. Instead of seeking to rein in an overly ambitious metaphysics as Kant endeavoured to do, Bergson aims to rein in the unchecked metaphysical enthusiasm of the exact sciences and their philosophical advocates: Bergson’s philosophy as a whole is a critical response to the dogmatically positivistic strains of materialism, mechanism and finalism which pervade the scientific community even to this day. This is why Bergson keeps a sustained dialogue with the science of his time: he seeks to join metaphysics and science in an interdisciplinary union of sorts which would benefit each tremendously.
Because Bergson’s work was so multifaceted, it was and still is capable of providing fresh and illuminating perspectives on scientific and metaphysical quandaries—which in turn provokes new questions pertaining to the scope and scale of his thought. Should duration, for example, be thought of as cosmic or ontological—or should we restrict ourselves to holding it to be merely psychological in nature? We cannot hope to take a meaningful stance to either of these possibilities within the range of this short essay—so we shall resort to a suspension of judgment for the time being, for modesty’s sake. However, for purposes of illustration and comprehension, we may provisionally allow ourselves a middle-ground stance of sorts. As I will attempt to show, duration and intuition are best understood when contextualized within the domain of life: we would do well to think duration in terms of the organic, since duration is most clearly understood in terms of the sequential processes of life. Let us consider this line of argument.
To begin with, we should ask ourselves a crucial question: what is life—what is an organism? We cannot hope to give any definitive answer to this seemingly perennial mystery—but for our present purposes, we can approximately delineate only a few of those central aspects of living organisms which pertain most to our discussion. First and foremost, a living organism is capable of enduring. We may say that it endures in a few different senses. It does this in the first place actively maintaining the structural integrity of its physical body, a process of maintenance made possible by energy accumulation which offsets the energy expenditure necessary for preservation. Moreover, an organism is capable of prolonging the process of life—albeit another life than its own—by way of reproduction. The organism, then, is capable not only of preserving itself qua process, but the life it originally sprang from as well. This is chiefly what distinguishes an organized system from an unorganized one. Obviously, these few functions are far from exhaustive. Even so, we would do well to consider them carefully.
Let us begin by considering the process of reproduction. Reproduction is a complex sequential operation which, essentially, recreates a particular material structure (such as the structure of an organism in general) through a given formal set of instructions. These instructions are already partially (in the case of meiotic or sexual reproduction) or completely (in cases of mitosis and binary fission) encoded within the material structure to be replicated. The structure of a DNA molecule serves as a prime example of a simple form which such a formal arrangement can take. Physico-chemically speaking, the replication of a DNA molecule is not mechanically different from, say, a non-organic chemical reaction such as the one between iron and sulfur as iron sulfide is produced—but in terms of its informational content, there is a definite, qualitative difference. DNA, after all, is (in)formed in such a manner that it is capable of doubling itself, a doubling which is structurally essential to it. It may be described as a formally recursive procedure which replicates itself by referring to itself: DNA repeats itself. Any repetition presupposes an influence of a mnemonic force of sorts which preserves what is to be repeated—it requires that time should pass in a certain direction: in an irreversible arrow which begins from preservation and progresses on to replication.[19] Reproduction is a process of becoming during which we can say that the organism qua form of life en-dures even death. There is no temporal symmetry in living organisms—the course of life cannot be reversed without inducing death, it cannot even be thought in reverse without losing everything that is peculiar and essential to it. This means that duration, lived time, is literally “of the essence” for the organism—not a speculative time, a derivative product of a duration which has undergone a violent dismemberment and discretization by the cognitive faculties—but a confluence of irreversible directions or tendencies which, when taken together, constitute the flux of procedural genesis we call life.
We can similarly examine the process of maintenance by considering thermodynamics, by which we may differentiate between a given non-organic system and an organic one. We may well observe how each physical system inescapably tends towards an increase in entropy over time. Only one, however—the organic system—is capable of independently retarding this tendency by forming a closed-off unity or a singularity—its organicity acts as a membrane, preserving actionable energy and producing a localized negentropic effect which we may equate with life itself. It is only at the end of life, in death, that the negentropic effect or force dissipates and entropy finally takes the system for its own. Duration is the sequential and asymmetrical necessity by which an organism faces the world in its struggle for continuation—a direction of life or a tendency towards some things and away from other things. Actionable energy is lost in each passing moment, forcing the organism to circumspectively approach the world in a race against its innermost limit as its time runs out—a rhythm which can only endure for so long, a rhythm which comprises its living duration. Time is always running out in a constant flux of change and movement—or, to put it simply, time is this running out. The organism is one with this change and movement—it is alive in its directionality. This directionality or tendency is the common denominator of all life—does not the single-celled organism, without having any “Ψυχη” to speak of, experience its own lived time, its own duration, in the direction it chooses at each moment? Is life itself not this informational sequence—this order of operations?[20] Is not the very passage of time only first made possible in and alongside the organism? We cannot but suppose that inorganic matter must have moved, collided and interacted long before the advent of the organism and in a certain mechanically sequential order—which means that inorganic matter is without a doubt in time—in the abstracted sense of physical time, at the very least.
However, even if time as such definitely predates the organism, can we meaningfully say that time passed in the case of this inorganic matter? Our actual flux of life-time—the time that we as flows of information, matter and energy are forced through insofar as we are living organisms—this time is always presupposed in any artificial reverse-projection, one violently wrested from the irreversible passage of duration. That is, we can only reconstruct an abstract time predating life, because as organisms, we already rely upon the durational confluence of lived time—it is only by first paying attention to duration, the time of life, that we are capable of tearing it apart into discrete units. Any attempt, then, to think duration before the advent of the organism seems doomed to face serious problems—since it must rely upon the abstract physical time of physics in order to construct a coherent account of pre-biological duration.[21]
4. The In-completeness of the Given
We have seen how the concept of duration is intimately connected with a novel conception of life and evolution and a new vision of the organism—an understanding which may be neatly enfolded by the method of intuition. Bergson’s philosophy may have fallen into disfavour since his passing, although interest in it has undoubtedly been revitalized in the last fifty years or so. His concept of duration and his methodology of intuition, alongside his strong emphasis on the philosophical significance of the processes of organic life, will in all likelihood be indispensable for philosophy in coming times—we must learn to grasp the rhythm of life on earth in a sustainable and non-toxic manner. Even so, who can say how philosophy will develop in the future? Bergson emphatically argues that the given itself is radically incomplete from the relative point of view in a manner which does not allow for any actual foreknowledge of coming events.
The nature of duration is its passing into existence—it is a process of truly novel becoming. Duration is insusceptible to calculability due to the radical contingency of organic processes, contingency which renders each durational moment incommensurable with any other. Life is ever creating itself anew, forming new ways of being, evolving novel forms of organization in and through its formally recursive self-maintaining impetus which Bergson called the élan vital. The point is that while life en-dures, it is never finished, never complete. Is it not precisely this formal element of life which Bergson refers to in Matter and Memory as spirit? Is the information which life encodes and preserves in the form of memory not the spiritual component which imbues otherwise inert matter with vital organizational power?
In any case, philosophers would do well to take Bergson more seriously and read his texts more carefully—if only to recover the hopeful and positive demeanour which the concept of creative novelty entails: especially now, in times of environmental and economic crisis, does the value of such thought become apparent.
Footnotes
[1] On this, see Bergson’s letter to Harald Höffding in Henri Bergson, Key Writings. Mélanges translated by Melissa McMahon. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey. New York, NY: Continuum, 2002. p. 367.
[2] Cf. “The Possible and The Real,” reproduced in Key Writings, p. 226.
[3] It might as well be noted here that Bergson’s opposition to mechanistic theories of evolution hinge on this critical distinction: change does not happen to the organisms—on the contrary, the organisms themselves are the evolutionary change. Evolution takes place within (in the conditions of negentropic autonomy created by the organism as a whole) as well as without (in the given material environs which the organism inhabitates).
[4] See Matter and Memory, reproduced in part from p. 88 onwards of Key Writings.
[5] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. Authorized Translation by Arthur Mitchell. Foreword by Irwin Edman. New York, NY: Random House, 1944. “Foreword” p. xxiii.
[6] Cf. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. Authorized Translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1991. P. 211.
[7] See Bergson’s essays “Introduction to Metaphysics” and “The Perception of Change” reproduced in Key Writings, p. 274 & p. 248 respectively.
[8] Cf. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 209-210.
[9] Cf. Camille Riquier, “The Intuitive Recommencement of Metaphysics.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Available at: <https://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/771>. Date accessed: 28 apr. 2020. P. 69.
[10] Cf. “Introduction to Metaphysics” in Key Writings, p. 277.
[11] Ibid., p. 275-276.
[12] Cf. Deleuze & Guattari’s observation in A Thousand Plateaus on how virtuoso Glenn Gould completely transforms the Goldberg Variations by modulating the speed at which the piece is played. See Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2005. P. 8.
[13] Bergson himself even makes an example of a character in a novel in his “Introduction to Metaphysics”.
[14] Again, see Bergson’s letter to Höffding: “The theory of intuition [...] only emerged for me quite a long time after the latter: it is derived from it and can only be understood through it.” Cf. Key Writings, p. 367. Compare also Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002. P. 13.
[15] The time of physics, on the other hand, has been made subject to deconstruction by analysis and reconstruction through synthesis, forming an unmoving and completely artificial block of space-time—in which the “arrow of time” ultimately becomes meaningless. Again, that is not to say that the time of physicists is an untrue or false time—it is merely to be understood to be an abstraction from the original time of life, the duration which is operated upon and abstracted from in constructing any physical theory.
[16] Bergson, Key Writings, p. 72.
[17] Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 40.
[18] To philosophize, of course, is to “reverse the normal directions of the working of thought.” Cf. “Introduction to Metaphysics” in Key Writings, p. 275.
[19] This repetition is not one of pre-given abstract identity. On the contrary, it is an irreversible process of concrete differentiation through time. Material factors play a crucially contingent role in the process of repetition—chaos inevitably seeps into the membrane of the self-enclosed, self-referring organism.
[20] A sequence, however, conjures up images of discrete actions, one following the other in a combinatorial succession. Bergson would caution us against this way of viewing duration, and rightly so: we can only rely upon language up to a certain extent in our descriptive venture. The point is not that an organism is a sequence of discrete actions—but rather that each “discrete action” necessarily presupposes an irreducible organic holism in which they find their meaning: in the durational rhythm that is the life of the organism itself, a duration which takes place completely unforeseeably.
[21] My interpretation here has become quite speculative and is bound to raise questions. As made clear in the course of the essay, I am attempting to perform an “organistic” reading here—and these apparent restrictions might be indicative of the shortcomings of such a reading, even if provisionally employed for illustrative purposes.
Bibliography
Cited works by Henri Bergson:
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Authorized Translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1991.
Bergson, Henri. Key Writings. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey. Mélanges translated by Melissa McMahon. New York, NY: Continuum, 2002.
Bergson, Henri. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T.E. Hulme. New York, NY: The Knickerbocker Press, 1912.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Authorized Translation by Arthur Mitchell. Foreword by Irwin Edman. New York, NY: Random House, 1944.
Other works cited or consulted:
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2005.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002.
Riquier, Camille. “The Intuitive Recommencement of Metaphysics.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Available at: <https://jffp.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/771>. Date accessed: 28 apr. 2020.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Henri Bergson. Translated by Nils F. Schott. Edited by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015.
