Henri Bergson

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Henri-Louis Bergson
Bergson-Nobel-photo.jpg

Bergson in 1927
Born 18 October 1859
Paris, France
Died 4 January 1941 (aged 81)
Paris, France
Awards Nobel Prize in Literature (1927)
Era 20th century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Continental philosophy
French Spiritualism
Main interests Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language,
philosophy of mathematics
Notable ideas Duration, intuition, élan vital, open society
Influences
Influenced

Wikiquote Quotes

  • I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
    • An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), translated by T. E. Hulme. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912, p. 44.
  • The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
    • Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter I, translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 14. (Bergson italicized this sentence.)
  • All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.
    • Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271
  • The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.
  • Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
    • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), Chapter III.
  • La société ouverte est celle qui embrasserait en principe l’humanité entière.
    • The open society is one that is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.
    • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), Chapter IV.
  • Toute notre civilisation est aphrodisiaque
    • Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
    • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), Chapter IV. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, p. 302.
  • Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods (la fonction essentielle de l’universe, qui est une machine à faire des dieux).
    • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), concluding sentences. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, p. 317.
    • Often just the last part of the last sentence is quoted, in the form: “The universe is a machine for making gods.”
  • Je dirais qu’il faut agir en homme de pensée et penser en homme d’action.
    • I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.
    • Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris, 1937.
    • Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as “Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.“
  • Intuition is a method of feeling one’s way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.
    • Quoted in Georgia O’Keeffe, 1887-1986 : Flowers in the Desert (2000) by Britta Benke, p. 28

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Henri Bergson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Henri-Louis Bergson (French: [bɛʁksɔn]; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.

He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”.[2] In 1930, France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.

Philosophy

Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality (as expressed in, say, finalism). He argued that we must allow space for free will to unfold in an autonomous and unpredictable fashion. While Kant saw free will as something beyond time and space and therefore ultimately a matter of faith, Bergson attempted to redefine the modern conceptions of time, space, and causality in his concept of Duration, making room for a tangible marriage of free will with causality. Seeing Duration as a mobile and fluid concept, Bergson argued that one cannot understand Duration through “immobile” analysis, but only through experiential, first-person intuition.

Creativity

Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.[21]

Criticizing Kant‘s theory of knowledge exposed in the Critique of Pure Reason and his conception of truth — which he compares to Plato‘s conception of truth as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order of thought) — Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and intuition, and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought’s possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure duration. Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes a frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of concepts, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things. For instance, he says in The Creative Evolution (chap.III) that thought in itself would never have thought it possible for the human being to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from walking. For swimming to be possible, man must throw itself in water, and only then can thought consider swimming as possible. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of evolution used by man to survive. If metaphysics is to avoid “false problems”, it should not extend to pure speculation the abstract concepts of intelligence, but rather use intuition.[22]

The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer‘s evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression “survival of the fittest“). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer’s mechanistic philosophy.[23]

Henri Bergson’s Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life) can be seen as a response to the mechanistic philosophies of his time,[24] but also to the failure of finalism.[8] Indeed, he considers that finalism is unable to explain “duration” and the “continuous creation of life”, as it only explains life as the progressive development of an initially determined program — a notion which remains, for example, in the expression of a “genetic program”;[8] such a description of finalism was adopted, for instance, by Leibniz.[8]

Bergson regarded planning beforehand for the future as impossible, since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one could always explain a historical event retrospectively by its conditions of possibility. But, in the introduction to the Pensée et le mouvant, he explains that such an event created retrospectively its causes, taking the example of the creation of a work of art, for example a symphony: it was impossible to predict what would be the symphony of the future, as if the musician knew what symphony would be the best for his time, he would realize it. In his words, the effect created its cause. Henceforth, he attempted to find a third way between mechanism and finalism, through the notion of an original impulse, the élan vital, in life, which dispersed itself through evolution into contradictory tendencies (he substituted to the finalist notion of a teleological aim a notion of an original impulse).

Duration

See also: Duration (philosophy)

The foundation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy.[24] Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and consciousness in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.[25]

Kant believed that free will could only exist outside of time and space, that we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.[25] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.[26] In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration.[27]

Intuition

See also: Intuition (Bergson)

Duration, as defined by Bergson, then is a unity and a multiplicity, but, being mobile, it cannot be grasped through immobile concepts. Bergson hence argues that one can grasp it only through his method of intuition. Two images from Henri Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics may help one to grasp Bergson’s term intuition, the limits of concepts, and the ability of intuition to grasp the absolute. The first image is that of a city. Analysis, or the creation of concepts through the divisions of points of view, can only ever give us a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never give us the dimensional value of walking in the city itself. One can only grasp this through intuition; likewise the experience of reading a line of Homer. One may translate the line and pile commentary upon commentary, but this commentary too shall never grasp the simple dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its originality itself. The method of intuition, then, is that of getting back to the things themselves.[28]

Élan vital

See also: Élan vital

Élan vital ranks as Bergson’s third essential concept, after Duration and intuition. An idea with the goal of explaining evolution, the Élan vital first appeared in 1907’s Creative Evolution. Bergson portrays Élan vital as a kind of vital impetus which explains evolution in a less mechanical and more lively manner, as well as accounting for the creative impulse of mankind. This concept led several authors to characterize Bergson as a supporter of vitalism—although he criticized it explicitly in The Creative Evolution, as he thought, against Driesch and Johannes Reinke (whom he cited) that there is neither “purely internal finality nor clearly cut individuality in nature”:[29]

Hereby lies the stumbling block of vitalist theories (…) It is thus in vain that one pretends to reduce finality to the individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it encompasses the whole of life in one indivisible embrace.[30]

Laughter

In the idiosyncratic[need quotation to verify] Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Bergson develops a theory not of laughter itself, but of how laughter can be provoked (see his objection to Delage, published in the 23rd edition of the essay).[8] He describes the process of laughter (refusing to give a conceptual definition which would not approach its reality[8]), used in particular by comics and clowns, as the caricature of the mechanism nature of humans (habits, automatic acts, etc.), one of the two tendencies of life (degradation towards inert matter and mechanism, and continual creation of new forms).[8] However, Bergson warns us that laughter’s criterion of what should be laughed at is not a moral criterion and that it can in fact cause serious damage to a person’s self-esteem.[31] This essay made his opposition to the Cartesian theory of the animal-machine obvious.[8]

Reception

From his first publications, Bergson’s philosophy attracted strong criticism from different quarters, although he also became very popular and durably influenced French philosophy. The mathematician Édouard Le Roy became Bergson’s main disciple. Nonetheless, Suzanne Guerlac has argued that his institutional position at the Collège de France, delivering lectures to a general audience, may have retarded the systematic reception of his thought: “Bergson achieved enormous popular success in this context, often due to the emotional appeal of his ideas. But he did not have the equivalent of graduate students who might have become rigorous interpreters of his thought. Thus Bergson’s philosophy–in principle open and nonsystematic–was easily borrowed piecemeal and altered by enthusiastic admirers”.[32]

Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged Bergson’s influence on his process philosophy in his 1929 Process and Reality. However, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead’s collaborator on Principia Mathematica, was not so entranced by Bergson’s philosophy. Although acknowledging Bergson’s literary skills, Russell saw Bergson’s arguments at best as persuasive or emotive speculation but not at all as any worthwhile example of sound reasoning or philosophical insight.[33] The epistemologist Gaston Bachelard explicitly alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938 book The Formation of the Scientific Mind. Others influenced by Bergson include Vladimir Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on him in 1931,[34] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Gilles Deleuze who wrote Le bergsonisme in 1966.[35] Bergson also influenced the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas,[36] although Merleau-Ponty had reservations about Bergson’s philosophy.[37] The Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis studied under Bergson in Paris and his writing and philosophy were profoundly influenced as a result.[38]

Many writers of the early 20th century criticized Bergson’s intuitionism, indeterminism, psychologism and interpretation of the scientific impulse. Those who explicitly criticized Bergson, either in published articles or in letters, included Bertrand Russell[39] George Santayana,[40] G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger,[41] Julien Benda,[42] T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis,[43] Paul Valéry, André Gide, Jean Piaget,[44] Marxist philosophers Theodor W. Adorno,[45] Lucio Colletti,[46] Jean-Paul Sartre,[47] and Georges Politzer,[48] as well as Maurice Blanchot,[49] American philosophers such as Irving Babbitt, Arthur Lovejoy, Josiah Royce, The New Realists (Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt, and William Pepperell Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake, Roy W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Roger Fry (see his letters), Julian Huxley (in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis) and Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table).[citation needed]

The Vatican accused Bergson of pantheism, while free-thinkers[who?] (who formed a large part of the teachers and professors of the French Third Republic) accused him of spiritualism. Still others have characterized his philosophy as a materialist emergentism — Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly claimed Bergson as their forebear.[8] According to Henri Hude (1990, II, p. 142), who supports himself on the whole of Bergson’s works as well as his now published courses, accusing him of pantheism is a “counter-sense”. Hude alleges that a mystical experience, roughly outlined at the end of Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, is the inner principle of his whole philosophy, although this has been contested by other commentators.

Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated him with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, “a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his utmost to muddle all distinctions.” William James’s students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson. See, for example, Horace Kallen’s book on the subject James and Bergson. As Jean Wahl described the “ultimate disagreement” between James and Bergson in his System of Metaphysics: “for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action…must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth”[page needed]. Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will overestimate Bergson’s influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for “the spirit of the age”.

As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson’s philosophy, above all his view of the New and the indeterminate:

the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time,” he writes in his book on Hermann Lotze, “does not practically affect the method of investigation;…the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. This is no great renunciation; for that consummation of science…is by no one really expected.

According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, claims which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson’s understanding of number in chapter two of Time and Free-will. According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor (“extended images”) to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. “Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general”, writes Russell (see The Philosophy of Bergson[page needed] and A History of Western Philosophy[page needed]).

Furthermore, writers such as Russell, Wittgenstein, and James saw élan vital as a projection of subjectivity onto the world. The external world, according to certain[which?] theories of probability, provides less and less indeterminism with further refinement of scientific method. In brief, one should not confuse the moral, psychological, subjective demand for the new, the underivable and the unexplained with the universe.[citation needed] One’s subjective sense of duration differs the (non-human) world, a difference which, according to the ancient materialist Lucretius should not be characterized as either one of becoming or being, creation or destruction (De Rerum Natura).

Suzanne Guerlac has argued that the more recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Bergson is related to the growing influence of his follower Deleuze within continental philosophy: “If there is a return to Bergson today, then, it is largely due to Gilles Deleuze whose own work has etched the contours of the New Bergson. This is not only because Deleuze wrote about Bergson; it is also because Deleuze’s own thought is deeply engaged with that of his predecessor, even when Bergson is not explicitly mentioned.”[50] Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard agree with Guerlac that “the recent revitalization of Bergsonism […] is almost entirely due to Deleuze.” They explain that Bergson’s concept of multiplicity “is at the very heart of Deleuze’s thought, and duration is the model for all of Deleuze’s ‘becomings.’ The other aspect that attracted Deleuze, which is indeed connected to the first, is Bergson’s criticism of the concept of negation in Creative Evolution. […] Thus Bergson became a resource in the criticism of the Hegelian dialectic, the negative.”[51]

Bibliography

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