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November 20 - December 1, 2024
He held as a principle that “there is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language,” and that philosophers should “not write for a restricted circle of initiates; they write for humanity in general.”
People talk about progress. But every new advance is accompanied by the invention of a new kind of noise: trains, cars, aeroplanes.… I would have loved to live in the countryside.”
Words, Bergson said, are mere labels we affix to things. We use concepts to tidy up the overwhelming diversity of reality into neat boxes. But in doing so, we often lose sight of what is special and particular about the different aspects of reality that our words describe, including our own inner lives.
The final words of Bergson’s 1932 book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion could have been written today: “Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining whether they want to go on living or not.”
Therefore, some of the most important thinkers in the Western philosophical canon built their philosophy around the idea that in order to know the world it is better to focus on eternal, unchanging ideas than on the fluctuations and accidents of everyday life.
This idea that there is more reality in stability than in change, more truth in eternity than in the passing of time, became one of the most deeply engrained biases of Western thinking.
“For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself.”
permanence is the illusion, and change is the most fundamental reality of all.
Bergson circled back to one fundamental idea: change is not something that happens on top of a fixed reality; change is reality.
Bergson conceded that the impulse towards specialisation was a natural one, prompted by the “miserable discovery that the universe is greater than our mind; that life is short, education time-consuming and the truth infinite.”
Feelings of disenchantment were rippling through the industrialised world. What the positivists had hailed as progress was increasingly met with suspicion as many mourned what they saw as a loss of purpose, wonder, and mystery in a mechanically driven world.
In his PhD thesis, Bergson would distinguish between two selves: a superficial self “that conforms to social conventions and the pressures of language,”14 and a more profound self, one accessed only at those rare times when the “ego lets itself live.”
It is precisely this experience of the passing of time, the perceived difference in its quality, that is erased in the way science treats time.23 And it was this qualitative temporality that Bergson called durée.
For Bergson, time is not an abstraction. It cannot be reduced to a symbolic notation. It is a real force acting in the world.
To measure or even talk about time and movement, science has to borrow from space, a category external to time, thus confusing time with space, movement with immobility. In realising that philosophy, if conducted correctly, is in a position to capture the true, mobile essence of reality, Bergson relegated science to a useful but general and disconnected form of knowledge.
Listening to music, he found, was one of the human experiences that best illuminated real time, or as he called it, durée.
The very language we use tricks us into conceiving our existence as a string of separate events, with a clear-cut “before” and “after.” It is hard to resist separating moments in our lived experience from one another and treating them as though each has a clear beginning and ending:
Durée is indivisible; but this does not imply that past and present are simultaneous. On the contrary, durée is essentially succession: only it is a succession that does not imply a “before” and an “after” external to each other. You can get a clear sense of this by listening to a melody, letting yourself be lulled by the sound and leaving aside all visual images which, in spite of yourself, distort your auditory perception—visual images of musical notes written on paper, visual images of musical instruments being played and stopping, and so on.
If… we remain absolutely within ourselves, we feel that something expands without any divisions, just like the progression of a melody. Our inner life, from beginning to end, is thus an indivisible continuity, and this is what I call our durée. It is succession, but succession without numerical and distinct multiplicity, that is, pure succession.
Picture yourself in an art gallery. After a few moments of perusing the paintings, one of them stops you in your tracks and you remain transfixed for a while. Although you are barely moving a muscle, an important transformation is taking place within you. As time passes, your appreciation of the painting expands and takes on new, indescribable forms. The longer you stare at the painting the more emotional textures, idea associations, and recollections swell up inside of you, layered on top of your initial impression. Each moment that passes is slightly different from the one immediately
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Durée is the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances.… This survival of the past makes it impossible for a consciousness to pass through the same state twice.… As such, our personality constantly sprouts, grows, and matures. Each of its moments is something new added onto what came before.
Our personality is like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulating experience as it grows. Time that passes is not lost but rather it is gained. We carry our whole history with us as we advance.
We have formed the habit of solidifying our inner life into rigidly defined concepts. This is a useful and unavoidable way of making sense of the uninterrupted flux of the multiple interpenetrating qualitative states that constitute our consciousness. How else would we communicate our internal states than by using words that make them accessible to others? But in conforming too heavily to the practical requirements of social life and communication, we miss the symphony for the drums. We lose sight of our real, more profound self.
But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the optimism of those who were extending the reach of science outside of its habitual domains collided with a growing sense of unease. Some had started to perceive rickety foundations beneath the apparently unassailable façade of scientific progress. What if some questions did not allow for mathematically precise answers? What if not everything could be predicted? What if some aspects of reality were not meant to be quantified at all?
The French novelist and literary critic Paul Bourget spoke of a “bankruptcy of hope” caused by science’s empty promise “to unriddle the problems of which revelation offered a solution” that was nothing less than “a war against the spirit.”
According to Bergson, psychophysics belonged to a long tradition of theories that inserted space into the nonspatial and quantity into the unquantifiable. Fechner’s thinking perfectly embodied the confusion that Bergson had started seeing everywhere between temporal and spatialised realities.
In our everyday life, when we talk about the intensity of our feelings, sensations, and emotions, we use the language of physical measurement and quantity. We speak of immense joy, or we say that the pain in our arm is greater than the pain in our leg. Whether we realise it or not, we treat our internal experiences as quantifiable, as though they can be measured against one another. This is spatial thinking.
Guerlac writes, inner states do not have the same boundaries as external things, but rather “overflow into one another, interpenetrate, even as they succeed one another.”
Bergson argued that there is an essential difference, a difference in kind, a complete incommensurability between quantity (something’s measurability) and quality (how something feels to us).
Prediction relies on repetition and the “projection of past information forward,” but in consciousness no two moments are ever the same: “The same cause never presents itself twice.”
Most of the time, we live outside ourselves; we only perceive the colourless phantom of ourselves.… We live for the external world rather than for ourselves. We speak rather than think; we are acted upon rather than acting ourselves. To act freely is to retake possession of oneself.… It is to place oneself back in pure duration.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson made a radical move by arguing that we do not perceive in order to know, but that we perceive in order to act.
In other words, external objects exist outside of what I perceive of them, and at the same time I actively participate in producing my perception of them. When we perceive the external world, we select the contours of the objects that best serve our needs.
The separation between nerves and brain allows for action to take place in a “zone of indetermination,” with often unpredictable outcomes.8 The more differentiated the nervous system, the greater the zone of indetermination, and the greater the scope of the organism’s choice, creativity, and freedom.
Most of the time, we are turned towards practical things, towards action, and so what Bergson calls our “attention to life” is at its highest. In everyday life, we rely on our brain to get rid of the background noise of our own consciousness and to only facilitate the passage of the memories that are useful to our actions:
the past preserves itself automatically. It likely follows us around, at each instant, in its entirety. All that we have sensed, thought, and desired since our earliest childhood is there, leaning over the present that is about to join up with it, pressing against the door of consciousness that would prefer to leave it outside.
There are situations in which our “attention to life” relaxes itself, for instance, when we are daydreaming. In these cases, memories that have been buried more deeply and are not directly relevant to our everyday actions might resurface. When we are asleep, our attention to life relaxes completely. Awake, we are in a state of “uninterrupted tension” in which perceptions, with some effort, attach themselves to mostly relevant memory images. But when we are asleep, any memory taken from the entirety of our past can attach itself to any external stimulus that happens to make its way into our
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“She helped me understand the unspoken law, which I have observed so often in my life, that the suffering, the pain or the brokenness of a loving woman, of a loving daughter, enter as ingredients in the creative work of a man.”
In 1530, following the advice of fellow humanists, King François I, a patron of the arts (it was he who acquired the Mona Lisa), founded the Collège Royal, which later became the Collège de France. It was a place where knowledge could be dispensed freely with none of the constraints of a university. To this day the Collège grants no degrees and has no entry or registration requirements. The dozens of weekly lectures delivered in the sciences and the humanities are open to the public.
The authors lamented a teaching that had become obsessed with methods drawn from the physical sciences, that replaced creativity with dry exegesis, bibliographical study, and philology, and conflated the natural and moral sciences,
I have no system in philosophy. I have no simple set of rules from which I could evolve my philosophy. In philosophy there are different problems and each problem must be solved by special methods. The methods employed in solving one problem will not do when you attempt to solve another problem. I cannot always deduce from answers I have already given the answers to other problems. There must be a new answer to every new question.
This tension inside him, between the shy Bergson and the ambitious Bergson, would earn him the Nobel Prize but cost him his health.
In his 1907 book Creative Evolution, Bergson described life as an ever-changing, creative, and spontaneous movement.
Using metaphorical language, Bergson described life as an “effort,” a constant striving to break free from material constraints through ever more sophisticated evolutionary innovations. Most often, however, “this effort is cut short,” Bergson wrote.10 Throughout the history of life, organisms that have failed to adapt to environmental challenges have become extinct. At both the individual and the species levels, survival has depended on organisms’ ability to demonstrate “a certain elasticity”—that is, enough adaptability to find ways around material obstacles.
Social life, wrote Bergson, requires a “delicate adjustment of wills” and constant “reciprocal adaptation” between the members of the group. Society therefore needs its members to display “the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability,” and society itself must guard against “a certain rigidity of body, mind and character.”
In general, we laugh at “something mechanical encrusted on the living.”
for Bergson, vanity was one of the most laughable of human traits. In the same way that a lack of awareness of one’s material surroundings can result in (often comical) physical injuries, an unhealthy obsession with oneself denotes a lack of awareness of others, which can in turn damage society.
The original purpose of laughter is to correct these socially “inconvenient” attitudes gently but firmly. In this sense, according to Bergson, laughter is punitive: “Society holds suspended over each individual member, if not the threat of correction, at all events the prospect of a snubbing, which although it is slight, is none the less dreaded. Such must be the function of laughter.”
At an age when ideas enter the mind in the form of enthusiasms, his dynamic notions of qualitative duration, of heterogeneous continuity, of multiple and mobile states of consciousness… gave us new reasons for exaltation, and very noble ones at that.…
“Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed.”2 It is a veil of generalisations, necessities, and ready-made ideas that we need in order to get things done. This veil is “dense and opaque for the common herd,—thin almost transparent for the artist and the poet”:
