Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 20 - December 1, 2024
Art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.
Artists are able to isolate “brilliant” but constantly “dissolving” visions from a mass of information that we are usually obliged to dim to be able to function. In a sense, the artist is a distracted figure, one who is detached from the practical requirements of life. But in another sense the artist’s gift lies in the ability to perceive and express more than the ordinary person can.
the very purpose of language, concepts, and symbols is to stop durée in its tracks. Indeed, communication would be impossible if our definitions of words changed following the constant flow of durée. How would we make quantitative predictions about movement other than by immobilising it through symbols? How would we communicate our subjective, ever-evolving internal states if not by using words that delineate them and make them accessible to others?
Bergson believed that beyond the practical requirements of scientific knowledge, and of everyday life, a new kind of philosophy could lift the veil of concepts, generalisations, and abstractions sitting between us and reality and thereby reveal the continuous change at work in the universe and put us in direct contact with durée: “Beyond the ideas which are chilled and congealed in language, we must seek the warmth and mobility of life.”
I have to carry out a number of different types of research at the same time, with the near certainty that they must converge somewhere, but without yet being able to determine where or how.
There are, wrote Bergson, two ways of knowing an object: analysis and intuition.
Analysis, Bergson said, is condemned to be “eternally unsatisfied” in its quest to “embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn.”
Life requires us to drape a veil between ourselves and the unique particularities and colourations of our temporal experience.
[Bergson] frankly admits that we must stand on our heads, and seize that brief moment of unstable equilibrium to snatch a hasty glance at things as they really are.
intuition was an effort, a radical upheaval of deeply engrained habits of thought to break through intellectual moulds and come into direct contact with reality.
Since his philosophy could not dispense with concepts or language, Bergson had to find creative ways to use language to transcend the very limitations of language.
To critics like Russell and Le Dantec, Bergson’s poetic style was synonymous with ambiguity and lack of rigour. But for Bergson’s supporters, his appeal came from his capacity to use language to express what language usually hides and to undo the deeply entrenched habits of thought that had rendered philosophical debates sclerotic.
Bergson provided philosophical ammunition to those who wished to see expressions of subjectivity taken seriously at a time when objective methods were making their way into all areas of human experience.
“Such is the artifice of the cinematograph. And such is also the artifice of our knowledge. Rather than attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves on the outside of them in order to artificially recompose their becoming.”
But in reality, said Bergson, the human intellect is at its core a tool for making more tools.
It is in vain that we force the living being into one or another of our frameworks. All of the frameworks crack.
The paradox that Bergson had discovered in his study of the history of the mind was this: human intelligence has evolved in a way that makes it bad at understanding evolution.
Where intelligence adopts the contours of external matter, instinct follows the internal movements of life itself.
“There are things that the intellect alone is capable of looking for, but will never find by itself. Instinct alone could find these things, but it will never go looking for them.”
the implication of Bergson’s evolutionary theory of knowledge is that “instinct in contact with intelligence could expand into intuition.”
In the same way Bergson viewed instinct and intelligence as inseparable, he also viewed science and philosophy as destined for collaboration. He argued that if philosophy is understood as complementary to science rather than subjugated to it, philosophy might come to the aid of science by making science aware of its own tendencies and limits.
Creativity requires an act of will, something like an effort by which we draw “from ourselves not only all that was there, but more than was there.”
Instead of pushing for more freedom, life has often become stuck or has settled for the automatous ways of the matter it inhabits.
Bergson described in detail his key notion of durée. There are, said Bergson, “changes, but there is no thing that changes: change doesn’t need anything to stand upon. There are movements, but there aren’t necessarily invariable objects that move; mobility does not presuppose something that moves.”
According to Bergson, all societies tend towards closure; that is, in the words of the historians of philosophy Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott, “they limit moral, political, and religious concern, along with the rights and obligations that flow from it, to an exclusive group of people. This group can be as small as a family or tribe, or as large as a country or group of nations.”
But in its inward-looking attitude, in the “us vs. them” distinction it draws, the natural outcome of a closed society is war. One of Bergson’s aims in his new book was to determine how to escape the bind of our natural tendency towards closure.
In his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson wrote about the need to inject more spirit—meaning more humanity—into our technology, which is progressing too fast for our ethical concerns to keep up. He also wrote about our need to find ways to open up societies that close up on themselves and retreat into increasing authoritarianism and xenophobia. The thinker of durée still has a lot to say to the present moment.
