The Philosophy
Bergson’s philosophy can be understood through his three most famous, and quite readable, texts, Time and Freewill, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. The challenge when it comes to understanding Bergson comes from the complete re-thinking of the notions of time and wholes that is required. Once you understand what he means by duration, especially how it differs from the scientific notion of time; that is, time as we usually conceive it, and how wholes are the originary truth, more fundamental than the parts of which they are composed, everything starts to make sense.
Becoming / Continuity
Becoming and continuity are two closely related terms which describe what we might think of as a kind of metaphysical framework central to Bergson’s thought. We’ll take each of these terms one by one.
Reality is a becoming, a progressing, a continual change. All of these words are really synonyms that express the idea that the real is a process, rather than a fixed, static thing, or collection of things. The opposite term is being, which entails some kind of finality or completion. Being is, whereas becoming progresses. This is the complete antithesis of how we typically think about reality.
Think about your commute to work yesterday. This is an event that happened over a period of time, involving continual change throughout. How is this not a process? Well, it is a process, but when we think about it, we think about it as a thing; that is to say, as completed. When you describe your commute, you describe events that occurred over time, but there is no real becoming here because in the middle of your account, there is nothing to stop you from suddenly jumping to the end and telling me the last thing you did. This is only possible because the whole commute is already laid out before you, complete and finished. Could this be because you imagined an event from your past? Well, think about your commute tomorrow. Describe what you imagine will happen. You will find exactly the same thing. As with your yesterday’s commute, you can jump around in the timeline of tomorrow’s commute. Even though it hasn’t happened yet, when you think about it, you imagine it as a completed activity.
Is this not just an incidental consequence of how we think about events? Of course we talk about events as if they are already completed. If we didn’t, we couldn’t say, or think, anything! But that is precisely Bergson’s point. We literally can’t think or talk about genuine becoming. Becoming, progress, change, can only be lived. This is in no way meant to demean our usual (and only) mode of thinking (or talking) about reality; i.e. as being rather than becoming. Indeed, human life would be completely impossible without this capacity. Bergson is merely pointing out that this way of viewing reality is a secondary, derived one; great for human life, but not necessarily a metaphysically ‘true’ characterisation.
Reality is also continuous. As with becoming, this is the precise opposite of how we usually think of reality. What is real? The table in front of you and the chair you are sitting on? Or maybe the particles that make up the table and chair? No matter how you decide to slice it, we see reality as a collection of discrete, particular objects, separated from each other in space, whether we are talking about tables and chairs, electrons and quarks, or divisions at the Planck scale. For Bergson though, this way of talking about reality, while immeasurably useful, is not an accurate description of reality itself. It is another secondary, derived picture.
Imagine a book on a bookshelf. How is this not a legitimate thing? Well, we know a book is just a collection of pages. Perhaps the pages are the ‘real’ things? But those are made of molecules. Are the molecules ‘ultimate reality’? I’m sure you can see where this is going, and, in fact, it is a rabbit hole that goes down as far as we care to look. It is tempting to believe there must be an end somewhere. We must eventually get to some incredibly tiny particle which just can’t be further divided. But why should this be the case? Why must there be a tiny particle, presumably made of matter like the book of which it is a tiny part, that cannot be divided anymore? The only response to this is a negative one; i.e. to assert that an infinite regression is impossible. I will explain why this is wrong in a moment. First though, let’s return to our book.
So far, we’ve smashed the book to pieces looking for a fundamental, indivisible thing only to discover that inside, there are just more, smaller things. What about in the other direction? If a book is a clearly delineated thing, what about the stack of books of which our book is a part? How about the room where the stack of books are located? The library? The block? The city? And so on. Each of these ‘units’ are perfectly valid ways of cutting up the reality in which we find our book. This reveals a deep truth. Any discrete unit I carve out of reality is, while not completely arbitrary, arbitrary in the sense that I have chosen it to align with my current goals. If I am looking at a map, it’s no good breaking the world up into books. On the other hand, if I’m looking for a specific book, carving the world up by city blocks won’t help. Either way, reality itself is a continuous whole. The discrete elements are ways we divide this whole up to make it useful.
Now we see that we can easily resist the claim that the impossibility of an infinite regression proves there must be a fundamentally indivisible unit. Quite simply, if reality is continuous, an infinite regression is not impossible. Of course, this doesn’t mean reality is composed of an infinite number of little ‘pieces’ (that would be impossible); it means that reality precisely isn’t composed of any little pieces. The little pieces are abstractions. The real is the whole.
As with becoming, I am not suggesting here that books aren’t real; simply that they don’t reflect the deeper metaphysical truth that is reality itself. We absolutely have to carve this metaphysical reality up into useful units, or action, intervention in the world, would be impossible. But we aren’t trying to describe human life here. Instead, we’re looking for reality itself. And it turns out to be continuous in nature.
I have separated becoming and continuity above, but in truth they are more like two sides of the same coin. Becoming is really just continuity applied to time, in the same way that continuity is nothing more than becoming applied to matter.
Duration
The best way to understand duration is to see how it differs from the time of physics. Physics imagines time as a fourth dimension, an addition to the three dimensions of space. Just as we move through the spatial dimensions, we move through the temporal one, only instead of going from here to there, we go from past to future. But, if you look at this conception of time carefully, you will see that it is actually spatial; that is, there is no sense of enduring, the very thing that makes time what it is! The past is where we were, the present is where we are, the future is where we are going to be. The sense is of moving through a landscape. We call this landscape ‘time’ (instead of ‘space’) and label the points on it ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ (instead of ‘here’ and ‘there’), but beyond the semantics, these two models are the same. The scientific notion of time fails to capture the essence of time; duration.
So, what is duration? Well, it isn’t a ‘dimension’ somehow separate from us which we ‘move through’ in some inexplicable fashion. Nor do things happen ‘in time’ as if time were a box that could contain events, or a river that could carry events along in its current. Duration, simply put, is a succession (of events, states, actions, etc.) in which each individual item is prolonged into every other one and the whole is contracted into a single intuition. The two important words there are ‘prolonged’ and ‘contracted.’ ‘Prolonged’ refers to the way each item in the succession ‘penetrates’ the items around it. A good example here are the notes in a melody. If all you heard were separate, individual notes, there would be no melody. The melody only exists because each note ‘follows on’ from the one(s) before even as it ‘leans into’ the one(s) following. In this way, each note ‘prolongs’ itself into the next one, so that rather than a sequence of discrete sounds we hear a flowing melody somehow appearing over and above the notes of which it is composed. ‘Contraction’ describes the way a prolonged succession is apprehended all at once as a whole, grasped ‘at a glance,’ as it were. The melody, then, is only a melody if we can ‘get our heads around it’ so as to grasp, as a totality, the succession of notes, each of which has been prolonged into all of the others. Any temporal sequence; that is, any sequence that endures, has these characteristics of prolongation and contraction.
Bergson’s notion of duration is hard to come to grips with. One of its consequences is that objects in the natural world don’t endure. Time doesn’t touch my pen because a pen does not prolong a succession of states into each other and contract them into a single intuition. Every single event that happens to a pen occurs as an isolated, discrete event without any connection to other events. When light waves strike a pen, each vibration (or each photon if you prefer to think in quantum terms) has the same effect as every other one. When light waves enter your eye however, you don’t register each vibration separately. Rather, billions of these individual vibrations are ‘gathered’ up, ‘blended’ together, and grasped as… red. This is duration. Remember, it isn’t that the individual vibrations of the wave are happening ‘in time’; time (that is, duration) is the prolonging of these vibrations into each other and their contraction into a single intuition. Anything else gets you a spatialised version of time that doesn’t endure and therefore can’t properly be called time.
The Self
Bergson argues that we have two ‘kinds’ of self; the original or fundamental self, and the spatial self or ego. The original self is a succession of psychic states (thoughts, emotions, beliefs, etc.)… you guessed it, prolonged into each other and contracted into a whole. Four points to note here. First, the self isn’t a standalone entity that has thoughts, feels emotions, holds beliefs, etc. Such a being would be the (fictitious) Cartesian mind. Rather, the self is those thoughts, emotions, beliefs, etc., bound together into a whole. Second, this is exactly how we defined duration in the section above. Thus, the self endures, or even better, the self is duration, the duration of psychic states. Third, this self is constantly changing, ambiguous and inexpressible. As a totality in which each part affects every other part, every new state blends in with every other one to produce a whole that is in constant motion, a dynamic process that frustrates the efforts of language to reduce it to fixed, clear, simple definitions. In order to ‘capture’ one element of my personality, one would need to capture every element, and to capture every element one would need to be me. Finally, the original self is a whole that cannot be dissected. It is not a collection of disparate parts, each external to the other. This original self can’t be broken apart while at the same time retaining anything that pertained to the original whole. When we do try to understand the original self by breaking it up into its constituent parts, we get the ego.
The spatial self, or ego, is the original self that has been refracted into a million pieces and then reconstituted in space (i.e. not duration), or perhaps it would be more correct to say, reconstituted in a spatialised time. The ego is the dynamic, original self frozen, dissected, and articulated with concepts; a process turned into a thing. The advantage of the spatial self is that it is clear, precise, and stable. It gives us something to erect before us and study the way we study things in the natural world. We call this branch of science psychology. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t truly reflect who we are; in other words, it is impersonal. The price we pay for turning the self into something tractable is that, instead of my real self, what we end up with is a shallow imitation that resembles me but is missing all of the important pieces.
Freedom
Freedom is actually a natural consequence of duration, but before we articulate exactly how this is the case, let’s take a look at how we would have to be constructed in order for determinism to be true. Determinism depends on cause and effect; specifically, on the idea that prior events cause later events. A simple causal, deterministic chain would read A à B à C, where the arrows mean ‘causes.’ What is implied in such a chain is that each of the events, A, B, and C, are isolated and separate from each other. This must be the case or it makes no sense to speak of a cause-effect relation between them. Thus, for determinism to hold in the case of a human being; i.e. for my behaviour to be nothing more than the effects of external or internal causes, there are two options. Either 1) “I” am a crystallised, isolated entity (not unlike a Cartesian mind) assailed by psychic states (e.g. emotions and thoughts) that are not just separate from each other, but also separate from me, or 2) there is no “I,” and the totality of a person is nothing more than discrete psychic states causing a physical body to do things. Either picture only makes sense if we are dealing with the spatial self (as discussed above); i.e. the original self fragmented into pieces which are then projected side by side into space. If, on the other hand, “I” am a multiplicity of states/events that endure; i.e. in time; i.e. that interpenetrate each other and are only graspable as a whole, then causality can gain no traction because there are no isolated ‘parts’ to affect other ‘parts.’ It is not actually correct, then, to say, “I am free” because I am not a separate being that has the property of freedom; rather, I, as the enduring of a multiplicity of psychic states, am freedom itself.
The Brain
Modern neuroscience has saddled the brain with the responsibility for performing almost impossible feats, from creating unextended, mental models of the world around us to storing memories to producing some magical, shockingly ill-defined thing called consciousness. We have thus been sent scurrying into the depths of the brain looking for neural correlates of consciousness, neuronal patterns that represent reproductions of memories, and quantum tubules. Bergson is having none of this. The brain, he claims, is nothing more than a telephonic exchange, its only office being to allow or delay communication. Most importantly, it adds nothing to what it receives. Of course, the brain is central to perception, cognition, awareness, sensation, affectivity, and everything else that makes human lives worth living, but it doesn’t ‘produce’ unextended mental phenomena. We only believe it does because we have an erroneous understanding of mental phenomena. The brain is a physical organ, an almost unfathomably complex and astonishing organ, for sure, but a physical organ, and physical organs don’t produce non-physical phenomena.
The other controversial claim of Bergson’s regarding the brain is his denial that it stores memories. Memories are non-physical. How can a physical object, an object that is a part of the material world, literally ‘store’ the past? And even if it could perform such a feat, neuronal events always take place in the present. How is it that they appear as past to us? What distinguishes a neuronal firing pattern in the present in response to a perception and a neuronal firing pattern in the present recollecting a memory? No. The brain is a physical object, and no matter how amazing it is, it is not magic. Your next question will be, “Where are memories stored then?” A good question, and one we’ll come back to after we look at perception.
Pure Perception
This section will describe ‘pure perception’ which is an abstraction we never actually experience because all actual perception for Bergson, involves memory, but it is important to understand pure perception before we tackle its concrete, ‘impure’ cousin.
We usually imagine perception to be comprised of two steps; one physical and the other mental. Physical phenomena (wavelengths of light, the jostling of air molecules, etc.) impinge on sense organs creating electrical/chemical disturbances which pass down nerves to brain centres where an unextended, mental representation is somehow generated. As we’ve seen, since Bergson rejects the notion that a physical organ (the brain) can produce non-physical phenomena, this explanation of perception is a non-starter.
Imagine there is a red apple on the table in front of you. When you look at it, what do you see? Bergson says you see the red apple on the table in front of you, not a mental representation of an apple in some non-physical realm that exists ‘between’ you and the actual apple out there in the real world. You see the red apple itself. Despite the elegance and simplicity of this idea, we instinctively rebel against it because we know, or think we know, that the object is made of matter and the ‘image’ we perceive is mental. This is a prejudice ingrained in us from centuries of dualistic philosophical thought (which usually openly acknowledged its dualism) and (a few) centuries of scientific thought (which usually denies its dualism). Bergson is offering a completely different account of perception here; one which has the enormous advantage that it dispenses with the mysterious requirement that physical causes somehow produce non-physical effects.
It might help to think of a reflection in a mirror. The mirror doesn’t ‘create’ anything. We don’t get two separate things (a reflected image and a concrete object), the reflected image is the concrete object, quite literally. Note that the image reflected in the mirror does not exist ‘on’ the surface of the mirror, as if it were different from the concrete object. Light rays reflecting off the object simply take a circuitous path to your eye. You aren’t seeing a new object on the mirror, interposed between you and the real object, you are seeing the object precisely where it is. Exactly the same thing happens in perception. You don’t ‘see’ a reproduction of the original concrete object that may then be more or less similar to it. You see the object directly.
Pure perception, then, is essentially a passive faculty, in the sense that it doesn’t actively create, or add anything to, the physical stimuli it receives. We perceive the object as it is, not a facsimile of it. But it is also, what I call, transparent with respect to location. Where do our perceptions take place? You see an apple on the table in front of you, but where does the apple you see exist? Keeping the analogy of the mirror in mind, there is only one place it can be; on the table in front of you. Your perception, your mind, is quite literally out there in the object itself. There is nowhere else for it to be.
Pure Memory
Memory is essentially the past. This means it is time, and in Bergson, this means duration, which, for us, means we need to resist the temptation to think in confused notions of spatialised time. Remembering that duration (that is, time) is a succession of events prolonged into each other and contracted into a whole is therefore going to be crucial if we are going to understand memory. In fact, if you really understand duration, there is no need to explain memory because the two are one and the same thing. Colloquially, we might describe memory as the preservation (not ‘storage,’ a metaphor which immediately sends us back to a spatial, ‘container’ form of time) of events, and how could one better explain preservation than in the model of duration we have already outlined?
Recall our pen from the ‘Duration’ section above. Imagine a succession of photons striking it. What happens? Each photon is absorbed or reflected, each packet’s energy dispersed according to the laws of physics, and then… nothing. That’s it. Each individual event is a discrete, isolated whole unto itself. Even the pen itself is a discrete, isolated mass for each photon-striking event. The mass it is for photon-striking event C being quite separate and distinct from both the pen that bore photon-striking event B and the one that will bear photon-striking event D. Maybe the pen changes due to the energetic interactions in between events, but nothing actually preserves anything about a prior photon-striking event for a later photon-striking event. In other words, there is no lived continuity for the pen; that is to say, the pen doesn’t remember.
Contrast this with a human being. When an event happens to me, my birthday, for example, it doesn’t just occur once and then disappear. Rather, it gets taken up and integrated into all of the other events I have experienced, in such a way that it pervades the whole which I am, my original self. The important thing here is to be clear that the birthday party doesn’t get added on to a pile of discrete events, all separate from each other. As soon as it happens, it spreads through all of those events like a drop of dye in water. Of course, I can recall the birthday party on its own, but when I do this, it is an abstraction (hence the ‘pure’ in ‘pure memory’). The significance of memory is that it is preserved in the human being. Indeed, we can go even further than this, and say that human beings are event-preserving organisms. Note, we aren’t stand-alone organisms first, that only subsequently accumulate discrete events which get added and compiled like separate and self-contained chapters in a book; rather, we are the events that happen, we are nothing more than a succession of events prolonged into each other and contracted into a whole.
We can now see that the question from the section ‘The Brain’ (where are memories stored?) quite literally doesn’t make sense because it is asking for a spatial answer to a temporal question. Memories aren’t ‘stored’ anywhere (least of all the brain) because memory isn’t a container and time isn’t a fourth dimension somehow separate from us. Time; that is, duration, is a process, the process that is the human being. Another way to get a handle on this is to compare memories in time to places in space. Memories don’t need to be stored somewhere anymore than places need to be. Is the footpath outside your house ‘stored’ somewhere? Of course, not. It just is in space. In the same way, a memory is in duration.
All resistance to this notion stems from either thinking of time as space or a subjective illusion. Either path leads to the unanswerable question: ‘where?’ Duration is just as real as space, but it doesn’t have the same distance from us as the latter. Duration isn’t spread out around us with each of its parts simultaneously co-present the way space is. Duration/time/memory (all synonyms in Bergson) is the process which we are.
Reflective Perception
We’ve seen how the abstract concept of pure perception is a passive, transparent process because it doesn’t create duplicates of physical objects. What, then, is concrete perception as it happens in real life? The crucial difference for Bergson is that every perception is accompanied by memory, a process which takes place according to a double movement; one negative, the other positive. The first, negative movement involves the arrest of the practical drive, the utilitarian concern with manipulating and using physical objects in space, that characterises all life. This drive narrows our focus to the present (as we deal with objects in front of us) although with one eye cast toward the future (as we aim at the successful completion of projects or the realisation of intended states). The second, positive movement is a turn to the past (memory) in which memory intervenes in the present by adding images relevant to the current perception. Bergson calls this double movement, reflective perception. The question though is how are the correct, ‘relevant’ memories selected?
For Bergson, pure perception is a purely sensory process; i.e. ‘out there’ in the world, not ‘in here’ in some mysterious mental domain which would be spatial, not temporal. Pure memory, on the other hand, is the complete opposite; as duration it is unextended (although still not in some mysterious mental domain) and past, not spatial. Bergson describes pure memory as virtual to capture this fact of its ineffectuality in the present. If we were mindless organisms incapable of thought, perception would elicit direct responses from us with little or no scope for freedom. In other words, our bodies would react automatically to external stimuli. Now, we aren’t mindless organisms (although we’ve seen that being ‘minded’ for Bergson has very little to do with the ‘Mind’ or ‘Consciousness’ that most of us think we are), but nor are we body-less. This means that our bodies play an important, and largely ignored, role in much of what we do (over and above the obvious ‘without bodies we couldn’t act’ refrain, of course). Just like mindless organisms, our bodies still ‘know’ what to do even without conscious direction (indeed, most of our actions are automatic; that is, not consciously directed), so what happens when we perceive is that our bodies automatically begin to react. Bergson calls these nascent movements. I think of them as a kind of bodily attunement to the stimulus, and the effect they have is to mark out a kind of “field” into which the appropriate action is naturally, automatically selected by the body (as in with habitual actions). However, because of our brains, whose principal function you will remember is to delay communication, a ‘gap’ arises in between the stimulus and our reaction, preventing the nascent movement from immediately being carried through to fruition. This gap, the “zone of indetermination,” allows time for pure memory to be called upon. That “field” the nascent movement sketched out now serves to attract, not just an automatic, habitual action, but a selection of relevant memories which can inform our reaction. When one, the most relevant one according to our purposes, is ‘selected,’ that memory fuses with the perception, becoming actual, in the process.
Our concrete perceptions, then, are always impregnated with memory-images, which transition from virtual to actual by ‘descending’ from pure memory into the sensori-motor present. Thus, actual perception is always a blend of memory and ‘pure’ perception.
The Body
The body plays a central role in Bergson’s philosophy. It is actually quite ironic that he emphasises the body and diminishes the brain whereas these days we do the exact opposite. The typical picture we compose for ourselves concerning the body is that it is the medium through which “we,” as minds, interact with the world. The body, then, is something like a personal tool or instrument we wield to manipulate worldly tools or instruments, or objects. This woefully impoverished view of the body doesn’t even come close to the truth for Bergson. On the contrary, the body conditions much of what we typically consider purely mental activity.
We’ve already seen the pivotal role the body plays in recalling memories in reflective perception through the marking out of the “field” into which relevant memories are drawn. Another example Bergson gives concerns our preferences. Why do you like certain things and dislike others? As bodies first and foremost, Bergson suggests that preference is nothing more than a “certain disposition of our organs,” such that when two pleasures are offered to us our body inclines towards one more than the other. A similar thing happens with art. The body imitates certain aesthetic effects which transport us into the psychological state of the artist.
The “disposition of the organs,” bodily imitations, or “nascent movements” (from the previous section) are extremely subtle and usually beneath conscious awareness, but this is no argument against their impact. The point is that, for Bergson, the body is at least as important as the mind in facilitating our ordinary lived experience, not because it is our entry point into the physical (as if we were ‘really’ disembodied minds controlling the body the way we control an avatar in a game), but because we are our bodies as much as we are our minds.
Intellect / Instinct / Intuition
We usually think of the intellect as the capacity we have for disinterested, rational cognition. This is partly true, but it’s not the intellect’s primary job according to Bergson. Instead of abstract thought, the intellect’s principal concern is for action; specifically, the faculty we have for manufacturing artificial objects. This is what the intellect evolved to do, and it is where it is most at home; namely, when it is directed towards practical concerns. We forget this at our peril, and it causes problems when we try to use the intellect to do philosophy or metaphysics (we’ll discuss this more in the next section).
There are three features of the intellect that follow directly from its principal function of facilitating action: First, it can only form a clear idea of the discontinuous. When the intellect tries to think continuity, it always ends up imagining discontinuous, separated parts (e.g. time being made out of discrete ‘instants’). Second, it only sees immobility. The intellect tries to understand movement by reconstructing it out of a series of immobilities put together. Third, the intellect is characterised by the unlimited power of decomposing. In other words, it automatically, naturally attempts to understand things by breaking them apart into smaller things, believing that the truth is somewhere in the parts (e.g. molecules, atoms, electrons/quarks, strings…). What these three features have in common is that they are all effective methods if one wants to accomplish some practical aim in the world. The intellect is an evolved faculty, and evolution selects for adaptive fitness. On its own, there is nothing wrong with this and life without the intellect would be impossible to imagine, but is a faculty that has evolved for practical utility the best way to understand metaphysical reality; i.e. what the world is really like? Bergson doesn’t think so.
Instinct is basically the opposite of the intellect. Where the intellect is practically focused and therefore detached from life and concerned with abstractions (discrete parts instead of continuous wholes, immobilities instead of mobilities), the instinct is an unthinking harmony with life. Instinct is simply the continuation of the work by which life organises matter. The example here is bees in a hive. The hive only exists because each bee unthinkingly fulfils the purpose given to it by nature. In a certain sense, the hive is the organism while the individual bees are analogous to the cells in a human body.
The idea here is that instinct is within the current of life, the truth of reality. However, because it is within the truth in this way, it doesn’t, and can’t, know the truth. Intellect, on the other hand, is outside the truth of reality, detached from it. While the intellect can know reality (represent it in concepts, ideas, words, etc.), what it knows is not the truth of reality, precisely because reality (continuous, whole, enduring, becoming, etc.) can only be lived; i.e. from the inside. The way out of this catch-22 is intuition.
We should first note that the way Bergson used the word ‘intuition’ is quite different from the way we use it these days. Bergsonian intuition has nothing to do with a “gut-feeling” or some kind of ‘sixth-sense’ we have for acquiring knowledge. It is essentially thinking, but a way of thinking that resists the temptation to follow the intellect down its path of discontinuity, immobility, and decomposition. In fact, Bergson says: “To think intuitively is to think in duration,” which is really nothing more mysterious than thinking in terms of continuity, movement (becoming), and wholes.
Perhaps an example would help here. How does the intellect conceive time? It typically imagines a succession of ‘instants’ passing. The instant that is right now is the present, instants gone by are the past, and instants yet to come are the future. So, time is actually a collection of parts (decomposition) which are discrete and separate from each other (discontinuity), and if we dig deep enough, we’ll discover that the instants are actually snapshots of static points strung together so fast we can’t see the individual freeze frames (immobility).
How does intuition conceive time? Time is a continuous whole. To break it up into smaller parts is to destroy the very thing we were trying to understand in the first place. “But,” the intellect says, “Any whole must be composed of parts. That’s what a ‘whole’ is!” And the intellect would be right. Logically, analytically, a whole that can’t be broken into pieces just doesn’t make sense. But this is where intuitive thinking comes in. It acknowledges that the intellect with its logical, analytic way of thinking in terms of concepts and categories, while being immeasurably useful when it comes to understanding things in the universe, is not the right tool for understanding metaphysical reality, the universe itself. If Bergson is right about reality; i.e. the whole is prior to the parts (something that violates the rules of logic), genuine movement is possible (not just relative movement or the succession of static parts), and the whole cannot be understood in terms of its parts, then reality, life, evolution, time, the universe (the ultimate ‘whole’) will not accord with the way the intellect functions. We will have to think in terms of continuities, wholes, and change; qualitative instead of quantitative thought will become the order of the day; a certain ambiguity will take precedence over mathematical precision – this is what intuitive thinking means.
Clearly this doesn’t mean that intuition can be a cover for mystical or spiritual mumbo-jumbo. It won’t do to argue for astral travel or becoming one with the universe in meditation or manipulating ‘energy’ by claiming that you’re using ‘intuition’ to go beyond the intellect. Intuition is still rigorous. It’s still philosophy, not spiritualism or religion or the paranormal. Bergson isn’t abandoning clear thinking, embracing irrationalism, or abandoning evidence for speculative, wishful flights of fancy with intuition. In fact, we shouldn’t even think of intuition as ‘going beyond’ the intellect because that makes it sound like we are throwing the doors open to any and all manner of nonsense. As I said earlier, intuition is just thinking continuity instead of discontinuity, movement instead of immobility, and wholes instead of parts.
Life
Life is a continuously unfolding process, like a current passing through the medium of organisms. What is important in this picture is that the developed organisms are mere temporary stopping-points – they appear to be more important than they really are (thinking from the universe’s perspective, of course; my life is, quite rightly, extremely important to me!) only because we are thinking about life from within the midst of it. Life, properly thought, is less about the organisms themselves, which are (relatively) static things, than the process unfolding through them.
Life has divided into two broad paths: plant and animal (presumably this was before bacteria, protista, and fungi lobbied for their own kingdoms, but it doesn’t affect the essence of Bergson’s argument). As with all continuous processes, there are no clear dividing lines or ultimate distinguishing characteristics between the two groups, although we can note two general differences regarding alimentation and movement. Plants tend to make their own food so there is little pressure on them to move. Animals, on the other hand, get their nourishment from plants or other animals, so the capacity for movement becomes critical here.
The animal branch has further sub-divided into two tracks: instinct and intellect. Instinct is characterised by the knowledge of how to use ‘organised’ tools, where ‘organised’ means created by nature, typically as part of the organism’s own body. The advantage of this is it is perfectly specialised and immediately useful. The disadvantage is its limited scope. Intellect, on the other hand, is characterised by the knowledge of how to make ‘unorganised’ tools, where ‘unorganised’ means the tools must be fashioned by the organism from objects in the environment. The advantage is its unlimited scope, while the disadvantage is that it requires effort and doesn’t guarantee success. The main difference between the two, therefore, lies in the kind of knowledge of each. Instinct is “categorical,” meaning that it knows definite objects, involves knowledge of matter, and says, “This is.” Intellect is “hypothetical” in that it knows relations, involves knowledge of a form, and says, “If such and such, then such and such.”
Observing these broad paths life has divided itself along leads Bergson to three important insights:
- The development of life exhibits one clear trend; a movement towards ever greater freedom. Animals exhibit greater freedom than plants, and the intellect affords greater freedom over instinct-driven animals. Bergson thus concludes that life is fundamentally the “effort to engraft on to the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of indetermination.”
- The difference between animals and humans is one of kind, not degree. This is a highly controversial statement these days, but it’s based on the limited scope of instinct and the unlimited scope of intellect. Instinct, by its very nature, is limited in its possible responses to environmental threats or opportunities. Intellect, however, with its capacity for understanding relations and abstract categories is infinitely flexible. Moreover, in simply using the intellect to satisfy needs (through the manufacture of tools), new needs are produced, which drives further tool-creation, and so on, in a never-ending, upward spiral. Since the difference between the finite and the infinite is a difference of kind not degree (you can never reach the infinite by the successive addition of finite parts), so must the difference between animals and humans be one of kind.
Now, of course, nothing in this says that an animal currently driven by instinct can’t evolve to use intellect; after all, this is exactly what we did. (There is nothing to stop even a plant species from evolving in this direction) If they did, then they would then join humans on this side of the divide. As I already mentioned, life is a continuous process that does not admit of clear-cut distinctions. However, in the middle of this process, a qualitative leap takes place that produces something different in kind from what it used to be. - Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division. Ever since Aristotle the three broad categories of life have been noted: vegetative torpor, instinct, and intelligence. The error, however, was to see these as three successive degrees of development representing differences of intensity rather than of kind. The standard picture is that life gains something (complexity, intelligence, etc.) as it proceeds, moving from poverty to riches over time. Bergson reverses this picture, seeing more in the earlier, which then divided its riches across two groups. Exactly, what this ‘more’ is, we’ll explore in the final section “The Elan Vital”.
Evolution
In what you might note is becoming a bit of a trend, Bergson has a quite different take on evolution to the orthodox position. His essential problem with evolution orthodoxy is the same as it is with everything else we’ve looked at in this summary; that is, the attempt to explain wholes by dissecting them into discrete parts. The organism and its organs must be understood as wholes first and foremost. Breaking them up into smaller pieces, while useful for medicine and biology, will not lead to a greater understanding of the metaphysical reality of the organism or organ themselves.
There are three options Bergson considers regarding evolution, each of which is partially right in Bergson’s eyes. We’ll consider them one by one:
- Darwinian adaptation by accidental variation: Bergson is quite happy with natural selection. What he rejects here is the idea that the variations are purely accidental and the result of mechanistic forces. In responding to Darwin, Bergson talks about the evolution of the eye. Without doubt, the eye has evolved through a step-by-step, gradual progression from simple light-detecting pigments to the full complexity of the human eye. Without doubt, the mechanism for this is genetic. Without doubt, natural selection is the engine driving the change. The sticking point for Bergson, though, is the idea that this evolutionary pathway can be explained by a series of accidental genetic mutations. His principal argument is that since all parts of any organism are coordinated, any single, isolated random mutation, rather than improving the functioning of an organ, for example the eye, will actually disrupt it. (It is worth noting that Darwin recognised this problem and sought to overcome it with the theory of insensible variations; that is, changes so slight that they couldn’t disrupt normal functioning. The flaw with this is clear. If the change is so slight that it doesn’t cause a problem, then it obviously can’t improve anything either.)
- Adaptation due to external conditions: This argues that adaptation has a direction, and this direction comes about through the external environment acting directly on organs. Bergson accepts that adaptation proceeds in definite directions, but rejects the notion that it is a purely mechanical response to the environment. This theory could explain changes in something like a pigment-spot for example, which endures the direct physical imprint of sunlight, but most organs are far more complex, involving a nervous system, muscular system, skeletal system, etc. Adaptation as a direct result of the environment is insufficient to account for most evolutionary changes to organs.
- Lamarckism: This theory supposes that physical characteristics acquired in the lifetime of the organism are heritable. We can therefore say that heritability is related to the ‘effort’ of the organism in its lifetime (whether conscious (will) or unconscious (the ‘effort’ of living, so to speak)). Bergson rejects the central premise of Lamarckism because everything which it explains can be better explained through genetics. The kernel that he finds true is the idea that heritability is dependent on effort. Lamarckism’s error here is in thinking that it is the effort of the individual that is at issue. What ‘effort’ is Bergson talking about, then? This will be explained in the last section.
In general, the problem with evolution orthodoxy is that it attempts to explain the process of evolution with reference to parts that don’t change. Think about it. In one step, we have an eye with a cornea and a retina. The next step in the process is the addition of a fluid-filled sack (a lens). Where is the change here? In between the two steps. That is, it doesn’t appear in the process at all. Ah no, the change is in this particular part of the DNA. This is the same problem though. Step one: the original DNA. Step two: the mutated DNA. Where is the change? In between the two steps. The theory never actually captures change. Instead, it tries to understand change by stacking a bunch of static steps together. How can you understand the process of evolution (which is literally how organisms change over time), or any process for that matter, if your explanation doesn’t account for change?
One example Bergson gives to illustrate this is that of a brush stroke on a canvas. Were we to try to understand this by breaking it up into the tiny squares of colour of which it is composed, we would soon find ourselves staring at a miraculous infinity, with no way to explain how anyone could have put these infinite pieces together in a finite length of time. And yet, that is precisely what happened – the painter produced this infinite complexity with a single brush stroke. The secret is to realise that the brush stroke cannot be understood as a complex assemblage of small, isolated parts. Rather, it must be understood as a simple, continuous whole, for that is what it is. It is only our eyes and intellects which have decomposed this whole into a billion pieces. The same thing holds for evolution. The changes evolution accomplishes in the organisms that are its medium it produces with a single stroke; a single stroke we futilely try to piece together from static steps.
The Elan Vital
As is often the case with Bergson, it is a good idea to start an explanation of some aspect of his philosophy by looking at what it isn’t. To this end, the elan vital is not some airy-fairy, mystical codeword for ‘energy,’ ‘chi,’ ‘prana,’ or ‘universal life-force’ that would place one squarely in the midst of spiritualist/religious nonsense, invoking notions of ‘tapping into’ some cosmic power, aligning chakras, or any of a host of other fantasies people like to delude themselves with. With that caveat out of the way, we can get into what the elan vital is.
Bergson is a dualist. He readily acknowledges this. But he isn’t a Cartesian dualist because he doesn’t fall into the mistake of turning mind and matter into substances. While they aren’t substances, they are, however, completely different, meaning that the one cannot be reduced to the other. This effectively takes any form of monism off the table. Rather, following exactly the same method he employed regarding the evolution of life (which progresses through a process of differentiation and division, not association and addition), Bergson wants to understand the duality of mind and matter, not by trying to get one out of the other, but by looking to what ‘preceded’ both; what it was out of which matter and mind split off as the duality we know and love. This ‘prior’ reality is what Bergson called the elan vital.
The first thing we can say about the elan vital is that it won’t contain either mind or matter. Prior to the point where animal life diverged into instinct and intellect, what we don’t see is some ungainly, contradictory mix of instinctual and intelligent animal life. The precursors of intelligent animal life couldn’t have possessed intelligence, by definition, or they wouldn’t be precursors. They must have had a latent capacity for intelligence, some characteristic(s) that could develop into intelligence given time and the right circumstances. This is how Bergson approaches the precursor of mind and matter, the elan vital. It won’t contain either mind or matter, nor will it be some ugly, impossible hybrid. Rather, it will be something that has the potential to split into mind and matter.
So, what kind of framework could be something out of which mind and matter could emerge, but which doesn’t include either mind or matter. Bergson pictures an original impetus characterised by opposing forces. On the one hand, we have an effort or tension (this, by the way, is the ‘effort’ that doesn’t belong to the individual which Bergson extracted from Lamarckism), while on the other a relaxation, detension, or interruption.
The tension is precisely what we have already seen at work in duration; i.e. a capacity to gather up the past, prolonging it into a present which this very effort creates. It manifests in wholes, continuities, change, and movement. Mind (i.e. the’ duration’ of psychic states) inclines in the direction of this tension, but never completely achieves it. This is important. Mind is never purely tension; it always expresses itself in its opposite.
The opposite movement then, is detension, a relaxation or interruption of this effort which results in the instant; i.e. a moment that lacks duration. It manifests in parts, discontinuities, immobility, and stasis. Matter (i.e. isolated ‘things’ standing out from the continuity of the universe) inclines in this direction although it doesn’t completely achieve total detension of the original impetus, always retaining something of the tension that is its opposite. Space, or extension, is another important consequence of this movement. Space arises from the breaking up of the continuity of the whole that is the universe into parts, which means it has its ultimate source in the analytic, deconstructing intellect, which in turn, has its source in the interruption of the tension.
What can we say about this original impetus, or the elan vital, from which time and space, mind and matter, emerge as opposing movements of tension and relaxation? Well, not that much, but that’s precisely the way it must be. Whatever precedes mind and matter must literally transcend any concepts we, as minds surrounded by matter, might want to apply to it. Since mind and matter are both abstract moments of this whole that contains their seeds, how could we possibly hope to apply either one of them to the problem? And since the only furrows our thoughts are capable of following reduce either to the mental or the physical, we have in a very real sense reached the limit of human knowledge (this is why our most earnest attempts to understand the cosmos invariably end up in embarrassingly parochial notions of a ‘universal consciousness,’ or a God, or other similar ‘forces/energies’ which immediately betray their origins in human thought). About the only thing we can say with any degree of (hesitant) confidence, based on the history of the evolution of life on this planet, is that the elan vital is characterised by a creative drive, a ceaseless impulse to develop, progress, generate.
A particularly helpful analogy Bergson uses regarding the elan vital is that of a vessel full of steam at pressure. If we imagine cracks through which the steam escapes, we will get jets of steam shooting upwards for a time before condensing into droplets which then fall to the ground. The steam collected, stored, and projected upwards is the tension of the elan vital while its eventual condensing into droplets is the relaxation of this tension. The tension cannot stop the falling droplets (as they crystallise into static things, rigid concepts, and homogeneous space), but it can retard their formation for a brief while (generating dynamic change, the creation of the genuinely novel, and duration).