A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Part 3

Concepts translate relations resulting from comparisons by which each object is finally expressed as a function of what it is not. They dismember it, divide it up piece by piece, and mount it in various frames. They lay hold of it only by ends and corners, by resemblances and differences. Is not that obviously what is done by the converting theories which explain the soul by the body, life by matter, quality by movements, s.p.a.ce itself by pure number? Is not that what is done generally by all criticisms, all doctrines which connect one idea to another, or to a group of other ideas?

In this way we reach only the surface of things, the reciprocal contacts, mutual intersections, and parts common, but not the organic unity nor the inner essence.

In vain we multiply our points of view, our perspectives and plane projections: no acc.u.mulation of this kind will reconstruct the concrete solid. We can pa.s.s from an object directly perceived to the pictures which represent it, the prints which represent the pictures, the scheme representing the prints, because each stage contains less than the one before, and is obtained from it by simple diminution.

But, inversely, you may take all the schemes, prints, pictures you like--supposing that it is not absurd to conceive as given what is by nature interminable and inexhaustible, lending itself to indefinite enumeration and endless development and multiplicity--but you will never recompose the profound and original unity of the source.

How, by forcing yourself to seek the object outside itself, where it certainly is not, except in echo and reflection, would you ever find its intimate and specific reality? You are but condemning yourself to symbolism, for one "thing" can only be in another symbolically.

To go further still, your knowledge of things will remain irremediably relative, relative to the symbols selected and the points of view adopted. Everything will happen as in a movement of which the appearance and formula vary with the spot from which you regard it, with the marks to which you relate it.

Absolute revelation is only given to the man who pa.s.ses into the object, flings himself upon its stream, and lives within its rhythm. The thesis which maintains the inevitable relativity of all human knowledge originates mainly from the metaphors employed to describe the act of knowledge. The subject occupies this point, the object that; how are we to span the distance? Our perceptory organs fill the interval; how are we to grasp anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end of the wire?

The mind itself is a projecting lantern playing a shaft of light on nature; how should it do otherwise than tint nature its own colour?

But these difficulties all arise out of the spatial metaphors employed; and these metaphors in their turn do little but ill.u.s.trate and translate the common method of a.n.a.lysis by concepts: and this method is essentially regulated by the practical needs of action and language.

The philosopher must adopt an att.i.tude entirely inverse; not keep at a distance from things, but listen in a manner to their inward breathing, and, above all, supply the effort of sympathy by which he establishes himself in the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, tunes himself to its rhythm, and, in a word, lives it. There is really nothing mysterious or strange in this.

Consider your daily judgments in matters of art, profession, or sport.

Between knowledge by theory and knowledge by experience, between understanding by external a.n.a.logy and perception by profound intuition, what difference and divergence there is!

Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who a.n.a.lyses it in mechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship with it, even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or easy working, who feels the play of its inner muscles, its likes and dislikes, who notes its movements and the task before it, as the machine itself would do were it conscious, for whom it has become an extension of his own body, a new sensori-motor organ, a group of prearranged gestures and automatic habits?

The student's knowledge is more useful to the builder, and I do not wish to claim that we should ever neglect it; but the only true knowledge is that of the engineer. And what I have just said does not concern material objects only. Who has absolute knowledge of religion, he who a.n.a.lyses it in psychology, sociology, history, and metaphysics, or he who, from within, by a living experience, partic.i.p.ates in its essence and holds communion with its duration?

But the external nature of the knowledge obtained by conceptual a.n.a.lysis is only its least fault. There are others still more serious.

If concepts actually express what is common, general, unspecific, what should make us feel the need of recasting them when we apply them to a new object?

Does not their ground, their utility, and their interest exactly consist in sparing us this labour?

We regard them as elaborated once for all. They are building-material, ready-hewn blocks, which we have only to bring together. They are atoms, simple elements--a mathematician would say prime factors--capable of a.s.sociating with infinity, but without undergoing any inner modification in contact with it. They admit linkage; they can be attached externally, but they leave the aggregate as they went into it.

Juxtaposition and arrangement are the geometrical operations which typify the work of knowledge in such a case; or else we must fall back on metaphors from some mental chemistry, such as proportioning and combination.

In all cases, the method is still that of alignment and blending of pre-existent concepts.

Now the mere fact of proceeding thus is equivalent to setting up the concept as a symbol of an abstract cla.s.s. That being done, explanation of a thing is no more than showing it in the intersection of several cla.s.ses, partaking of each of them in definite proportions: which is the same as considering it sufficiently expressed by a list of general frames into which it will go. The unknown is then, on principle, and in virtue of this theory, referred to the already known; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to grasp any true novelty or any irreducible originality.

On principle, once more, we claim to reconstruct nature with pure symbols; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to reach its concrete reality, "the invisible and present soul."

This intuitional coinage in fixed standard concepts, this creation of an easily handled intellectual cash, is no doubt of evident practical utility. For knowledge in the usual sense of the word is not a disinterested operation; it consists in finding out what profit we can draw from an object, how we are to conduct ourselves towards it, what label we can suitably attach to it, under what already known cla.s.s it comes, to what degree it is deserving of this or that t.i.tle which determines an att.i.tude we must take up, or a step we must perform. Our end is to place the object in its approximate cla.s.s, having regard to advantageous employment or to everyday language. Then, and only then, we find our pigeon-holes all ready-made; and the same parcel of reagents meets all cases. A universal catechism is here in existence to meet every research; its different clauses define so many unshifting points of view, from which we regard each object, and our study is subsequently limited to applying a kind of nomenclature to the preconstructed frames.

Once again the philosopher has to proceed in exactly the opposite direction. He has not to confine himself to ready-made business concepts, of the ordinary kind, suits cut to an average model, which fit n.o.body because they almost fit everybody; but he has to work to measure, incessantly renew his plant, continually recreate his mind, and meet each new problem with a fresh adaptive effort. He must not go from concepts to things, as if each of them were only the cutting-point of several concurrent generalities, an ideal centre of intersecting abstractions; on the contrary, he must go from things to concepts, incessantly creating new thoughts, and incessantly recasting the old.

There could be no solution of the problem in a more or less ingenious mosaic or tessellation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be employed.

We need plastic fluid, supple and living concepts, capable of being continually modelled on reality, of delicately following its infinite curves. The philosopher's task is then to create concepts much more than to combine them. And each of the concepts he creates must remain open and adjustable, ready for the necessary renewal and adaptation, like a method or a programme: it must be the arrow pointing to a path which descends from intuition to language, not a boundary marking a terminus.

In this way only does philosophy remain what it ought to be: the examination into the consciousness of the human mind, the effort towards enlargement and depth which it attempts unremittingly, in order to advance beyond its present intellectual condition.

Do you want an example? I will take that of human personality. The ego is one; the ego is many: no one contests this double formula. But everything admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what is bound to happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, by the mere fact that we take them for general frames independent of the reality contained, for detached language admitting empty and blank definition, always representable by the same word, no matter what the circ.u.mstances: they are no longer living and coloured ideas, but abstract, motionless, and neutral forms, without shades or gradations, without distinction of case, characterising two points of view from which you can observe anything and everything. This being so, how could the application of these forms help us to grasp the original and peculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity of the ego? Still further, how could we, between two such ent.i.ties, statically defined by their opposition, ever imagine a synthesis? Correctly speaking, the interesting question is not whether there is unity, multiplicity, combination, one with the other, but to see what sort of unity, multiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all, to understand how the living person is at once multiple unity and one multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation are connected, how these two diverging branches of abstraction join at the roots. The interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolical colourless marks indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is the continuity between, with its changing wealth of colouring, and the double progress of shades which resolve it into red and violet.

But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless we begin from direct intuition and descend to the a.n.a.lysing concepts.

Again, the same duty of reversing our familiar att.i.tude, of inverting our customary proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. The conceptual atomism of common thought leads it to place movement in a lower order than rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. According to common thought, movement is added to the atom, as a supplementary accident to a body previously at rest; and, by becoming, the pre-existent terms are strung together like pearls on a necklace.

It delights in rest, and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves.

Immobility appears to it to be the base of existence. It decomposes and pulverises every change and every phenomenon, until it finds the invariable element in them. It is immobility which it esteems as primary, fundamental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on the contrary, which it seeks to explain as a function of immobility. And so it tends, out of progresses and transitions, to make things. To see distinctly, it appears to need a dead halt. What indeed are concepts but logical look-out stations along the path of becoming? what are they but motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted stream of movement?

Each of them isolates and fixes an aspect, "as the instantaneous lightning flashes on a storm-scene in the darkness." ("Matter and Memory", page 209.)

Placed together, they make a net laid in advance, a strong meshwork in which the human intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux of reality, and seize it as it pa.s.ses. Such a proceeding is made for the practical world, and is out of place in the speculative. Everywhere we are trying to find constants, ident.i.ties, non-variants, states; and we imagine ideal science as an open eye which gazes for ever upon objects that do not move. The constant is the concrete support demanded by our action: the matter upon which we operate must not escape our grasp and slip through our hands, if we are to be able to work it. The constant, again, is the element of language, in which the word represents its inert permanence, in which it const.i.tutes the solid fulcrum, the foundation and landmark of dialectic progress, being that which can be discarded by the mind, whose attention is thus free for other tasks. In this respect a.n.a.lysis by concepts is the natural method of common-sense.

It consists in asking from time to time what point the object studied has reached, what it has become, in order to see what one could derive from it, or what it is fitting to say of it.

But this method has only a practical reach. Reality, which in its essence is becoming, pa.s.ses through our concepts without ever letting itself be caught, as a moving body pa.s.ses fixed points. When we filter it, we retain only its deposit, the result of the becoming drifted down to us.

Do the dams, ca.n.a.ls, and buoys make the current of the river? Do the festoons of dead seaweed ranged along the sand make the rising tide? Let us beware of confounding the stream of becoming with the sharp outline of its result. a.n.a.lysis by concepts is a cinematograph method, and it is plain that the inner organisation of the movement is not seen in the moving pictures. Every moment we have fixed views of moving objects.

With such conceptual sections taken in the stream of continuity, however many we acc.u.mulate, should we ever reconstruct the movement itself, the dynamic connection, the march of the images, the transition from one view to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in the picture apparatus, and must therefore be given in addition to the views themselves; and nothing can better prove how, after all, movement is never explicable except by itself, never grasped except in itself.

But if we take movement as our principle, it is, on the contrary, possible, and even easy, to slacken speed by imperceptible degrees, and stop dead.

From a dead stop we shall never get our movement again; but rest can very well be conceived as the limit of movement, as its arrest or extinction; for rest is less than movement.

In this way the true philosophical method, which is the inverse of the common method, consists in taking up a position from the very outset in the bosom of becoming, in adopting its changing curves and variable tension, in sympathising with the rhythm of its genesis, in perceiving all existence from within, as a growth, in following it in its inner generation; in short, in promoting movement to fundamental reality, and, inversely, in degrading fixed states to the rank of secondary and derived reality.

And thus, to come back to the example of the human personality, the philosopher must seek in the ego not so much a ready-made unity or multiplicity as, if I may venture the expression, two antagonistic and correlative movements of unification and plurification.

There is then a radical difference between philosophic intuition and conceptual a.n.a.lysis. The latter delights in the play of dialectic, in fountains of knowledge, where it is interested only in the immovable basins; the former goes back to the source of the concepts, and seeks to possess it where it gushes out. a.n.a.lysis cuts the channels; intuition supplies the water. Intuition acquires and a.n.a.lysis expends.

It is not a question of banning a.n.a.lysis; science could not do without it, and philosophy could not do without science. But we must reserve for it its normal place and its just task.

Concepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces the concepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition you will have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and a.n.a.lyses into concepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. But by successive a.n.a.lyses you will never reconstruct the least intuition, just as, no matter how you distribute water, you will never reconstruct the reservoir in its original condition.

Begin from intuition: it is a summit from which we can descend by infinite slopes; it is a picture which we can place in an infinite number of frames. But all the frames together will not recompose the picture, and the lower ends of all the slopes will not explain how they meet at the summit. Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is the impulse which sets the a.n.a.lysis in motion, and gives it direction; it is the sounding which brings it to solid bottom; the soul which a.s.sures its unity. "I shall never understand how black and white interpenetrate, if I have not seen grey, but I understand without trouble, after once seeing grey, how we can regard it from the double point of view of black and white." ("Introduction to Metaphysics.")

Here are some letters which you can arrange in chains in a thousand ways: the indivisible sense running along the chain, and making one phrase of it, is the original cause of the writing, not its consequence.

Thus it is with intuition in relation to a.n.a.lysis. But beginnings and generative activities are the proper object of the philosopher. Thus the conversion and reform inc.u.mbent on him consist essentially in a transition from the a.n.a.lytic to the intuitive point of view.

The result is that the chosen instrument of philosophic thought is metaphor; and of metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an incomparable master. What we have to do, he says himself, is "to elicit a certain active force which in most men is liable to be trammelled by mental habits more useful to life," to awaken in them the feeling of the immediate, original, and concrete. But "many different images, borrowed from very different orders of things, can, by their convergent action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as unlike as possible, we prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up, since it would in that case be immediately routed by its rivals. In making them all, despite their different aspects, demand of our mind the same kind of attention, and in some way the same degree of tension, we accustom our consciousness little by little to a quite peculiar and well-determined disposition, precisely the one which it ought to adopt to appear to itself unmasked." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".)

Strictly speaking, the intuition of immediacy is inexpressible. But it can be suggested and called up. How? By ringing it round with concurrent metaphors. Our aim is to modify the habits of imagination in ourselves which are opposed to a simple and direct view, to break through the mechanical imagery in which we have allowed ourselves to be caught; and it is by awakening other imagery and other habits that we can succeed in so doing.

But then, you will say, where is the difference between philosophy and art, between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition? Art also tends to reveal nature to us, to suggest to us a direct vision of it, to lift the veil of illusion which hides us from ourselves; and aesthetic intuition is, in its own way, perception of immediacy. We revive the feeling of reality obliterated by habit, we summon the deep and penetrating soul of things: the object is the same in both cases; and the means are also the same; images and metaphors. Is Mr Bergson only a poet, and does his work amount to nothing but the introduction of impressionism in metaphysics?

It is an old objection. If the truth be told, Mr Bergson's immense scientific knowledge should be sufficient refutation.

Only those who have not read the ma.s.s of carefully proved and positive discussions could give way thus to the impressions of art awakened by what is truly a magic style. But we can go further and put it better.