A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Part 7

I. Mr Bergson's Work and the General Directions of Contemporary Thought.

A broad survey of the new philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid and summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be superfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more important or more difficult individual points, and to examine by themselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light of our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds and turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I claim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least pa.s.sing example employed takes its place as a particular study? Still less do I wish to undertake a kind of a.n.a.lytic resume; no undertaking could be less profitable than that of arranging paragraph headings to repeat too briefly, and therefore obscurely, what a thinker has said without any extravagance of language, yet with every requisite explanation.

The critic's true task, as I understand it, in no way consists in drawing up a table of contents strewn with qualifying notes. His task is to read and enable others to read between the lines, between the chapters, and between the successive works, what const.i.tutes the dynamic tie between them, all that the linear form of writing and language has not allowed the author himself to elucidate.

His task is, as far as possible, to master the accompaniment of underlying thought which produced the resonant atmosphere of the inquirer's intuition, the rhythm and toning of the image, resulting in the shade of light which falls upon his vision. His task, in a word, is to help understanding, and therefore to point out and antic.i.p.ate the misunderstandings to be feared. Now it seems to me that there are a few points round which the errors of interpretation more naturally gather, producing some astounding misconceptions of Mr Bergson's philosophy. It is these points only that I propose to clear up. But at the same time I shall use the opportunity to supply information about authorities, which I have hitherto deliberately omitted, to avoid riddling with references pages which were primarily intended to impart a general impression.

Let us begin by glancing at the milieu of thought in which Mr Bergson's philosophy must have had birth. For the last thirty years new currents are traceable. In what direction do they go? And what distance have they already gone? What, in short, are the intellectual characteristics of our time? We must endeavour to distinguish the deeper tendencies, those which herald and prepare and near future.

One of the essential and frequently cited features of the generation in which Taine and Renan were the most prominent leaders was the pa.s.sionate, enthusiastic, somewhat exclusive and intolerant cult of positive science. This science, in its days of pride, was considered unique, displayed on a plane by itself, always uniformly competent, capable of gripping any object whatever with the same strength, and of inserting it in the thread of one and the same unbroken connection.

The dream of that time, despite all verbal palliations, was a universal science of mathematics: mathematics, of course, with their bare and brutal rigour softened and shaded off, where feasible; if possible, supple and sensitive; in ideal, delicate, buoyant, and judicious; but mathematics governed from end to end by an equal necessity. Conceived as the sole mistress of truth, this science was expected in days to come to fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day: all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and phantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey morning before the splendour of the rising sun.

However, after all this pride came the turn of humility, and humility of the very lowest. This deified science, borne down in its hour of triumph by too heavy a weight, had necessarily been recognised as powerless to go beyond the order of relations, and radically incapable of telling us the origin, end, and basis of things. It a.n.a.lysed the conditions of phenomena, but was ill-suited ever to grasp any real cause, or any deep essence. Further, it became the Unknowable, before which the human mind could only halt in despair. And in this way dest.i.tution arose out of ambition itself, since thought, after trusting too exclusively to its geometrical strength, was compelled at the end of its effort to confess itself beaten when confronted with the only questions to which no man may ever be indifferent.

This double att.i.tude is no longer that of the contemporary generation.

The prestige of illusion has vanished. In the religion of science we see now nothing but idolatry. The haughty affirmation of yesterday appears today, not as expressing a positive fact or a result duly established, but as bringing forward a thesis of perilous and unconscious metaphysics. Let us go even further. If true intelligence is mental expansion and apt.i.tude for understanding widely different things, each in its originality, to the same degree, we must say that the claim to reduce reality to one only of its modes, to know it in one only of its forms, is an unintelligent claim. That is, in brief formula, the verdict of the present generation. Not, of course, that it in any way misconceives or disdains the true value of science, whether as an instrument of action for the conquest of nature, or as intelligible language, allowing us to know our whereabouts in things and "talk" them.

It is aware that in all circ.u.mstances positive methods have their evidence to produce, and that, where they p.r.o.nounce within the limits of their power, nothing can stand against their verdict. But it considers first of all that science was conceived of late under much too stiff and narrow a form, under the obsession of too abstract a mathematical ideal which corresponds to one aspect of reality only, and that the shallowest. And it considers afterwards that science, even when broadened and made flexible, being concerned only with what is, with fact and datum, remains radically powerless to solve the problem of human life. Nowhere does science penetrate to the very depth of things, and there is nothing in the world but "things."

Experience has shown where the dream of universal mathematics leads us.

Number is driven to the heart of phenomena and nature dissected with this delicate scalpel. Speaking in more general terms, we adopt spatial relation as the perfect example of intelligible relation. I do not wish to deny the use of such a method now and again, the services it may render, or the beauty of construction peculiar to the systems it inspires. But we must see what price we pay for these advantages. Do we choose geometry for an informing and regulating science? The more we advance towards the concrete and the living, the more we feel the necessity of altering the pure mathematical type. The sciences, as they get further from inert matter, unless they agree to reform, pale and weaken; they become vague, impotent, anaemic; they touch little but the trite surface of their object, the body, not the soul; in them symbolism, artifice, and relativity become increasingly evident; at length, arbitrary and conventional elements crop up and devour them. In a word, the claim to treat the living as inert matter conduces to the misconception in life of life itself, and the retention of nothing but the material waste.

This experience furnishes us with a lesson. There is not so much one science as several sciences, each distinguished by an autonomous method, and divided into two great kingdoms.

Let us therefore from the outset follow Mr Bergson in tracing a very sharp line of demarcation between the inert and the living. Two orders of knowledge will thereby become separate, one in which the frames of geometrical understanding are in place, the other where new means and a new att.i.tude are required. The essential task of the present hour will now appear to us in a precise light; it will henceforward consist, without any disregard of a glorious past, in an effort to found as specifically distinct methods of instruction those sciences which take for objects the successive moments of life in its different degrees, biology, psychology, sociology;--then in an effort to reconstruct, setting out from these new sciences and according to their spirit, the like of what ancient philosophy had attempted, setting out from geometry and mechanics. By so doing we shall succeed in throwing knowledge open to receive all the wealth of reality, while at the same time we shall reinstate the sense of mystery and the thrill of higher anxieties.

A further result will be that the phantom of the Unknowable will be exorcised, since it no longer represents anything but the relative and momentary limit of each method, the portion of being which escapes its partial grip.

This is one of the first controlling ideas of the contemporary generation. Others result from it. More particularly, it is for the same body of motives, in the same sense, and with the same restrictions, that we distrust intellectualism; I mean the tendency to live uniquely by intelligence, to think as if the whole of thought consisted in a.n.a.lytic, clear and reasoning understanding.

Once again, it is not a question of some blind abandonment to sentiment, imagination, or will, nor do we claim to restrict the legitimate rights of intellectuality in judgment. But around critical reason there is a quickening atmosphere in which dwell the powers of intuition, there is a half-light of gradual tones in which insertion into reality is effected.

If by rationalism we mean the att.i.tude which consists in cabining ourselves within the zone of geometrical light in which language evolves, we must admit that rationalism supposes something other than itself, that it hangs suspended by a generating act which escapes it.

The method therefore which we seek to employ everywhere today is experience; but complete experience, anxious to neglect no aspect of being nor any resource of mind; shaded experience, not extending on the surface only, in a h.o.m.ogeneous and uniform manner; on the contrary, an experience distributed in depth over multiple planes, adopting a thousand different forms to adapt itself to the different kinds of problems; in short, a creative and informing experience, a veritable genesis, a genuine action of thought, a work and movement of life by which the guiding principles, forms of intelligibility, and criteria of verification obtain birth and stability in habits. And here again it is by borrowing Mr Bergson's own formula from him that we shall most accurately describe the new spirit.

That the att.i.tude and fundamental procedure of this new spirit are in no way a return to scepticism or a reaction against thought cannot be better demonstrated than by this resurrection of metaphysics, this renaissance of idealism, which is certainly one of the most distinctive features of our epoch. Undoubtedly philosophy in France has never known so prosperous and so pregnant a moment. Notwithstanding, it is not a return to the old dreams of dialectic construction. Everything is regarded from the point of view of life, and there is a tendency more and more to recognise the primacy of spiritual activity. But we wish to understand and employ this activity and this life in all its wealth, in all its degrees, and by all its functions: we wish to think with the whole of thought, and go to the truth with the whole of our soul; and the reason of which we recognise the sovereign weight is reason laden with its complete past history.

And what is that, really, but realism? By realism I mean the gift of ourselves to reality, the work of concrete realisation, the effort to convert every idea into action, to regulate the idea by the action as much as the action by the idea, to live what we think and think what we live. But that is positivism, you will say; certainly it is positivism.

But how changed! Far from considering as positive only that which can be an object of sensation or calculation, we begin by greeting the great spiritual realities with this t.i.tle. The deep and living aspiration of our day is in everything to seek the soul, the soul which specifies and quickens, seek it by an effort towards the revealing sympathy which is genuine intelligence, seek it in the concrete, without dissolving thought in dreams or language, without losing contact with the body or critical control, seek it, in fine, as the most real and genuine part of being.

Hence its return to questions which were lately declared out of date and closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality, its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a faith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence its restless desire to hark back to tradition and discipline.

A new philosophy was required to answer this new way of looking at things. Already, in 1867, Ravaisson in his celebrated "Report" wrote these prophetic lines: "Many signs permit us to foresee in the near future a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be the predominance of what may be called spiritualist realism or positivism, having as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has in itself of an existence recognised as being the source and support of every other existence, being none other than its action."

This prophetic view was further commented on in a work where Mr Bergson speaks with just praise of this shrewd and penetrating sense of what was coming: "What could be bolder or more novel than to come and predict to the physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, to biologists that life will only be understood by thought, to philosophers that generalities are not philosophic?" ("Notice on the Life and Works of M. Felix Ravaisson-Molien", in the Reports of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 1904.)

But let us give each his due. What Ravaisson had only antic.i.p.ated Mr Bergson himself accomplishes, with a precision which gives body to the impalpable and floating breath of first inspiration, with a depth which renews both proof and theses alike, with a creative originality which prevents the critic who is anxious for justice and precision from insisting on any researches establishing connection of thought.

One reason for the popularity today enjoyed by this new philosophy is doubtless to be found in the very tendencies of the milieu in which it is produced and in the aspirations which work it. But, after once remarking these desires, we must further not forget that Mr Bergson has contributed more than anyone else to awaken them, determine them, and make them become conscious of themselves. Let us therefore try to understand in itself and by itself the work of genius of which just now we were seeking the dawning gleams. What synthetic formula will be best able to tell us the essential direction of its movement? I will borrow it from the author himself: "It seems to me," he writes, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.) "that metaphysics are trying at this moment to simplify themselves, to come nearer to life." Every philosophy tends to become incarnate in a system which const.i.tutes for it a kind of body of a.n.a.lysis.

Regarded literally, it appears to be an infinite complication, a complex construction with a thousand alcoves of high architecture, "in which measures have been taken to provide ample lodging for all problems."

(Ibid.) Do not let us be deceived by this appearance: it signifies only that language is incommensurable with thought, that speech admits of endless multiplication in approximations incapable of exhausting their object. But before constructing such a body for itself, all philosophy is a soul, a mind, and begins with the simple unity of a generating intuition. Here is the fitting point at which to see its essence; this is what determines it much better than its conceptual expression, which is always contingent and incomplete. "A philosophy worthy of the name has never said but one thing; and that thing it has rather attempted to say than actually said. And it has only said one thing, because it has only seen one point: and that was not so much vision as contact; this contact supplied an impulse, this impulse a movement, and if this movement, which is a kind of vortex of a certain particular form, is only visible to our eyes by what it has picked up on its path, it is no less true that other dust might equally well have been raised, and that it would still have been the same vortex." ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale", November 1911.)

Hence comes the fact that a philosophy is at bottom much more independent of its natal environment than one might at first suppose; hence also the fact that ancient philosophies, though apparently relative to a science which is out of date, remain always living and worthy of study.

What, then, is the original intuition of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the creative intuition whence it comes forth? We cannot hesitate long: it is the intuition of duration. That is the perspective centre to which we must indefatigably return; that is the principle which we must labour to expose in its full light; and that is, finally, the source of light which will illumine us. Now a philosophy is not only an expressed intuition; it is further and above all an acting intuition, gradually determined and realised, and tested by its explanatory works; and it is by its fruits that we can understand and judge it. Hence the review upon which we are entering.

II. Immediacy.

The philosopher's first duty is in clear language to declare his starting-point, with what a mathematician would call the "tangent to the origin" of the path along which he is travelling, as afterwards the critic's first duty is to describe this initial att.i.tude. I have therefore first of all to indicate the directing idea of the new philosophy. But it is not a question of extracting a quintessence, or of fencing the soul of doctrine within a few summary formulae. A system is not to be resumed in a phrase, for every proposition isolated is a proposition falsified. I wish merely to elucidate the methodical principle which inspires the beginning of Mr Bergson's philosophy.

To philosophy itself falls the task and belongs the right to define itself gradually as it becomes const.i.tuted. On this point, an antic.i.p.ation of experience seems hardly possible; here, as elsewhere, the finding of a synthetic formula is a final rather than preliminary question. However, we are obliged from the outset of the work to determine the programme of the inquiry, if only to direct our research.

It is the same on the threshold of every science. There, it is true, the a.n.a.logy ceases. For in any science properly speaking the determination of beginning consists in the indication of an object, and a matter, and beyond that, to each new object a new science reciprocally corresponds, the existence of the one involving the legitimacy of the other. But if the various sciences--I mean the positive sciences--divide different objects thus between them, philosophy cannot, in its turn, come forward as a particular science, having a distinct object, the designation of which would be sufficient to characterise and circ.u.mscribe it. Such was always the traditional conception: such will ours continue to be. For, as a matter of fact, every object has a philosophy and all matter can be regarded philosophically. In short, philosophy is chiefly a way of perceiving and thinking, an att.i.tude and a proceeding: the peculiar and specific in it is more an intuition than a content, a spirit rather than a domain.

What, then, is the characteristic function of philosophy, at least its initial function, that which marks its opening?

To criticise the works of knowledge spontaneously effected; that is to say, to scrutinise their direction, reach, and conditions: that is today the unanimous answer of philosophers when questioned about the goal of their labours. In other terms, what they study is not so much such and such a particular "thing" as the relation of mind to each of the realities to be studied. Their object, if we must employ the word, is knowledge itself, it is the act of knowing regarded from the point of view of its meaning and value. Philosophy thus appears as a new "order"

of knowledge, co-extensive with what is knowable, as a kind of knowledge of the second degree, in which it is less a question of learning than of understanding, in which we aim at progressing in depth rather than in extent; not effort to extend the quant.i.ty of knowledge, but reflection on the quality of this knowledge. Spontaneous thought--vulgar or scientific--is a direct, simple, and practical thought turned towards things and partial to useful results; seeking what is formulable rather than what is true, or at least so fond of formulae which can be handled, manipulated, or transmitted, that it is always tempted to see the truth in them; a thought which, moreover, sets out from more or less unguarded postulates, abandons itself to the motive impulses of habits contracted, and goes straight on indefinitely without self-examination. Philosophy, on the contrary, desires to be thought about thought, thought retracing its life and work, knowledge labouring to know itself, fact which aspires to fact about itself, mental effort to become free, to become entirely transparent and luminous in its own eyes, and, if need be, to effect self-reform by dissipating its natural illusions. What we have before our eyes then are the initial postulates themselves, the first spontaneous thoughts, the obscure origins of reason; and we are proceeding towards a point of departure rather than arrival.

The new philosophy does not refuse to carry out this first critical task; but it carries it out in its own way after determining more precisely the real conditions of the problem. At the hour when methodical research begins, the philosopher's mind is not clean-swept; and it would be chimerical to wish to place oneself from the beginning, by some act of transcendence, outside common thought. This thought cannot be inspected and judged from outside. It const.i.tutes, whether we wish it or no, the sole concrete and positive point of departure. Let us add that common-sense const.i.tutes also our sole point of insertion into reality. It can only then be a question of purifying it, not in any way of replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, and what is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problems which really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the false problems, the illusory problems, those which relate only to our artifices of language.

The search for facts is then the first necessary moment of all philosophy.

But common thought comes before us at the outset as a piece of very composite alluvial ground. It is a beginning of positive science, and also a residue of all philosophical opinions which have had some vogue. That, however, is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari, says the proverb. In certain respects, "speculation is a luxury, whilst action is a necessity." ("Creative Evolution", page 47.) But "life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they have to our needs." ("Laughter", page 154.) Hence comes the fundamental utilitarianism of common-sense. Therefore if we wish to define it in itself and for itself, and no longer as a first approximation of such and such a system of metaphysics, it appears to us no longer as rudimentary science and philosophy, but as an organisation of thought in view of practical life. Thus it is that outside all speculative opinion it is effectively lived by all. Its proper language, we may say, is the language of customary perception and mechanical fabrication, therefore a language relative to action, made to express action, modelled upon action, translating things by the relations they maintain to our action; I mean our corporal and synthetic action, which very evidently implies thought, since it is a question of the action of a reasonable being, but which thus contains a thought which is itself eminently practical.

However, we are here regarding common-sense considered as a source of fact. Its utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spontaneous metaphysics from which we must detach ourselves. But is it not the very task of positive science to execute this work of purification? Nothing of the kind, despite appearances and despite intentions. Let us examine more closely. The general categories of common thought, according to Mr Bergson, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Metaphysical and Moral Review", November 1911, page 825.) remain those of science; the main roads traced by our senses through the continuity of reality are still those along which science will pa.s.s; perception is an infant science and science an adult perception; so much so that customary knowledge and scientific knowledge, both of them destined to prepare our action upon things, are of necessity two visions of the same kind, though of unequal precision and reach. It does not follow that science does not practise a certain disinterestedness as far as immediate mechanical utility is concerned; it does not follow that it has no value as knowledge. But it does not set itself genuinely free from the habits contracted in common experience, and to inform its research it preserves the postulates of common-sense; so that it always grasps things by their "actable" side, by their point of contact with our faculty for action, under the forms by which we handle them conceptually or practically, and all it attains of reality is that by which nature is a possible object of language or industry.

Let us turn now towards another aspect of natural thought, to discover in it the germ of the necessary criticism. By the side of "common-sense," which is the first rough-draft of positive science, there is "good sense," which differs from it profoundly, and marks the beginning of what we shall later on call philosophic intuition. (Cf. an address on "Good Sense and Cla.s.sical Studies", delivered by Mr Bergson at the Concours general prize distribution, 30th July 1895.) It is a sense of what is real, concrete, original, living, an art of equilibrium and precision, a fine touch for complexities, continually feeling like the antennae of some insects. It contains a certain distrust of the logical faculty in respect of itself; it wages incessant war upon intellectual automatism, upon ready-made ideas and linear deduction; above all, it is anxious to locate and to weigh, without any oversights; it arrests the development of every principle and every method at the precise point where too brutal an application would offend the delicacy of reality; at every moment it collects the whole of our experience and organises it in view of the present. It is, in a word, thought which keeps its freedom, activity which remains awake, suppleness of att.i.tude, attention to life, an ever-renewed adjustment to suit ever-new situations.

Its revealing virtue is derived from this moving contact with fact, and this living effort of sympathy. This is what we must tend to transpose from the practical to the speculative order.

What, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After taking cognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativity in which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, something which decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such a principle, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its action of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus only be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem of temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate, the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception considered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this will be for us a criterion and departure-point.

Let us specify this point. Immediate data or primitive data or pure data are apprehended by us under forms of disinterested action; I mean that they are first of all lived rather than conceived, that before becoming material for science, they appear as moments of life; in brief, that perception of them precedes their use.

It is at this stage previous to language that we are by these pure data in intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our critical task is to return to them through a regressive a.n.a.lysis, the goal of which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to our primordial intuition. The latter already const.i.tutes a thought, a preconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which is action itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question here of restricting in any degree the part played by thought, but only of distinguishing between the perceptive and theoretic functions of mind.

What is "the image" of which Mr Bergson speaks at the beginning of "Matter and Mind" except, when grasped in its first movement, the flash of conscious existence "in which the act of knowledge coincides with the generating act of reality"? ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", philosophical vocabulary, article "Immediate".)

Let us forget all philosophical controversies about realism and idealism; let us try to reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, a virginal and candid glance, freeing us from the habits contracted in the course of practical life. These then are our "images": not things presented externally, nor states felt internally, not portraits of exterior beings nor projections of internal moods, but appearances, in the etymological sense of the word, appearances lived simply, without our being distinguished from them, as yet neither subjective nor objective, marking a moment of consciousness previous to the work of reflection, from which proceeds the duality of subject and object. And such also, in every order, appear the "immediate feelings"; as action in birth, previous to language. (Cf. "Matter and Memory", Foreword to the 7th edition.)

Why depart from the immediate thus conceived as action and life? Because it is quite impossible to do otherwise, for every initial fact can be only such a pulsation of consciousness in its lived act, and the fundamental and primitive direction of the least word, were it in an enunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only be such a direction of life and action. And we must certainly accord to this immediacy a value of absolute knowledge, since it realises the coincidence of being and knowledge.

But let us not think that the perception of immediacy is simple pa.s.sive perception, that it is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, today when our utilitarian education is completed and has pa.s.sed into the state of habit. There is a difference between common experience and the initial action of life; the first is a practical limitation of the second. Hence it follows that a previous criticism is necessary to return from one to the other, a criticism always in activity, always open as a way of progressive investigation, always ready for the reiteration and the renewal of effort.

In this task of purification there is doubtless always to be feared an illusion of remaining in the primitive stage. By what criteria, by what signs can we recognise that we have touched the goal? Pure fact is shown to be such on the one hand because it remains independent of all theoretical symbolism, because the critique of language allows it to exist thus as an indissoluble residue, because we are unable not to "live" it, even when we free ourselves from the anxiety of utility; on the other hand, because it dominates all systems, and imposes itself equally upon them all as the common source from which they derive by diverging a.n.a.lyses, and in which they become reconciled. a.s.suredly, to attain it, to extricate it, we must appeal to the revelations of science, to the exercise of deliberate thought. But this employment of a.n.a.lysis against a.n.a.lysis does not in any way const.i.tute a circle, for it tends only to destroy prejudices which have become unconscious: it is a simple artifice destined to break off habits and to scatter illusions by changing the points of view. Once set free, once again become capable of direct and simple view, what we accept as fact is what bears no trace of synthetic elaboration. It is true that here a last objection presents itself: how shall we think this limit, purely given, to any degree at all in fact, if it must precede all language?