A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Part 9

The task is impossible. They co-ordinate a few guiding marks; but who shall say what infinite transitions underlie them?

A word designates rather a current of thought than one or several halts on a logical path. Here again a dynamic continuity exists previous to the parcelling out of the acceptations. What, then, should be the att.i.tude of the mind?

A supple moving att.i.tude more attentive to the curve of change than to the possible halting-points along the road. But this is not the case at all; the effort would be too great, and what happens, on the contrary, is this. For the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints is very quickly subst.i.tuted. This is in itself an undesirable simplification, for it is impossible to reconst.i.tute the infinity of real shades by combinations of fundamental colours each representing the h.o.m.ogeneous sh.o.r.e, which each region of the spectrum finally becomes.

However cleverly we proportion these averages, we get, at most, some vulgar counterfeit: orange, for example, is not a mixture of yellow and red, although this mixture may recall to those who have known it elsewhere the simple and original sensation of orange. Again, a second simplification, still more undesirable, succeeds the first.

There are no longer any colours at all; black lines serve as guide-marks. We are therefore with pure concepts decidedly in full symbolism. And it is with symbols that we shall henceforward be trying to reconstruct reality.

I need not go back to the general characteristics or the inconveniences of this method. Concepts resemble photographic views; concrete thickness escapes them. However exact, varied, or numerous we suppose them, they can certainly recall their object, but not reveal it to any one who had not had any direct intuition of it. Nothing is easier than to trace the plan of a body in four dimensions; all the same, this drawing does not admit "visualisation in s.p.a.ce" as is the case with ordinary bodies, for want of a previous intuition which it would awaken: thus it is with concepts in relation to reality. Like photographs and like plans, they are extracted from reality, but we are not able to say that they were contained in it; and many of them besides are not so much as extracts; they are simple systematised notes, in fact, notes made upon notes. In other terms, concepts do not represent pieces, parts, or elements of reality. Literally they are nothing but simple symbolic notations. To wish to make integral factors of them would be as strange an illusion as that of seeing in the co-ordinates of a geometric point the const.i.tutive essence of that point.

We do not make things with symbols, any more than we should reconstruct a picture with the qualifications which cla.s.sify it.

Whence, then, comes the natural inclination of thought towards the concept? From the fact that thought delights in artifices which facilitate a.n.a.lysis and language.

The first of these artifices is that from which results the possibility of decomposition or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. For that we need a previous subst.i.tution of symbols for things. Nothing demonstrates this better than the celebrated arguments which we owe to Zeno of Elea. Mr Bergson returns to the discussion of them over and over again. ("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 85-86; "Matter and Memory", pages 211-213, "Creative Evolution", pages 333-337.)

The nerve of the reasoning there consists in the evident absurdity there would be in conceiving an inexhaustible exhausted, an unachievable achieved; in short, a total actually completed, and yet obtained by the successive addition of an infinite number of terms.

But the question is to know whether a movement can be considered as a numerical multiplicity. Virtual divisibility there is, no doubt, but not actual division; divisibility is indefinite, whereas an actual division, if it respects the inner articulations of reality, is bound to halt at a limited number of phases.

What we divide and measure is the track of the movement once accomplished, not the movement itself: it is the trajectory, not the traject. In the trajectory we can count endless positions; that is to say, possible halts. Let us not suppose that the moving body meets these elements all ready-marked. Hence what the Eleatic dialectic ill.u.s.trates is a case of incommensurability; the radical inability of a.n.a.lysis to end a certain task; our powerlessness to explain the fact of the transit, if we apply to it such and such modes of numerical decomposition or recomposition, which are valid only for s.p.a.ce; the impossibility of conceiving becoming as susceptible of being cut up into arbitrary segments, and afterwards reconstructed by summing of terms according to some law or other; in short, it is the nature of movement, which is without division, number, or concept.

But thought delights in a.n.a.lyses regulated by the sole consideration of easy language; hence its tendency to an arithmetic and geometry of concepts, in spite of the disastrous consequences; and thus the Eleatic paradox is no less instructive in its specious character than in the solution which it embodies.

At bottom, natural thought, I mean thought which abandons itself to its double inclination of synthetic idleness and useful industry, is a thought haunted by anxieties of the operating manual, anxieties of fabrication.

What does it care about the fluxes of reality and dynamic depths? It is only interested in the outcrops scattered here and there over the firm soil of the practical, and it solidifies "terms" like stakes plunged in a moving ground. Hence comes the configuration of its spontaneous logic to a geometry of solids, and hence come concepts, the instantaneous moments taken in transitions.

Scientific thought, again, preserves the same habits and the same preferences. It seeks only what repeats, what can be counted.

Everywhere, when it theorises, it tends to establish static relations between composing unities which form a h.o.m.ogeneous and disconnected multiplicity.

Its very instruments bias it in that direction. The apparatus of the laboratory really grasps nothing but arrangement and coincidence; in a word, states not transitions. Even in cases of contrary appearance, for example, when we determine a weight by observing the oscillation of a balance and not its rest, we are interested in regular recurrence, in a symmetry, in something therefore which is of the nature of an equilibrium and a fixity all the same. The reason of it is that science, like common-sense, although in a manner a little different, aims only in actual fact at obtaining finished and workable results.

Let us imagine reality under the figure of a curve, a rhythmic succession of phases of which our concepts mark so many tangents. There is contact at one point, but at one point only. Thus our logic is valid as infinitesimal a.n.a.lysis, just as the geometry of the straight line allows us to define each state of curve. It is thus, for example, that vitality maintains a relation of momentary tangency to the physico-chemical structure. If we study this relation and a.n.a.logous relations, this fact remains indisputably legitimate. Let us not think, however, that such a study, even when repeated in as many points as we wish, can ever suffice.

We must afterwards by genuine integration attain moving continuity. That is exactly the task represented by the return to intuition, with its proper instrument, the dynamic scheme. From this tangential point of view we try to grasp the genesis of the curve as envelope, or rather, and better still, the birth of successive tangents as instantaneous directions. Speaking non-metaphorically, we cling to genetic methods of conceptualisation and proceed from the generating principle to its conceptual derivatives.

But our thought finds it very difficult to sustain such an effort long.

It is partial to rectilineal deduction, actual becoming horrifies it. It desires immediately to find "things" sharply determined and very clear. That is why immediately a tangent is constructed, it follows its movement in a straight line to infinity. Thus are produced limit-concepts, the ultimate terms, the atoms of language. As a rule they go in pairs, in ant.i.thetic couples, every a.n.a.lysis being dichotomy, since the discernment of one path of abstraction determines in contrast, as a complementary remainder, the opposite path of direction. Hence, according to the selection effected among concepts, and the relative weight which is attributed to them, we get the antinomies between which a philosophy of a.n.a.lysis must for ever remain oscillating and torn in sunder. Hence comes the parcelling up of metaphysics into systems, and its appearance of regulated play "between antagonistic schools which get up on the stage together, each to win applause in turn." (H. Bergson, "Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

The method followed to find a genuine solution must be inverse; not dialectic combination of pre-existing concepts, but, setting out from a direct and really lived intuition, a descent to ever new concepts along dynamic schemes which remain open. From the same intuition spring many concepts: "As the wind which rushes into the crossroads divides into diverging currents of air, which are all only one and the same gust."

("Creative Evolution", page 55.)

The antinomies are resolved genetically, whilst in the plane of language they remain irreducible. With a heterogeneity of shades, when we mix the tints and neutralise them by one another, we easily create h.o.m.ogeneity; but take the result of this work, that is to say, the average final colour, and it will be impossible to reconst.i.tute the wealth of the original.

Do you desire a precise example of the work we must accomplish? Take that of change; (Cf. two lectures delivered by Mr Bergson at Oxford on "The Perception of Change", 26th and 27th May 1911.) no other is more significant or clearer. It shows us two necessary movements in the reform of our habits of imagination or conception.

Let us try first of all to familiarise ourselves with the images which show us the fixity deriving from becoming.

Two colliding waves, two rollers meeting, typify rest by extinction and interference. With the movement of a stone, and the fluidity of running water, we form the instantaneous position of a ricochet. The very movement of the stone, seen in the successive positions of the tangent to the trajectory, is stationary to our view.

What is dynamic stability, except non-variation arising from variation itself? Equilibrium is produced from speed. A man running solidifies the moving ground. In short, two moving bodies regulated by each other become fixed in relation to each other.

After this, let us try to perceive change in itself, and then represent it to ourselves according to its specific and original nature.

The common conception needs reform on two princ.i.p.al points:

(1) All change is revealed in the light of immediate intuition, not as a numerical series of states, but a rhythm of phases, each of which const.i.tutes an indivisible act, in such a way that each change has its natural inner articulations, forbidding us to break it up according to arbitrary laws, like a h.o.m.ogeneous length.

(2) Change is self-sufficient; it has no need of a support, a moving body, a "thing" in motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no spatial receptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, no material dummy successively draped in coloured stuffs; on the contrary, it is the body or the atom which should be subordinately defined as symbols of completed becoming.

Of movement thus conceived, indivisible and substantial, what better image can we have than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody? That is how we must work to conceive reality. If such a conception at first appears obscure, let us credit experience, for ideas are gradually illuminated by the very use we make of them, "the clarity of a concept being hardly anything, at bottom, but the a.s.surance once obtained that we can handle it profitably." (H. Bergson, "Introduction to Metaphysics".)

If we require to reach a conception of this kind with regard to change, the Eleatic dialectic is there to establish it beyond dispute, and positive science comes to the same conclusion, since it shows us everywhere nothing but movements placed upon movements, never fixed "things," except as temporary symbols of what we leave at a given moment outside the field of study.

In any case, the difficulty of such a conception need not stop us; it is little more than a difficulty of the imaginative order. And as for the conception itself, or rather the corresponding intuition, it will share the fate of all its predecessors: to our contemporaries it will be a scandal, a century later a stroke of genius, after some centuries common evidence, and finally an instinctive axiom.

V. The Problem of Consciousness. Duration and Liberty.

Armed with the method we have just described, Mr Bergson turned first of all toward the problem of the ego: taking up his position in the centre of mind, he has attempted to establish its independent reality by examining its profound nature.

The first chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate Data" contains a decisive criticism of the conceptions which claim to introduce number and measure into the domain of the facts of consciousness.

Not that it is our business to reject as false the notion of psychological intensity; but this notion demands interpretation, and the least that we can say against the attempt to turn it into a notion of size is that in doing so we are misunderstanding the specific character of the object studied. The same reproach must be levelled against a.s.sociation of ideas, the system of mechanical psychology of which the type is presented us by Taine and Stuart Mill. Already in chapters ii.

and iii. of the "Essay", and again all through "Matter and Memory", the system is riddled with objections, each of which would be sufficient to show its radical flaw. All the aspects, all the phenomena of mental life come up for successive review. In respect of each of them we have an ill.u.s.tration of the insufficiency of the atomism which seeks to recompose the soul with fixed elements, by a ma.s.sing of units exterior to one another, everywhere and always the same: this is a grammatical philosophy which believes reality to be composed of parts which admit of number just as language is made of words placed side by side; it is a materialist philosophy which improperly transfers the proceedings of the physical sciences to the sciences of the inner life.

On the contrary, we must represent the state of consciousness to ourselves as variable according to the whole of which it forms a part.

Here and there, although it always bears the same name, it is no longer the same thing. "The more the ego becomes itself again, the more also do its states of consciousness, instead of being in juxtaposition, penetrate one another, blend with one another, and tinge one another with the colouring of all the rest. Thus each of us has his manner of loving or hating, and this love or hate reflect our entire personality."

("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 125-126.)

At bottom Mr Bergson is bringing forward the necessity, in the case before us, of subst.i.tuting a new notion of continuous qualitative heterogeneity for the old notion of numerical and spatial continuity.

Above all, he is emphasising the still more imperious necessity of regarding each state as a phase in duration; and we are here touching on his princ.i.p.al and leading intuition, the intuition of real duration.

Historically this was Mr Bergson's starting-point and the origin of his thought: a criticism of time under the form in which common-sense imagines it, in which science employs it. He was the first to notice the fact that scientific time has no "duration." Our equations really express only static relations between simultaneous phenomena; even the differential quotients they may contain in reality mark nothing but present tendencies; no change would take place in our calculations if the time were given in advance, instantaneously fulfilled, like a linear whole of points in numerical order, with no more genuine duration than that contained in the numerical succession. Even in astronomy there is less antic.i.p.ation than judgment of constancy and stability, the phenomena being almost strictly periodic, while the hazard of prediction bears only upon the minute divergence between the actual phenomenon and the exact period attributed to it. Notice under what figure common-sense imagines time: as an inert receptacle, a h.o.m.ogeneous milieu, neutral and indifferent; in fact, a kind of s.p.a.ce.

The scholar makes use of a like image; for he defines time by its measurement, and all measurement implies interpretation in s.p.a.ce.

For the scholar the hour is not an interval, but a coincidence, an instantaneous arrangement, and time is resolved into a dust of fixities, as in those pneumatic clocks in which the hand moves forward in jerks, marking nothing but a sequence of pauses.

Such symbols are sufficient, at least for a first approximation, when it is only a question of matter, the mechanism of which, strictly considered, contains nothing "durable." But in biology and psychology quite different characteristics become essential; age and memory, heterogeneity of musical phases, irreversible rhythm "which cannot be lengthened or shortened at will." ("Creative Evolution", page 10.)

Then it is that the return of time becomes necessary to duration.

How are we to describe this duration? It is a melodious evolution of moments, each of which contains the resonance of those preceding and announces the one which is going to follow; it is a process of enriching which never ceases, and a perpetual appearance of novelty; it is an indivisible, qualitative, and organic becoming, foreign to s.p.a.ce, refractory to number.

Summon the image of a stream of consciousness pa.s.sing through the continuity of the spectrum, and becoming tinged successively with each of its shades. Or rather imagine a symphony having feeling of itself, and creating itself; that is how we should conceive duration.