Bergson and Phenomenology

At one point in his contribution to this volume, McDowell says that the principle ofcharity requires that we not attribute bad philosophy to someone unless we are forced todo so (p. 85). The problem with this construal of the principle of charity is that it is oftenvery difficult to distinguish between bad philosophy and extraordinary philosophy,especially when it comes to Hegel. The final impression I took away from this finecollection is that Hegel’s theory of action is, in fact, most interesting and even mostinsightful precisely on those points where it looks most implausible, even outrageous.This volume represents a welcome effort to make Hegel’s ‘hard sayings’ intelligible inmore contemporary philosophic language.

Mark AlznauerDepartment of PhilosophyNorthwestern University

[email protected]

REFERENCES

Quante, M. (1993), Hegels Begriff der Handlung. Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: FrommannHolzboog.

Wood, A. W. (1990), Hegel’s Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bergson and Phenomenology, edited by Michael R. Kelly. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2010, xii + 277 pp.ISBN 978-0-230-20238-2 hb £55.00

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is widely recognized to be France’s greatest philosopher of themodern period. He was the author of four classic texts of philosophy, three of themcharacterized by a combination of exceptional philosophical gifts and impressive masteryof extensive scientific literature. Each text offers readers a number of theoretical innova-tions. Time and Free Will (1889) provides a novel account of free will by showing that timeis not space and that psychic states do not lend themselves to treatment as magnitudes.Matter and Memory (1896) provides a non-orthodox (non-Cartesian) dualism of matter andmind, seeking to show that while the difference between matter and perception is one ofdegree (unless we construe it in these terms, the emergence of perception out of matterbecomes something mysterious and inexplicable), that between perception and memoryis one of kind (unless we construe it in these terms, memory is deprived of anyautonomous character and is reduced to being a merely diluted form of perception).Matter and Memory offers an extremely rich and novel account of different types ofmemory that philosophical psychology is still catching up with today. In Creative Evolution(1907) Bergson endeavours to demonstrate the need for a philosophy of life in which thetheory of knowledge and a theory of life are viewed as inseparably bound up with oneanother. In the text, Bergson seeks to establish what philosophy must learn from the newbiology (the neo-Darwinism established by August Weismann) and what philosophycan offer the new theory of the evolution of life. It is a tour de force, a work of truly

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© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

extraordinary philosophical ambition. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932),his final text, and where the engagement with scientific literature is not as extensive,Bergson outlines a novel approach to the study of society (sociology) with his categoriesof the ‘closed’ and the ‘open’ and the ‘static’ and the ‘dynamic’.

Bergson’s ambition was to restore the absolute as the legitimate object of philosophyand to accomplish this by showing how it is possible to think beyond the humancondition—that is, beyond our spatialized and instrumental habits of representation.Although he contests Kant’s stress on the relativity of knowledge to the human stand-point in a manner similar to Hegel, his conception of the absolute is not the same. Thisis the surprise of Bergson, and perhaps explains why he appears as such an unfamiliarfigure to us today: he seeks to demonstrate the absolute—conceived as the totality ofdifferences in the world, differences of degree and differences of kind—through placingman back into nature and the evolution of life. In other words, he uses the resourcesof naturalism and empiricism to support an apparently Idealist philosophical pro-gramme. Indeed, Bergson argues that true empiricism is the real metaphysics and heldthat the more the sciences of life develop, the more they will feel the need to reintegratethought into the very heart of nature. In his own day he was read primarily as anempiricist whose thinking amounted, in the words of his former pupil and later harshcritic, Jacques Maritain, to a wild experimentalism. Maritain accused Bergson of pro-ducing an ontology of becoming not after the fashion of Hegel’s panlogism, but ratherafter the fashion of an integral empiricism. Julien Benda vigorously protested againstBergson’s demand for new ways of thinking and new methods in philosophy and calledfor a return to the hyper-rationalism of Spinoza. Bergson does not readily fit into thetwo main camps that define the contemporary academic institution of philosophy:neither the continental one which insists on keeping apart philosophy and science andregards any interest in science as philosophically suspect, nor the analytic one whichcheerfully subsumes philosophy within the ambit of the natural sciences and rendersmetaphysics otiose. As Gilles Deleuze rightly observed, in the case of Bergson, scientifichypotheses and metaphysical theses are constantly combined in an effort to reconstitutecomplete experience.

As Michael Kelly notes in his Introduction, it is in fact only in the twenty-first centurythat a Bergsonian school of thought has emerged. Bergson’s thought was in seriousdecline in his own lifetime, and after the end of the Second World War existentialismbecame the popular philosophy in France. This new Bergsonian school of thought seeksto revive Bergson’s thought on its own terms, but here, in this volume, the editor seeksan encounter between Bergson and phenomenology—the dominant discourse in conti-nental philosophy today. If there is reason for accepting Bergson into this tradition, a goodplace to start would be with exploring his unacknowledged influence on phenomenologyand even how the concepts Bergson fashioned might be relevant for issues in contem-porary research in phenomenology. To a large extent, this is what is attempted in thisedited collection of essays, which has been skilfully put together by the editor. He notesat the outset of his Introduction to the volume that although Sartre admitted to beingbowled over by Bergson—Merleau-Ponty would go further and maintain that Bergsonbowled over philosophy—his ideas and texts have received little attention from phenom-enology both in its history and today: ‘Twentieth-century phenomenology in its relationsto Bergson thus ranges from the polite to the dismissive to the confrontational. But seriousengagement never occurred’ (p. 3). History gives us only isolated incidents and neglectedpossibilities for staging an encounter between Bergson and phenomenology, such asHusserl’s reported disclosure that phenomenologists are the ‘true Bergsonians’. But, as

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Deleuze pointed out in his Afterword to the English translation of his book Bergsonism(first published in France in 1966), any return to Bergson nowadays should mean not onlya renewed admiration for a great philosopher but an extension of his project today inrelation to transformations taking place in life and society and in parallel with transfor-mations in science. He thought Bergson’s research could be followed through in threedirections and he noted that the same themes are to be found in phenomenology: intuitionas a method, philosophy as a rigorous science, and the theory of multiplicities as a newlogic. Michael Kelly also notes that the ground is fertile for staging a productive rapportbetween Bergson and phenomenology, with both Husserl and Bergson making, inresponse to scientism and psychologism, a turn to experience and emphasizing theimportance of time, embodiment and intuition.

Having noted this, it is equally important to appreciate the extent to which the agendasdiffer and the two traditions of thought diverge on the question of experience. WhereHusserl sought a science of the essential structures of consciousness, Bergson sought todevelop a new philosophy of life and within it a metaphysics of freedom and novelty.Moreover, can phenomenology effect, as Bergsonism seeks to, a transformation of life andsociety or, in its quest for the primordially lived, is it unable to fight against the tyrannyof perceptual and affective clichés, being content to imprison the movement of life withinthe realm of common sense? Although we can locate in Bergson a ‘Bergsonian epoché’, inwhich the question about the reality or ideality of the external world is bracketed, andalthough Bergson’s expansion of experience and Husserl’s deepening of it put the two onthe same road, they ultimately are walking, as Kelly puts it, in different directions. As henotes, Bergson does not focus on the qualitative feel of life so as to accord privilege to thefirst-person perspective of consciousness and against the reductive claims of the sciences.Although he does invoke a ‘turn of experience’, this, as the editor correctly notes, denotesin Bergson a turn to a moment prior to experience becoming relative to human needsand intelligence. Bergson is thus proposing a turn away from what is given to conscious-ness and, as the editor notes, ‘phenomenology does not fully turn away from the humancontribution to experience because its epoché turns only to a clarification of the dogmasand mundane engagements that obscure the phenomena as presented to experience’(p. 9). Bergsonism does not, then, privilege human consciousness since the aim is toreintegrate it into nature or life (we are presented with a ‘Whole’ that is neither given norgiveable). Indeed, Bergson conceives philosophy as the discipline that ‘raises us abovethe human condition’ (la philosophie nous aura élevés au-dessus de la condition humaine) andmakes the effort to ‘surpass’ (dépasser) it (Bergson 1965: 50). Philosophy provides us withthe methods for reversing the normal directions of the mind (instrumental, utilitarian), soupsetting its habits. Because it finds itself having to work against the most inveteratehabits of the mind, Bergson compares philosophy to an act of violence. The aim of theenterprise is to expand the humanity within us and allow humanity to surpass itself byreinserting itself in the whole (it recognizes it is part of nature and the evolution of life).Intelligence is reabsorbed into its principle and comes to know its own genesis. In spiteof what one might think, this makes the task of philosophy a modest one. If we supposethat philosophy is an affair of perception, then it cannot simply be a matter of correctingperception but only of extending it. As Michael Kelly notes, Bergson goes beyond the aimof clarifying the intentionalities of the natural attitude by seeking to effect a radical turnto what he called the ‘very life of things’ in the realm of the real world and our ownimplication in them. As Merleau-Ponty noted in one of his appreciations of Bergson, forBergson absolute knowledge is not detachment but inherence. Indeed, Merleau-Pontygoes so far as to impute to Bergson the regaining at the heart of our being in the world

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a pre-Socratic and ‘prehuman’ meaning of the world: ‘Never before had anyone estab-lished this circuit between being and myself which is such that beings exists “for me”, thespectator, but which is also such that the spectator exists “for being” ’ (Merleau-Ponty1964: 185).

It is in this attempt to radicalize the meaning of human experience that the editorof this volume thinks a ‘nouvelle-Bergsonism’ can be found in contemporary phenom-enology. This may strike many readers sympathetic to phenomenology as an audaciousclaim, but it makes sense when one considers the effect that the work of severalpost-phenomenologists, such as Derrida for example, have had on our thinking aboutconsciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, presence and so on. As Kelly puts it, ‘theincreasing talk in phenomenology of the solicitation of the object, sensitivity to howbeing gives itself and the call of the other suggests an increasing convergence ofphenomenology and Bergson’ (p. 11). The aim of this volume as a whole is to rediscoveran ‘audacious’ Bergson and, moreover, through such a recovery give serious consid-eration to the claim, equally audacious perhaps, that Bergson always has had more tosay to phenomenology than phenomenology has allowed him to say. The principaleffort of the volume, then, is to place the two traditions of thoughts in dialogue andthere would be little point in doing this if there was not in the first place quitefundamental concerns the two share and have in common, such as the claims of modernscience to give us the only true access to the real. Both traditions of thought call intoquestion scientism and the attempt to quantify the quality of life and so have a commonfoe—namely, the positivistic conception of science. Bergson called for what one mightcall a ‘superior’ positivism which he outlined in his Huxley lecture of 1911 on ‘Life andConsciousness’: ‘we possess now a certain number of lines of facts, which do not go asfar as we want, but which we can prolong hypothetically’ (Bergson 2007: 4). This istaken up again in the Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where he states that thedifferent lines of fact indicate for us the direction of truth but none go far enough; theattainment of truth can only take place when the lines are prolonged to the point wherethey intersect. In Creative Evolution, Bergson attempted to show that the problem ofknowledge, the problem of accounting for the faculties of intellect and intuition, is onewith the metaphysical problem—the problem of gaining access to the real: the two forma circle, the centre of which is the empirical study of evolution. The double form ofconsciousness (intuition and intellect) is shown to be the double form of the realitself. The attempt to demonstrate this constitutes what we might choose to call the‘Bergsonian revolution’. It is an effort to enter into life’s own domain, conceived as‘reciprocal interpenetration, indefinitely continued creation’.

Bergson and Phenomenology features thirteen essays in total and is divided into threemain parts. Part one endeavours to lay the ground for opening up a debate betweenBergson and phenomenology. It features essays by Leonard Lawlor on intuition andduration; Rudolf Bernet on the driven force of consciousness and life; Gary Gutting onBergson and Merleau-Ponty on experience and science; and Stephen Crocker on art, lifeand finitude in Bergson’s essay on laughter. Part two brings the two traditions into closerapport and centres on the actual debates between them. It features essays by HanneJacobs and Trevor Perri on intuition and freedom in Husserl and Bergson; Dan Zahavi onlife and phenomenology in the early Bergson; Pete Gunter on a Bergsonian critique ofSartre’s concept of time; Alia Al–Saji on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on a new theory ofvision; Nicolas de Warren on Bergson and Levinas on ‘creation’; and John Mullarkeyon Bergson and Michel Henry on the psycho-physics of phenomenology. The thirdand final part is on the life-world and life and aims to expose the core issues at stake in

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the debate between Bergson and phenomenology. As the editor puts it, the issue of life‘cuts to the very point at which Husserl (phenomenology) and Bergson may both meetand diverge, namely the relation between intentionality and the élan vital’ (p. 16). The coreissue centres on whether classical phenomenology or Bergson can make a positivecontribution to a phenomenology of life and where ‘life’ is taken to mark the meetingpoint of the natural and the transcendental. This third part features three essays: PierreKerszberg on life and life-world in Bergson and phenomenology; Frédéric Worms onconsciousness and life in Bergson and that situates him between phenomenology andmetaphysics; and Renaud Barbaras on the ‘failure’ of Bergsonism which focuses onBergson’s inability to get to the essence of the meaning of life. The essays are uniformlyexcellent and the editor Michael Kelly has succeeded in putting together a welcome andtimely volume of essays; it is a book that should greatly aid the recovery of Bergson nowtaking place and it succeeds in showing him to be a major philosophical figure that isrefreshingly contemporary.

Keith Ansell-PearsonDepartment of Philosophy

University of WarwickUK

[email protected]

REFERENCES

Bergson, H. (1965), Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams.—— (2007), Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), ‘Bergson in the Making,’ in Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

The Pragmatic Turn, by Richard J. Bernstein. Cambridge: Polity, 2010, xi + 263 pp.ISBN 978-0-7456-4907-8 hb £55.00; ISBN 978-0-7456-4908-5 pb £17.99

If one is asked what ‘pragmatism’ is about, no short or precise answer comes readily tohand. The term ‘pragmatism’, arising from the Greek ‘pragma’, meaning action, signals aneffort to bring intellectual things down to questions of practical interest—but this surelyis too wide a circumscription. Fundamentalist political movements are typically doingjust this: setting academic goals regarding what to produce intellectually, out of a giveninterest. This is not what pragmatists are in sympathy with. Rather, what they have inmind is both a critique of socially decontextualized thought (paradigmatically traditionalphilosophy) and a programme of social democratic culture. These are difficult andsomehow overambitious—perhaps even conflicting—aims. Their attack on ‘pure’ thoughtdemands from pragmatists a wide-ranging campaign not only against traditional phi-losophy, but also against its more recent ‘analytic’ manifestations: already an enormoustask. To go one step further: How do pragmatism’s therapeutic quest and its partisanshipfor a left-wing liberal policy work together? Are philosophical self-criticism and demo-cratic policy not simply too far apart?

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Bergson and Phenomenology