An Introduction, and Henri Bergson

So the plan is to go through Andrew Cutrofello’s Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction, a dense 450-page monster of an overview to precisely the stuff I need to know better than I now do. As I make my way through the book, which is organized in chapters under the names of individual philosophers, I will write a bit about each one. And in many cases I will read a bit about that philosopher beyond whatever Cutrofello has given, especially in the cases (which are many) of those philosophers about whom I already own secondary texts. In some cases I’ve already read those secondary texts, and in other cases they’re fresh to me (despite having sat on my shelves for, in some instances, years). The major supplementary sources will be Simon Critchley’s Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, which I read in January, and the edited volume The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, most of which I have not read. In addition I’ll be taking time-outs to read other supplements, such as Heidegger’s Hut, How to Read Sartre, etc.

All told, the project will probably take two months, and perhaps as long as the entire summer. The ultimate idea is to try to retain the key information for each of these thinkers, as it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that I need to master—and, hubristically, I insist that I do mean master—this tradition of thought. These posts aren't really for the public benefit. They're just to keep my thoughts straight, to encourage my own retention of the material I've read, as well as to get myself into the habit of writing daily about academic topics. I contemplated not blogging them at all, instead quarantining them to my hard drive. But hey, what the hell, right? Maybe someone else will get something out of it, and maybe someone, somewhere, will even see fit to correct some of my inevitable mistakes.

First up (it should only ever be spoken in a Python falsetto): "Henri Bergson."

Bergson’s major beef is with the concept of spatialized time, which he says has dominated Western rationalism. Kant is only the most persuasive of the thinkers in this tradition of error. Bergson’s critique begins by asserting that intensities (a.k.a. sensations) are absolutely non-quantifiable. However, they can be associated with quantifiable extensities, which they are then said to represent. As an effect of such an association, the intensity becomes linked to degrees, but the intensity itself remains purely qualitative. Any “increase in sensation” is always only an illusion that results from a confusion of the nature of this link; rather, what is real in such a situation is only the “sensation of increase.”

Due to this irreducibly non-discrete nature of intensity, it is also impossible to isolate ontologically any intensity from its sensible manifold. This has major consequences. First, it puts the kibosh on Kant’s notion of time as a homogenous medium (in which arithmetical synthetic a priori judgments are made; “the form of inner sense”). Rather, time for Bergson is durée (duration). Durée is definitionally linked to subjectivity for the early Bergson: the self is only “the lived flux of [its] own duration,” and is located at the intersection of durée and extensity.

Bergson believes that such concepts of the self and of time evade the antinomy of freedom that caused Kant to posit the transcendental subject of noumenal freedom and phenomenal determination, because that antinomy only arises when freedom is thought in the spatialized-time regime, as the real-possible relation of forking paths (shades of Deleuze’s actual-virtual solution to the paradox of incompossibility here). Bergson further believes (although the details of this belief are not clear to me) that growths on the plane of extensity influence the subject’s action without being incorporated into its consciousness, thus providing the subject with lived freedom, a rather dubious notion that Cutrofello admits is for Bergson “an ineffable fact that can only be intuited and not defined.”

This lived freedom manifests as a moment of delay in which consciousness separates perception from action. These two processes are normally contiguous. Unconscious perceptions trigger automatic actions (reactions). But a contraction of durée in consciousness “pauses time,” so to speak, and permits the mental (the past) to intrude into the physical (the present). “To be free is to be capable of living in memory,” as Cutrofello puts it, “or rather to bring the past to bear on present situations.”

This all pertains to what the Columbia History calls Bergson’s interactive dualism, that is, what Ronald Bogue calls the second moment in Bergson’s thought, the moment of clarifying dualism (after having critiqued illusory dualisms of mind/body, quality/quantity, and space/time in the first moment). Interactive dualism opposes internal durée to external space (Deleuze on Cinema, 20-21). But there are, Bogue writes, two later moments in Bergson’s thought. The third moment, the moment of higher monism, shows that the interactive dualism is actually a monism of rhythmic contractions and relaxations of a vibrational whole. And the fourth and final moment, the moment of generative dualism and pluralism, relies on the concept of élan vital. Élan vital is a force that “moves life forward on the path of time, carrying the principle of duration from subjective consciousness to life itself—to evolution (Columbia, 430). Élan vital is, Bergson says, “la durée agissante.”

In animals, élan vital manifests as instinct. In humans, it is expressed as intellect, which is practical, oriented toward the sensori-motor schema that enables us to survive and motivates science. But intellect cannot reveal metaphysical significance; that role is given only to intuition, which is the human version of instinct. It’s unclear to me whether intellectual intuition (which for Bergson is the intuition of lived durée and is thus opposed to the German idealists’ concept of intellectual intuition as a non-temporal intuition) is to be considered a synthesis of intellect and intuition, or identical to (adjectiveless) intuition, or rather one form of intuition.

There’s more to Cutrofello’s and Columbia’s treatment of Bergson, but these are the points that seem crucial. Tomorrow: Husserl.