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Henri Bergson and the Perception of
Time
Know the name, can’t quite recall
what he thought? John-Francis Phipps explains the surprising
ideas of the philosopher of vitalism.
Bergson’s name is not usually included
on shortlists of the philosophical greats, so it’s quite easy to
miss him. I first came across him many years ago, when I read
Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Russell
clearly disliked Bergson’s philosophy and provided unconvincing
reasons to justify his prejudice. This made me want to read Bergson
and judge for myself, which I duly did and soon saw how wrong
Russell was. I eventually wrote an introductory booklet on Bergson
entitled A Living Philosophy (Now out of print, although most
of the text is still available in another publication.)
Henri Who?
When I started reading Bergson’s works,
I immediately took to his philosophy and writing style, although
there are places where his argument is not easy to follow and some
of the subtler nuances of his thought get lost in translation.
Despite this, it was like reaching an oasis of wisdom after
fruitless wanderings in arid deserts claiming the noble name of
‘philosophy’, which are in some cases branches of grammar,
linguistics or casuistry – modern secular versions of counting
angels on pin-heads.
Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859
and died there in 1941. His mother was Anglo-Irish and his father
Polish and an accomplished musician. Bergson uses musical analogies
and writes with gallic panache and imagination, drawing freely from
the metaphysician and artist in himself. One can see why his style,
imagery and free usage of terms such as ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ did not
appeal to the logical positivists.
In 1891 he married Louise Neuburger, a
cousin of Marcel Proust, who was greatly influenced by Bergson’s
theories on time and memory. Quite early in his professional
teaching career, Bergson had one of those life-changing eureka
moments. Until then he had been “Wholly imbued with mechanistic
theories”, as he himself put it some years later in a letter to his
friend, the American philosopher, William James. Bergson’s main
critique of the mechanistic view centred on the perception of time:
“It was the analysis of the notion of time, as that enters into
mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw, to my
great astonishment, that scientific time does not endure.
This led me to change my point of view completely” (Encyc.
Brit. article on Bergson)
His doctoral thesis was on Time and
Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
(1889). Here Bergson distinguished between time as we actually
experience it, lived time – which he called ‘real duration’
(durée réelle) – and the mechanistic time of science. This,
he argued, is based on a misperception: it consists of superimposing
spatial concepts onto time, which then becomes a distorted version
of the real thing. So time is perceived via a succession of
separate, discrete, spatial constructs – just like seeing a film. We
think we’re seeing a continuous flow of movement, but in reality
what we’re seeing is a succession of fixed frames or stills. To
claim that one can measure real duration by counting separate
spatial constructs is an illusion: “We give a mechanical explanation
of a fact and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself”,
he wrote.
His next major work, Matter and
Memory (1896), was an essay on the relation between mind and
body. In his preface, Bergson affirms the reality of mind and the
reality of matter and tries to determine the relation of the one to
the other by the study of memory, which he saw as the intersection
or convergence of mind and matter. He regarded the brain as an organ
of choice, with a practical role. Its main function is to filter
mental images, allowing through to consciousness those impressions,
thoughts or ideas that are of practical biological value. (Time
and Free Will, p.181)
He spent five years researching all the
psychological, medical and other literature then available on
memory. He focussed in particular on the condition known as aphasia
– loss of the ability to use language. The aphasiac understands what
people are saying, knows what he or she wants to say, suffers no
paralysis of the speech organs, and yet is unable to speak. This,
Bergson argued, shows that it is not memory as such that is lost,
but the bodily mechanism that is needed to express it. From this
observation he concluded that memory, and so mind, makes use of the
physical brain to carry out its own purposes.
Clearly there is vastly more in a given
occasion of consciousness than in the corresponding brain state.
This is surely a perfectly natural, normal, everyday part of human
experience – a common-sense, empirical fact of life. We don’t really
experience life as a succession of separate conscious states,
progressing along an imaginary line. Instead, we feel time as a
continuous flow, with no clearly demarcated beginnings and ends. We
should not therefore confuse an abstract, arbitrary notion of
practical convenience with the underlying truth that is continuously
confirmed by our own experience.
Bergson uses one of his musical
analogies to make the point: “As the symphony overflows the
movements which scan it, so the mental/spiritual life overflows the
cerebral/intellectual life. The brain keeps consciousness, feeling
and thought tensely strained on life, and consequently makes them
capable of efficacious action. The brain is the organ of attention
to life.” (l’Energie Spirituelle 1910, p.47)
In his best known work, Creative
Evolution (1907), Bergson made it clear that he accepted
evolution as a scientifically established fact. He was born the year
The Origin of Species was published and Creative Evolution
adds a vital missing dimension to Darwinian theory. He believed
that the failure to take into account the real time underlying the
whole process results in the failure to appreciate the uniqueness of
life. Bergson proposed that the evolutionary process should be seen
as the expression of an enduring life force (élan vital),
that is continually developing. Evolution has at its very heart this
life force or vital impulse.
In An Introduction to
Metaphysics (1912), Bergson expands on the central role of
intuition. The true purpose of knowledge is to know things deeply,
to touch the inner essence of things via a form of empathy: “A true
empiricism”, he wrote, “is that which proposes to get as near to the
original itself as possible, to search deeply into its life, and so,
by a kind of intellectual auscultation, to feel the throbbings of
its soul.”
Auscultation is listening to the
internal organs through a stethoscope. Just as the physician does
this to find out what is happening within the patient’s body, so the
metaphysician practises a mental equivalent of auscultation to
apprehend the inner essence of things.
Bergson also served on French
diplomatic missions and from 1921-26 acted as president of the
committee on international cooperation of the League of Nations. He
was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927 and in 1932
published his last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and
Religion. On the one hand, there’s the closed society based on
conformity to rules and moral codes, interpreted in a strict,
legalistic, literal way. On the other hand, there’s the open
society, which expresses creativity, imagination and spirituality
via the arts, music, poetry, philosophy and mystical experience. The
source of the former is the intellect and the source of the latter
is intuition.
In The Two Sources Bergson
seemed to subscribe to a more traditional Christian theological
notion of God. He acknowledged that his reflections had in fact
brought him closer to the Roman Catholic position, which he saw as
the fulfillment of his Judaic faith. But he never actually became a
Catholic: “I would have become a convert”, he wrote, “had I not
foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-semitism about to break
upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to
be persecuted”. Only weeks before his death in 1941 and despite
being seriously ill, Bergson insisted on registering as a Jew, even
though he had been offered exemption by the Vichy
government.
Why Vitalism is Vital
With the ascendancy of the mechanistic
outlook throughout most of the twentieth century, ‘vitalism’ became
a dirty word in scientific circles. For a biologist to be accused of
vitalist tendencies was equivalent to a charge of heresy. When
Rupert Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life came out in
1981, the editor of a leading scientific journal used language more
appropriate to the time of the Inquisition, in calling for it to be
burnt.
The mechanistic view alone is
singularly ill-equipped to understand the immense variety and depth
of human experience, to say nothing of the more subtle aspects of
the phenomenon of consciousness. Whenever any given outlook –
scientific, philosophical, political, economic or religious –
becomes closed and dogmatic, it sooner or later has to undergo its
own creative evolution and become more open to new ideas and
insights. The fact that a mechanistic approach is essential for many
aspects of scientific research does not mean that everything in life
can be accounted for in reductionist, nothing-but mechanistic
terms.
From the 1960’s onwards, some
scientists became increasingly aware that something vital was
missing from the prevailing worldview. In his book The Living
Stream, for example, the eminent marine biologist, Professor Sir
Alister Hardy FRS, stressed the importance of non-material aspects
of evolution. The subtitle reads: A Restatement of Evolution
Theory and its Relation to the Spirit of Man. In order to
investigate methodically this aspect of human experience, Hardy set
up a research unit, originally at Oxford. It is now at the
University of Wales at Lampeter and is named after its founder (The
Alister Hardy Research Centre.)
It was William James who had originally
pioneered this work over a century ago and not much was done in this
field until the Hardy unit was set up in 1969.
Bergson believed that mental and
spiritual aspects of human experience were greatly neglected as a
result of focussing so single-mindedly on the physical and material.
He once speculated on how things might have developed had modern
science devoted more attention to exploring the non-material realm.
He believed that we would by now have had a psychology of which
today we can form no idea, any more than before Galileo people could
have imagined what our physics would be like. A biology quite
different to ours would also have emerged: “A vitalist biology which
would have sought, behind the sensible forms of living beings, the
inward invisible force of which the sensible forms are the
manifestations. On this force we have today taken no hold precisely
because our science of mind is in its infancy ...” He went on to
say: “Together with this vitalist biology there would have arisen a
medical practice which would have sought to remedy directly
the insufficiencies of the vital force: it would have aimed at
the cause and not the effects, at the centre instead of at the
periphery ...”
Over the past twenty or thirty years,
there has been an ever-increasing growth in demand for many
varieties of alternative healing, some of which are becoming part of
medical practice, the development of psychosomatic medicine and many
different therapies. Quite apart from the efficacy of any given
remedy or therapeutic technique, this growth represents a widespread
revolt against reductionist, materialist, mechanistic
fundamentalism.
Terms such as ‘life force’ and ‘vital
energy’ are now back in general usage. Recent advances in the new
physics and cosmology have also led to a radical reappraisal of old
ways of thinking about time and causality, subject/object,
observer/observed.
Bergson is sometimes claimed to have
anticipated features of relativity theory. He wrote a paper on
‘Duration and Simultaneity with regard to Einstein’s Theory’ (1921).
In the public debate between the two, it was generally held that
Einstein ‘won’. But there aren’t really winners or losers in any
debate about time.
The way we perceive time is surely a
core perception, which affects all other perceptions. It determines
our philosophy of life, matters of war and peace, how we perceive
work and the amount of quality time we devote to the people and
things that really matter.
Despite the recovery of a more
vitalistic outlook in attitudes towards physical and mental
wellbeing, the main underlying perception of our modern,
urban-industrial society remains mechanistic and soulless. Over the
years, the dominant western worldview has become de-vitalised and
devalued, especially in politics and economics. Let’s suppose things
had developed in a more balanced, Bergsonian way over the sixty
years or more since his death: reason and intuition,
intellect and imagination, matter and mind, the
physical and the spiritual. Perhaps we would have learned
from this a greater respect for all expressions of the life force,
including our own species.
To extend Bergson’s speculations, let’s
imagine that the present green awakening and concern over the
environment had started to get under way sixty years ago – I mean
really take off, not just lone voices in the wilderness, such as
Rachel Carson. By now we would have had an environmentally-friendly
form of global politics that we can barely imagine. Had such a
re-valuation of our natural habitat and its human, plant and animal
inhabitants taken place half a century ago, our planet would
probably be in much better shape today, allowing us to pass it on in
a healthy state to our descendants. Political and economic
priorities would by now have changed radically and war would be seen
as an absolute last resort. There can be no place in a genuinely
ethical foreign policy for the doctrine that might is right. There
could therefore be no question of any nation, however powerful,
embarking on pre-emptive wars against any other nation.
With a more vitalistic perception, the
intrinsic value of others and of humanity as a whole would by now
have become something so written into our lives that it would be
that much harder to demonise those we disliked. In order to exploit
and abuse others and make war against them, you first have to
devalue them. Seeing them as of no greater value than devitalized
machines is one way of doing this.
Writing in The Independent (14
May 04), Terence Blacker observed that the fascination of cruelty is
now so pervasive that we hardly notice it’s there. He believes there
is a direct line from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to millions of home
computers across the western world. Pictures not at all dissimilar
to the shocking images from Abu Ghraib are available as a form of
home entertainment. “If you tap the words ‘torture’, ‘rape’ or
‘slave’ into a search engine,” wrote Blacker, “You will not be led
to human rights organizations or academic reports, but to thousand
upon thousand of websites specialising in recreational sadism. All
this is mind-bogglingly profitable, because it taps into the age’s
most compelling vices and weaknesses: cruelty, voyeurism, boredom.
The problem is consumers are never satisfied by what they’re
offered.”
The production line mindset defines the
consumer as a buying machine with an insatiable appetite, whose
tastes, fads and fashions can be manipulated, via advertising, with
artificially contrived, largely unnecessary and usually
environmentally destructive, wants. When one buying machine finally
breaks down (when a customer dies), it is replaced by a new one,
already well groomed in the dark arts of consumption. Underlying the
consumerist juggernaut is the mechanistic view of time, the great
fear of boredom that goes with it and the compulsion to fill up
every waking moment with more and more graphic images, leaving less
and less time for the things that really matter.
Our deeper needs are vitally real – not
at all the same thing as contrived wants. One of our deepest needs
is to find and express that vital creative spark that lies somewhere
in all of us. If we saw ourselves as potentially creative artists of
one kind or another, if this was the main view of ourselves and each
other, we would spend more time creating our own images, writing our
own stories, rediscovering our own myths. The artist is not a
special kind of person. Every person is a special kind of
artist.
In a society that put greater emphasis
on creation than production, boredom would not even be an issue.
Instead of fearing time and thinking of it as an endless space that
has to be filled in, we would value it more and make sure we had
time to express our own particular form of creativity, time to
dream, time to do nothing in particular, to have a fallow period,
time to sit silently, or walk mindfully.
In The Rebel (l’Homme
Révolté, first published in 1951), Albert Camus observed that
the society based on production is only productive, not creative.
We’ve grown so used to living in a society ruled by production that
we can barely even imagine one ruled by creation. Bergson enables us
to envisage a society based more on creativity than the soulless,
mechanistic, produce consume model. His philosophy offers a more
integrated view of life, where science, technology, art, economics,
politics and spirituality can all work together.
You do not need to subscribe to any
kind of religious faith, or belief in the supernatural, to stand in
awe at the creative beauty of the evolutionary life force in all its
incredibly varied and wonderful manifestations. This sense of wonder
comes as naturally to a person of scientific inclination as it does
to an artistic or spiritually-minded person. Bergson’s philosophy
has the effect of opening doors in the mind, enabling us to think
more deeply about the nature of time and how we, in our western
culture, perceive it – or rather, misperceive it. Above all, his
philosophy provides a basis for a more creative, revalued and
revitalized general outlook.
© John-Francis Phipps 2004
John-Francis Phipps lives in
Oxfordshire. The most recent of his many books and pamphlets is
On Being Alive: Reflections After 11th September. See http://www.john-francis-phipps.co.uk/ |
