A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson Part 4

That there are a.n.a.logies between philosophy and art, between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition, is unquestionable and uncontested.

At the same time, the a.n.a.logies must not be allowed to hide the differences.

Art is, to a certain extent, philosophy previous to a.n.a.lysis, previous to criticism and science; the aesthetic intuition is metaphysical intuition in process of birth, bounded by dream, not proceeding to the test of positive verification. Reciprocally, philosophy is the art which follows upon science, and takes account of it, the art which uses the results of a.n.a.lysis as its material, and submits itself to the demands of stern criticism; metaphysical intuition is the aesthetic intuition verified, systematised, ballasted by the language of reason.

Philosophy then differs from art in two essential points: first of all, it rests upon, envelops, and supposes science; secondly, it implies a test of verification in its strict meaning. Instead of stopping at the acts of common-sense, it completes them with all the contributions of a.n.a.lysis and scientific investigation.

We said just now of common-sense that, in its inmost depths, it possesses reality: that is only quite exact when we mean common-sense developed in positive science; and that is why philosophy takes the results of science as its basis, for each of these results, like the facts and data of common perception, opens a way for critical penetration towards the immediate. Just now I was comparing the two kinds of knowledge which the theorist and the engineer can have of a machine, and I allowed the advantage of absolute knowledge to practical experience, whilst theory seemed to me mainly relative to the constructive industry. That is true, and I do not go back upon it. But the most experienced engineer, who did not know the mechanism of his machine, who possessed only una.n.a.lysed feelings about it, would have only an artist's, not a philosopher's knowledge. For absolute intuition, in the full sense of the word, we must have integral experience; that is to say, a living application of rational theory no less than of working technique.

To journey towards living intuition, starting from complete science and complete sensation, is the philosopher's task; and this task is governed by standards unknown to art.

Metaphysical intuition offers a victorious resistance to the test of thorough and continued experiment, to the test of calculation as to that of working, to the complete experiment which brings into play all the various deoxidising agents of criticism; it shows itself capable of withstanding a.n.a.lysis without dissolving or succ.u.mbing; it abounds in concepts which satisfy the understanding, and exalt it; in a word, it creates light and truth on all mental planes; and these characteristics are sufficient to distinguish it in a profound degree from aesthetic intuition.

The latter is only the prophetic type of the former, a dream or presentiment, a veiled and still uncertain dawn, a twilight myth preceding and proclaiming, in the half-darkness, the full day of positive revelation...

Every philosophy has two faces, and must be studied in two movements--method and teaching.

These are its two moments, its two aspects, no doubt co-ordinate and mutually dependent, but none the less distinct.

We have just examined the method of the new philosophy inaugurated by Mr Bergson. To what teaching has this method led us, and to what can we foresee that it will lead us?

This is what we have still to find.

II. Teaching.

The sciences properly so called, those that are by agreement termed positive, present themselves as so many external and circ.u.mferential points from which we view reality. They leave us on the outside of things, and confine themselves to investigating from a distance.

The views they give us resemble the brief perspectives of a town which we obtain in looking at it from different angles on the surrounding hills.

Less even than that: for very soon, by increasing abstraction, the coloured views give place to regular lines, and even to simple conventional notes, which are more practical in use and waste less time. And so the sciences remain prisoners of the symbol, and all the inevitable relativity involved in its use. But philosophy claims to pierce within reality, establish itself in the object, follow its thousand turns and folds, obtain from it a direct and immediate feeling, and penetrate right into the concrete depths of its heart; it is not content with an a.n.a.lysis, but demands an intuition.

Now there is one existence which, at the outset, we know better and more surely than any other; there is a privileged case in which the effort of sympathetic revelation is natural and almost easy to us; there is one reality at least which we grasp from within, which we perceive in its deep and internal content. This reality is ourselves. It is typical of all reality, and our study may fitly begin here. Psychology puts us in direct contact with it, and metaphysics attempt to generalise this contact. But such a generalisation can only be attempted if, to begin with, we are familiar with reality at the point where we have immediate access to it.

The path of thought which the philosopher must take is from the inner to the outer being.

I.

"Know thyself": the old maxim has remained the motto of philosophy since Socrates, the motto at least which marks its initial moment, when, inclining towards the depth of the subject, it commences its true work of penetration, whilst science continues to extend on the surface. Each philosophy in turn has commented upon and applied this old motto. But Mr Bergson, more than anyone else, has given it, as he does everything else he takes up, a new and profound meaning. What was the current interpretation before him? Speaking only of the last century, we may say that, under the influence of Kant, criticism had till now been princ.i.p.ally engaged in unravelling the contribution of the subject in the act of consciousness, in establis.h.i.+ng our perception of things through certain representative forms borrowed from our own const.i.tution.

Such was, even yesterday, the authenticated way of regarding the problem. And it is precisely this att.i.tude which Mr Bergson, by a volte-face which will remain familiar to him in the course of his researches, reverses from the outset.

"It has appeared to me," says he, ("Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness", Conclusion.) "that there was ground for setting oneself the inverse problem, and asking whether the most apparent states of the ego itself, which we think we grasp directly, are not most of the time perceived through certain forms borrowed from the outer world, which in this way gives us back what we have lent it. A priori, it seems fairly probable that this is what goes on. For supposing that the forms of which we are speaking, to which we adapt matter, come entirely from the mind, it seems difficult to apply them constantly to objects without soon producing the colouring of the objects in the forms; therefore in using these forms for the knowledge of our own personality, we risk taking a reflection of the frame in which we place them--that is, actually, the external world--for the very colouring of the ego. But we can go further, and state that forms applicable to things cannot be entirely our own work; that they must result from a compromise between matter and mind; that if we give much to this matter, we doubtless receive something from it; and that, in this way, when we try to possess ourselves again after an excursion into the outer world, we no longer have our hands free."

To avoid such a consequence, there is, we must admit, a conceivable loophole. It consists in maintaining on principle an absolute a.n.a.logy, an exact similitude between internal reality and external objects. The forms which suit the one would then also suit the other.

But it must be observed that such a principle const.i.tutes in the highest degree a metaphysical thesis which it would be on all hands illegal to a.s.sert previously as a postulate of method. Secondly, and above all, it must be observed that on this head experience is decisive, and manifests more plainly every day the failure of the theories which try to a.s.similate the world of consciousness to that of matter, to copy psychology from physics. We have here two different "orders." The apparatus of the first does not admit of being employed in the second.

Hence the necessity of the att.i.tude adopted by Mr Bergson. We have an effort to make, a work of reform to undertake, to lift the veil of symbols which envelops our usual representation of the ego, and thus conceals us from our own view, in order to find out what we are in reality, immediately, in our inmost selves. This effort and this work are necessary, because, "in order to contemplate the ego in its original purity, psychology must eliminate or correct certain forms which bear the visible mark of the outer world." ("Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness", Conclusion.) What are these forms? Let us confine ourselves to the most important. Things appear to us as numerable units, placed side by side in s.p.a.ce. They compose numerical and spatial multiplicity, a dust of terms between which geometrical ties are established.

But s.p.a.ce and number are the two forms of immobility, the two schemes of a.n.a.lysis, by which we must not let ourselves be obsessed. I do not say that there is no place to give them, even in the internal world. But the more deeply we enter into the heart of psychological life, the less they are in place.

The fact is, there are several planes of consciousness, situated at different depths, marking all the intervening degrees between pure thought and bodily action, and each mental phenomenon interests all these planes simultaneously, and is thus repeated in a thousand higher tones, like the harmonies of one and the same note.

Or, if you prefer it, the life of the spirit is not the uniform transparent surface of a mere; rather it is a gus.h.i.+ng spring which, at first pent in, spreads upwards and outwards, like a sheaf of corn, pa.s.sing through many different states, from the dark and concentrated welling of the source to the gleam of the scattered tumbling spray; and each of its moods presents in its turn a similar character, being itself only a thread within the whole. Such without doubt is the central and activating idea of the admirable book ent.i.tled "Matter and Memory". I cannot possibly condense its substance here, or convey its astonis.h.i.+ng synthetic power, which succeeds in contracting a complete metaphysic, and in gripping it so firmly that the examination ends by pa.s.sing to the discussion of a few humble facts relative to the philosophy of the brain! But its technical severity and its very conciseness, combined with the wealth it contains, render it irresumable; and I can only in a few words indicate its conclusions.

First of all, however little we pride ourselves on positive method, we must admit the existence of an internal world, of a spiritual activity distinct from matter and its mechanism. No chemistry of the brain, no dance of atoms, is equivalent to the least thought, or indeed to the least sensation.

Some, it is true, have brought forward a thesis of parallelism, according to which each mental phenomenon corresponds point by point to a phenomenon in the brain, without adding anything to it, without influencing its course, merely translating it into another tongue, so that a glance sufficiently penetrating to follow the molecular revolutions and the fluxes of nervous production in their least episodes would immediately read the inmost secrets of the a.s.sociated consciousness.

But no one will deny that a thesis of this kind is only in reality a hypothesis, that it goes enormously beyond the certain data of current biology, and that it can only be formulated by antic.i.p.ating future discoveries in a preconceived direction. Let us be candid: it is not really a thesis of positive science, but a metaphysical thesis in the unpleasant meaning of the term. Taking it at its best, its worth today could only be one of intelligibleness. And intelligible it is not.

How are we to understand a consciousness dest.i.tute of activity and consequently without connection with reality, a kind of phosph.o.r.escence which emphasises the lines of vibration in the brain, and renders in miraculous duplicate, by its mysterious and useless light, certain phenomena already complete without it?

One day Mr Bergson came down into the arena of dialectic, and, talking to his opponents in their own language, pulled their "psycho-physiological paralogism" to pieces before their eyes; it is only by confounding in one and the same argument two systems of incompatible notations, idealism and realism, that we succeed in enunciating the parallelist thesis. This reasoning went home, all the more as it was adapted to the usual form of discussions between philosophers. But a more positive and more categorical proof is to be found all through "Matter and Memory". From the precise example of recollection a.n.a.lysed to its lowest depths, Mr Bergson completely grasps and measures the divergence between soul and body, between mind and matter. Then, putting into practice what he said elsewhere about the creation of new concepts, he arrives at the conclusion--these are his own expressions--that between the psychological fact and its counterpart in the brain there must be a relation sui generis, which is neither the determination of the one by the other, nor their reciprocal independence, nor the production of the latter by the former, nor of the former by the latter, nor their simple parallel concomitance; in short, a relation which answers to none of the ready-made concepts which abstraction puts at our service, but which may be approximately formulated in these terms: ("Report of the French Philosophical Society", meeting, 2nd May 1901.)

"Given a psychological state, that part of the state which admits of play, the part which would be translated by an att.i.tude of the body or by bodily actions, is represented in the brain; the remainder is independent of it, and has no equivalent in the brain. So that to one and the same state of the brain there may be many different psychological states which correspond, though not all kinds of states.

They are psychological states which all have in common the same motor scheme. Into one and the same frame many pictures may go, but not all pictures. Let us take a lofty abstract philosophical thought. We do not conceive it without adding to it an image representing it, which we place beneath.

"We do not represent the image to ourselves, again, without supporting it by a design which resumes its leading features. We do not imagine this design itself without imagining and, in so doing, sketching certain movements which would reproduce it. It is this sketch, and this sketch only, which is represented in the brain. Frame the sketch, there is a margin for the image. Frame the image again, there remains a margin, and a still larger margin, for the thought. The thought is thus relatively free and indeterminate in relation to the activity which conditions it in the brain, for this activity expresses only the motive articulation of the idea, and the articulation may be the same for ideas absolutely different. And yet it is not complete liberty nor absolute indetermination, since any kind of idea, taken at hazard, would not present the articulation desired.

"In short, none of the simple concepts furnished us by philosophy could express the relation we seek, but this relation appears with tolerable clearness to result from experiment."

The same a.n.a.lysis of facts tells us how the planes of consciousness, of which I spoke just now, are arranged, the law by which they are distributed, and the meaning which attaches to their disposition. Let us neglect the intervening multiples, and look only at the extreme poles of the series.

We are inclined to imagine too abrupt a severance between gesture and dream, between action and thought, between body and mind. There are not two plane surfaces, without thickness or transition, placed one above the other on different levels; it is by an imperceptible degradation of increasing depth, and decreasing materiality, that we pa.s.s from one term to the other.

And the characteristics are continually changing in the course of the transition. Thus our initial problem confronts us again, more acutely than ever: are the forms of number and s.p.a.ce equally suitable on all planes of consciousness?

Let us consider the most external of these planes of life, and one which is in contact with the outer world, the one which receives directly the impressions of external reality. We live as a rule on the surface of ourselves, in the numerical and spatial dispersion of language and gesture. Our deeper ego is covered as it were with a tough crust, hardened in action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits, side by side, and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines and mechanical relations. And it is for the representation of the phenomena which occur within this dead rind that s.p.a.ce and number are valid.

For we have to live, I mean live our common daily life, with our body, with our customary mechanism rather than with our true depths. Our attention is therefore most often directed by a natural inclination to the practical worth and useful function of our internal states, to the public object of which they are the sign, to the effect they produce externally, to the gestures by which we express them in s.p.a.ce. A social average of individual modalities interests us more than the incommunicable originality of our deeper life. The words of language besides offer us so many symbolic centres round which crystallise groups of motor mechanisms set up by habit, the only usual elements of our internal determinations. Now, contact with society has rendered these motor mechanisms practically identical in all men. Hence, whether it be a question of sensation, feeling, or ideas, we have these neutral dry and colourless residua, which spread lifeless over the surface of ourselves, "like dead leaves on the water of a pond." ("Essay on the Immediate Data," page 102.)

Thus the progress we have lived falls into the rank of a thing that can be handled. s.p.a.ce and number lay hold of it. And soon all that remains of what was movement and life is combinations formed and annulled, and forces mechanically composed in a whole of juxtaposed atoms, and to represent this whole a collection of petrified concepts, manipulated in dialectic like counters.

Quite different appears the true inner reality, and quite different are its profound characteristics. To begin with, it contains nothing quant.i.tative; the intensity of a psychological state is not a magnitude, nor can it be measured. The "Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" begins with the proof of this leading statement. If it is a question of a simple state, such as a sensation of light or weight, the intensity is measured by a certain quality of shade which indicates to us approximately, by an a.s.sociation of ideas and thanks to our acquired experience, the magnitude of the objective cause from which it proceeds. If, on the contrary, it is a question of a complex state, such as those impressions of profound joy or sorrow which lay hold of us entirely, invading and overwhelming us, what we call their intensity expresses only the confused feeling of a qualitative progress, and increasing wealth. "Take, for example, an obscure desire, which has gradually become a profound pa.s.sion. You will see that the feeble intensity of this desire consisted first of all in the fact that it seemed to you isolated and in a way foreign to all the rest of your inner life. But little by little it penetrated a larger number of psychic elements, dyeing them, so to speak, its own colour; and now you find your point of view on things as a whole appears to you to have changed. Is it not true that you become aware of a profound pa.s.sion, once it has taken root, by the fact that the same objects no longer produce the same impression upon you? All your sensations, all your ideas, appear to you refreshed by it; it is like a new childhood." (Loc.

cit., page 6.)

There is here none of the h.o.m.ogeneity which is the property of magnitude, and the necessary condition of measurement, giving a view of the less in the bosom of the more. The element of number has vanished, and with it numerical multiplicity extended in s.p.a.ce. Our inner states form a qualitative continuity; they are prolonged and blended into one another; they are grouped in harmonies, each note of which contains an echo of the whole; they are encircled by an innumerable degradation of halos, which gradually colour the total content of consciousness; they live each in the bosom of his fellow.

"I am the scent of roses," were the words Condillac put in the mouth of his statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, as soon as observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact.

In a pa.s.sing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, in a ray of moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams.

A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas, my sensations, are like me. How would such facts be possible, if the multiple unity of the ego did not present the essential characteristic of vibrating in its entirety in the depths of each of the parts descried or rather determined in it by a.n.a.lysis? All physical determinations envelop and imply each other reciprocally. And the fact that the soul is thus present in its entirety in each of its acts, its feelings, for example, or its ideas in its sensations, its recollections in its percepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, is the justifying principle of metaphors, the source of all poetry, the truth which modern philosophy proclaims with more force every day under the name of immanence of thought, the fact which explains our moral responsibility with regard to our affections and our beliefs themselves; and finally, it is the best of us, since it is this which ensures our being able to surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly, and this which const.i.tutes the real unity of our person.

Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible s.h.i.+ver of running water through the mossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self, each of my att.i.tudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumed contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form of number. He who thus makes the really "deep" and "inner" effort necessary to becoming--were it only for an elusive moment--discovers, under the simplest appearance, inexhaustible sources of unsuspected wealth; the rhythm of his duration becomes amplified and refined; his acts become more conscious; and in what seemed to him at first sudden severance or instantaneous pulsation he discovers complex transitions imperceptibly shaded off, musical transitions full of unexpected repet.i.tions and threaded movements.

Thus, the deeper we go in consciousness, the less suitable become these schemes of separation and fixity existing in spatial and numerical forms. The inner world is that of pure quality. There is no measurable h.o.m.ogeneity, no collection of atomically constructed elements. The phenomena distinguished in it by a.n.a.lysis are not composing units, but phases. And it is only when they reach the surface, when they come in contact with the external world, when they are incarnated in language or gesture, that the categories of matter become adapted to them. In its true nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, an impalpable s.h.i.+ver of fluid changing tones, a perpetual flux of waves which ebb and break and dissolve into one another without shock or jar. Everything is ceaseless change; and the state which appears the most stable is already change, since it continues and grows old. Constant quant.i.ties are represented only by the materialisation of habit or by means of practical symbols. And it is on this point that Mr Bergson rightly insists. ("Creative Evolution", page 3.)