Logic of Bergson's philosophy

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Introduction

Like a number of other philosophical writers M. Bergson presupposes a world in which there are objects of knowledge and knowledges of these objects, the latter being true in the measure of their resemblance to what they are knowledges of; but more elaborately than any other philosopher, perhaps, he develops a consequence of this fundamental assumption, according to which a knowledge, to be absolutely true, must coincide with what it is knowledge of. He applies this supposition, along with its consequence, first to psychology, then to physics and biology, and, finally, to natural science as a whole. In Time and Free-Will he tries to effect a reform of psychology by making the mind it describes coincide with the object of psychological science, or immediate experience; in the sequel he repeats the attempt with regard to physics and biology. In other words, M. Bergson condemns whatever discrepancy he succeeds in discovering between science and concrete experience; he finds fault with science for being abstract and analytical, and his philosophy argues in favor of the validity of immediate intuition. It is not an unequivocal argument in favor of the doctrine of immediate intuition, however, for besides the difficulty of accounting for error in a doctrine that defines any object presented in consciousness as the truth of itself, an attack on the truth of the natural sciences, to carry weight, requires the provision of a substitute science. But — since formulations are abstract irremediably and experience concrete — in formulating a substitute science M. Bergson transgresses the fundamental assumption of his argument, which declares that as long as a discrepancy exists between knowledge and the object of knowledge, the latter must fall short of the absolute truth. Hence the most general characteristic of M. Bergson's logic: He discovers what he takes to be flaws of an epistemological order in natural science, and proposes a novel science in its place, in which the same flaws, or flaws of a similar sort, reappear.

The capital significance of M. Bergson's writings, for technical philosophy, then, is to be found in the fact that he originally defines a psychology radically distinct from ordinary psychology ; a metaphysics of matter radically distinct from ordinary physics ; and a general metaphysics radically distinct from natural science, and relinquishes these distinctions one by one, identifying in principle the sciences he proposes as true, philosophically, with the sciences of nature he impugns as invalid. This relinquishment is the chief source of the ambiguities that have frequently been noted in M. Bergson's writings, and which appear sometimes in sharp contradictions, but more often in the double or multiple meanings of the terms and definitions he employs; for in one form or another the ambiguity springing from this relinquishment pervades M. Bergson's philosophy, and is the only element of logic common to his successive books and informing them with a significant systematic unity. As to the purport of the relinquishment we describe, it may mean that so fan as M. Bergson formulates a succeedaneous science he is false to the truth of his own inspiration — that, strictly speaking, philosophical truths are inexpressible in abstractions; or it may mean that M. Bergson's initial assumption should be renounced — that his need to fall back on the characteristics of natural science, with which he found fault, is evidence in favor of their philosophical validity. We prefer the latter of these alternatives, but the reader may make his choice without prejudice to the following exposition of the difficulties of M. Bergson's logic.

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Table Of Contents

I Analysis of Time and Free-Will I

Demonstration of M. Bergson's relinquishment of his novel psychology 27

II Comparison of the relinquishment in Time and Free-Will with the relinquishment in Matter and Memory 34

II (i) MATTER AND MEMORY

The chiefly significant difference between the arrangement of M. Bergson's assumptions and observations in Time and Free-Will and Matter and Memory is that he accepts the extension of immediate experience as a genuine philosophical fact in the latter work, whereas in Time and Free-Will space is supposed to be present in the immediate illegitimately. M. Bergson's recognition that the immediate is really extended was encouraged, perhaps, by an advance in psychological doctrine in various quarters, but the development of the doctrine itself of Time and Free-Will from the premise that the immediate data of consciousness are unextended, to the demonstration that practise and language and abstract thought involve the confusion of quantity and quality in the sense of an actual mingling or pouring together of matter and mind, brought M. Bergson close to the complete admission that the immediate is extended. Postulating the extension of immediate experience, but retaining the dualistic hypothesis and the theory that genuine knowledge must coincide with the object of knowledge, M. Bergson proceeds to develop a doctrine epistemologically similar to the doctrine of Time and Free-Will. The principal peculiarity of that book lay in its attempt to combine the fact that a discrepancy separates the terms of the science of psychology from psychology's subject-matter, with the theory that knowledge is true of its object in the measure of their resemblance. Now in granting the extension of immediate experience M. Bergson accepts the presence of matter in immediate consciousness and confronts a discrepancy separating the terms of conceptual physics from the immediate material of physical science, parallel to the discrepancy between the terms and subject-matter of psychological science. Hence, in Matter and Memory M. Bergson attempts a reform of the science of matter similar to the reform he attempted in Time and Free-Will of the science of mind.

Due to his epistemological presupposition M. Bergson tended to identify knowledge of mind with the subject-matter of psychological science, but the tendency was checked by the danger of excluding the possibility of error from psychology. Hence the ''genuine" mind of Time and Free-Will was sometimes concrete experience and sometimes an abstraction therefrom, according to the circumstances of M. Bergson's treatment. Similarly in Matter and Memory M. Bergson attempts to identify "genuine" matter with immediate experience, and then, reversing this tendency, grants that matter is an abstraction really, just as the physical scientists claim that it is. But in addition to an indeterminate doctrine of physics in which real matter is denned alternately as the abstraction that physics describes and as a concrete immediate experience, Matter and Memory once more presents an indeterminate psychology in which genuine mind approaches and recedes from immediate experience. Hence two general statements in Matter and Memory concerning experience: Allowing both matter and mind to coincide with the immediate data of consciousness, and consequently with one another, M. Bergson treats all reality as of a piece, thereby satisfying his premise that veritable knowledge is one with its object. But the necessity of providing a position for error bars him from the hypothesis that reality is all of a piece, and causes M. Bergson to distinguish matter and mind from one another by distinguishing both from immediate experience.

The former descriptive treatment of the make-up or character of reality is exemplified in Matter and Memory in numerous passages. Thus in setting forth the results to which the application of his method of trusting (p. 245) to "immediate knowledge" may lead, M. Bergson formulates a number of propositions (pp. 246-291) which are intended, according to himself (p. 267), to narrow the interval between heterogeneous qualities and homogeneous movements, or sensations and matter. And in this phase of his thought he describes matter and mind as different rhythms of duration, or different degrees of tension of consciousness in a scale of being (p. 275). For the most part M. Bergson, however, breaks reality into separate terms: mind, matter, and immediate experience. In outline the indetermination of the nature he ascribes to matter and mind develops the following variations.

When, in order to satisfy his epistemological premise, M. Bergson begins to reduce the interval between immediate experience and matter by treating the abstractness of conceptual matter as false, the "pure perception" in which M. Bergson supposes mind and matter partly to coincide, tends to take on the character of conceptual matter. As the interval disappears and matter becomes immediate experience, quality is treated as actually present in matter; matter acquires the characteristics which physical science disregards in immediate experience; matter is no longer a determined system of movements, but exercises the faculty of choice; and "pure perception" is concrete immediate experience. And so, as matter moves towards immediate experience, " pure perception" is identified with ordinary perception; that is, memory is treated as the mark of whatever is mental, and as constituting perception, and even matter, perhaps. But, contrarily, when matter regresses from immediate experience in the direction of conceptual space, memory is treated as falsifying perception. Now, when matter coincides with the immediate data of consciousness, ceasing to be a determined system of movements, the nerves choose and deliberate and do the work of the mind; and mind, or the past, influences matter directly by affecting the brain. Naturally, when matter falls in with immediate experience, the abstract space of mathematical physics is described as an instrument of falsification vitiating concrete extensity. But when the identification of mind with the immediate forces matter towards conceptual matter, space is treated as valid philosophically.

In his Introduction to Matter and Memory M. Bergson states his project of reforming philosophy by identifying matter with immediate experience. The difficulties of dualism are due for the most part, he declares (p. vii), to the conceptions which philosophers entertain of matter; Descartes, he continues (p. ix), put matter too far from us when he made it one with geometrical space, and Berkeley exceeded the truth in an opposite direction when he made matter coincide with mind. "We place ourselves," says M. Bergson, "at the point of view of a mind unaware of the disputes between philosophers. Such a mind would naturally believe that matter exists just as it is perceived. . . . In a word, we consider matter before the dissociation which idealism and realism have brought about between its existence and its appearance (p. viii)." The difficulty, as we have said, connected with the enterprise of identifying matter and immediate experience, appears in a loss of the distinction between the object of physical science and that science itself, involving the preclusion of error in physics. In accordance with our preliminary outline above let us record some of the ambiguities springing from the difficulty of identifying matter with immediate experience.

We start from perception and note that as matter recedes from the immediate, perception is dragged in the direction of space. Sometimes in M. Bergson's exposition matter is qualitative; that is, it partakes of the nature of immediate experience : " . . . the sensible qualities of matter would be known in themselves . . . could we but disengage them from that particular rhythm of duration which characterizes our consciousness" (p. 75). " . . .we must leave to matter those qualities which materialists and spiritualists alike strip from it" (p. 180). " . . . there is no impassible barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction even . . . between quality and movement" (p. 291). l At other points in his exposition M. Bergson seems to argue that matter is not legitimately possessed of its perceived qualities: "The qualitative heterogeneity of our . . . perceptions of the universe results from the fact that . . . memory condenses in each an enormous multiplicity of vibrations. . . . If we were to eliminate all memory, we 4 should pass . . . from perception to matter . . . Then matter . . . would tend more and more towards that system of homogeneous vibrations of which realism tells us . . ." (p. 76). Concomitantly perception recedes from mind: "Pure perception . . . however rapid we suppose it to be, occupies a certain depth of duration, so that our successive perceptions are never the real moments of things . . . " (p. 75) " . . . spirit" is "in perception already memory . . . " " . . . the humblest function of spirit is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of things . . ." (p. 295). Yet: "... pure perception is . . . in a sense matter . . ." (p. 325). Further: " . . . matter . . . coincides, in essentials, with pure perception . . ." "It is in very truth within matter that pure perception places us . . ." (p. 235). "These . . . terms, perception and matter, approach each other in the measure that we divest ourselves of . . . the prejudices of action . . ." (p. 293). 2

Does memory then falsify or does it constitute perception? As matter progresses in the direction of the immediate, forcing perception towards mind, memory seems to be essential to perception, perhaps even to matter itself: "Does not ... an irreducible opposition remain between matter . . . and the lowest degree of . . . memory? . . . the distinction subsists, but union becomes possible, since it would be, given, under the radical form of a partial coincidence, in pure perception. . . . We may go further: memory does not intervene as a function of which matter has no presentiment and which it does not imitate in its own way" (p. 297). But: " . . . what can be a non-perceived material object . . . unless it is a kind of unconscious mental state" (p. 183)? " . . . matter as grasped in concrete perception . . . is in great part the work of memory" (p. 237). "Theoretically . . . the part played by consciousness in external perception . . . [is] to join together, by the continuous- thread of memory, instantaneous visions of the real. But, in fact, there is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name there is already some work of memory" (P- 75)- "Your perception, however instantaneous, consists . . .

in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth every perception is already memory" (p. 194). " . . .to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence" (p. 275). Slightly different is the following view of the subject: " . . . the subjective side of perception . . . [is] the contraction effected by memory, and the objective reality of matter . . . [is] the multitudinous and successive vibrations into which this perception can be internally broken up" (p. 77). As matter approaches homogeneous space, memory is treated more and more like a foreign element in perception. M. Bergson argues (pp. 24, 25) that perception must not be supposed to differ from memory in degree of intensity only; that in order to make our idea of matter clear we must neglect the contraction operated by memory ; and that perception as confined to the present, over against perception impregnated with the past, would mould itself truthfully on its object. "Our perception of matter is . . . [not] relative or subjective, at least in principle, and apart from memory" (p. 48). "The capital error, the error which, passing over from psychology into metaphysic, shuts us out . from the knowledge ... of body and of spirit, is that which sees only a difference of intensity, instead of a difference of nature, between pure perception and memory" (p. 71). " . . . memory above all . . . lends to perception its subjective character; the philosophy of matter must aim in the first instance ... at eliminating the contributions of memory" (p. 80).

"Either. . . our conception of matter is false, or memory is radically distinct from perception" (p. 318). 3 Similarly, as matter progresses in the direction of the immediate it ceases to be the system of determined interactions defined by physics, and takes on indetermination in the form of a faculty of choice. 11 . . . matter, the further we push its analysis . . . [tends] more and more to be only a succession of . . . movements which may be deduced each from the other . . ." (p. 295). "To reply to an action received by an immediate reaction . . . this is the fundamental law of matter: herein consists necessity" (p. 279). " . , . we may say that the nervous system, a material mass presenting . physical properties only . . . can have no other office than to receive, inhibit, or transmit movement" (p. 78). " . . . the living body in general, and the nervous system in particular, are the only channels for the transmission of movements . . ." (p. 81). " . . . as soon as we compare the structure of the spinal cord with that of the brain, we are bound to infer that there is merely a difference of complication, and not a difference in kind, between the functions of the brain and the . . . activity of the medullary system" (p. 18). Nevertheless: " . . . there is . . .a radical distinction between the pure automatism, of which the seat is mainly in the spinal cord, and the voluntary activity which requires the intervention of the brain" (p. 18). " . . . the cells of the various regions of the cortex . . . allow the stimulation received to reach at will this or that motor mechanism of the spinal cord, and so to choose its effect" (p. 19). " . . .if there exist in the material world places where the vibrations received are not mechanically transmitted . [these] zones of indetermination . . . must occur along the path of what is termed the sensori-motor process" (p. 37). "The afferent nerves bring to the brain a disturbance, which, after having intelligently chosen its path, transmits itself to motor mechanisms created by repetition" (p. 96). 4

In the measure that matter moves from pure space towards immediate experience, acquiring the character of concrete perception, which is constituted by memory, the past, from being invalid takes on a clearly admitted potency: " . . . though the whole series of our past images remains present with us, still the representation which is analogous to the present perception has to be chosen" (p. 114). "In the degree that . . . recollections take the form of a more complete, more concrete, and more conscious representation, do they tend to confound themselves with the perception which attracts them . . ." (p. 160). "Virtual, this memory can only become actual by means of the perception which attracts it. Powerless, it borrows life and strength from the present sensation in which it is materialized" (p. 163). " . . . the past tends to reconquer, by actualizing itself, the influence it had lost" (p. 169). "It is just because I made . . . [pure memory] active that it has become actual, that is to say, a sensation capable of provoking movements" (p. 179). "Memory . [is] powerless as long as it remains without utility . . ." (p. 181). Injure the cerebral mechanism and " . . . you deprive . . . [the past image] of all means of acting upon the real and consequently ... of being realized" (p. 88). " . . . our memory directs upon the perception . . . the memory-images which resemble it . . . Memory thus creates anew the present perception" (p. 123). "We will try to follow pure memory ... in the continuous effort which it makes to insert itself into motor habit" (p. 202). " . . . it is necessary that . . . recollections . . . should be able to set going in the brain the same machinery that perception ordinarily sets to work" (p. 316). 5

In so far as the past is viewed by M. Bergson as endowed with potency the distinction of function between the spinal cord and the brain becomes more marked; since it is upon the brain that he considers the past to act: "There is . . . only a difference of degree — there can be no. difference in kind — between what is called the perceptive faculty of the brain and the reflex functions of the spinal cord" (p. 10). "In our opinion (p. 19) . . . the brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic exchange . . .its office is limited to the transmission and division of movement" (p. 20). "The truth is that my nervous system interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the center, and from the center to the periphery" (p. 40). On the other hand: "Our contention ... is that . . . there are . . . in . . . [the substance of the brain], organs of virtual perception, influenced by the intention of memory, as there are at the periphery organs of real perception, influenced by the action of the object" (p. 164, note). The " . . . organ of sense ... is like an immense keyboard, on which the external object executes at once its harmony of a thousand notes. . . . Now, suppress the external object or the organ of sense, or both : the same elementary sensations may be excited, for the same strings are there, ready to vibrate in the same way; but where is the keyboard which permits thousands of them to be struck at once? ... In our opinion the 'region of images,' if it exists, can only be a keyboard of this nature. Certainly it is in no way inconceivable that a purely psychic cause should directly set in action all the strings concerned" (p. 165). " . . .in the case of mental hearing . . . [there is] only one plausible hypothesis . . . namely that . . . [the temporal lobe] occupies with regard to the center of hearing itself the place that is exactly symmetrical with the organ of sense. It is, in this case, a mental ear." 6

As matter moves from space to immediate experience, the concept of homogeneous space, by means of which physics abstracts matter from the immediate, is treated as an illegitimate substitute for concrete extensity. When M. Bergson regards the science of physics as speculatively true, saying for example that " . . . the object of science is . . . to rediscover the natural articulations of a universe we have carved artificially" (p. 260), and that Faraday and Kelvin (p. 265) are the two physicists of the nineteenth century who have penetrated farthest into the constitution of matter, he certainly accepts as speculatively valid the concept of geometrical space. And when M. Bergson criticizes the notion of homogeneous time (p. 273), he seems to regard space as a legitimate philosophical concept. But later on (p. 276), space is mentioned as merely "underlying" phenomena, and as not being (p. 280) a "property of things," but a " wholly ideal diagram (p. 278) of arbitrary and infinite divisibility," which, for the sake of action, "we throw . . . beneath concrete extensity" in order to "persuade ourselves that the real is divisible at will." Space, he writes, is "the diagrammatic design of our eventual action upon matter" (p. 280) ; and is neither (p. 281) a reality contemplated nor a form of contemplation, from the speculative point of view. "The artifice of the philosophical method proposed," says M. Bergson (p. 243), "consists . in distinguishing the point of view of customary or useful knowledge from that of true knowledge." The question whether such a method is applicable to the problem of matter (p. 244), is the question whether "in this 'diversity of phenomena' of which Kant spoke, that part which shows a vague tendency towards extension could be seized by us on the hither side of the homogeneous space to which it is applied and through which we subdivide it . . ." "Certainly it would be a chimerical enterprise to try to free ourselves from the fundamental conditions of external perception. But the question is whether certain conditions, which we usually regard as fundamental, do not rather concern the use to be made of things . . . far more than the pure knowledge which we can have of them. ... In regard to concrete extension . . .we do not see why it should be bound up with the amorphous and inert space which subtends it. . . . It might, then, be possible, in a certain measure, to transcend space without stepping out of extensity, and here we should really have a return to the immediate, since we do indeed perceive extensity, whereas space is merely conceived — being a kind of mental diagram" (p. 45).

Just as in Time and Free-Will the material of M. Bergson's argument wavered back and forth between space and pure uniqueness, so here his material moves between space and ' ' pure perception , ' ' and between "pure perception" and "pure memory." He has spaced out his original scheme of two points : quality and quantity, with a third term in which they legitimately meet. And the difficulty experienced by M. Bergson in satisfying the implication of the resemblance-theory of knowledge: that each object is the only genuine knowledge of itself, which made it difficult for him to secure the separateness of qualitative mind from quantitative matter, recurs now in the difficulty of preventing matter from coinciding with pure perception. Symmetrically, to provide for error (and to provide for the possibility of abstraction, and for the undeniable validity of physical science), it is impossible for M. Bergson fully to identify matter with pure experience; it is impossible for him to be faithful entirely to his intention of considering matter "before the dissociation which idealism and realism have brought about between its existence and its appearance," just as it was impossible for him to admit the confusion of matter with mind, in Time and Free-Will, as a legitimate fact. In order better to envisage the relation between the distribution of M. Bergson's epistemological elements in Time and Free-Will, and their distribution in Matter and Memory, we must compare his opinions as to the sources of the corruption of immediate experience as they are set forth in the one book and in the other.

In Time and Free-Will M. Bergson concluded, — after discovering an' element of experience different from the matter of physics and from what the mind of associationistic psychology has in common with the matter of physics, — that real mind or the real immediate is the opposite of the abstract matter of physical science. He concluded that what was originally real mind has become falsified by*being materialized through the influence of language, stupidity, social life, or what not. In Matter and Memory, having admitted to his philosophy a new term in which matter and mind are supposed coincident, he is able no longer unequivocally to claim that matter falsifies the immediate, since he has brought matter into the immediate, and the immediate could not readily be imagined to falsify itself. He is therefore forced, in so far as he makes pure perception a fraction of the material world, to suppose matter falsified by mind ; for he must suppose the immediate falsified because he finds in it an element — uniqueness — not represented in physics, where it should be represented, in his view, in order to satisfy the implication of the resemblance-theory that an idea must be one with its object to be genuinely true. But, when he regards the immediate as especially mental he is forced to find in matter an influence reaching out to falsify mind. In order that matter may falsify the immediate it must be distinct therefrom, and thus must take on the abstract character ascribed to it ordinarily by physics. By legitimatizing the extension of the immediate, in other words, M. Bergson breaks down the principal distinction between mind and matter, and over against the concrete unique phases of immediate experience he can set not only abstract matter, but abstract mind as well, attributing the abstractness of the sciences of the immediate to the illegitimate influence of first one side of the dualistic world and then of the other.

Real matter, therefore, will be defined by the absence of certain attributes treated as veritably present in mind and thence illegitimately transferred to the material world. Real mind will be defined by the absence of these same attributes now supposed veritably proper to the nature of matter and introduced illegitimately to the realm of consciousness. The reconciliation of these contradictory views will be achieved by giving up the dualistic distinction and treating all reality as concrete and unique in a variety of ways, and as lacking in all of these forms the characteristics that distinguish the terms of abstract science from immediate experience.

What, then, are the causes, according to M. Bergson, that have led philosophy to mistake the real nature of matter? Sometimes the corruption of matter and of experience in general is ascribed to causes determined vaguely, as for instance: to "the need of symmetry" (p. 250), ''the exigencies of social life" (p. 239), an "invincible tendency" (p. 154), "instinct" (p. 186), "reflexion" (p. 216), a "metaphysical error" (p. 45), "life" (p. 194), "language" (p. 159), " scientific thought" (p. 154), and so forth. But on the whole M. Bergson ascribes the falsity of our idea of matter to an influence of mind: for example, to "intellect" (p. 190), "memory" (p. 76), "perception" (p. 178), "will" (p. 278). On the other hand he ordinarily traces the falsification of our psychology to some material influence; to "body" (p. 233), "material needs of life" (p. 185), "needs of the body" (p. 47), "images drawn from space" (p. 191), "space" (p. 293), and so forth. Since M. Bergson defines the body, on the whole, as a center of action, and mind as a practical instrument, it is from action that he derives the positive characteristics by the absence of which he defines real mind and real matter; and which, illegitimately present in mind and in matter, he traces back in the one case to matter and in the other to mind. Let us observe the ambiguous position and definition of action in M. Bergson's dualism, and its changeable status in the scheme of his philosophical values.