The philosophy of Bergson

Preface

Some apology is needed for publishing a book on the philosophy of Bergson. Books on philosophers are always a poor substitute for the writings of the philosophers themselves, and that is especially true of a writer so brilliant as Monsieur Bergson. My excuse is that in some degree the very brilliance and charm of Monsieur Bergson's writing has hindered a proper appreciation of his work. His method of philosophical exposition is a combination of abstract thinking and most illuminating and suggestive concrete illustrations. The combination constitutes, I think, an ideal method, but, as few professional philosophers since Plato have had the artist's power of concrete vision, an unusual one. In consequence the suggestiveness of the illustrations has obscured the systematic nature of the thought which they illustrate, and Bergson has, in spite of his explanations and protests, too often been regarded by his vi PREFACE

admirers as a philosopher who does not believe in systematic thinking and by his critics as a writer remarkable indeed for some brilliant apergus but not to be taken seriously as a philosopher. I have therefore endeavoured to bring out the unity and systematic nature of Monsieur Bergson's thought, and to show something of its connection with the historical development of philosophy, and more especially with the philosophy of Kant. The book does not pretend to be an account of all Monsieur Bergson's work. There are many things in his writings which I have not discussed, notably his contribution to aesthetics in he Rire and ^his more special psychological studies, such as Le Reve, U Effort Intellectuel, and Le Souvenir du Present et la Fausse Reconnaissance. Further, as I have wished to examine certain problems with which modern philosophy is especially concerned in the light which Monsieur Bergson throws upon them, rather than to make a critical study of his writings in great detail, I have not been careful to distinguish when I am merely giving a resume of what Monsieur Bergson says and when the arguments are my own.

PREFACE vii

For the same reason I have ventured to criticise the details of Monsieur Bergson's arguments when they seemed to me to obscure what I take to be the main results of his thinking.

As a justification of my attempt to reduce to more technical terms and to connect with previous philosophy, writing so fresh and original I would quote Monsieur Bergson's own words : —

For convenience I have cited the pages in the English translation of Les Donnees Immediates de la

1 Revue de Mitaphysique et de Morale, vol. xvi. p. 32.

viii PREFACE

Conscience, Matiere et Memoire, and V Evolution Creatrice, and have referred to these books by their English titles and in most cases quoted from the translation. As the Introduction a la Metaphysique which appeared in the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, January 1903, is now out of print and almost inaccessible in French, I have in referring to it cited the pages of the German translation.

The book contains the substance of lectures which I delivered at Balliol as Jowett Lecturer, and I have not been careful to remove all traces of their original form, nor to change their original character, of an endeavour rather to help myself and possibly others to understand the main lines of Monsieur Bergson's thought than to appraise its value or to attempt a complete and critical answer to the questions which it raises.

A. D. LINDSAY

April 191 1

Introduction

In a passage of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant remarks that " It is a great and essential proof of cleverness or insight to know how to ask reasonable questions." Many difficulties and antinomies in philosophy arise, he held, from a failure to ask the right question, or from asking questions which have really no meaning. In face of antinomies thus created, the chief part of the philosopher's task is his statement of the problem, and he may be judged to have succeeded if in his new statement he brings together the elements of importance in the old problems. Yet this is bound at first to have the result that the new philosophy will be hard to classify : it will not fit into any of the old schools ; it may seem to be a mere confused jumble of inconsistent doctrines, a comprehensive eclecticism ; and if we go to it with the old questions, we may get what seem unsatisfactory or inconsistent answers. The new philosophy will win its way only if through its help the antinomies of the older are exposed and resolved.

Kant's own philosophy made an advance of this kind. He began, as we know from his correspondence, with a consciousness of antinomies. He was convinced of the truth of certain elements both in English Empiricism and Continental Rationalism, as he was convinced of the unsatisfactoriness of either of these doctrines taken by itself. The Critical Philosophy began when, from a study of these antinomies, he came to formulate a new problem. A great part of the advance in philosophy made by the Critique consisted in the perception of the problem involved in synthetic a priori judgments ; and while there are differences of opinion as to the success with which Kant solved the problem which he stated, almost every one is agreed that its mere statement marked an epoch in philosophy.

Now, without suggesting any comparison in importance between Bergson and Kant, there is this resemblance between them, that much of the interest of Bergson's work consists in his statement and exposition of antinomies to be found in present-day philosophy, that as the best road to the solution of these antinomies he offers a new statement of the task or problem of philosophy, and propounds a new method. Like Kant's, his work professes to be critical : to find the main source of previous difficulties in an uncriticised assumption. This new statement of problems has the natural result that he will fit in to none of the ordinary categories of philosophical schools. He has been called a Pragmatist ; and much of his work consists in insisting on the influence of practical considerations on thought, both ordinary and scientific, and in detecting that influence just where its presence had been least suspected. Yet at the same time he believes in the power of thought to transcend this influence, and insists that philosophy is only possible if the distinction between thought and action, which Pragmatism tends to deny, is clearly recognised. Much of his work in Matter and Memory is devoted to showing mind's independence of body : he pushes to great lengths the notion that mind is more intelligible than matter, that the truest and most metaphysical apprehension of reality must be in forms of mind. Yet he is not an idealist in the ordinary sense. No one has stated more trenchantly the externality of perception. He brings together in Matter and Memory arguments with which we are familiar in modern Realism. But his realism is such as to allow, and indeed perhaps sometimes unduly to insist upon, the subjectivity of much of our thinking. Much of his work is psychological. The first chapter of Time and Free Will is an inquiry as to how we come to attribute intensity to our psychical states — a purely psychological inquiry. Matter and Memory is largely concerned with the results of specific researches into the relations of brain and mind ; and Bergson believes that these results may be of real importance in a philosophical account of the relations of mind and body ; not as providing a theory, but as proving that the philosophical theory will explain the detailed facts. Yet, at the same time, his work, especially in Time and Free Will and in the essay on Psychophysiological Parallelism, is a criticism of the foundation and assumptions of most psychology, a criticism which leads to the view that psychology is only possible when it follows the reflective method of philosophy.

Bergson, then, is not easy to classify. If we were, in the manner of some writers, to ask what propositions he holds to be true, we might produce a list showing that Bergson agrees in some proposition with the most various and strictly opposed philosophers. Yet he is not to be styled an Eclectic. For he claims at least that all these propositions, hitherto supposed to be incompatible, will be seen to involve one another in the light of his new statement of the problem of philosophy. It is not because he is sometimes an Idealist, and sometimes a Realist that he agrees with some of the statements of the first school and with some of the second. He does not sometimes think that presentations are inside consciousness, and sometimes that they are outside ; rather he has shown that the question whether objects are inside or outside the mind (which has divided Idealism and Realism) is really unmeaning, and has suggested that the problem of the relation between mind and its objects should be stated in terms not of space but of time.

Bergson thus resembles Kant in this, that his work springs from a consideration of antinomies and a conviction that they can be resolved only by approaching problems by a new method or from a new point of view. Whatever, therefore, we may think of his success in providing a solution, a study of his work cannot fail to be instructive in so far as it will be a study of tendencies in modern philosophy. For that reason I propose to devote attention to Bergson's exposition of antinomies, to his critical rather than to his constructive and positive work. There can, I think, be little doubt as to the great value of the first. The value of the second is much more difficult to appraise.

But there is another and more interesting aspect in which Bergson resembles Kant, and can at the same time be contrasted with him, viz. in respect to his view of the relations between philosophy and science. Kant's whole work is dominated by his conception of science. The Critique begins with a contrast between the assured and certain results of science and the uncertainty and confusion of existing metaphysic. The Critique is both a criticism of metaphysics and a validation of science. It establishes or seeks to establish the conditions on which the success of science depends. His analysis of the Critique is entitled Prolegomena to any future metaphysic which can pretend to be scientific; and he got his notion of what " being scientific " involved from his knowledge of the most progressive sciences of his time, mathematics and mathematical physics. His philosophy presupposed though it criticised science. He was himself both scientist and philosopher.

Since Kant's time the enormous growth of the sciences and the increasing specialisation of all intellectual work has caused a divorce between philosophy and science. It has been increasingly hard for the philosopher to take anything like a synoptic view of the results and methods of scientific inquiry. Philosophy has less and less held it to be its concern to survey reality as presented in the sciences, and, from a more comprehensive view than that of any one of them, display the whole of which they are parts. Sometimes it has essayed to comprehend reality independently of the detailed results of the sciences, contenting itself with knowing that science, because abstract, must be wrong, and not always realising that a proud independence of matter of fact may be as abstract. This produces an irritating encounter with the scientist who has found that his science raises philosophical problems. The scientist knows that philosophy cannot do his work over again without his patient study of detail, and fails to see how the philosopher can criticise his results unless he to some extent studies and accepts them. Perhaps more often philosophy tries to become scientific by limiting itself, finding some special region of facts which only philosophy can explore, in the hope, expressed or implicit, that a conquest of that region may bring with it a mastery of all the field of knowledge. This explains the excessive preoccupation of philosophy with theory of knowledge — an inquiry which, when it is treated in entire isolation from what is known, is bound to be barren and apt to become subjective. It accounts for the impossible view often taken of psychology, that it is a special inquiry to be studied scientifically, which is to have all the rigour and certainty of the most rigid science, and yet is to contain within itself the explanation of many, if not all, the problems with which the other special sciences deal.

But philosophy can neither be an isolated science nor isolated from all science. It cannot be its business to do over again the work of the sciences, to check and correct their investigations, yet it cannot exist apart from science. If it does not study any particular facts, it at least studies scientific investigation, and reflects upon the results and methods of science.

In spite of any formal separation between science and philosophy there is no doubt that philosophy is affected by progress in science, that the different problems with which philosophy is concerned from time to time are largely suggested by the different stages of scientific inquiry or the different natures of the sciences which are for the time the most important. It is a commonplace that not only was the development of modern philosophy, which began with Descartes and culminated with Kant, coincident with the development of modern mathematics and the enormous progress made by such sciences as physics and mathematical astronomy, but its methods and aims were largely influenced by the methods and aims of the mathematical sciences. It is as universally recognised that many of the most important of present-day problems in philosophy are raised by the remarkable growth of the biological sciences since Kant's time. These are problems found within the sciences ; they concern the whole question of the applicability of the mathematical method to the facts of life. The difficulties of the biological sciences have therefore raised what is eminently a philosophical problem, the solution of which will be at least assisted by, if it does not necessitate a knowledge of, the detailed form in which the problem presents itself in the sciences themselves.

io THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON

Kant, when he spoke of science, meant mathematical science. He even goes so far as to say that an inquiry is scientific just in so far as it is mathematical. The main heads of his Prolegomena to any future metaphysic which may pretend to he scientific were, therefore, naturally : " How is pure mathematics possible ? How is pure science of nature (by which he meant physics) possible? and how is pure metaphysic possible ? " He answered the first two questions in terms which precluded the possibility of metaphysics. The growth of the biological sciences suggests the further question, or perhaps questions, How is biology possible ? and how is psychology possible ? and raises the possibility that these questions may be so answered as to suggest how metaphysics is possible. Bergson, in bringing philosophy back into close contact with science, is continuing the questions of the Prolegomena in this sense. He has himself stated this very clearly : * " This method claims to escape from the objections which Kant has formulated against metaphysic in general, and its principal object is to remove the opposition established by Kant between metaphysic and science, by taking account of the

1 Discussion on u Le parallelisme psychophysique et la metaphysique positive," Bulletiti de la Sociiti Fran$aise de Philosophic, June 1901.

quite new conditions in which science works. If you read the Critique of Pure Reason you see that Kant has criticised, not reason in general, but a reason fashioned to the habits and exigencies of the Cartesian mechanism or the Newtonian physic. . . . The doctrine that I defend proposes to rebuild the bridge (broken down since Kant) between metaphysics and science. This divorce between science and metaphysics is the great evil from which our philosophy suffers. We are fond of saying that the faults are on the side of the scientists. Let us ask ourselves if we have not, too, some reason to reproach ourselves. Let us ask whether our metaphysic cannot be reconciled with science simply because it lags behind science, being the metaphysic of a rigid science with entirely mathematical categories, in short of the science that flourished from Descartes to Kant, while the science of the nineteenth century seems to have aspired to a much more subtle form, and not always to have taken mathematics as its model."

We may regard Bergson as completing rather than opposing Kant's work, inasmuch as his criticism of the attempt to make all science mathematical or to construct a universal mathematic is, like Kant's criticism, a delimitation of the sphere of mathematics rather than a denial of their validity within their own sphere. Hence, as Kant claims, such criticism is equally removed from dogmatism and scepticism : from the dogmatic determinism which asserts the theoretical possibility of expressing ail reality in terms of mathematical necessity, and the scepticism, expressed e.g. in Mr. H. G. Wells's Scepticism, of the Instrument, which sees in the failure of mathematics to apply to all the details of reality a proof that mathematical laws may themselves be false.

We take it, then, that Bergson's work is primarily an attempt to examine the assumptions of the biological and non-mathematical sciences, and to discover whether there are not certain inquiries which are not mathematical but which nevertheless give us knowledge, and in the light of such inquiries to renew the question of the Prolegomena, How is metaphysic possible ?

It may be useful to notice how far Bergson is here giving more special attention to a problem already raised though not satisfactorily solved by Kant. Kant denied the possibility of metaphysics, because metaphysics could not fulfil the conditions of the mathematical sciences. Yet while the mathematical sciences are, in Kant's eyes, the only strict sciences, he recognised the existence of certain inquiries which were not capable of an a priori treatment, and in the third Critique he examines not the a priori constitutive principles, but the postulates of empirical inquiry. In the Critique of Teleological Judgement he definitely asserts the limitations of the mathematical or mechanical method, and sets by its side the teleological ; and in that Critique he is largely concerned with the problems already raised in biology, and he considers that this Critique mediates between the first and the second, i.e. between the principles of the mathematical sciences and the metaphysical concepts which are implied in conduct.

Kant considered himself to have established the validity of the mathematical sciences by showing that they are confined to phenomena and do not apply to things in themselves. This distinction is open to the interpretation, which has perhaps usually been put upon it, that the a priori sciences are possible because in them the mind is in contact with realities or things which are somehow constructed by the mind, and which as actual entities must be distinguished from the things in themselves which exist unknowable behind them. This interpretation has naturally led to a doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, against which we shall find Bergson protesting, and even, in spite of Kant's repeated protests, to the view that the mind has somehow superior knowledge of its own states. Under such an interpretation the validity of the mathematical sciences which the Critique establishes is not worth much.

But if we examine the actual arguments either in the Deduction or the Schematism of the Categories, we find that Kant is concerned, not with the soundness of mathematical reasoning, but with the validity of its application to reality as presented in perception ; that that depends on the principle that mathematics involves synthesis of the homogeneous ; and that in mathematical synthesis we are synthesizing discrete elements whose discreteness is the work of the understanding. This is seen more especially in the part played by time in the Schematism of the Categories. Time is regarded by Kant as a homogeneous order, the relations of whose parts can be anticipated just because time is homogeneous, and the principles involved in such a homogeneous order can be applied to reality in so far as real things appear in time. When Kant comes to treat of causation, he finds the difficulty that causation is synthesis of the heterogeneous and hence cannot be anticipated. His solution is that there can be an a priori principle of causation only in so far as things can be regarded as points in the time series. Causation is the relation, in a continuous change, between one point taken by us and another point also taken by us. We have made the discretion, and hence the synthesis is of a series the points in which are of our distinguishing. Hence, when Kant says that the principles of the mathematical sciences are valid only of phenomena, that means at least that they are valid of reality in its spatial and temporal relations, space and time being regarded as wholes which we articulate. We can have an a priori law of causation because causation is a time relation. But particular laws of causation are not derivable from the general nature of time, but from a study of real events that occur in time. Therefore, as Kant insists in the Critique of Judgement, they cannot be anticipated, but must be studied empirically. In that Critique he examines the principles governing empirical investigation and distinguishes the two principles of mechanism and teleology, both of which he asserts to be necessary to science without being able to explain their relation. The concept of teleology is necessary in science in so far as we have to recognise in empirical investigation the individuality and distinct nature of different things, but it is a concept with no relation to Kant's a priori principles of the understanding. Its importance lies in the implication that while the principles of the understanding are valid only of phenomena, of a synthesis of points which we have distinguished, empirical knowledge demands some apprehension of the real articulation and individuality of things, though the method and principles of such apprehension are unexplained.

Kant also applies his distinction of phenomena and thing in itself to the self, and asserts that the self can only be known phenomenally : which means, in so far as it can be regarded as a series of discrete states, acting, as the Critique of Practical Reason shows Kant to have thought, externally upon one another according to the principle of causation.

Kant's doctrine that we only know phenomena, and his statement that an inquiry is only scientific in so far as it is mathematical, are thus two ways of saying the same thing : that we can only know objects, whether physical or psychical, in so far as they can be regarded as discrete external points in a time series. Following this principle science has endeavoured to construct a scientific psychology and a scientific biology, whose main assumption is that their objects can be treated as so discrete : that we can regard the mind as an aggregate or series of states, and animal life as an aggregate or series of mechanical changes.

Bergson's examination of the antinomies created by this assumption results in showing that a scientific psychology and a scientific biology are not possible if scientific is to be taken to mean mathematical. But this result raises the further question, Are such inquiries of no value because they are not mathematical ? Do they or should they want to be so ? Have they no standards or methods of their own ? This leads to a consideration of those elements in knowledge which are not represented in mathematical analysis ; and to Bergson's account of intuition. The question, How are psychology and biology possible ? is answered thus : Only because knowledge is not exhausted in mathematical analysis, because over against the discursive understanding stands the more immediate intuitive knowledge.

As, then, the examination of the possibility of the mathematical sciences led in Kant to a critique of the understanding, the examination of the possibility of the biological sciences leads in Bergson to a critique of intuition. It is here that we have perhaps the chief interest and difficulty of his work.

Criticism of the discursive understanding is not new, and we are all familiar with views which depreciate the scientific understanding at the expense of something more immediate and profound, something more akin to feeling. Hume's scepticism, for example, is an attack on reason in favour of feeling, and feeling which is thus exalted is something which has no standard and no methods, whose only test is subjective and momentary. The discursive understanding is examined and found wanting, but the feeling or intuition set up in its place is not found wanting simply because it is not examined. It is therefore of great importance that the criticism of the limits of mathematical thinking is in Bergson made in the name of science. For the existence of inquiries such as biology and psychology, and (we would add, though Bergson unfortunately does not do so) as history, may show us that non-mathematical inquiries have their own standards, their good and bad methods, though they may not be accessible to just the same kinds of test and verification as are the mathematical sciences. Thus Bergson himself does not attack the sciences in the name of immediate feeling, though some of his followers may do so. Intuition is for him not a method practised by turning away from the results of the sciences, but by somehow completing them. His doctrine of intuition is, as we have seen, an attempt to rebuild the bridge between science and metaphysic. He says in the conversation from which we have already quoted : " If by mysticism be meant (as it almost always is nowadays) a reaction against positive science, the doctrine which I defend is in the end only a protest against mysticism." M. Le Roy, his interlocutor, suggests that the true opposition is between intellectual thought and thought lived, to which Bergson replies : " That is still intellectualism, in my opinion. But you are quite right to distinguish between thought drawn from its profound sources and superficial thought, which is ready to fix itself in formulas. Automatism is the enemy. That is true of the intellectual life, as of the physical and moral life." " There are two kinds of intellectualism, the true, which lives its ideas ; and a false intellectualism, which immobilises moving ideas into solidified concepts to play with them like counters." * We are, then, to have the criticism of an intuition which is distinguished equally from the discursive understanding and from mere feeling.

1 Bulletin de le Sociiti Franpaise de Philosophies vol. i. p. 64.

We suggested that the answer to the new question, How are the biological sciences possible ? might raise afresh the question as to the possibility of metaphysics, answered in the negative by Kant. Here again let us see where Kant left the problem. Metaphysics implies knowledge of the absolute or of things in themselves : but for Kant all knowledge is mathematical knowledge, and as that is only of phenomena, metaphysics is impossible. But, as he said, Kant limited reason to make room for faith, and the metaphysical concepts of God, Freedom, and Immortality, though they could not be known, could be lived. This results in his remarkable account of freedom. On the one hand we have the phenomenal self regarded as a series of external states influencing one another by mechanical laws, in such a way that were these fully known, they could be fully determined beforehand : on the other hand the self as moral agent, a responsible individual standing in relation to other responsible individuals, and whose actions are therefore free. The difficulties in ethics into which this distinction led Kant are well known. Just because the phenomenal self can only be known in so far as it is regarded as a series of discrete states governed by the law of causation, it can only be known as in its place in the phenomenal world regarded as a similar but larger series. Therefore, if there be any known relation between a particular state of mind and a particular change in the outside world, or vice versa, the relation must be that of necessary causation.

In other words, as phenomenon the individual loses his individuality. We may make the attempt to separate a psychological series from a physical series (we shall find Bergson examining attempts of this kind), but in the end, once we regard the self as a series of separate discrete states, we can no longer maintain the distinction between that series and other similar causal series. Kant's answer to this difficulty is that causation only holds of the self as phenomenal, and it is more than phenomenal. Treatment of the self as a series of discrete states is then, according to Kant, inadequate. We escape from causation only in so far as we can regard the self as individual, and since we can never know anything as individual, freedom can never be known. We get free action only in so far as we realise the self as acting from motives that stand in no relation to other things at all, in moral praise or blame that takes no account of circumstance. It follows that for Kant there can be no degrees of freedom : or at least if there are they cannot be known. For, it is important to recognise, freedom is a question of individuality, and for Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason there is no third alternative to knowing the self as a series of states in causal relations with the rest of reality, a mere nexus of changes, hardly even a nexus, and realising the self as acting under the moral claim to behave as an independent moral agent responsible to other independent moral agents.