Living in Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson

In “Diachrony and Representation,” Emmanuel Levinas lamented that Henri Bergson was a forgotten philosopher. Levinas thought this was unfair and wrote favorably of Bergson in much of his work. Things have changed. In France, Frederic Worms has directed a new critical edition of Bergson's oeuvre. Annales Bergsoniennes began publishing in 2002. New works on Bergson started appearing in English in the late 1990s and have continued. John Mullarky's Bergson and Philosophy appeared in 2000, Leonard Lawlor's The Challenge of Bergsonism in 2003, Susan Guerlac's Thinking in Time in 2006, and the collection of essays titled The New Bergson in 1999. This trend has accelerated. A new journal Bergsoniana began in 2021. There are far too many books to list here, and more appear almost monthly. One of the best is Barry Allen's Living in Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson. Allen, who teaches at McMaster University, was a student of Richard Rorty and came to Bergson, as have many others, through Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze's Bergsonism was published in France in 1966, and his long discussions of Bergson in his Cinema books helped revive interest in Bergson in both France and the United States. Deleuze's English disciple, Keith Ansell-Pearson, has written several works on Bergson. Allen has spoken about how reading Bergson led him away from Deleuze.This move from Deleuze to Bergson is one of the strengths of Allen's reading. Though one can appreciate Deleuze's reading, it is Deleuze's Bergson. Deleuze neglects Bergson's last great book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, as have several interpreters of Bergson influenced by Deleuze. Allen's book is divided into four chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. Each chapter is more or less devoted to the theme of one of Bergson's major works, though each chapter draws on the whole corpus, including the two collections: Mind Energy and Creative Mind. Chapter 1, “Taking Time Seriously,” focuses on Time and Free Will. Chapter 2, “Making Memory Matter,” centers on a discussion of Bergson's most challenging work, Matter and Memory. Chapter 3, “Élan Vital,” is on Bergson's most famous but also most misunderstood work, Creative Evolution. Finally, chapter 4, “Open and Closed,” focuses on Bergson's most ignored book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and pairs this with his often-read essay Laughter. Allen gives an excellent introduction to Bergson's thought that brings him into conversation with other thinkers, both historical and contemporary.For example, in chapter 1, “Taking Time Seriously,” Allen offers excellent Bergsonian responses to some of Bergson's contemporaries and critics on the philosophy of time. One of these is a Bergsonian response to McTaggart's claim time was not ultimately real. In his famous description of the A-Series and the B-Series, the A-Series equaled tense: past, present, future. McTaggart thought it was inconsistent that one event be both tomorrow and yesterday. Thus, he decided that the A-Series was unreal. The B-Series deals with time for classical physics. It is a linear order represented by a line on which each moment of the series is an instant and an event. While Bergson never commented on McTaggart's theory of time, Allen applies Bergson to the way McTaggart describes time in the A-series. It neither expresses nor models temporal passage. All events are already on the line waiting for us to reach them (19–20). For Bergson, future and past events do not exist in the present or future; they exist at the time of their occurrence. Duration exists for us as a flow, as the interpenetration of conscious states. The idea of interpenetration in the flow is important here. Matter does not remember the past. It repeats the past. Extensity is prior to space. The notion of space is an abstraction. Space is not something intelligence introduced to better know nature but something intelligence introduced to better interact with it (36).Famously, Bergson argued against Kant that we can know the thing-in-itself through intuition. Allen does an excellent job explaining how this works for Bergson. Kant denied the possibility of intellectual intuition. For Bergson, intuitive knowledge is not of things but of movements (52). Existence is given only in an experience. William James called this attempt to “think backwards” toward the source of thought in duration a Copernican Revolution in philosophy (53).Bergson famously differentiates intellect, instinct, and intuition. Instinct is unconsciously enacted. Intellectual knowledge is thought out and consciously understood. Intellect illuminates choice where instinct diminishes choice. The preference becomes conscious when instinct is thwarted (54). Intellectual knowledge is also knowledge of form. Intuition is instinct that has become disinterested. Such attention is not natural, easy, or spontaneous (55). Bergson calls it “thinking backwards.” “To philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought” (55).Allen's discussion of Matter and Memory in chapter 2 is a clear and concise discussion of Bergson's most challenging book. In Matter and Memory, Bergson eliminates the dichotomy of space and time and introduces duration into extensity, which makes consciousness and matter interpenetrating and temporally continuous. This overcomes the mind/body problem (83).In chapter 3, Allen shows that, despite being labeled a vitalist, Bergson is critical of theories of vitalism. Bergson updates Spinoza's argument against divine providence, and since mechanism mimics machines, it is a type of anthropomorphism. Allen claims that, despite his arguments against divine providence, Spinoza is still a finalist in his theory of nature, Deus sive natura (122–123). The vitality of an organism is the tendency to develop toward individuality, but this effort is compromised by the tendency of the body toward repetition (150). Bergson saw consciousness as creation and matter as repetition. Both are necessary. This is mirrored later in the tension between the individual and society. Life is balance of individuality and association (151). This is the meaning of the universe as a “machine for the making of gods” that concludes Bergson's final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (153). It is not what one is, but it is the power of becoming that makes someone divine (153). God is not the already made but the becoming. Bergson's “gods” are similar to Zarathustra's overman, but with the significant difference that religious mystics love and return to ethical action. The mystic draws humanity to him (195).This is the theme of the final chapter, which begins with a discussion of the short work Laughter. Laughter is the way a closed society punishes those outside of it. There is a rich discussion of the comic here, and Allen points to the limits of Bergson's negative understanding of the comic. He moves on to The Two Sources and the positive example of the mystic's life of universal love, which offers the possibility of stirring humans out of the closed tribal society (174).