Henri Bergson was born in 1859 in Paris. Until the age of 19, he remained a British citizen, since his mother Catherine, who was passionate about art and instilled in her son a love for the English language, literature and poetry, was English. Henri, who was brought up in boarding schools from the age of 9, finally decided to stay in France and continue his education at the Lycée Condorcet. Bergson seriously and successfully studied mathematics: the famous mathematician Debauve, who taught him, included Bergson’s student article in his book on Blaise Pascal and modern geometry, and for it Bergson received his first prize – the Annales de Mathematics. Bergson’s transfer in 1881 to the Ecole Normale, where he later studied philosophy together with Durkheim, was a great disappointment for his professors: “You could have become a mathematician, but you only wanted to be a philosopher.”
The problems that interest Bergson are, first of all, the problems of scientific knowledge. He is impressed by the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of the second half of the 19th century, first of all by H. Spencer, as well as by a whole galaxy of French authors: Ravaisson, who interpreted in his own way de Biran’s ideas on the relationship between facts and inner life, Lachelier, who offered his own interpretation of induction and taught at the Ecole Normale at the time, E. Boutroux, who developed Kant’s ideas in relation to the modern laws of natural science. Bergson is engaged in translating Lucretius and, as was customary, is preparing two final dissertations: “Sensory Knowledge According to Aristotle” and “Immediate Data of Consciousness”. He worked on the latter for two years, already holding a teaching position in Clermont-Ferrand, but it was in this work, published in 1889 under the title “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness”, that Bergson himself found a turning point in his discovery – duration (la duree): “Until the moment I became aware of duration, I could say that I lived outside myself.” Developing the ideas of the dual nature of our knowledge, Bergson, holding the position of professor at the College de France since 1890, delves into the problems of psychology – this is the subject of “Matter and Memory” (1896). A more specialized work – “Laughter. Essays on the Meaning of the Comic” (1900) – no less in detail describes the psychological phenomenon of laughter and the erroneous interpretations that existed in the history of philosophy. A kind of reconstruction of metaphysics — revolutionary intuitionism — is the “Creative Evolution” (1907) and the “Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903) preceding it. It was “Creative Evolution”, where the concept of creative impulse (élan vital) is introduced, that made Bergson a cult figure for many — for example, James, Maritain. His lectures were extremely popular in England, the USA, Spain — in 1919 the first collection of his speeches “Spiritual Energy” was published, the second collection — “Thought and the Moving” (1934) would become Bergson’s last publication during his lifetime. He became an academician (1920), in 1917 he was sent on a special mission to the USA, then he worked in the League of Nations in the “Commission on Intellectual Cooperation” until arthritis forced him to leave the post of its president. In 1928 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, after which he finally completed another work, as fundamental and detailed as all of Bergson’s few works, this time devoted to human society, “The Two Sources of Morality and Religion” (1932). During these years, Bergson was strongly influenced by Catholicism, and according to many testimonies, he was going to convert from Judaism, the religion of his parents, to Catholicism, but a wave of anti-Semitism forced him to postpone these plans: “I prefer to remain among those who will be outcasts tomorrow.” After the occupation of France by the Nazis, he refused the title of “Honorary Aryan” offered to him and joined the endless queue of Jews registering,he catches a cold and two days later, on January 7, 1941, he dies of pneumonia.
Bergson is the founder of intuitionism, since he opposed rational cognitive abilities to the abilities of intuition. Only intuition is capable of grasping the truth – the truth of integral and changing life. On this basis, Bergson is considered a representative of the so-called academic philosophy of life, which tries to solve the traditional problems of philosophy, based on the fact that the main specific subject of its attention should be life.
The doctrine of duration. In his “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness”, Bergson, largely under the influence of the ideas of H. Spencer’s evolutionism and, in particular, his development of the problem of time in “First Principles”, introduces his famous concept of duration (la durée), which turns out to be a definition of consciousness: “Pure duration is the form that the succession of our states of consciousness takes when our I simply lives, when it does not establish a distinction between the present states and those that preceded them” (1: 93). Bergson sets himself the task of defining consciousness in such a way that an extremely broad picture of individual spiritual life emerges, including thoughts, images, emotions, as opposed to the then popular quantitative approach in psychology. It is important for him to understand how concepts work in modern science, primarily mechanics and mathematics. But at the same time, he entered into the most heated debates in the field of psychology at that time. For example, Elements of Psychophysics (1860) by G. T. Fechner proposed a precise formula for the relationship between mental (feelings-perceptions) and physical (stimulus) consciousness. Bergson believes that what we perceive as a scale is only a qualitative transformation of data, and one should proceed from pure quality in relation to consciousness. Spiritual life does not obey the deterministic laws of science. Duration differs from the deterministic understanding of space and time. It would seem that this idea is inherent in a wide variety of sciences, including psychology, but, according to Bergson, no science has a concept in which time is presented the way we experience it. Bergson’s idea is that the experience of time coincides with the sequence of states of our consciousness, which is not reduced to the fixation of individual uniform moments – universal discrete units. Bergson gives the example of a clock: when I follow the hands of a clock with my eyes, I count simultaneities, and do not measure durations – outside me, in space, there is only one single position of the hands, nothing remains of the past, but “within me the process of organization or interpenetration of the facts of consciousness continues, constituting true duration” (1: 96). Only thanks to this duration do I imagine past positions at the very moment when I perceive a given position.
Consciousness in its broad sense, or the true, fundamental Self with all the unity of diversity, consists in the pure experience of duration – in the pure passage of time. In many ways, Bergson relies on the apriorism of I. Kant, according to which space and time are a priori forms of sensibility. Time is a special form of sensibility, since it is “internal”, structures the Self and, as noted by I. Kant, turns out to be the basis of experience, constituting sensory material on the basis of pure concepts of reason according to the principle of the so-called schematism of time. But Kant, from Bergson’s point of view, confuses space and time, considering time to be just as schematic and discrete as space. Duration and space should be contrasted. Moreover, there is always the danger of unconsciously replacing it with space when we want to measure it. However, the intuitionistic resolution of the opposition of space and time – as a result of immediate apprehension – is accompanied by Bergson’s so-called atomistic argument: the continuity of the true understanding of time is contrasted with the discreteness of the rational concept of space. This is precisely why Bergson’s argumentation did not suit modern philosophers who construct a concept of continuous, changeable space and appeal to the geometry of position – topology – as opposed to discrete Euclidean geometry. The self, understood as duration, will be shown as a manifestation of “uncontrollable freedom”. For Bergson, this is fundamentally important, this is the ultimate goal of research: “one must move into pure duration in order to find oneself again, to act freely.”
Psychology.The dual theory of knowledge presented in Bergson’s first work must be supplemented by psychology, which would explain the mechanism of such knowledge. This is the subject of his work “Matter and Memory”. The main sections of consciousness – perception and recollection – in Bergson’s contemporary psychology were considered as phenomena of the same nature, varying in intensity. This was also a feature of English philosophy of the New Age, which influenced the entire island philosophy of the 20th century: the reality of the perceived object and the ideality of the presented are essentially the same thing. As Bergson himself notes, the psychological problem thus turns into a metaphysical problem, which requires a fundamentally new solution: the problem of defining memory that does not reduce memory to the functioning of matter – the brain. Therefore, Bergson begins with a conditional “pure perception”, that is, the body is considered as a mathematical point in space, and the perception itself as a mathematical moment in time, and it is discovered that perception is “a virtual action of things on our body and of our body on things” (1: 306), the state of the brain is a continuation of perception, begun by action. The brain registers what is useful for action. In this sense, according to Bergson, one should understand intellectual illusions that reduce all spiritual activity exclusively to cerebral activity. Bergson has a remarkable figurative definition of the nature of cerebral activity: the brain works as an organ of pantomime, it animates thought, translates it into movement and facial expressions. Therefore, psychological analysis must, firstly, return to the problem of explaining the origin of mental functions, and secondly, pay special attention to the metaphysical explanation of the mechanical habit of acting. When we add subjective moments – we give the body its extension, and perception its duration, or, accordingly, affectivity and memory, it turns out that pure perception is not pure contemplation or a return to recollection, which was considered a weakened perception. Bergson criticizes the theory of associations primarily for the fact that all memories and our work with them are considered as links in perception according to the principle of similarity or contiguity. Even critics of associationism do not see the true nature of associations. According to Bergson, there is a section of action, where certain motor habits are fixed in the body – associations played out – an automatic motor reaction to a similar external situation, and there is a section of dreams, where no action is mixed with the image, this is the sphere of pure memory, the sphere of the spirit. Pure recollection comes into contact with pure perception, partly connected with the body, at the point of real perception, where everything turns out to be connected with duration and memory. The point of intersection of spontaneous reason with the body gives us the phenomenon of associations, the emergence of the most simple general ideas. Reason, in order to supplement its memories or localize them, must move from poor memories,intended for direct bodily action, to a wider circle of consciousness, to withdraw from action. There are no mechanical operations of the mind here, it is a transition to a level that is not reducible to the bodily, the active, the material – a transition to the level of the spirit. Recollection cannot therefore be the result of a cerebral state. It is the sphere of the spirit. Memory is separable from brain activity and it is thanks to memory that we acquire a sense of our own Self – all the wealth of our inner spiritual world, not connected with external actions.
The main conclusion of the discussion of matter and spirit, from Bergson’s own point of view, is not to confirm dualism, but to eliminate or mitigate the problem of the “triple opposition of the non-extended and the extended, of quality and quantity, of freedom and necessity” (1: 313), associated with dualism. It turns out that “immediate givenness, reality, is something intermediate between extension divided into parts and pure non-extension: this is what we have called extensive” (1: 313-314). This is a property of perception that is actively used by the mind in the interests of action: abstract space, for example, allows us to manipulate multiple and infinitely divisible extension, we can reduce the density of perception, dissolving it in affects, or, conversely, transform it into pure ideas. This double work in opposite directions and the excessive trust in reason lead to the initial intuition of perception as extensive being lost and replaced by the rigid antinomy of infinitely divisible extension and absolutely unextended sensations. If we accept the first opposition, then, as a consequence, we also accept the second: quality and quantity, that is, according to Bergson, consciousness and movement. But it can be removed, according to Bergson, by another idea, analogous to the idea of extensiveness – the idea of internal tension, or rhythm of duration, which distinguishes sensory qualities as they are given to us in representation, and the same qualities that are treated as calculable changes. Freedom turns out to be linked to necessity in the following way: “the spirit borrows from matter the perceptions that feed it, and returns them to it, giving them the form of movement – the form in which its freedom is embodied” (1:316). Speaking about the evolution of the living and the emergence of consciousness, Bergson notes that consciousness, thanks to the memory of the immediate experience of the past, which helps to organize this past into one whole with the present, becomes capable of easily coordinating with necessity.
Critics and followers of Bergson have had difficulty understanding the peculiar terminology used in this work, which differs from the generally accepted one (for example, images are understood as representative sensations, etc.). Many have emphasized the problem of freedom as central to the question of the relationship between body and spirit, but interpretations often contradict each other – Bergson is accused of sensualizing freedom, of understanding it regressively, of understanding it as a necessity, etc.
Creative evolution. However, it is precisely these ideas about the relationship between freedom and necessity that really represent the interpenetration of spirit and matter that prepare the release of Bergson’s main metaphysical work, Creative Evolution, in which the main subject of study will be the unity of life. Bergson at this time already critically evaluates all existing evolutionary concepts, primarily Darwinism, as well as the evolutionism of G. Spencer, under whose influence he was at the beginning of his philosophical evolution. The process of development, from the point of view of these concepts, is teleological, and even in Spencer, evolution is traced through individual changes that are recorded by rational analysis as changes in forms – this is the so-called dysmorphism.
In this case, the unity of life is not understood as an abstract unity grasped by the intellect. Bergson criticizes the foundations of Hegelianism and believes that the theory of life must receive its own anti-intellectualist theory of knowledge, based on what constitutes life itself. One must experience life, or, as Bergson puts it, try to scoop up water with a sieve. This is possible only with the help of intuition. Only in intuition is the contemplation of movement given in the same continuity as the variability of consciousness.
This is why Bergson begins with the problem of psychophysical parallelism, appealing to Descartes and formulating his position on the relationship between the brain and the mind: the brain and the mind are in solidarity, but not identical. What is in the soul, not the mind, is instinct: “a force acting on matter and organizing it in accordance with the goal required by life.” This distinguishes instinct from automatic behavior, of which Bergson gives many examples. This is primarily the world of insects, where the wasp “knows” how to paralyze its victim.
Unlike automatism, instinct presupposes a certain sympathy, spiritual openness to the world, knowledge of the unity of life, not thought out in advance, not specially assimilated, but discovered by actions, experienced and expressed. If the mind is directed at a multitude of objects and reveals their similarities and differences, comparing each element of the multitude with each other, then instinct grasps one object or its part, but grasps it in a special way – in its variability. The mind establishes relationships between things, identifies properties and on this basis is able to make artificial tools. The mind identifies the required function and links it with this or that property,
which is characteristic of a number of objects. Instinct does not calculate or analyze, but it is precisely thanks to it that a predator catches up with its prey, catching it in motion, and not drawing or calculating the trajectory of its path. Thanks to instinct, natural tools appear that use an object as a whole or in part. This is partial knowledge, but since in this part it is integral, only instinct is capable of knowing movement and life. But most importantly, instinct is capable of becoming aware of itself. For example, aesthetic perception, which is closest to the philosophy of life, is based on this. Philosophy must cease to be a science in order to know not relatively, but absolutely – this is how one of Bergson’s aphorisms sounds. Traditional science relies on comparison and symbolic designation of an object and gives knowledge that is not identical to the object. The main method should be intuition, direct knowledge. This is a double movement of tension and relaxation, which is first directed at the Self itself. This is a necessary impetus for obtaining the correct direction of cognitive search. Thus, the first in the picture of the world is psychological introspection, on the basis of which, by analogy, a picture of the Universe is built. Here, at the stage of metaphysics, reason is connected. The philosophy of intuition, thus, will be able to build a metaphysics of the absolute, to grasp the quality of life, that is, life in formation and movement, will be able to understand the present, and not only the past, as evolution.
Bergson’s basic definitions of life turn out to be metaphorical. The most persistent is the image of a continuous creative impulse (élan vital), which is described as “a rocket, the extinguished remains of which fall in the form of matter … also what remains of the rocket itself and, cutting through these remains, ignites them in organisms” (2: 233). Another definition emphasizes the role of consciousness, which is the driving principle of evolution. However, in the literature there is no clear opinion whether Bergson’s concept can be considered idealistic on this basis, whether the basis of life can be interpreted as super-consciousness. After all, according to Bergson, a spontaneous vital impulse lies at the basis of those manifestations and creative search in matter that respond with irritability (in plants), instinct (in animals), intellect and intuition-instinct – Bergson uses both terms – (in humans).
Society. The society that Bergson calls open and distinguishes from closed society, and its spiritual foundation – dynamic, as opposed to static, morality and religion – must correspond to this vital response. The social concept completes the philosophy of spiritual life and creative impulse: love for humanity must be affirmed as an organizing principle based on the new metaphysics of the intuitionist philosophy of life. In closed societies that exist for the sake of self-preservation and protect the interests of a small group of people, the main moral principle is moral duty – the basis of will as a common habit. This is a supra-individual social requirement of a closed society that requires discipline and hierarchical subordination. Static religion, serving a closed society, creates myths that calm and protect from the fear of death and the omnipotence of the intellect. But even in a closed society, heroes appear who bring with them creativity and openness. In a static religion, texts may appear that preach brotherly love, such as in the Gospel Sermon on the Mount. True religion itself is built on creative impulse and love, it is mystical, since mysticism corresponds to the mutability of life. Dynamic morality is called upon to develop love for humanity and God – each individual responds emotionally to the calls of moral heroes. Only in an open society is each individual a personality, thanks to which society is constantly evolving. Such societies have a future. Based on these ideas of Bergson, the concept of the “open society” of K. Popper appears. In the social utopia, those qualities of Bergson that P. Valéry named at a special meeting of the Academy dedicated to the memory of Bergson in 1941 were most clearly manifested: “A sublime, pure, excellent image of a thinking man, perhaps one of the last people who thinks extraordinarily, deeply, majestically in times when the world thinks and reflects less and less, when civilization, it seems, will turn from day to day into ruins and a memory…” (1: 49).
Literature
1. Bergson A. Collected Works: In 4 volumes. Volume 1. Moscow, 1992.
2. Bergson A. Creative evolution M., 1998.
3.Bergson H. Oeuvres. Ed. of the century. Texts annot. by A. Robinet. Introduction. by H. Gouhier. P., 1959.
4. Blauberg I. Henri Bergson. M., 2003.
5.Antliff M. Inventing Bergson, 1993.
6.Kolakowski L. Bergson, 1985.
7.Soulez F. Henry Bergson, 1986.