Chapter II

MIND AND MATTER, SPIRIT AND BODY

Bergson regards knowledge of oneself as the optimal case of knowing; oneself, he thinks, is the sample of reality which best serves for an acquaintance with the nature of reality in general. “The existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own, for of every other object we have notions which may be considered external and superficial, whereas, of ourselves, our perception is internal and profound.”[118] It is this perfect or optimal relation of identity or inwardness—which one bears to oneself—that is the condition of true (i. e. intuitive) knowledge. And in this case we find existence to be a perpetual flow of transition. That we think of our states as distinct from each other is due to the fact that reflection on one’s own existence is, unlike the flow of that existence itself, necessarily discontinuous. It is only now and then that motives arise which turn the attention to the self as an object, like others, for examination. The flow of change is not uniform, to be sure. It is quite imperceptible to our reflective attention most of the time, but if it ever ceased, we should at that moment cease to exist. Only the relatively sudden and interesting periods of transition get our attention. Then we see a new “state of consciousness” which we add to the others that we have mentally strung together in a temporal line. So we conceive of our history as the sum of elements as distinct as beads on a string.

This intellectualistic view of the self eliminates the peculiar characteristic of its reality, namely, its duration, or the flow of its change, like a snowball, accumulating its substance as it rolls, duration goes on preserving itself in incessant change that accumulates all its past. Time, Bergson says, is the very stuff the psychological life is made of. “There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial.”[119]

Life and inertia or matter are two antagonistic principles or tendencies. Life is the positive and active principle; reality and duration are predicable only of life. Matter is an “inversion” or “interruption” of life; its value is negative to life and to reality. “All that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of true positivity, which would have to be defined in psychological terms.”[120] Matter is a determination of reality in much the same sense as that in which the reality of the Platonic idea suffers diminution under the influence of the principle of not-being, resulting in a world of sensible experience or of appearance. Bergson points out that the real in Plato is the timeless, motionless, definite idea, and the relatively unreal is the ever-changing “infinite” or indefinable datum of experience, to which duration is essential. Bergson reverses the Platonic metaphysics: reality is the ever-changing and indefinable; rather, it is change itself. “There are no things, there are only actions.” “... things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming.”[121] The principle antagonistic to reality gives rise to the timeless, definite concept, which is a view or appearance of reality operated by intelligence in the service of action. As our practical interests break up the continuum of time into discrete states, so they break up the continuum of matter into distinct bodies. The active antagonism of time, which is pure quality or heterogeneity, and space, which is pure quantity or homogeneity, results in the world of our experience, comprising “states” of consciousness and things or objects.

The relation between life and matter in the evolution of the world, Bergson represents by the figure of a generation of steam in a boiler.[122] Life, the positive principle, streams or flows, like the steam, by the force which is its very nature. In its course, this vital impetus is checked, as a jet of steam is checked, by its condensation, and falls back upon itself in drops, retarding, but not annihilating, the flow. But we are warned that the figure must be corrected in that the interruption or inversion of the impetus is due to a principle inherent in the impetus itself, not to an external determination. If there were such an external principle, the two would seem coördinate in reality, but the reality of matter is as the reality of rest, which, as the negation of motion, is nothing positive, yet is not a mere naught.

Sometimes, in reading Bergson, it seems very clear that reality and matter must exclude each other, since one is the negation of the other; and perception and conception, whose object is matter, are not knowledge, because that object is unreal. Moreover, not only is the stuff of reality that psychic process which is life and lapsing time, but there is no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. And in numerous other ways the mutual exclusion of reality and matter seems quite fundamental to Bergsonism. One can never remain long in any security about this, however. If Bergsonism is Platonism reversed, it is natural that the peculiarities of the latter should reappear in some form. Platonic not-being is much too important and too active to be denied a coequal positivity with being. Over and above these “worlds,” moreover, there is that one in which we live, with a third status. Perhaps it is this which is most like Bergsonian matter—“nothing positive, yet not a mere naught”! In the letter from which I have already quoted, Monsieur Bergson wrote me, concerning a previous paper of mine:[123] “You give me the choice between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ whereas I cannot respond with either, but must mix them. In each particular case, the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ have to be apportioned, and this is just why the philosophy I adhere to is susceptible of improvement and progress. For instance, you find that my premises lead to this conclusion: ‘Matter has no duration; but duration is synonymous with reality; therefore matter is not real.’ But, to my mind, matter has exactly the same reality as rest, which exists only as negation of motion, yet is something other than absolute nothingness. All that is positive in my ‘vital impetus’ is motion; stoppage of this motion constitutes materiality; the latter, therefore, is nothing positive, yet not a mere naught, absolute nothingness being no more stoppage than motion.”

If one seek (it is not to be found, I think, in Bergson’s writings) an explanation of this abatement or diminution of the élan vital, this tendency toward rest, the problem turns into the very ancient problem of the polarity of being in subject and object. In Platonism, matter arises as product of an eternal antagonism between two coeval principles, the Idea and Not-being. Not-being is thus something efficient, something that is capable of entering as a factor, together with the Idea, into a product, the Sensible Object. The truth is, therefore, that Not-being is something very real: it is something because it does something. It is as real as the Idea, because it is as efficient as the Idea. And in the Bergsonian creative evolution there often seems just such an antagonism as this, between two coördinate, efficient, and therefore real principles. Thus: “The impetus of life ... is confronted with matter, that is to say, with the movement that is the inverse of its own.”[124] And: “Life as a whole ... will appear as a wave which rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter.”[125] But, as with Plato, so with Bergson, dubbing the hated principle “Not-being” or “Negation of Positive Reality” hardly avails against the soundness of its claim to positivity. And the case is not different if the “élan vital” is a self-limited absolute instead of an eternal dualism: the philosopher’s selection of one of the two coefficients or poles of this self-polarized absolute, rather than the other, to be snubbed, is arbitrary, instinctive, personal. With Plato it is one, with Bergson the other; no logical principle determines it, in either case.

On no other point, I believe, is criticism of Bergson so clamorous or so unanimous as on his conception of matter. Without doubt, his conception of matter is obscure. Time and space (terms equivalent for Bergson, to life and matter) being essentially antagonistic, must essentially imply each other; and if so, do they not stand in the same rank as real existences? In what sense, then, is either real and the other unreal, except by an arbitrary decree? The ontological obscurity has its corresponding epistemological obscurity as to the cognitive status of knowledge of matter, which is the crux of Bergson’s philosophy. Instinct is suited to life and duration; intelligence, to matter and space. Science says many things about time, but affords no acquaintance with time itself. The duration of the unit of time is a matter of indifference to the meaning and value of any scientific formula.[126] For example, if this unit were made infinity, and the physical process represented by the formula were thus regarded as infinitely quick, i. e. an instantaneous, timeless fact, the instantaneity of the fact would be irrelevant to any truth expressed by the formula. The only truth the formula expresses is a system of relations, which remains the same for any unit of time. Science knows no past or future, nothing but an incessantly renewed instantaneous present, without substance. The conclusions of science are given in the premises, mathematically; the world of science is a strict determinism. In the real world of consciousness, on the other hand,—knowledge of which can only be acquaintance with it—the future is essentially contingent and unforseeable, for each new phase is an absolute creation, into which the whole past is incorporated without determining it.

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