The Meaning of Bergsonism
Llewellyn Jones
Bergson’s philosophy is the antithesis of the natural-science view of the universe as mechanism. In that view the laws of nature are fixed sequences controlling matter, or energy, and the more complicated and faultless the mechanism the higher the life. Just how this mechanism became conscious of the fact that it was a mechanism—caught itself at itself, so to speak, and announced the laws of its own being—is a question as puzzling as the old theological one of the aseity of God—which is simply a Latinized way of asking how the deity could, being infinite, turn himself inside out in such a manner as to become aware of his own existence and attributes. In fact, the two questions are one and the same. According to Bergson, mechanism not only cannot explain consciousness, but it is the very antithesis of conscious life. Behind mechanism he places an inextinguishable but not uncheckable vital urge with endless potentialities and with no fixed goal. The progress of this “elan vital” is through resistance to matter, which is simply the reversal of its own movement. The onward urge is what Bergson calls “pure duration” or motion, and its collision with its own reverse movement is what appears to us as space. The actual situation of life at any given time is simply a modus vivendi between this spiritual activity striving to be free, and the reverse movement.
We know, of course, that the physical universe is simply energy running down. Just as a glass of water cools off, so the sun dissipates its heat, and so, we are learning, the elements break up into simpler forms, giving off their contained energy in the forms of heat and electricity as they do so. But on the other hand the plant takes unto itself that energy of the sun, and with it builds up again the inorganic salts from its soil into higher forms with a greater content of stored energy. What the plant does, says Bergson, is typical and symbolical of what all life does at all times: sets up a reverse current to the running-down tendency of the universe of matter.
Life cannot do this easily, but has to adapt itself to the resistance of the downward flow. It does this through its motor reactions, its sense organs, and above all through its intelligence when that is evolved. The evolution of these things gives us our ideas of space. The insect cuts up its environment into spatial forms easy for it to deal with. Man with different sense organs probably lives in a different space world. As “a thing is where it acts,” it is obvious that the boundaries of things in the material realm would be quite different if we had, for example, some sort of sense organ adapted to identify things by their electrical properties. But this identifying of things by spatial and material concepts—the mathematical order—is instrumental to the ends of action, and the original consciousness of life, while it included the potentialities of intellectual knowledge, was instinctive. Instinct, according to Bergson, is first-hand knowledge, but knowledge incapable of conceptual extension. It is therefore no use in the practical affairs of life, but certain and immediate in its apprehension of the actual flow of life itself. In its broadened form of intuition it is responsible for all the valid and original insights of the philosophers and poets. The structural and dialectic forms in which philosophies have been given to the world are simply the intellectualizing process which philosophers have used to buttress—and which they have often thought produced—the insight which was prior to and independent of the system.
Bergson’s doctrine has been seized upon by apologists for every creed and for every iconoclasm. Bergson has been accused of every intellectual crime, from being the intellectual father of syndicalism to being the last rich relative of struggling obscurantism. The protestant theologians talk glibly of Bergson’s idea of God, and use him as a stick with which to beat the hated materialist. Bergson himself would never apply his philosophy to the uses of the syndicalists. The argument of the syndicalists themselves is simply an ingenious parody of the Bergsonian philosophy, as it is so far developed. As mechanism and the mathematical order, they say, do not represent life, we cannot by the means of natural and sociological sciences predict in advance what life will do, and what forms it will take. We cannot base revolutionary action, for instance, along Marxian lines, because the whole Marxist philosophy rests upon the assumption that life is the slave of material forces—chemical firstly, and economical in the human drama—and that it will therefore follow along predetermined lines. If life is an “elan vital,” breaking its path as it goes, and only able to think in terms of the past, then revolutionary activity must cut loose from the reactionary intellect, and trust itself to its instincts; fight its way to that freedom which is impossible in the mathematically determined intellectual realm, and which is equally impossible of achievement by mere intellectual foresight. So the syndicalist in the name of Bergson cuts loose from all theories of the future he wishes to bring in, preaches the “general strike” for its stimulating effect on the emotions of the proletarian constituents of his social “elan vital”—quite careless of whether it would ever be a practical success or not—and deliberately cuts loose from all forms of “bourgeoise culture.”
But the anti-revolutionists point out that Bergson does believe in the intellect as a guide to the practical affairs of life; and industry and production—the field of the syndicalist—are far more mechanical than they are vital. In man’s industrial relations he has to approximate himself as much to the machine as possible, and for Bergson’s anti-intellectualism to be applied to this particular realm of life is as great a calamity as could happen to the doctrine. And then these conservatives proceed, less justifiably perhaps, to train the captured gun of intuition upon the syndicalists. The racial intuitions, they say, are older than the race’s newly-found intellectual conceptions. For generations the race has lived by certain instinctive rules of conduct. Religion, custom, and patriotism, these are all sacred because they are extra-intellectual, and they dare us to disturb these sacred things. It is a strange sight—this most revolutionary philosophical doctrine being used to support all the prejudices that the ages have handed down—but we cannot deny that it is a plausible use of intuitionism, and a more legitimate use than that to which Sorel and his followers have put the teachings emanating from the College of France.
Perhaps the most detailed application that Bergson has yet made of his philosophy to the affairs of life is his application of its principles to the puzzling æsthetic problem of laughter and the comic. His theory is that laughter is a social corrective directed against the man who allows the dogging steps of mechanism to overtake him and imprison his spirit in a web of meaningless action. The man who is walking along the street should be going in a determinate direction with a determinate end in view, and with the ability to get there in spite of reasonable obstacles. So says society. When he becomes abstracted, walks mechanically, and in consequence falls over a brick, we laugh at him. He has permitted himself to become a machine for the nonce instead of a self-conscious spirit, and society cannot afford to have its interests jeopardized in that way.
The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1914, contains an article by J. W. Scott, who accuses Bergson of ethical pessimism on the grounds of his view of the comic. He points out that the psychology of comic action, as Bergson works it out, is precisely that of moral action. For in moral action, too, a man does what is habitual, what is against his own self-conscious impulse, what is mechanical in that it is a fixed course of conduct pursued without reference to the favor or disfavor of the environment. The life impulse must be, he convicts Bergson of saying, adaptable to its circumstances; it must insert itself between the determinisms of matter; it must pursue the crooked path where the straight path is too difficult. It cannot follow its moral ideal without making itself ridiculous, as indeed in real life moral people are always doing.
This criticism hangs on the acceptance of a moral ideal, and if we must have an ideal in the sense of a goal beckoning us from the future, then the criticism is well founded and Bergson is an ethical pessimist. But systematic ethics have been denied by other philosophers before Bergson, and most people of modern temperament are quite willing to let the whole question of a priori ethics drop. They might not be willing to exchange it for the very unpoetic utilitarianism which has so often been offered in its place, but Bergson offers something more than that. If he be an ethical pessimist, he is not a religious pessimist. Of religion he has not yet spoken, except incidentally. Obviously so long as he uses the scientific method in his philosophy, proceeding from facts to their subordination in a picture whose values are given by intuitions, he cannot present a systematic philosophy. But in spite of the fact that pessimism—not only in ethics but in his view of the content of personality and its relations with the universe—is charged against him, Bergson means to be decidedly optimistic in his treatment of personality. In his article in The Hibbert Journal for October, 1911, occur these remarkable words: