"Creative Evolution": A Résumé of the Teaching of M. Bergson (Part II — Perception, Intellect and Intuition, Contingency and Destiny, Conclusion)
VI. Perception
Dr. Wildon Carr writes: “The important doctrine that perception is part of reality, that it actually exists whether it comes to consciousness or not, that it is not an independent and particular kind of inner or mental experience representative of external reality, is most ably expounded by Bergson in Matter and Memory” (The Philosophy of Change, p. 97). “If rays of light come from a point P, this point and the rays which it emits, together with the retina and the nervous elements affected in the process of perception, form a single whole. The point P is an indispensable factor in this whole, and it is really in P and not anywhere else that the perception of P is formed and perceived” (cf. Realities and Appearances: An Introduction to Philosophy, by S. Alexander).
This position, held in common by Bergson and the New Realists, perceives the floor, for instance, as a non-mental reality. Take the case of perceiving the floor: the floor, as perceived, is the floor. All that the mind does is to exercise, in reference to the floor, its power of receiving stimulation from it; it does not create or have created within it some modification of itself called a “perception,” by means of which it then infers the existence of an external reality. Bergson’s argument for the validity of this view runs thus: “Eliminate the image which bears the name ‘material world,’ and you destroy at the same time the brain and the cerebral disturbances which are parts of it. Suppose, on the contrary, that these two images — the brain and the cerebral disturbance — vanish: ex hypothesi you efface only these, that is to say, a very little — an insignificant detail from an immense picture — the picture in its totality remains. To make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is a contradiction in terms, since the brain is, by hypothesis, [only] a part of the image” (Matière et Mémoire, pp. 3–4). Put otherwise: there is a system of images which we term the “external world,” and my body is one of them; but within the body occurs “affection,” that is, sensation. Because of this distinction between images and sensations, Bergson affirms that the totality of perceived images subsists even should our body disappear, whereas we cannot annihilate our body without destroying our sensations along with it. The affection, or sensation, is the subjective aspect of perception; the image is its objective aspect — the one within the body, the other without it. The perception, on this account, does not merely represent reality; it is reality, or a part of it.
Dr. Wildon Carr notes that the New Realism resembles the old Idealism rather than the old Realism, in holding that the perceptions themselves are real; but it differs from the old Idealism precisely in denying that perceptions are exclusively mental, and it differs from the old Realism in denying that the object of perception is something wholly detached from, and merely resembling, the mind’s representation of it. What Bergson calls “objects” and what the New Realists call “images” are, on this account, not something that merely represents the thing, or is a faithful copy of it — the object is the thing itself.
This position, in fact, differs very little from the scholastic view. Both systems insist that we have an immediate perception of the outward world, that sense-impressions are not themselves directly perceived, but rather give rise to the immediate perception of the outward object (cf. Principles of Christian Apologetics, p. 4). And both systems stress the fact that what the sense-organs perceive is not the whole truth about the universe, but is nonetheless true — the universe being an infinite system of radiating energy, all radiation being wave-movement, and all difference in the universe being, at bottom, a difference of wave-lengths alone; to certain ranges of wave-length only can we be susceptible, because our organs are fitted to react to precisely these.
Finally, to the question, “what is it that perceives?” — Bergson replies that it is the mind. The brain and its movements are themselves perceived objects; they cannot, therefore, also be the very act of perceiving.
VII. Intellectual Knowledge
(A) The Intellect. M. Bergson is an anti-intellectualist — or should we rather call him a supra-intellectualist? He maintains that the intellect cannot grasp movement, continuity, or life, because it is not made for speculation, but for action. He alleges that the intellect’s conception of movement is merely a series of immobilities strung together, since the intellect can form a clear conception only of immobility: “the intellect does not pretend to reconstitute movement such as it actually is; it merely replaces it with a practical equivalent” (Creative Evolution, pp. 163–164). Let us test this statement. Aristotle defines movement as “a change, or passage, from one state to another” — a passage which may concern place, quality, or quantity — and this passage is not, on his account, something merely negative, but positive, an incomplete act: movement is defined as a passage from power to act, from potentiality to achievement (Physics, Bk. III, cc. 1, 6, 9). As Monsignor Bourges writes, “C’est le devenir en marche” — “it is becoming in the act of happening.” It is clear from these definitions that the philosophy of the Schools contemplates movement not as a mere juxtaposition of immobilities, but claims the genuine identity, at each instant, of act and power, of being and non-being — an essential duality within movement itself which Bergsonian “homogeneity” simply suppresses.
(b) M. Bergson further claims that the intellect can grasp only discontinuity. This statement stands in direct conflict with personal experience: every conscious, intellectual being recognises himself as one and undivided, and this awareness of continuity is itself an immediate perception. Aristotle’s own definition of continuous bodies shows that he had an adequate grasp of the point: “continuous bodies are those whose extremities are one” — that is, the parts are so united that the end of one is the beginning of the next (Physics, Bk. VI, c. 1). “The denial of discontinuity in nature,” Bergson writes, “results in the elimination of all knowledge… matter is made to appear to our eyes as a boundless and undivided continuity.” But no sound philosophy claims that the intellect grasps the nature of any being in the totality of its energy; it grasps, rather, some of the essential characteristics and qualities of entities, and is thereby enabled to build up the edifice of scientific truth. When Bergson notes that “life is above all a tendency to act upon matter… a certain effort to obtain certain things from brute matter,” he fails to grasp the two essential characteristics of life: immanent activity, and spontaneity.
(B) Concept. In the philosophy of the Schools, the proper function of the intellect is described as twofold — Abstraction and Generalisation. Bergson characterises abstraction as morcelage, an illegitimate carving-up of things, and regards generalisation as a mere solidifying of the flowing stream of nature; thought, on his account, is “an immense piece of cloth, in which we can cut out what we will, and sew it together again as we please” (Creative Evolution, p. 165). But a concept, on this description, once thus crystallised, is dead. If so, how do concepts give rise to Science, Morality, and Art? Poincaré rightly notes that Science is made up of concepts; Morality arises from the concepts of truth, perfection, and love; the principles of the Fine Arts are themselves embodiments of concepts. In truth, every object has a twofold aspect — one mobile and fugitive, the other stable — but Bergson has seen in the concept only its character of fixity and immobility, and, since he maintains that all is flowing, a concept must, on his view, be merely an instantaneous view taken from moving reality, a rapid succession of such instantaneous views giving the appearance of reality, as in a cinematograph. This claim invites three criticisms: (1) a view is never absolutely instantaneous — there is necessarily an interval of time involved, which itself implies a certain quantity, however small, of motion; (2) if such views really were instantaneous, the result would be an image, not a concept, for an image represents the singular, temporal, and fleeting, whereas a concept represents the general and the abiding; and (3) a concept is not a stable view taken from an unstable, flowing stream of things, but rather a genuine grasp of the stable element within things, that is, of their necessary and abiding forms.
M. Bergson claims that a general notion or concept is only a word — he is, in this regard, a Nominalist through and through, since for him even time itself, the “flowing stream” from which the intellect cuts distinct parts “like you and me,” is the fundamental reality: “If I want to prepare a glass of sugar and water, I must wait till the sugar melts… This little fact is big with meaning. The time I have to wait is not mathematical time, but a certain duration. What can this mean, except that the glass of water, the sugar, and the process of melting are abstractions?” (Creative Evolution, p. 10). In answer, it is enough to say that the real distinction of cosmic things is an undeniable fact. There may or may not be spatial continuity among things, but this does not touch the substantial continuity, or discontinuity, with which the intellect is here concerned.
VIII. Intuition
We have already alluded to Bergson’s anti-intellectual, or supra-intellectual, attitude. On his view the intellect can furnish us with symbolic knowledge only; it is “a lantern glimmering in a tunnel,” unwisely turned into “a sun which can illuminate the world.” To understand precisely what is meant by Intuition is not easy. It is “knowledge from within, that can grasp facts already sprung, in their springing forth, instead of taking them as already sprung; that can dig beneath spatialised time” (Creative Evolution, p. 382). “The feeling we have of our evolution, and of the evolution of all things, in pure duration, forms around the intellectual concept properly so called an indistinct fringe that fades off into darkness. Mechanism and Finalism agree in taking account only of the bright nucleus shining at the centre. They forget that this nucleus has been formed out of the rest by condensation, and that the whole must be used in order to grasp the inner movement of life. Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and indistinct, it should have more importance for philosophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds; for it is its presence that enables us to affirm that the nucleus is a nucleus, that pure intellect is a contraction, by condensation, of a more extensive power” (Creative Evolution, p. 49). “We shall be aided by the fringe of vague intuition that surrounds our distinct, intellectual representation… It is there, accordingly, that we shall find the means to… transcend the intellectual form of our thought… and there shall we derive the impetus necessary to lift us above ourselves” (Creative Evolution, p. 52).
The question naturally arises: how can this “fringe” be studied by means of the intellect at all? Bergson notes the difficulty, but fails to give a satisfactory answer. Intuition, he holds, is the élan vital, the vital impetus which has evolved into animal instinct, and thence into intelligence; the transition from instinct to intelligence has been made by a sharp leap, so that intelligence differs from instinct not merely in degree but in kind. The intellect is marked by a natural inability to comprehend life; whilst intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. “If the consciousness that slumbers in the instinct should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask it and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life” (Creative Evolution, p. 174). “Intuition is the mind itself, and, in a certain sense, life itself; the intellect has been cut out of it by a process resembling that which has generated matter” (Creative Evolution, p. 282). “Intuition is a lamp almost extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin, and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light feeble and vacillating, but which nonetheless pierces the darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us” (Creative Evolution, p. 282).
Critique. (A) If intuition genuinely pierces the darkness in which the intellect leaves us, how can the intellect itself simultaneously be described as the luminous nucleus? In truth, M. Bergson’s system here cuts mental life in two, splitting it into the separate exercise of a faculty of intuition and a faculty of thought — a morcelage indeed, and one with momentous consequences, since intuition, on this scheme, has absolute need of concepts, which are declared to be a mere makeshift standing in for it.
(B) M. Bergson’s attempt to prove both the existence and the special functioning of a distinct faculty of intuition ultimately fails, because, as the philosophy of the Schools has long pointed out, the process he calls “intuitional” is in reality a function both of sense-perception and of intellectual conception. It is widely recognised that: (1) man has an immediate intuition of the external world; (2) man has an immediate intuition of himself, as an ego; and (3) an immediate intuition of substance penetrates beneath the mere appearance of things to their underlying nature. Bergson’s own evidence for the reality of Intuition comes, in the end, from the works of great poets, great musicians, and great painters — “from time to time, Nature raises up, detached from practical life, souls of vision, dreamers of dreams — men or women who produce great poetry, great music, or great painting. What is it that we call the genius of these artists, if not their capacity to penetrate further into reality by enabling us, through the vision they make manifest in the picture, to make an actual entry into the artist’s own vision? And whatever, however imperfectly, this vision expresses and reveals to us — it reveals more than we could otherwise have perceived by ourselves” (cf. Bergson and His Philosophy, by J.A. Gunn, p. 108).
IX. The Problem of Contingency and of Human Destiny
In the philosophy of the Schools, whatever begins to exist — that is, whatever has a cause — is called contingent. Before attacking the contingency of being itself, M. Bergson attacks the contingency of one of its modes, namely order: “When I enter a room and pronounce it to be in disorder, what do I mean? The position of each object is explained by the automatic movements of the person who has slept in the room, or by whatever efficient causes have caused each article of furniture, clothing, and the rest to be where it is: in this second sense, the order is perfect. But it is order of the first kind — the order that a methodical person consciously puts into his life, a willed order — that I am expecting; and so I call the absence of this order disorder” (Creative Evolution, p. 245). Bergson goes on to argue that the idea of disorder is only a pseudo-idea, raising a pseudo-problem — namely, the origin of order — since disorder, being simply automatic order, does not, properly speaking, exist at all. Hence order, he concludes, is not contingent but necessary: “in analysing the idea of disorder thus subtilised, we shall see that it represents at the same time all the problems which have grown up around it” (Creative Evolution, p. 235).
But it must be objected that we should always find either a willed order or an automatic order everywhere, and the choice between them remains contingent — why should we find one rather than the other? So too, even within the sphere of an intentional order, the choice of one definite plan from among a great number of possible plans remains itself contingent. The problem of contingency cannot, in short, be eliminated in this way. Bergson proceeds to attack the contingency of being itself as another such pseudo-problem: “‘Nothing’ is a pseudo-idea… what is the cause of being?” To this we answer that Aristotle and St. Thomas are emphatic that the idea of being is the first idea the intellect grasps, and that the idea of nothing is conceived only afterward, negatively, and by contrast with it. But granted that all existence cannot be denied, what follows? Only that some being is necessary — not that all beings are necessary. Thus the problem of contingency arises once more. Indeed, in a letter to Père de Tonquédec, M. Bergson himself admitted the insufficiency of his own argument here: “The reasoning results only in showing that something has always existed. But regarding the nature of this something, there is no positive conclusion [to be drawn].”
Creative Evolution has, in the end, very little to say about the destiny of man. “A principle of creation has been put at the base of things” (Creative Evolution, p. 291) — is this principle Pure Duration? Accepting the statement of a principle of creation, we must infer that man and other creatures are indeed contingent; but if man is contingent, what, then, is his destiny? We are told that immortality is a dogma affirmed by Intuition, yet denied by Intelligence and by Science: “When a strong instinct assures [us of] the probability of personal survival, [the Spiritualists] are right not to close their ears to its voice; but if there exist souls capable of an independent life, whence do they come? When, how, why do they enter into this body, which we see arise, quite naturally, from a mixed cell derived from the bodies of its two parents?” (Creative Evolution, p. 283). Whence, indeed, do souls come? Bergson can offer no answer more intelligible than an “auto-creation” and “absolute commencement without cause” of which science itself knows nothing. “The word ‘soul,’” he continues, “means to my mind a certain force capable of drawing from itself more than it contains, of giving more than it has…” — a genuinely spiritual, incorruptible substance, independent of matter, capable of surviving the death of the body, is precisely what the Schoolmen taught, though M. Bergson’s own psychic monism is more accurately described as an “evolutionary monism,” giving rise to successive states, “always new and irreducible to the preceding.”
“The whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us, in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance, and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death” (Creative Evolution, p. 271). Though M. Bergson protests that he is not a pantheist or a monist, it is difficult to interpret such a passage in any other sense, especially when set beside statements such as: “A body cuts a soul from the psychical totality… and if [the soul] persists after separation from the body, it returns to its origin” — to the nirvana, that is, of an impersonal immortality (Creative Evolution, p. 284). Some authorities say that souls “enter” bodies from without; others, that soul comes from within, and the body, as it were, assumes a human shape and encloses it. When do souls enter bodies? Some say at conception, others say when the body attains full stature; but Bergson’s own answer runs otherwise: “God is a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display — provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting-out. God thus defined has nothing of the already-made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it ourselves when we act freely” (Creative Evolution, p. 262).
Conclusion
The essential errors of the Bergsonian philosophy may be summarised under six heads.
1. Negation of Being. All is “Becoming” — actions without an agent, attributes without a subject, accidents without substance, modes of being without any underlying being. The apostle of “pure becoming” regards potentiality as greater than realisation, power as greater than act, whereas the Catholic philosophical conception of God, amply justified by argument, is precisely Pure Act.
2. Negation of the Principles of Identity and Contradiction. These principles are allowed to be laws of mere discourse, but not laws of reality. In the “supra-logical” region to which M. Le Roy — a devoted student and accredited representative of Bergson — appeals, logical contradictions are simply reconciled.
3. Negation of the Principle of Causality. Creative Evolution is, on this account, a movement which creates itself, incessantly giving to itself the existence which it does not, of itself, possess.
4. Negation of the Real Multiplicity of Things. All is one; subject and object, cause and effect, father and son, matter and spirit, are, on this system, only illusions produced by our own “postulat du morcelage,” our postulate of carving reality up into distinct pieces.
5. Negation of the Primacy of Reason, and the Consequent Divorce of Philosophy from Science. “Let us try to see no longer with the eyes of the intellect alone, which grasps only the already-made, and which looks from the outside, but with the spirit — I mean with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the faculty of acting, and which springs up, somehow, by the very twisting of the will upon itself, when action is turned into knowledge” (Creative Evolution, p. 264). Bergsonian principles are, on M. Maritain’s forceful summary, wholly incompatible with a fully Catholic philosophy, and Le Roy’s own further sentences stress the consequent incompatibility with theology as well: “Pour nous, Dieu n’est pas… [antérieur à la création]” — for Bergsonians, God is not, in the traditional sense, prior to the created order at all (Revue Philosophique, September, 1901, p. 539).
6. Incompatibility with Divine Faith. Catholic philosophy alone recognises the true primacy of reason, and the genuine force of the motives of credibility; Faith is a superstructure resting securely upon reason, and hence the famous Anselmian phrase, “fides quaerens intellectum” — “faith seeking understanding” — remains fully intelligible only on Catholic, and not on Bergsonian, principles.
A few concluding sentences from Bergson’s writings sketch fairly the strengths and limits of his thought. His is a competent and fascinating reaction against Kantism, drawing on real knowledge of biological science; his thought is spiritualistic, elevated, mystical. He makes much of biological Determinism as due to lack of imagination rather than to genuine philosophic rigour. His literary style has been compared to the song of the lark. An attempt to explain “the riddle of the universe” — an attempt recommended by originality of thought and beauty of style — will always appeal to the present-day interest in Philosophy; but it is not, in the end, a substitute for sound philosophy itself.