Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Pli is edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Volume 15. Lives of the Real: Bergsonian Perspectives ISBN 1 897646 11 9 ISSN 1367-3769 © 2004 Pli, individual contributions © their authors, unless otherwise stated. Editorial board 2003/4: Wahida Khandker Henry Somers-Hall Scott Revers Michael Vaughan Brian Smith This issue edited by Wahida Khandker. Contributions, Orders, Subscriptions, Inquiries: Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL UK Email: [email protected] Website: www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pliJournal/ Cover design by zago design inc: www.zagodesign.com Contents Lives of the Real: Bergsonian Perspectives Intuition and Sympathy in Bergson. DAVID LAPOUJADE 1 Duration, Rhythm, Present. MARIA LAKKA 18 The 'Zigzags of a Doctrine': Bergson, Deleuze, and the Question of Experience. SUZANNE GUERLAC 34 On Certain Transitory Themes That Allow the Passage from Duration to the Intuition of Duration. MARGARITA KARKAYANNI 54 An 'Applied Rationalism' of Time: A Reinvestigation of the Relationship Between Bachelard and Bergson-Deleuze. ANDREW AITKEN 76 Bergson, Kant, and the Evolution of Metaphysics. WAHIDA KHANDKER 103 The Rule of Dichotomy: Bergson's Genetics of Matter. JOHN MULLARKEY 125 Nature from the Perspective of Immanence. ROBIN DURIE 144 Varia Time, Space, Forced Movement, and the Death-Drive: Reading Proust with Deleuze. KEITH ANSELL PEARSON 159 Revulsion is not Without its Subject: Kant, Lacan, 2izek, and the Symptom of Subjectivity. ADRIAN JOHNSTON 199 Reviews Architectural Philosophy. JAMES WILLIAMS 229 Nietzsche's Philosophy. KEITH ANSELL PEARSON 233 Acknowledgements The paper by Andrew Aitken derives from a one-day workshop held at the University of Warwick on 6'h June 2003, entitled ‘Bergson and Contemporary Thought’, organized by Wahida Khandker. The paper by John Mullarkey was originally presented at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, which took place in Citta di Castella, Umbria, Italy on 271" July 1999. The paper by Robin Durie derives from a one-day workshop held at the University of Warwick on 30lh May 2003, entitled ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Philosophy of Nature’, organized by Miguel Beistegui and the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature. We would like to thank Keith Ansell Pearson for generously contributing his time and work to this volume. Pli 15 (2004), 1-17 Intuition and Sympathy in Bergson. DAVID LAPOUJADE The philosopher neither obeys nor commands but strives to sympathize. (Henri Bergson) What is signified by the term ‘sympathy’ that Bergson raises on the subject of intuition? It belongs to that group of general and undefined terms which seem to obscure, rather than clarify, the Bergsonian method. Commentators rarely draw upon it except to reduce its impact. The term ‘sympathy’ would merely be employed to illustrate the act or the ‘series of intuitive acts’ that themselves establish a rigorous method. With this we are quickly brought to the conclusion that intuition is only conceived rigorously (as method) if it stops being conceived as sympathy, a vague notion marred by psychology.1 Sympathy would only prove to be its ground by virtue of pedagogy or psychology - in short, as a substitute for intuition. We know, however, that Bergson constantly returns to the point at which intuition and sympathy seem to be confused with one another: ‘We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and 1 One could say that the most significant efforts of rereading Bergson over the past decades have attempted to free him from a supposed psychologism masking a fecundity. One can see there a reaction to the Sartrean and Marxist interpretations which recognize in Bergson a philosophy burdened by psychologism and spiritualism. This concerns the essential role played from then on by Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991; henceforth referred to as MM] and a relative silence on Les Deux Sources [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion]. Examples of this tendency are two texts of the 1960’s, Bento prado, Présence et champ transcendental, OLMS; and Deleuze, Le bergsonisme, PUF. 2 Pli 15 (2004) consequently inexpressible in it’.2 Similarly, aesthetic intuition is replaced ‘back within the object by a kind of sympathy’.3 What is more, intuition is defined as a ‘spiritual sympathy’ with that which is ‘more internal’ to reality.4 Here, sympathy seems to be more than an illustration of intuition or a vague psychological correlate. Rather, it appears to be an indispensable methodological complement. It is that which allows the passage ‘to the interior’ of realities, to grasp them from ‘the inside’. Yet what does it mean to ‘pass to the interior’, to grasp from ‘the inside’? What does one gain in precision and rigour? More importantly, if Bergson identifies these terms with one another why does he return specifically to sympathy? In what way does sympathy stand out from ‘intuitive acts’, properly speaking? Does it have a distinct methodological status? Bergson begins with rather vague indications: intuition is an effort, a prolonged effort that calls for an assiduous fréquentation with the object: For one does not obtain from reality an intuition, that is to say, a spiritual sympathy with its innermost quality if one has not gained its confidence by a long comradeship with its superficial manifestations. And it is not a question simply of assimilating the outstanding facts; it is necessary to accumulate and fuse such an enormous mass of them that one may be assured, in this fusion, of neutralizing by one another all the preconceived and premature ideas observers may have deposited unknowingly in their observations.5 2 La Pensée et le mouvant [henceforth referred to as PM], PUF, p. 181 [The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison, New York: Citadel Press, 1992, p. 161]. 3 L'Evolution créatrice, PUF, p. 178 [Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, New York: Dover, 1998, p. 177], On the relation between sympathy and the aesthetic one could equally consult Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, PUF, pp.10-14 [77'me and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson, New York: Dover, 2001, pp. 11-19], 4 PM, p. 226 [The Creative Mind, p. 200], 5 Ibid. This extract alludes to the long period separating the composition of each of Bergson’s texts. It is a period establishing this ‘sympathetic’ relation. There needs to be a memory of the object equally carrying all of the hypotheses, directions of work, errors, paths that have covered the object in such a way that it becomes a kind of palimpsest of our efforts to constitute it intuitively. The term ‘long comradeship’ in relation to sympathy appears from the Essai onwards. DAVID LAPOUJADE 3 Certainly, one can suppose that this only applies in the case of the preparatory conditions that remain empirical. But what is essential is already at play at this level. Reality is constituted as a continuous whole that possesses an internal unity (‘fusion’ of the ‘mass’). Now, the whole only owes it nature to a certain memory that assures the internal continuity of which it is made. In other words, this long fréquentation permits the proper ‘leap’ to the intuitive act that Bergson specifies as neither synthesis nor recollection. In what, then, does this leap consist? It is not only the mind, by its own efforts, installing itself ‘at once’ in the element of duration, but equally in that of meaning,6 The duration of this reality is not without memory nor without a type of ‘consciousness’ characterized as ‘intention’ or ‘direction’ constitutive of its meaning. Thus at the conclusion of this preparatory work, this reality becomes real duration and, at the same time, expresses an ‘intention’, a ‘direction’ that constitutes it as virtual consciousness. That which belongs specifically to the work of intuition is the grasping of this reality in terms of duration, but that which belongs exclusively to sympathy is the grasping of an intention internal to this duration. It may even be that the conception of duration as memory can only be understood through the intermediary of this act of sympathy, and it is this to which we now turn. Intuition is concentrated exclusively upon totalities: the vital, the material, the social, the personal, etc. This amounts to saying that intuition circulates across the whole universe (monism) and through its different levels (pluralism). Bergson meanwhile affirms that intuition is the ‘direct vision of the mind by the mind’, that it concentrates exclusively ‘upon mind’.7 Bergson insists on this point: never is intuition anything other than a ‘reflection’ of mind upon itself.8 In other words, there is no intuition of 6 We know that Bergson often resorts to this term to indicate the difference of nature that goes beyond intuition through its ‘leap’. Thus the intuitive access to matter: ‘Our eyes are closed to the primordial and fundamental act of perception - the act, constituting pure perception, whereby we place ourselves in the very heart of things’, MM, p. 70 [Matter and Memory, p. 67]. The same applies to the accessing of memory, pp.149-150 [p. 135]: ‘But the truth is that we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it’. It is again the case for the universe of meaning or of ideas, p.129 [p. 116]: ‘So [...] the hearer places himself at once in the midst of the corresponding ideas...’ We will return to this text later. Cf. equally, PM, p. 210 [p. 187], 7 PM, p. 42 [p. 42], 8 ‘Intuition is what attains the spirit, duration, pure change’, PM, p. 29 [p. 33], Cf. equally, p. 40 [p. 41]: ‘Quite different is the metaphysics that we place side by side 4 Pli 15 (2004) the material, of the vital, of the social as such. How then can intuition open itself up to different levels of reality and reach such an extension? It is here that sympathy intervenes. Again, in a somewhat abstract manner, one can define sympathy as a movement through which each of these realities becomes ‘mind’. Yet how can such a transformation be possible? One wonders how mind can enter ‘into sympathy’ with itself or with another mind. Bergson frequently invokes a type of psychological endosmosis, the reciprocal penetration of minds. He provides an example in La Pensée et le mouvant where he attempts to draw out the fundamental intuition of Berkeley, beyond the theses effectively laid down in language. He returns to a primordial intention of which the work will consequently be the indirect expression. At this level, sympathy is presented as the movement by which we take it upon ourselves to return to a purely spiritual intention, immanent to the whole (here, the work of Berkeley), as its integral. This movement checks itself with each change of level. Is this not indeed the same movement that is produced when we descend to the vital level? One endeavours to take hold of the primordial intention of life, beyond the varieties of living forms for such is the sense of the concept of the ‘élan'. The ‘élan' is not merely destined to describe life as ‘the outpouring of unforeseeable novelty’; it is firstly that which enables the grasping of the continuous whole of the vital as mind or consciousness. In other words, the vital stops being external to the sphere of mind, which explains that intuition can then take it for its ‘object’, in accordance with its definition since we are dealing with the relation between the mind and one of its levels. Or rather, thanks to sympathy, life becomes ‘subject’ for the metaphysical (in terms of mind or consciousness), whilst it remains ‘object’ for science (in terms of physico-chemical material). Here, sympathy plays an essential role: it singles out the spiritual ‘intention’ of the vital thereby permitting it to be constituted in the tendency-subject inside of metaphysics, rendering intuition accessible in the same stroke. Yet if one can attribute an intention to life, to single out the spiritual ‘élan’ that animates it, can one proceed in the same way with matter? How is the spiritual element of matter to be extracted which, by definition, with science. Granting to science the power of explaining matter by the mere force of intelligence, it reserves mind for itself. Moreover, Bergson says that it is an ‘intimate knowledge of the mind by the mind’, PM, 216, n2 [notes to text not included in the English translation] or a ‘reflection of the mind on the mind’, PM, p. 226 [p. 199], DAVID LAPOUJADE 5 is without spirituality? Here, again, the concept of intuition by itself would not allow us to understand this extension, unless a ‘sympathy’ with matter was established. What does it consist of at this level? It is defined by the institution of a community of movements. The spiritual element of matter is movement in terms of an indivisible reality. Mind ‘sympathizes’ with matter in as much as it grasps it, not as a thing or mass, but as pure movement; from that moment on, the continuum of matter becomes mind or consciousness (in terms of ‘pure perception’). This is the central theme of the first chapter of Matière et mémoire: a matter reduced to movement but raised, at the same time, to the status of consciousness*. In this sense we can say that the ‘’élan’ is to the vital universe what the ‘image’ or ‘pure perception’ is to the material universe: the mark of our sympathy. But the answer remains incomplete, for strictly speaking is there anything properly spiritual within movement? Is it the image? Pure perception? Nothing will be of benefit here as these tenns presuppose what is in question: the image certainly defines itself as pure perception or as a present of movement, but how is such a definition possible? It is here that intuition needs to be reintroduced in its ‘fundamental’ sense: ‘to think intuitively is to think in duration’. 190 That which constitutes the ‘mind’ of matter is its duration. ‘...We place consciousness at the heart of things for the very reason that we credit them with a time that endures’.11 Duration is the spiritual element of the material (and because of this, of the vital and the social also). This is why science can get to movement yet without being able to extract the essence (mobility), for it does not think ‘in duration’. Now duration initially signifies conservation. There is duration as soon as there is an instant, and yet brief though it is, which retain what is transferred from the previous instant (even if only for an immediate retransmission); so that what could be theoretically thought as a ‘memory’ should instead be thought effectively as a forgetting that ‘enables’ material movement to continue without end (communication). We can bestow upon this memory just what is needed to make the connection; it will be, if we like, this veiy connection, a mere continuing of the before into the immediate after with a 9 ‘No doubt also the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness...’, MM, p. 264 [p. 235]. Cf. equally, pp. 35-36 [pp. 37-39], 10 PM, p. 30 [p. 34], 11 Durée et simultanéité, PUF, p. 62 [Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson, ed. Robin Durie, London: Clinamen, 1999, p. 33. Henceforth DS].