Bergson as Writer: Literature in Philosophy 1399540440, 9781399540445

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Bruno Clément

Bergson Writer as

Lite r ature in Ph i losoph y Translated by Anthony Uhlmann

Bergson as Writer

The figure of Bergson has haunted the seminars I’ve led over the years at the University of Paris 8, or at the Collège international de philosophe. A faithful and demanding public has helped me to overhear, observe, interrogate this figure. The restless longing of some, the ceaseless curiosity of others, have goaded me on. This book is dedicated to them.

Bergson as Writer Literature in Philosophy

Bruno Clément Translated by Anthony Uhlmann

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Henri Bergson, Prix Nobel de littérature by Bruno Clément © Éditions Verdier, 2021 English translation © Anthony Uhlmann, 2024 Cover image: Photograph by Pierre Petit. Fonds photographique de l'école : PHO D/2/1878/5 Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com Edinburgh University Press Ltd 13 Infirmary Street Edinburgh EH1 1LT Typeset in Bembo by Manila Typesetting Company, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 4044 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 4046 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 4047 6 (epub)

The right of Bruno Clément to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Translator’s Introduction

vi

List of Abbreviations

xiii

1 ‘In other words …’ An Author’s Preface How to Write Philosophy and Literature Three Figures The Words of Philosophy, the Words of Life Bergson’s Languages

1 1 7 21 31 42 54

2 ‘… in the same direction as art’ Art and Thought Art and Philosophy To Philosophise as an Artist ‘We artists …’

63 63 76 87 100

3 An effective fiction On the Imagination in Philosophy Generalised Invention Bergson’s Ghost Philosophy Literature and Philosophy Mixed Critique of the Imagination, Critique of Bergson

121 121 131 147 168 180

4 ‘… to transfer thought, still living, into the soul of another’ 187 Coincidences188 ‘The spirit of form’ 198 Bergson, Among Many Others 209 ‘Words, words, words…’ 215 Works Cited220 Index222

v

Translator’s Introduction

Bruno Clément has been a major figure in thinking the intersection of literature and philosophy in France for the past four decades. Emerging from the milieu of Paris 8, and following a great generation of French thinkers that included Derrida, Deleuze, Cixous, Ricoeur and others, Clément completed his thesis under the direction of Michel Deguy on rhetoric and metaphysics in the work of Samuel Beckett. He has returned to the theme of the intersection between rhetoric, or the technical capacities of literature, and metaphysical thought, throughout his highly distinguished career. He is the author of eight books: L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Seuil, 1994), Le Lecteur et son modèle (PUF, 1999), La Tragédie Classique (Seuil, 1999), L’Invention du commentaire. Augustin, Jacques Derrida (PUF, 2000), Le Récit de la méthode (Seuil, 2005), La Voix verticale. Essai sur la prosopopée (Belin, 2012) and Beckett,  ‘Libre cours’ (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2018). The book you are reading now is a translation of his most recent work, Henri Bergson, Prix Nobel de littérature (Verdier, 2021), which, in many ways, draws together interests Clément has developed throughout his career, precisely on the nature of the intersection between literature and philosophy. Rather than simply being a conjunction – one that might, as it were, talk of the two domains of thinking as if they were discrete or parallel – Clément here seeks to examine the ways in which they require or determine one another. The original title, whose significance is subtle and more legible in the French context than in an English context, refers to the simultaneous honour and humiliation bestowed upon the great philosopher Henri Bergson in being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. There is, of course, no Nobel Prize for Philosophy, and while his arch-critic Bertrand Russell himself was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Bergson at the time of his own award was denigrated for receiving the prize by his antagonists who sought to portray it as underlining that he was more of an imaginative ‘writer’ than a rigorous thinker. The English title we have chosen here seeks to focus attention on what is at stake: that Bergson, like Russell and all other philosophers, is indeed a writer, and that just as philosophy might exist within and emerge from literature, literature, indeed, exists within philosophy. vi

Translator’s Introduction On the Contexts of the Book Bruno Clément’s Bergson as Writer: Literature in Philosophy concerns the question of expression in Bergson’s work; that is, the question of how philosophy is able to convey its ideas to readers through the medium of language. It is important to underline the ambition and scope of the claims of this book at the outset: it is not simply a matter of thinking about Bergson as a writer, or thinking about his interest in the nature of writing and how writers generate effects; rather, the very grounds upon which philosophical discourse is based are drawn into question by Bergson through his strong and enduring interest in the problem of the nature of philosophical expression. While this is a specific question it is by no means narrow. It is a question that, arguably, should be addressed or considered by all those who study Bergson’s philosophy and indeed philosophy more generally. It also moves beyond the discipline of philosophy, of course; it is a question that comes at the intersection of literature and philosophy, and so it is of interest not only to philosophers but also to literary scholars with an interest in philosophy. Indeed, although Clément here focuses on expression in language, the notion of ‘expression’ is wider than language alone, and so the work is also of interest to theorists of the arts more generally. As Clément notes under the section ‘Commentary on Bergson’ in Chapter 1, the question of the importance, for Bergson, of expression to philosophical discourse itself is almost completely ignored by French Bergson critics, even though Bergson draws our attention to this question again and again. This is not to say that critics are not interested in Bergson’s thoughts about expression; rather, that they have directed this interest almost exclusively towards ideas of artistic expression, rather than expression in philosophy itself. Because the question has been ignored in relation to philosophical expression, Clément does not enter into major dialogue with specific critics in French; rather, astonished by this silence, he develops close readings of Bergson and his discussions of representation to forcefully underline how Bergson himself insists on the importance of language and rhetorical technique to the creation of truth in philosophical expression. One French critic, Arnaud François, talks in terms that are adjacent to Clément, underlining how for Bergson the production of the truth involves ‘invention’, but he does not specifically focus on the role of expression in this process (François 2020: 16). Moore too talks of questions of representation that are broadly aligned with Clément’s thesis (Moore 1996). Other than this, the most sustained discussion of the importance of Bergson’s interest in the role of expression in the development of philosophical truths is an unpublished, but impressive, thesis by Jeanne Priley McLean submitted to Loyola vii

Translator’s Introduction University in Chicago in 1975 entitled Immediate Experience and the Problem of Expression: A Study in the Philosophy of Bergson. So too, Clément considers Bergson’s bilingualism, a topic that has equally been almost totally ignored (I can find no source directly discussing it). Although Bergson’s principal language was French, his mother was English, and Bergson wrote and presented some of his essays in English, essays which he then adapted and translated himself into French, much as Samuel Beckett would do later, working back and forth between the two languages, and, like Beckett, demonstrating an understanding of the different potentials of each language and the contexts words carry with them in each. A word like ‘ghost’ has a cross-linguistic resonance, then, for someone like Bergson, and Clément focuses on the implications of this bilingual capacity for Bergson’s understanding of expression. Yet while Clément’s book makes a major new contribution to an understanding of the importance of expression to philosophy, it also contributes to areas of study related to Bergson that have attracted a greater number of scholars: that is, the relation of Bergson’s thought to the arts. There has been a good deal of interest in Bergson’s relation to the arts in English-language criticism and theory in recent years. Much of this has focused on the influence of Bergson on modernism both in literature and the visual arts. The range and depth of this work demonstrates the profound influence his philosophy had on major artistic traditions; indeed, one might argue that his philosophy shaped elements of modernism’s understanding of the nature of representation. This influence in turn has passed into contemporary theoretical approaches to understandings of the capacities and potentials of artistic practice.1 Often this kind of theory has come to Bergson via the work of Gilles Deleuze, and here the theory moves not just in literature and the plastic arts but also into film and new media.2 At the same time, while this work has not engaged with questions of expression, there has been a significant philosophical engagement with Bergson’s thought in French, English and other traditions. Strong introductions to his work have been written by Mullarkey (1999b), Sinclair (2020) and Moore (1996). A key element of this has been a consideration of the importance of Bergson’s work to science and the dialogue (however strangled off and forbidden) between science and philosophy, in studies by Cˇapek

1. For example, see Douglas 1986; Fink 1999; Gillies 1996; Maxwell 1999; Zourabichvili 2000; Dalissier 2022; Ardoin, Mattison and Gontarski 2013; Uhlmann 2006. 2. Of course Deleuze’s Cinema books, which have been widely influential in cinema studies, are important here. For critics who have worked with Bergson in relation to the visual arts see Sinclair 2020; Ó Maoilearca and de Mille 2013; and Atkinson 2020.

viii

Translator’s Introduction (1971), Papanicolaou and Gunter (1987) and others. Other key contributions, like those brought together by Sinclair and Wolf (2022) or Mullarkey (1999a), have focused on how Bergson’s work is essential to understanding the nature of time, the human mind, ethics and politics, for example. Others have shown how Bergson is at the heart of an historical moment when scientists deliberately turned away from any genuine engagement with philosophy (see Bergson’s arguments with Einstein) (Canales 2015; Dolev 2022). Perhaps the most important work on Bergson for English-language critics has come via Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, who creatively return to his concepts again and again, in turn bringing many anglophone philosophers to re-­evaluate his works, such as Lundy (2018), Olkowski (2021), Grosz (2005), Ansell-Pearson (2005), Hodges (2008) and others. Clearly, then, Clément’s work is moving among an important body of contemporary thinking that recognises the ongoing significance of Bergson’s work.

On the Translation Engaging with Bruno Clément’s Bergson as Writer: Literature in Philosophy, I felt as if the work itself were offering instructions on how it might be translated. Whereas in past translations I had focused heavily on what I habitually believed to be the source of sense – conceptual logic and the particular meanings of words – and so had sometimes broken up longer sentences, or reorganised them to highlight the role of conceptual terms, here I became aware of the flow of sentences as essential to the meaning of the whole. So, Clément’s work told me to attend to rhythms, to sounds and their echoes, as much as to the meanings of words, and to preserve, as far as possible, the ‘sentence sound’ (as writers of English literature have called it) while substituting the straightforward (though subtly altered) sense of French words for an equally straightforward sense in English. In short, the method of Clément’s work demonstrates its underlying thesis (which, as he demonstrates, is also Bergson’s underlying thesis): that while certain things can only be suggested rather than precisely conceptually formulated, one can be made to sense them through rhythms and shapes and images that lead to thought. The translation, then, attempts, as best as I was able, to convey something of this sense in English by preserving, for the most part, the flow of Clément’s prose while equally preserving the clarity of his enunciations. In my view this is a profound book, by a thinker who deserves a much greater reputation in English. It builds on a long career devoted to an interest in rhetoric and method and the potentials of literary form, but, more than this, in how these potentials themselves are essential to our capacity to think and express ix

Translator’s Introduction meaning, not only in literature but also in philosophy. Readers coming to Clément’s work for the first time can be reassured that this book provides a clear epitome of his ongoing project. At the same time, however, it offers an astonishing and provocative reappraisal of Henri Bergson’s work, arguing, through meticulous engagement with the source texts, that the very first thesis Bergson develops and never loses sight of concerns the problem of expression itself, and how the limitations of language (which is habitually attuned to representations of space and so struggles to represent ‘phenomena’ such as modes of thinking ‘that do not occupy space’) need be exceeded so as to create a philosophy capable of doing justice to intuitive understandings that are impossible to circumscribe using concepts alone. At the end of the book Clément underlines how this problem is not Bergson’s alone; rather, he argues, many philosophers deliberately make use of figures and methods one might call ‘literary’, although different philosophers emphasise different figures. The book approaches the work of Bergson as a living whole rather than a set of objects to be dissected and fixed in place. Throughout, Clément underlines how two figures and one principle dominate Bergson’s work: the figure of epanorthosis, or indefinite correction, involves approaching a problem again and again from different angles with each approach resulting in a cumulative approximation of what cannot otherwise be expressed. It is a figure of ‘ebbing and flowing’. The figure of prosopopoeia, through which things are given voice, involves imagining oneself inside things. Fabulation or storytelling in turn involves giving things ‘sens’: a word which in French can mean at once meaning, sensation and direction. The voice ebbs and flows, moving us through and beyond time and space with stories that both intimate and make us feel phenomena which exist outside of space, phenomena that are themselves the seat of what is meaningful. So too Clément recovers key ideas that have been overlooked in Bergson’s works, such as the ‘fabulising function’. This idea promises to open new ways of understanding and imagining the power of literary expression and its importance to how we think. Equally, Clément requires us to come to terms with the effectiveness of fiction, with how it is able to achieve things and bring things into being. These insights are of crucial importance in a world which, on the one hand, increasingly ignores the capacities of literature and, on the other, is being shaped and reformed by often nefarious narratives in every domain. Clément’s readings offer new ways of reading these processes. Finally, Clément demonstrates, step by step, how a major philosopher might make us feel the thoughts he or she wishes to express, transferring those thoughts, in Bergson’s words, ‘still living, into the soul of another’. In considering technique and method rather than forms, Clément allows us to x

Translator’s Introduction glimpse how ideas come into being and are continually having to come into being in the bodies and minds of those who engage with them. * A few things need to be said about the translation. Clément quotes extensively from Bergson’s works, most of which were translated into English soon after they appeared in French. These early translations remain standard and are readily accessible. For this reason, when Clément quotes Bergson I use the existing English translations (see the following List of Abbreviations). Occasionally the translations have been modified (for example ‘myth-­making function’ is changed to ‘fabulising function’), and these modifications are noted where they occur. On the rare occasions an untranslated work by Bergson is quoted, I cite the French edition and offer my own translation. So too, I have used English-language versions of texts cited by Clément (such as works by Proust, Mallarmé or Henry James), be these available translations or the original English versions. On the very rare occasions that no translation or original version could be found, I have made my own translation and cited the French source. I have endeavoured to avoid too many footnotes or citing original French words in square brackets so as not to break up the rhythms of the prose, but on some occasions such interpolations have proved necessary. My thanks and friendship go to Bruno Clément, who closely assisted in this translation process.We gratefully acknowledge the guidance and generosity of Carol Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press, who has worked with us in bringing this important work to press. Anthony Uhlmann Western Sydney University

Works Cited Ansell-Pearson, Keith (2005) ‘The Reality of the Virtual: Bergson and Deleuze’, MLN 120:5, pp. 1112–27. Ardoin, Paul, Laci Mattison and S. E. Gontarski (eds) (2013) Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Atkinson, Paul (2020) Henri Bergson and Visual Culture, London: Bloomsbury. Canales, Jimena (2015) The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cˇapek, Milicˇ (1971) Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation, Dordrecht: Reidel. Dalissier, Michel (2022) ‘Bergson on Poetics: Philosophy, Literature and Science’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 24:5.

xi

Translator’s Introduction Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dolev, Yuval (2022) ‘Infinite Divisibility vs. Absolute Indivisibility: What Separates Einstein and Bergson’, in The Bergsonian Mind, edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf, London: Routledge. Douglas, Paul (1986) Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. François, Arnaud (2020) ‘Bergson’s Theory of Truth’, translated by Nils F. Schott, in Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays, edited by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–26. Fink, Hilary L. (1999) Bergson and Russian Modernism 1900–1930, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Gillies, Mary Ann (1996) Henri Bergson and British Modernism, Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2005) ‘Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming’, Parallax 11:2,  pp. 4–13. Hodges, M. (2008) ‘Rethinking Time’s Arrow: Bergson, Deleuze and the Anthropology of Time’, Anthropological Theory 8:4, pp. 399–429. Lundy, Craig (2018) Deleuze’s Bergsonism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McLean, Jeanne Priley (1975) Immediate Experience and the Problem of Expression: A Study in the Philosophy of Bergson, PhD thesis, Loyola University Chicago, available at https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1569 Maxwell, Donald R. (1999) The Abacus and the Rainbow: Bergson, Proust, and the Digital-Analogic Opposition, New York: Peter Lang. Moore, F. C. T. (1996) Bergson:Thinking Backwards, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mullarkey, John (ed.) (1999a) The New Bergson, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mullarkey, John (1999b) Bergson and Philosophy: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ó Maoilearca, John and Charlotte de Mille (eds) (2013) Bergson and the Art of Immanence, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Olkowski, Dorothea E. (2021) Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Papanicolaou, Andrew C. and Pete A. Y. Gunter (eds) (1987) Bergson and Modern Thought: Towards a Unified Science, Chur: Harwood Academic. Sinclair, Mark (2020) ‘Bergson’s Philosophy of Art’, in in Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays, edited by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 87–103. Sinclair, Mark and Yaron Wolf (eds) (2022) The Bergsonian Mind, London: Routledge. Uhlmann, Anthony (2006) Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zourabichvili, François (2000) ‘The Eye of Montage: DzigaVertov and Bergsonian Materialism’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 141–52.

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List of Abbreviations

Books by Henri Bergson Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, London: Macmillan, 1912. CM The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison, New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946. DI Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), ed. Arnaud Bouaniche, Paris: PUF, ‘Quadrige’, 2007. EC L’Évolution créatrice (1907), ed. Arnaud Bouaniche, Paris: PUF, ‘Quadrige’, 2007. ES L’Énergie spirituelle (1919), ed. Élie During,Arnaud François, Stéphane Madelrieux, Camille Riquer, Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Ghislain Waterlot, Paris: PUF, 2011. L Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, London: Macmillan, 1911. M Mélanges, ed. André Robinet, Paris: PUF, 1972. ME Mind Energy, translated by H. Wildon Carr, New York: Henry Holt, 1920. MM Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, London: Macmillan, 1910. PM Le Pensée et le Mouvant (1934), ed. Arnaud Bouaniche, Arnaud François, Stéphane Madelrieux, Camille Riquier, Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Ghislain Waterlot, Paris: PUF, ‘Quadrige’, 2009. TFW Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, authorised translation by F. L. Pogson, New York: Dover, 2001 (1913). TS The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter, London: Macmillan, 1935. CE

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1 ‘In other words . . .’1

An Author’s Preface In February 1888, Bergson writes an Author’s Preface to his Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, one of the two strands of the philosophy thesis he had just defended and which the press Félix Alcan would publish the following year. He is twenty-nine years old, this is his first book, the few lines of this Author’s Preface are, with the exception of one or two articles in scholarly journals, the first he has published; it will be through them that the general public is first introduced to his work. These few words therefore constitute an absolute beginning: We necessarily express ourselves by means of words, and we usually think in terms of space. In other words, language demands that we establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity as between material objects. (TFW, xix, translation modified)

If I choose to approach Bergson’s work via these first words, which are still so often quoted, it is because of the radical nature of the project that is only very rarely the subject of commentary or critical reflection; that is, it is not often related to the work which obviously results from it.When commenting on this Author’s Preface, one generally prefers to stress the theme of space and the limits it imposes on thought rather than that of the ‘demands’ of language, to which philosophy is hostage, when it is not its dupe. The agenda of this attack is nothing less than an overhauling of the foundations of philosophy. It is a task of this kind that summons the young philosopher by immediately asking, without any ambiguity or concessions, the question of how philosophy is expressed. ‘We necessarily express ourselves by means of words . . .’ he says. Now, words suffer so greatly from their spatial condition (space is by nature and by hypothesis discontinuous) that they are incapable of apprehending what, 1. [‘En d’autres termes. . .’ This is the beginning of the second sentence of Bergson’s Author’s Preface to Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. In Pogson’s English translation this is translated as ‘That is to say .  .  .’. I have used ‘In other words’ throughout as this better fits with Clément’s usage of the phrase. Trans.]

1

In other words . . . as we know, will be the object par excellence of Bergson’s philosophy: pure duration, which is characterised, according to him, by a continuity that is difficult to grasp. It matters little to me whether this postulate is well founded or not, whether the situation of philosophy at the time when Bergson decides to make his contribution to it justifies or, on the contrary, invalidates a state of things announced so curtly as to seem undeniable. In fact, I make no claim in this book of commenting on or analysing Bergson’s philosophical system. Nor is it my ambition to clarify some element of his philosophy, or particular concepts which commentators have commonly used in such a way, say, that their negligence or blindness might have led to readings, interpretations, conclusions that the particular omission I might be pointing to would render invalid. Nor will I attempt to shed light on Bergson by comparing him to other philosophers, be they his contemporaries or not; nor to refer readers to the critical engagements that his philosophy, like that of any other philosopher, has provoked. This book simply proposes to closely examine the genuinely strong, truly innovative propositions Bergson makes about the nature of philosophical expression. My goal is to take seriously – to take literally – Bergson’s point of departure, which claims to explore an hypothesis that contends that philosophy will remain vain and fruitless so long as it does not undertake an evaluation of and reform of its mode of expression. I will argue that Bergson’s importance lies precisely in his plan of writing a work which will allow, or even ensure, that ‘other words’ may vary, not only once but indefinitely. A unique formulation, through which he can never be sufficiently careful about the conditions of his enunciation; and it must always be read while keeping in mind his fierce, unwavering desire to remove language from its essential spatiality. Examining Bergson’s method and style [manière] is the proper way to access his philosophy. My deep conviction is that we would betray it – in any case we would misunderstand it – if we were to represent it in ignorance of this radical mutation that he wanted and worked to bring about for the discipline to which he was so attached. And since this commentary on the Author’s Preface is itself an author’s preface, allow me two or three more preliminary remarks. Each of these remarks, I suggest, justifies methodically unfolding the presuppositions of this first page of Time and Free Will to reveal their ultimate consequences, however disturbing they may be. Firstly, let us note that it is not that common for a philosopher to consider the problem of philosophical expression to be important enough to make it the methodical starting point of his programme. Yet this is the case with Bergson, whose every book can be read as the hypothetical implementation 2

In other words . . . of the solutions he envisions to circumvent the damaging demands of language.We will see that it is not only the Author’s Preface that can – that must – be read in this light, but his entire oeuvre. The second remark precisely concerns the nature of the solutions, as diverse as they are surprising, that he brings to bear to ensure that the practice of a rigorous philosophy, which he always strives not to sacrifice, overcomes the demands of language. If the expression he is working on at the same time as he is demonstrating something were that of a sociologist or an artist many of the suggestions he makes would not deserve attention. Bergson holds that philosophical expression poses specific problems, and that the question of the mode of philosophical argumentation cannot be ignored without consequences. It is no exaggeration to say that it is this conviction that prompted him to enter the arena in the first place, and that if he was able to build an oeuvre that we can still comment on like any other – by weighing the validity or relevance of its theses or its hypotheses; by analysing, however finely, its propositions, its concepts, its objects, its constants and even its silences – we would still miss a great deal if we ignored that which genuinely founds it and which never ceases to guide its choices, in helping to make explicit, or at least understandable, the intuition from which his work was born. I will argue that Bergson’s originality is not only due to this suspicion of words and standard language (‘it may be asked’, he says, ‘whether the insurmountable difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space’ (TFW, xxiii)). His originality rests in particular in the hope of putting an end to these difficulties, of overcoming them, ‘getting rid of the clumsy symbols [images] round which we are fighting’ (I am again quoting here from the Author’s Preface, TFW, xxiii). If we are to understand ‘clumsy symbols [images]’ to refer to standard philosophical methods, we see that developing a radical reading of this Author’s Preface is readily justifiable. I must make one last point before I go any further. I believe it is essential. One might object that this Author’s Preface seems to consider the suspicion it expresses to be of negligible value, since it apparently uses the most ordinary, the least sophisticated language, the very language whose demands he deplores, to give itself its form and verisimilitude. My hypothesis is that Bergson, alert to this pitfall, can never be caught lacking in methodical coherence on this point; and that each time he expresses a doubt or a suspicion, or warns of a danger, he invents and implements the solution – a solution at least – capable of thwarting it. This Author’s Preface is a clear example of this method, I will argue, but we should also never lose sight, in this book, of the fact that every important thesis Bergson presents is accompanied by a profound questioning of the legitimacy of its mode of expression, and that the 3

In other words . . . response he offers to this concern cannot be abstracted from the thesis which is at that moment being stated. One will have noticed, for example, that the suspicion on which Bergson’s entire philosophy is to be based is not expressed in one sentence but in two, and that the second is, curiously, given as equivalent to the first. If it is true that the second of these two sentences says, ‘in other words’ [‘that is to say’ in Pogson’s translation], the same thing as the first, why is it necessary to keep both? If the first sentence was imprecise, inaccurate, incomplete or only approximate, why not replace it altogether with its corrected version? Would it have been unthinkable that the Bergsonian oeuvre began, abruptly certainly, but significantly, with a postulate stating the tyranny of language: ‘Language demands . . .’? However, the second sentence does not say exactly – since it says ‘in other words’ – the same thing as the first. In fact, it brings to the debate, though only sketched out here, two new elements – which are equally provocative. The first element consists in designating language as an inadequate tool: the use of ‘sharp and precise distinctions’ is not some regrettable collateral damage which one could, at a pinch, put up with; it is seemingly a necessity from which it is impossible to escape. Bergson, for the first time, formulates here a suspicion to which he will give various forms and species, and which will never cease to haunt the philosophers who succeed him – from Wittgenstein, born the same year Bergson published Time and Free Will, to Derrida, who in 1971 cites Bergson on this subject in ‘White Mythology’ (Derrida 1982) – a suspicion according to which philosophical propositions are, perhaps, only the projection into discourse of the deep structures of language. By virtue of which one might justify the very Wittgensteinian position according to which philosophical statements are only ever tautologies. Bergson writes (this is the continuation of the Author’s Preface): ‘When an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended, of quality into quantity, has introduced contradiction into the very heart of the question, contradiction must, of course, recur in the answer’ (TFW, xxiii). There are many passages in his work where Bergson imputes this almost tautological approach to such and such a philosopher. This provides, for him, numerous ways of differentiating himself from them, the disagreement being less about their doctrines than their mode of enunciation. This is how, for example, ‘A Plato, an Aristotle adopt the cutting out of reality that they find already made in language’ (CM, 95). Above all, it is in this way that he challenges any thought which, without being explicitly based on it, does not take the trouble – nor especially the time – to examine the language it uses to express itself when this is precisely its major epistemological obstacle: 4

In other words . . . The philosopher has not always this patience. How much simpler it is to confine oneself to notions stored up in the language! These ideas were formed by the intelligence as its needs appeared.They correspond to a cutting out of reality according to the lines that must be followed in order to act conveniently upon it. Most frequently they distribute objects and facts according to the way they can be turned to account, throwing pell-mell into the same intellectual compartment everything which concerns the same need. (CM, 41)

The second element the second sentence of the Author’s Preface brings us is therefore the refusal – determined although implicit – to treat ‘ideas’ (which also pertain to what has no space) and ‘material objects’ in the same way. We can see, however, that neither of these two initial sentences can take the place of the other. Although the second is presented as the equivalent of the first, it is necessary that it follow it, but not without coming back to it, to clarify it, to enrich it. And its scope would certainly be less if the verbal predetermination of philosophy had not been previously stated. A predetermination which one might fear also weighs heavily on the text we are reading. For the case of philosophy, at least as it is presented here, decidedly begins badly: in devoting whatever philosophy may be to language, the philosopher – and Bergson himself of course – will necessarily deal with objects condemned to become as material as he himself is, even if it is ‘phenomena which do not occupy space’ that call for and must retain his attention. We must therefore ask ourselves – unless we consider this Author’s Preface to be vain or insignificant – whether these two sentences escape the very demand that they formulate; and if so, how they accommodate the verbal condition they underline and deplore. The figure that expresses two different versions of the same idea is one of the means used, among many others that I propose to examine in this book, which allow thought to proceed, despite the demanding nature of its mode of expression. I will return to this notable formulation of discourse. Just let us flag, for the moment, that the sequence of these two sentences here does not correspond to a standard structure of argumentation; that it does not constitute a series of propositions whose second would simply be added to the first. Bergson’s manner, so integral, so fluid, so continuous as it first seems, in reality very often consists, as it does here, of cyclings back, suspensions, restarts, corrections, repentances, not so much like a watercourse which flows however badly – and can but flow – from upstream to downstream, but like a discreet unfurling of successive waves, going, coming back, then going again, and again coming back, before setting off again, infinitely. This is because the predetermination I mentioned is not implacable.While Bergson says that ‘we necessarily express ourselves by means of words’, he does not deduce from this necessity that all thought is spatial; rather, he says, 5

In other words . . . more subtly, that ‘we usually think in terms of space’. Of course, the distance that separates ‘usually’ from ‘always’ is not as great as the verbal necessity of the expression seems to imply; but it is invaluable. It is probably not even an exaggeration to say that in this distance, and in this distance alone, rests the chance to write a work of thought that might be worthwhile. Bergson is rarely polemical, or peremptory. But he is often radical, even if quietly so. His oeuvre, which begins here, even before it names the object of study of Time and Free Will, with the Author’s Preface (this will be, as we know, ‘the problem of freedom’), is concerned with indicating the perils that the philosopher who undertakes it must navigate – in reality any philosopher navigates these perils, whether or not he or she knows it. Let us never forget, this young author warns: we philosophers use a tool that is neither neutral nor transparent. If the condition of language is spatiality, how could the ambition to apprehend what is not spatial – freedom of course is only one example – not be affected? If this beginning is remarkable, it is not only because it insists that the philosophical exercise is necessarily related to language, and therefore perilous; after all, many others before Bergson had done the same thing, drawing attention to various different consequences (Nietzsche, of course, who speaks almost without differentiation about philosophers and artists; but also Plato, who chooses the genre of dialogue to attempt to escape the perilous condition of writing that his master Socrates had warned him against; or even Descartes in whose eyes the universal method could not be stated in the supposedly universal language that was Latin for the philosophers of his time). It is remarkable above all because, like the most illustrious of these philosophers, Bergson glimpses the possibility of a philosophical language which does not coincide with our quotidian language – a philosophical language that, in ‘getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting’, allows one to escape, for the duration of a book or a work, from the spatial condition of language. I am well aware that a reading like the one I am undertaking here is not entirely without risk. But this risk is also my horizon. It will not take one long to realise that the solutions imagined and attempted by Bergson, as a means of extracting philosophy from what he considers a false step, very often tend to bring philosophy closer to what it is not: a novel, a symphony, a portrait, a comedy, a series of photographs .  .  . These acquaintances are described in such a wise, precise, plausible way, such a faithful way, that they contain something disturbing to a mind – like mine – that is anxious to identify the specificity of philosophical writing. This perturbation is my object of study as much as it is Bergson’s. I have said why I have chosen to enter his oeuvre through the doorway of expression; and we now understand better 6

In other words . . . why, among all the works of philosophy, I chose his. Few philosophers pose with such attentive exigency, with such an uneasy rigour, the question of the proper nature of philosophy; and it is remarkable to me that Bergson never dissociates this question from his writing. But if he poses and invites us to ask this question of the proper at all times, it is almost – what is the word? – it is almost without thinking about it, at least without intending to dispute its existence, which in fact he never seriously questions. I did not want to take lightly the verisimilitude of his assertions in a matter which was perhaps in his mind only a question of method. It was this verisimilitude that seduced me as well as troubled me. But if – I hope one will get to see it! – verisimilitude has its virtues, and even its beauty, it also has its uncertain face. To take Bergson at his word – at his words, I should say – is also not to shy away from the ultimate consequences of fictions (I mean, of metaphors, of textual configurations, of fables, of more or less figurative connections, and even of concepts) so carefully contrived that they seem to seduce philosophy, when they do not situate it in the spheres – the spheres of art – where truth knows a freer course, or certainly one that is more inventive and less assured. This is the Bergson I would like to help one to read. A Bergson who, let it be said to parody him, surpasses Bergson; who throws such a vivid light – that is to say, so radical, so blinding – on the question of how philosophers write that one might call it almost doubtful. It is in fact impossible to read his work as if, at the same time as freedom, duration, religion, morality, dreams, memory, instinct, ghosts, it did not also speak of Kant, of Plotinus, of Spinoza, of Berkeley, of Spencer; as if their works weren’t fissured from top to bottom by the doubt his concerns about finding a language adequate to thought lay claim to. I will read Bergson closely. Even very closely, because the proximity, the detail alone, gives the measure of his radicality. But I will be careful not to forget for a moment that Bergson is, if we believe him, aiming at something other than the objects he names. Freedom – in Time and Free Will – is only a ‘problem’ chosen to convey the idea of the confusion that common language never fails to generate. Likewise, evolution in Creative Evolution is, according to Bergson himself, the object which allows a method to be tested. Such is Bergson for me: an example. I will read (almost) nothing but him. My loyalty to him will consist in going beyond him.

How to Write There is, for Bergson, a specificity to philosophical writing. But things get confused as soon as we try to name it, as the problems that philosophy alone 7

In other words . . . thinks to pose will never receive more than an inadequate response, because of the tools it uses, which reflect the aporias at work in language. This is why, if one wants to use language for philosophical purposes, it must be reformed from top to bottom. Bergson must write of course – he is not Socrates – but write differently. While inventing his language. Writing ‘in other words’. But Bergson, as we know, is not one for neologism. He does not invent words, he is loath to use a language whose technicality, even scientific, would be an alibi; what he is formulating here is the ideal of a language – it obviously remains to be fashioned – which, in not imposing its structures, would not dictate its contents to thought. It is necessary, he says in this Author’s Preface, to begin the elaboration of a thought at last freed from the natural structures of language; to work towards the invention of a language that challenges distinction, juxtaposition, even clarity – if it is true that it is always the contours, the limits, the borders that are clear – in short, we must work to fashion a language which makes room, fully, for what is totally foreign to language: the continuous.

The distinction of a poet One could almost evoke here – with the necessary precautions when one crosses what is most often perceived to be a border – if not the project, at least the terms of the problem which arises with a similar acuteness in another writer, who was contemporary. Mallarmé’s ‘Crisis of Verse’ appeared in its first version in 1893, just four years after Time and Free Will. Mallarmé, like Bergson one is tempted to say, distinguishes between ‘[a] double state of speech – brute and immediate here, there essential’. The first state is that of ‘universal reporting’, which Mallarmé identifies with narration, teaching, description itself, in short, with any use of language ‘except for literature’ (Mallarmé 2007: 208): it is the language of everyday communication. The second state is that of poetry, which combats, step by step, the vagaries of sonorities and significations; which ‘makes up for language’s deficiencies’ (206); which, refusing to take its part in the arbitrariness of the sign, fashions a tool suitable not for exchange but for the statement of truth, for the just formulation of ‘the pure notion’ (210). Claudel, who in his youth was an assiduous listener at Mallarmé’s famous Tuesdays, would say a few years later in ‘The Muse called Grace’, one of his Five Great Odes: ‘The words I use are everyday words and they are not the same.’ One can clearly see why the comparison is tempting: Bergson, without rejecting words, intends to make use of them in a way that does not coincide 8

In other words . . . with everyday use, undertaking, without repudiating them in the least, to free them from their condition, since this condition, like that of reporting, leaves them incapable of grasping ‘that which does not occupy any space’. But we also see what might hold one back from placing the names of Bergson and Mallarmé, one a philosopher, the other a poet, side by side. A philosopher is not normally someone who, in the practice of their writing, poses aesthetic problems. Bergson, however, forces us to consider this possibility. He is one of those writers who, dissatisfied with the verbal means at their disposal, find themselves obliged to fashion a tool suited to their purpose. There are innumerable passages in his works where he asks this question of the language suitable for philosophy. Far from seeing in this the coquetry of an aesthete or the formal scruples of a philosopher in love with beautiful language, it must be seen as a precise reflection on philosophical enunciation, that is to say – Bergson in any case urges us to go this far – on the nature of philosophy itself. Bergson’s first published words articulate this necessity with impressive determination. It is not only Time and Free Will that is marked by this introductory precaution, it is in fact the whole oeuvre. For it is unthinkable that language, if it is poorly configured to pose ‘the problem of freedom’ in the right terms, does not also constitute an obstacle to the approach of other philosophical objects of study, those of books yet to come. Unless you deny that it is incumbent upon philosophy to be concerned with what does not occupy space. Something Bergson would never consider. However, it is certainly not enough, by way of founding a valid philosophical discourse, to underline once and for all, as a preamble, and as if to ward off fate, that any speculative proposition articulated according to the laws of standard language will be relative or even illegitimate. Rather, it will be necessary to work – not only in each Author’s Preface, or introduction, or foreword, but throughout every book, every page, every sentence, almost every word – to thwart the essential spatiality of language, under the penalty of failing in the essential task of philosophy: namely, the apprehension and thought of ‘phenomena which do not occupy space’. Let it be understood: what Bergson seeks to name in these very first lines is not the original sin of language – indeed, he will never fail to express language’s irreplaceable merits and usefulness – but that of philosophy, which, whatever one says about it, and even whatever it says, is doomed to verbal expression, an expression over which the suspicion of an essential impropriety hangs. In other words, and perhaps more clearly: a reflection on language is not, from this perspective, a necessary prerequisite for a philosophical enterprise (for which it would serve as a more or less convincing alibi that would 9

In other words . . . suddenly absolve philosophy from a hint of naivety). No. Because what kind of language would follow from this reflection? Operating on what non-­spatial principles? A reflection on language is indeed much less urgent than a novel use of language. What is needed is rather of the order of a revolution at the end of which no philosophical proposition could be said to be untainted by the unusual language apparatus which gives it form. And in fact, one will hardly find in Bergson, who was afflicted with this anxiety throughout his life, any specific discussion of language, words, or the question of philosophical expression. Rather, his entire body of work challenges the standard way of writing philosophy – that is, literally, of philosophising. Again, to say this in other words, this time radically: Bergson’s work does not include a dedicated reflection on language, on whose foundations vivid and novel propositions might be propitiously fixed to which it offers vigour and plausibility; rather, it is from start to finish, through and through, from top to bottom and from bottom to top, this reflection – and this reflection is the major, essential, inalienable philosophical proposition of his work. To use Bergson’s own words – they are far more radical than mine! – ‘it would be a strange mistake to take for a constitutive element of doctrine what was only the means of expressing it’ (CM, 131). It must be conceded that what is true of this or that philosopher (this statement is taken from a paper delivered at a philosophy conference in which Bergson uses the examples of Spinoza, Berkeley and Kant) is also true for Bergson himself. What I write, he seems to say, what you read (make no mistake!), is not my doctrine, is not even an element of my doctrine; it is merely the means of expression I have fashioned to convey the idea. My work consists in finding the form adequate to an object that cannot be identified through words that were elaborated merely to approach it rather than designate what it is. For Bergson the common mistake is confusing the language of everyday conversation with that of philosophy – confusing, that is, the spoken word and the writing of thought;‘speech dominates over thought’, [‘we speak more than we think’] he says, lamenting this in Time and Free Will (TFW, 70). It could not be said more clearly – or with more emphasis – that speech and thought are incommensurable. Or, to speak like a poet, that truly philosophical thought has nothing to do with ‘universal reporting’. The Author’s Preface to Time and Free Will continues as follows: This assimilation of thought to things is useful in practical life and necessary in most of the sciences. But it may be asked whether the insurmountable difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space, and

10

In other words . . . whether, by merely getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting, we might not bring the fight to an end. (TFW, xix)

Penetrating the veil of words This precision is essential for scientific language. If, for Bergson, philosophers behave in prejudicial ways, it is because they carelessly mimic the attitude of scientists, using, like them, a language characterised by discontinuity which is well suited for clear distinctions, and the precise assertions that they hope to establish. However, if it is true that continuity is its enemy, this language – the language of intelligence, reasoning, deduction, erudite conversation – is unsuitable for philosophy. There are of course, even outside the realm of thought, experts in speech, whether oral or written; people whose remarkable skill in handling language, concepts, ideas, is admirable. ‘This superior skill’, Bergson says, ironically, ‘is what supposedly constitutes the superiority of the mind’. But he immediately adds: ‘As if true superiority could be anything other than a greater force of attention! As if this attention were not [.  .  .] direct vision, a vision which penetrates the veil of words’ (CM, 99). Let us beware of seeing in this ‘direct vision’ something like the experience of the mystic; let us rather see in the formula an effort to present an idea that must be imposed as an alternative not only to the language of science but also to the idea of intelligence: ‘a greater force of attention’ corresponds, in the order of knowledge, to ‘the vision that penetrates the veil of words’ in the order of expression. This is, at this moment in the history of philosophy, a real revolution. Intelligence is not being dismissed with this declaration but put in its place. It is not a question of discrediting it, but rather of specifying its field, which is that of science and technology. Verbal communication, however, is certainly not the object of the same indulgence. To use the language of intelligence for things that do not come under its purview is simply a matter of showing ignorance: ‘as if it was not the very ignorance of things which gives so much facility in speaking of them!’ Bergson, for whom polemic or contemptuousness are so foreign, nevertheless shows a disapproval, which is as resolute as it is rare for him, for such ignorant people: Homo faber, homo sapiens, I pay my respects to both, for they tend to merge. The only one to which I am antipathetic is Homo loquax whose thought, when he does think, is only a reflection upon his talk. (CM, 99–100)

Let it be said, then, and said again: no reflection on the words of conversationalists! Instead of a vain, inappropriate, in short, contemptible reflection, 11

In other words . . . whose model would be conversation, let us rather try the experiment of a new speech suitable for a ‘manner of thinking which courts difficulty’ (CM, 103). A speech which, if one understands correctly, ‘breaking the frames of language’ (TFW, 1342), and thus removed from its ordinary condition, would refrain from designating, distinguishing, in short would refrain from producing a discontinuity similar or comparable to that which works to establish and promote science. This is what Bergson calls – the phrase is remarkable – ‘a vision that penetrates the veil of words’. ‘Penetrate the veil of words’. This is precisely the ideal that, forty years later, Samuel Beckett would privately confess to a friend who had asked him to translate poems from German into English. Here is his answer – it is written in German: And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. [. . .] As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through. I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (Beckett 1983: 172)

This alignment of authors which, I fear, will seem to many minds unfounded, if not crazy, should in any case prevent one from taking Bergson for a mystic – a reproach that one rarely addresses to Beckett, who was, however, a dreamer of the same dream. What Bergson in any case does not discourage considering is the hypothesis of a philosophical language which, without necessarily conforming to the aesthetic requirements of the poem, significantly moves away from that language whose function is to weave and maintain the social bond. Bergson does not find it inappropriate that a philosopher, at the very moment he is philosophising, brings ‘disrepute’ upon his ‘own language’.We will see that for him this peculiarity is hardly more obvious than it is for Beckett, who was also bilingual, having also grown up outside France. Let us only remember for the moment that, to Bergson’s eyes and ears, language is not a given – or rather that this given, an element of contingency, of error, or even of contradiction, must absolutely no longer be taken as given, precisely, but called into question – and put at stake in the game. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this is the proper task of philosophy, the one incumbent upon it.

2. [‘. . . bris[er] les cadres du langage’ (DI, 100), translation modified from ‘breaking up the constituent elements of an idea’. Trans.]

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In other words . . . Because to philosophise, yes, is to work on language. And let us be careful not to insert between ‘is’ and ‘to’ an ‘also’ which would tend to establish another invention – for example conceptual, or notional – a ‘more philosophical’ legitimacy. Because, let us say it now, standard language is not alone in bearing the cost of this discreet revolution: the concept, a fairly standard tool of philosophers, is actually disqualified by such an approach. If with language it is possible despite everything (Bergson never stops doing this) to find accommodations, with the concept, the instrument par excellence of delimitation, of definition, and therefore of discontinuity, no negotiation is possible. In a formula which in the eyes of many philosophers, I imagine, must have seemed scandalous, and which in fact remains very mysterious – but so rarely commented upon that it is almost ‘never’ mentioned – Bergson says ‘conceptual expression’ is ‘of necessity symbolical’ (CM, 129). That is to say – I will satisfy myself with this remark for the moment – that the concept hardly differs, in this process, from the ordinary word, that it is even a kind of ‘super word’, more discontinuous than the discontinuous par excellence that is language. Of course, its role cannot be reduced to this, but it is not useless to say right now: if it is true that the question Bergson poses at the threshold of his first book is indeed that of the language adequate to the philosophical exercise, ‘conceptual expression’ cannot constitute its principle. This radical lack of faith in the words of everyday language is in fact the guiding thread of the entire Essay, and keeps returning in one form or another. At the end of the first chapter, Bergson again names the enemy of an enterprise that takes duration as its object: speech. ‘[S]peech dominates over thought’ is the phrase he uses to begin the chapter’s conclusion (TFW, 70). A conclusion which in its last lines proposes to examine not an abstract statement, which is more or less scientific in appearance, nor a concept which would structure it, but an image. The idea of intensity is thus situated at the junction of two streams, one of which brings us the idea of extensive magnitude from without, while the other brings us from within, in fact from the very depths of consciousness, the image of an inner multiplicity. Now, the point is to determine in what the latter image consists, whether it is the same as that of number, or whether it is quite different from it. In the following chapter . . . (TFW, 73)

This change of perspective is remarkable. The programme announced at the end of this first chapter must be related to the initial postulate of the infirmity of language. It will of course be necessary to come back in detail to the status of the image, which is inseparable from this discussion, and to relate it to the search for a mode of expression that would make it possible to escape the predetermined spatiality of the word. Let’s say for the moment that this 13

In other words . . . first chapter of the first book includes, as one of its stated purposes, to determine what spontaneously comes to consciousness when it tries to think the extensive and the intensive. It could even be read as a first attempt to assess its powers, merits or dangers. One recalls that from the first lines of the Author’s Preface Bergson castigates ‘the clumsy symbols [images]’ around which the battle between what occupies and what does not occupy space is waged. This does not mean that the image is disqualified in the chapter that opens the book (nor in the book as a whole) – indeed it never will be entirely, even if Bergson never fails to set limits on the trust he accords to it. But it is remarkable that at the threshold of the philosophical investigation that Time and Free Will intends to conduct on the mode of expression of philosophy, the status of the image, including the poetic image, is the subject of an examination that associates it with rhythm. The matter is far from being anecdotal or trivial. The end of the second chapter carries the same tone. The same objective (‘breaking the frames of language’ (TFW, 134)), is in any case declared, and perhaps implemented there, and once again words are on trial. Bergson reproaches them for their ‘commonplace colour’ (TFW, 138) and reiterates that the ‘confused, ever changing, and inexpressible’ aspect (TFW, 129) of ‘our perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas’ cannot be expressed by the language which seizes upon it and would adapt it bluntly to its ‘commonplace forms’, causing it to fall ‘into public property’.This fear – this certainty, rather – is an opportunity to call to mind other uses of language, other forms of expression. Without claiming them for the philosopher, Bergson nevertheless insists on naming them, describing them, for a greater precision of his thesis – a less vague outline of the project than that with which his book begins.

Thought and language A tempting way of using language would be – for example – in the manner of the novelist. Now, if some bold novelist, tearing aside the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego, shows us under this appearance of logic a fundamental absurdity, under this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named, we commend him for having known us better than we knew ourselves. (TFW, 133)

Would the novelist therefore be more qualified, better equipped than the philosopher for the unprecedented task that Bergson assigns to philosophy? 14

In other words . . . No, of course not. Because language is their common good, it unfolds ‘our feeling in a homogeneous time’ and expresses ‘its elements by words’; and so, like the philosopher, the novelist can only ever present us ‘its shadow’.Yet the relation will not have been in vain: for an instant it will allow us to ‘suspect the extraordinary and illogical nature of the object which projects it’ (TFW, 134). The other mode of expression mentioned at the very end of the chapter is still more astonishing. And for a traditional philosopher, perhaps even more shocking. During his lamentation on the imbecility of language, Bergson evokes, as a possible model (for the philosopher of goodwill), the functioning of the dream: The strangest dreams, in which two images overlie one another and show us at the same time two different persons, who yet make only one, will hardly give us an idea of the interweaving of concepts which goes on when we are awake. The imagination of the dreamer, cut off from the external world, imitates with mere images, and parodies in its own way, the process which constantly goes on with regard to ideas in the deeper regions of the intellectual life. (TFW, 136–7)

Even if he does so discreetly, Bergson challenges here a very rarely contested philosophical tradition – that which holds that a particular utterance can only correspond to one meaning. Yet, univocity is in his eyes the main failing of language. The dream, of course, does not provide the model of what it would take to articulate valid propositions any more than the novel, but its evocation makes it possible to add a necessary key to an ideal which is difficult to formulate: that of equivocity, which is very rare for a philosopher to claim. The second chapter of Time and Free Will ends, like the first, with the announcement of a project to which words will be the declared obstacle, since it will be a question of ‘refusing the convenience of language’, of isolating the facts of consciousness from their own ‘symbolical substitute’ (TFW, 104; these are the last words of the chapter). In this way, at each important stage of Time and Free Will, Bergson seeks to reformulate his enterprise, never failing, by varying the formulas, examples and references as desired, to underline that ‘only those ideas which least belong to us can be adequately expressed in words ‘(TFW, 136). The rest of the book emphasises this fact, which can therefore be considered the essential and original contribution of Time and Free Will, even if this is not often recognised. The Author’s Preface named the subject of the book it opens as ‘the problem of freedom’ (which, let us note, is not quite the same as ‘freedom’), but it announced at the same time, in order to pose it in valid and operational terms, the need for a revolution of enunciative expression. The final chapter therefore closes unsurprisingly with this reminder: if one 15

In other words . . . struggles to formulate the question of freedom, it is because philosophers persist in asking it in a language whose inadequacy they fail to perceive. This is the last sentence of chapter three: All the difficulties of the problem, and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable. (TFW, 221; my emphasis)

The conclusion to the book is clear: the successive phases of our interior life cannot be expressed in ‘the fixed terms of language’ (TFW, 237). If a philosopher decides to use ordinary language to name them, describe them, explain their nature and their mode of emergence to consciousness, that philosopher will only arrive at ‘a self which can be artificially reconstructed, and simple psychic states which can be added to and taken from one another just like the letters of the alphabet in forming words’ (TFW, 237). Bergson says it so clearly that one is astonished that all critical readings of his work do not begin here – that is to say, where he himself began: the ‘past states’ of consciousness ‘cannot be adequately expressed in words or artificially reconstructed by a juxtaposition of simpler states’ (TFW, 239). To put it another way, or ‘in other words’, if freedom has become a problem for modern philosophers, it is because of a misunderstanding. The last sentence of the book equates those who think they can pose it – and even solve it – by ordinary verbal means with the Sophists. Sophists likely to admire or even imitate Zeno the Eleatic who, breaking down what cannot be broken down, came to deny the very existence of movement. To speak of consciousness is – likewise – to relate the measurable and the defined to the living, through a hypothesis that is indecomposable, even in words: The problem of freedom has thus sprung from a misunderstanding: it has been to the moderns what the paradoxes of the Eleatics were to the ancients, and, like these paradoxes, it has its origin in the illusion through which we confuse succession and simultaneity, duration and extensity, quality and quantity. (TFW, 240)

Commentary on Bergson Before leaving for the moment Time and Free Will, I would like, even though this is not exactly the object of my study, to say something about the astonishing silence that Bergson’s most authoritative commentators keep on this aspect of his works: what I called above the need for an enunciative revolution 16

In other words . . . in philosophy. This need, moreover, does not only affect the facts of con­ sciousness. We know that in speaking of life, creation, evolution, matter, morality, religion, and especially in speaking of philosophy, Bergson will never fail in his mistrust, in his vigilance towards the requirements of verbal language. In 1932, in Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion], he will dedicate a longer discussion to this necessity which in reality involves his entire philosophy – and which even involves, if one might believe it, all philosophy. Frédéric Worms, for example, in a paper called ‘Les trois dimensions de la question de l’espace dans l’oeuvre de Bergson’ [‘The Three Dimensions of the Question of Space in Bergson’s Work’], develops a truly remarkable philosophical commentary on this opening of Time and Free Will. It illuminates how the question of space, at the heart of the first sentence, is for Bergson the means of designating from the outset everything that goes against his enterprise; but he does not go so far as to make language and the need to reform it the very subject of the question – and the touchstone of the whole enterprise.Whereas Bergson makes language an instrument disqualified by its spatiality, Worms makes space ‘the condition of possibility of multiple knowledge systems’, including ‘the linguistic order’; whereas Bergson speaks of an intrinsic – and regrettable – link between language and space, Worms speaks, for his part, ‘of this very particular relationship with language which characterises Bergson’s notion of space’ (1994: 90). There is more than a nuance here: rather, there is a real difference of point of view, which prevents, it seems to me, the taking into account of the imperative requirement of this new philosopher: to reform the mode of expression of philosophy. If it is true, as Merleau-Ponty says (quoted by Worms), that Bergson passes ‘from a critique of language’ to a ‘philosophy of expression’,Worms passes imperceptibly from Bergson’s critique of language to his criticism of space, which is the real subject of his article. On the reform of expression called for in the Author’s Preface, he remains surprisingly discreet: However, he continues, it will always remain, in such a renewal, to think about the status of pure space in itself, and the test of the philosophy of duration will not only consist in critiquing it, or going beyond it, but also and above all in justifying, and situating in metaphysics, a theory of knowledge and psychology, whose foundation it enables, and which is articulated as in a fully-fledged philosophy of the spirit. (Worms 1994: 91)

I also note, in the same spirit, that the Avant-propos [Author’s Preface] to Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience [Time and Free Will], in the PUF edition (DI), does not include any note or commentary on what is the explicit and even somewhat solemn project of Bergson’s book. I fully 17

In other words . . . subscribe to what Frédéric Worms says about this first sentence: ‘The effect of the opening passage is undeniable and deliberate’ (Worms 1994: 89). Yet this project, as we have just seen, structures the book and constitutes its thread, from its first to its very last page. In the introduction of the text of this scholarly edition, there is nothing about language, nothing about words, nothing about the need for a change in writing practice in philosophy. Nothing either on the so difficult question of the validity of a verbal statement (Time and Free Will itself) which challenges the verbal. Here is the full summary made of this essential opening passage of the Author’s Preface; the silence concerning the question of expression (Bergson’s first words) is impressive: Recourse to space is useful and legitimate in action and knowledge, but it gives rise to false problems and confusion in thought. Suddenly, the philosophical stakes become those of re-establishing a division of domains, which should dispel the difficulties arising from the projection into space of phenomena that escape it.This is what must appear through the successive analysis of the notions of intensity, duration and freedom. (DI, 265 [my translation])

If no note relates to the side of Bergson’s project that concerns language – which is also, I believe, his major philosophical contribution – the notes included in this edition which should help one better read the Author’s Preface are interesting if one wants to understand this absence – which is no doubt involuntary, and probably unconscious. The editor places the first of these notes at the end of the first (and decisive) sentence, which I cite again: ‘We necessarily express ourselves by means of words, and we usually think in terms of space.’The note says this (I am only quoting the beginning, the rest is equally silent on the question of expression): This is the first occurrence of the concept of space in Bergson’s work. This concept is fundamental. It will be at the heart of Chapter II [. . .] as of all the following books. (DI, 265 [my translation])

It is striking, and at the same time a little astonishing, that the radical nature of Bergson’s words is not pointed out, nor the difficulty that they set up in the reading of what is to follow – in the reading of any philosophical text; and that the commentator does not put space, the importance of which is obviously not to be minimised in Bergson’s thought, in relation to language. And yet the strength and the novelty of Bergson’s words derive precisely from this connection. If it is true that language is spatial and that its use is an unavoidable necessity of our expression, how might it deal with time? The same remark, or almost the same, can be made about the note which follows this sentence from the third chapter (it is one of the innumerable occurrences of Bergson’s thesis as to the danger of relying on ordinary 18

In other words . . . language to philosophise): ‘Therefore, it is only an inaccurate psychology, misled by language, which will show us the soul determined by sympathy, aversion, or hate as though by so many forces pressing upon it’ (TFW, 165). The editor’s note: Bergson’s target, here again, is John Stuart Mill, according to whom we are influenced in our actions by internal moral antecedents, which act by being articulated with the external circumstances [here a quote from JSM]. In fact, from the point of view of duration, and qualitative multiplicity, each state expresses my personality as a whole. (DI, 242, note 41 [my translation]).

That this error, denounced by Bergson, emerges from language itself (of which, he says, the philosopher and the psychologist are the dupes!) does not seem to be mentioned – let alone commented on.Yet it is language which is at the origin of the whole enterprise. Bergson’s previous line, which is also not remarked upon, says: ‘there is no common measure between mind and language’. What applies to the notes of course also applies to their, sometimes regrettable, absence. When Bergson writes for example: ‘It is advisable, then, that we should place ourselves at this new point of view, and, setting aside all translation into words, all symbolism in space [des préjugés du langage], attend to what pure consciousness alone shows us about an action that has come to pass or an action which is still to come’ (TFW, 173), the editor does not feel the need to add a note.The ‘prejudices of language’ are not, however, so trivial a matter that it is inappropriate to relate this sentence to others written in the same spirit – which this edition does remarkably when it comes to ideas or abstract concepts. Now, why is this strong interrogation, this suspicion, this distrust Bergson expresses with regard to the prejudices of language so rarely noticed? And when it is, why does it never affect the way Bergson is read? I admit that I do not have a clear answer to this question, which I ask in relation to Bergson because he forces us to ask it, so to speak, but which one could ask about any philosophical work. Despite this, I will make a few suggestions – in my view they indicate the timeliness of Bergson’s approach, the urgency of returning to his major propositions. The first reason undoubtedly has to do with philosophy itself, at least as Bergson describes its practice when he reflects on it before an audience of professors of philosophy (in Bologna, in 1911) in his paper ‘Philosophical Intuition’. It is very difficult, he explains to his colleagues, to read a philosopher with the idea that the philosophical doctrine he expresses is not the whole thing, and that if the philosopher has undertaken to write a work, it is not so much about this doctrine itself as about what this doctrine clothes or veils, which (Bergson 19

In other words . . . says) even the philosopher himself is very often ignorant of. Remember, for Bergson: ‘it would be a strange mistake to take for a constitutive element of doctrine what was only the means of expressing it’ (CM, 131). Such is the first error to which we are exposed, as I was just saying, when we undertake the study of a system. So many partial resemblances strike us, so many parallels seem to be indicated, so many pressing appeals to our ingenuity and erudition are sent out from all directions, that we are tempted to recompose the philosopher’s thought with fragments of ideas gathered here and there, praising him afterwards, of course, for having been able – as we have just shown ourselves to be – to execute a pretty piece of mosaic. (CM, 131)

It would certainly be ‘a strange mistake’ to understand the works of philosophers in this way, but Bergson confesses that as a teacher this is what he most often does, without denying that while evoking forms of doctrinal synthesis when he reads philosophers with his students he experiences ‘an  aesthetic joy intensified by a professional satisfaction’. He goes so far as to describe his ordinary activity as that of a handyman [bricoleur], skilled in reassembling an object in order to end up understand its inner workings: We therefore set to work, we go back to the sources, we weigh the influences, we extract the similitudes, and in the end we distinctly see in the doctrine what we were looking for: a more or less original synthesis of the ideas among which the philosopher lived. (CM, 127)

Bergson warns us in vain: the reflexes he describes, the professional habits he says are damaging, remain strong, and where he speaks of space, his commentators will speak without otherwise taking heed of the ‘concept of space’, without noting that Bergson strongly distrusts this concept or pointing out that the concept of the space in question is here considered in its linguistic form and that it is in this connection – space/language – that the strength and the difficulty of the novel project that he begins to describe resides. This perhaps explains the forgetfulness of language in the commentaries that are often made of Bergson’s work. He is not the first to speak of space, or time, or duration; but he is undoubtedly the first to link these questions to that of verbal expression, and to risk the hypothesis, which is indeed very disturbing, that this spatiality of language, if it were established, would have serious repercussions for the treatment of any philosophical question – again, freedom is just a (first) example. A second reason for the habitual silence on this question of expression through words of standard language probably relates to the formidable difficulty of this first philosophical proposition; to the impossibility of providing an adequate commentary upon it. What can one say about a statement that 20

In other words . . . challenges the very principle of its expression? I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that Bergson, right up to his very last texts, will never cease to vary the propositions, the worried hypotheses, the paradoxes, the contradictions around this complex whose poetic, but also philosophical, repercussions are potentially enormous. This is not often said, but one of the consequences of Bergson’s dearly held conviction (that language forces us to speak differently than philosophical intuition desires that we speak) is the almost always explicit precaution that he takes to include himself – at the very moment when he expresses himself, when he writes, when he speaks, as in the conference I have just quoted – in the process that he describes (for example: ‘. . . for having been able – as we have just shown ourselves to be – to execute a pretty piece’). We must admit that there is a major difficulty here, which cannot be resolved definitively, and which the word ‘performativity’, which comes to mind and which I will sometimes use, does not completely reduce. There is perhaps a third cause for this paucity, not to say absence, of commentary on Bergson’s preoccupation with expression – an absence of which his commentators may not even have been aware. One has seen it, and one will see it again in many places: there are times when, in order to understand the requirement, the originality, the scope of Bergson’s approach, one is almost necessarily led to cite literary projects or works. (I have already mentioned those of Mallarmé and Beckett, others will come soon). Let us say it simply, even if it means being a little shocking: Bergson manhandles conceptual expression, recuperating it to progress on his way to a language that would function according to principles that, while not being foreign to a musician or a novelist, nevertheless contravene, openly, resolutely, the philosophical tradition which makes univocity of meaning a creed. So much so that the reflex of professional philosophers – who Bergson often mocks – is, when it comes to his poetic care, if not openly hostile criticism (as was the case with Russell during Bergson’s lifetime), then a more or less open condescension. The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him in 1927 certainly did not serve his cause! ‘It hurt him a good deal’, a philosopher friend of mine once said to me, a little embarrassed. This was confirmed, somewhat regretfully, by another friend of mine, also a philosopher, a great specialist in this work in France.

Philosophy and Literature The form of discourse That philosophers are writers is a reality that it would be difficult to dispute. But that their writing activity can give rise to the same questions as that of 21

In other words . . . poets, to a concern for form or expression comparable to that of novelists, to say nothing of a possible recourse to fiction, is a hypothesis that it is difficult for a philosopher to accept. Not only because the tradition of the separation of disciplines is never, neither by ‘philosophers’ nor by the ‘literary’, questioned other than formally – and indeed always very briefly. But also because to admit that the language of philosophy operates according to laws which also govern literary works (not only grammatical or syntactic but also those of rhetoric, genre, aesthetics and poetics) would have the consequence of a total upheaval in the teaching of philosophy, which philosophy professors would then have to approach as a set of texts that they would therefore no longer be able to consider as simple and neutral vectors of ideas – texts that would perhaps not even have a precise meaning, in any case one that might be easily formulated. My experience in this area has shown me that while philosophers take care not to despise literature, they are very careful to confine it to an enclosed space that is far enough away from philosophy. It may well happen that one says of one (Arendt) or another (Bergson) that they ‘write well’, and for Bergson, for example, that he did not get this Nobel Prize for nothing. But then, how might it be said? Literature is at best nothing more than an art of speaking well, involving an elegance or a remarkable precision of expression. Bergson ‘writes well’, so it is said. ‘Let’s not forget’, it is often added, ‘that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature!’ And it is thought that everything has been said about the work – no doubt considerable – of Bergson the writer. One example, among a thousand. I borrow it from the introduction to L’Évolution créatrice [Creative Evolution] made by the director of the major critical edition of Bergson’s works at the Presses Universitaires de France.This introduction is impeccable, and I have no doubt that it will be as useful and beneficial to its many readers as it has been to me, as indeed are the introductions of all the volumes in this edition. But it is notable that nothing is said in this introduction about the formal and poetic concerns that Bergson mentions – even in this book itself – until the moment when the introduction seems about to end: ‘Yet, again, nothing can replace, first of all, reading the book itself ’ (EC, 13 [my translation]). Then comes a final paragraph – it looks a bit like a Postscript or a Nota bene. It is called ‘Writing’: One last remark is in order, however, before returning to this. Here too, it is not a question of being satisfied with characterizing this book, in its very writing, through the literary genius that it nevertheless manifests and which earned its author, in 1927, the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is that the strength of this writing does not only lie in the seduction of its style but also in the precision which is inseparable from it, in the expression and the composition, the concepts and the structure, of the work. Anyone can

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In other words . . . verify this, not only by following a fluid and rigorous movement as if with one’s hand, but also by tracing, with the help of indices for example, the thread of images and ideas, examples and arguments, which the dossier helps to pull together. (EC, 13 [my translation])

A style that is not only attractive but precise – voila! – this is literary genius. To praise the precision of concepts is, for a philosopher, an almost obligatory gesture – even if it is not certain that this praise would have enchanted a writer who never ceased to be suspicious of the concept, precisely because of its too great precision and clarity. Here, as in the majority of comments on Bergson, the philosopher’s writing is evoked as ‘well expressed’, even as ‘very well expressed’, not at all as a philosophical question that affects his very approach and calls into question, in its discreet radicality, the very principle of the philosophical exercise. But how else might one speak of the writing of a philosopher? What place is there in a commentary, even a simple summary or blurb, for this suspicion? Or how, as a philosophical commentator, might one present the major text of an author who has never ceased to claim that the letter of his doctrine has little to do with the movement, ungraspable through words, which brings it into being? Ideas, of which concepts are the clumsy tools of expression, are described by Bergson as follows: ‘the ideas corresponding to each of the words are simply the images or concepts which would arise in the mind at each moment of the thinking if the thinking halted: but it does not halt’; their function, he specifies, is only that of ‘expressing metaphorically, as it were, the comings and goings of the mind’ (ME, 56). One can understand the perplexity of the philosophical commentator faced with such propositions: if the conceptual expression is ‘necessarily symbolic’, if ideas only ‘metaphorically express’ thought, then it is imperative to read philosophers differently. Hence this somewhat provocative, but very difficult to implement, imperative: ‘So leave aside artificial reconstructions of thought; consider the thought itself ’ (ME, 56). Here, undoubtedly is the major obstacle: it is impossible, for a philosopher who grew up in the tradition, to read a text as if it could be reduced to what it seems to say – and even to what it says. In formulating these propositions, Bergson shifts the boundaries so radically (that which separates literature and philosophy is only one of them) that one understands the reluctance of philosophers to take all this into account. It is very rare that Bergson’s commentators fail to offer, perhaps in self-defence, what he urges them to avoid: a reconstruction. The damage inflicted through this way of doing things is not collateral, it is essential, since it amounts to obscuring what makes this work what it is: a radical questioning of the standard language of philosophy. 23

In other words . . . In praise of approximation Here it is time to say that Bergson’s postulate about the invalidity of standard, everyday language in philosophy puts him and all the philosophers who would not challenge him on this point in a very uncomfortable position. A position that is so paradoxical that it even seems untenable. This postulate indeed implies a new and unprecedented way of expressing oneself since it will be a question, in short, of expressing through words the limits of expression by words. Outside of this declaration of principle, it will be a question of speaking while at every moment avoiding the deadly traps of language. In a sense, this enterprise is even more perilous than that for which Socrates made himself the legendary herald. For the doubt which he was the first to show then concerned, if we dare say it in this way, only written language – only writing as a practical principle of philosophy. One remembers that this disqualification of writing, which Plato nevertheless believed he could relate through writing, was pronounced for the benefit of speech, conversation, exchange – in a word, dialogue. Now, Bergson’s words against conversation are, as we have seen, as vehement, if not more so, than his reservations against language itself. Whether or not it is written is less important to him than the credit, however discreet, even tacit, that one gives to it. The whole of Bergson’s philosophy is therefore based on an aporetic postulate: only language is able to save us from language. His entire work has endeavoured to give verisimilitude to this conviction, playing language against itself, so to speak. One thinks of course of Pascal: ‘There is nothing so consistent with reason as this disavowal of reason’ (Pascal 1985: 171 [my translation]). I myself have risked a statement of the same type about the story that writers and philosophers do not fail to tell when they evoke the circumstances in which they invented their method: ‘Only narrative permits one to free oneself from narrative’ (Clément 2011: 17). Bergson’s philosophy is one of those monuments of thought that are built with the fine, enduring and precarious awareness of their own fragility. Its author is one of those who, like Pascal, can only produce enunciations that take into account what they renounce, implementing, along with their thinking, the thinking of their own way and the way in which they think. Against ‘the prejudices of language’, and to combat what it ‘demands’ of us, it will therefore be a question of developing an enunciative strategy. However, this strategy will necessarily be verbal. Just as the postulate (never stated by Bergson in this form, I confess) rests on an internal contradiction, its philosophical statement must never fail to give the idea of the extreme sharpness of the ridge along which it is built and progresses. It must in fact both formulate 24

In other words . . . what must be called a thesis, or at least a hypothesis, and, in doing so, not contradict the idea that this formulation is approximate at best. This unavoidability of resorting to verbal means is the subject of regular admissions and justifications, which are in fact frequently advanced in thought itself. When it comes, for example, to taking stock of the question that troubles and that has long troubled philosophy, of the unity or the multiplicity of the ego, Bergson does not fail to specify that if this way of opposing contraries has become necessary, it nevertheless does not correspond to reality: Is my own person, at a given moment, one or manifold? If I declare it one, inner voices arise and protest – those of the sensations, feelings, ideas, among which my individuality is distributed. But, if I make it distinctly manifold, my consciousness rebels quite as strongly; it affirms that my sensations, my feelings, my thoughts are abstractions which I effect on myself, and that each of my states implies all the others. I am then (we must adopt the language of the understanding, since only the understanding has a language) a unity that is multiple and a multiplicity that is one; but unity and multiplicity are only views of my personality taken by an understanding that directs its categories at me; I enter neither into one nor into the other nor into both at once, although both, united, may give a fair imitation of the mutual interpenetration and continuity that I find at the base of my own self. Such is my inner life, and such also is life in general. (CE, 257–8)

This is a remarkable passage. Of course, one can give in to the temptation of seeing in this a simple and banal statement, one subject to the laws of language that have been denounced elsewhere – indeed this statement takes part in this very act of renunciation ‘(we must adopt the language of the understanding, since only the understanding has a language)’. Yet things are not so simple. This renunciation rests, in effect, upon a kind of fiction, used briefly but suggestively, which makes several voices follow one another, as in a tense dialogue; yet what is at stake is crucial. The fiction itself is immediately called a ‘fair imitation’ of reality. What reality? To believe the text itself, it concerns ‘the mutual interpenetration and continuity that I find at the base of my own self ’.The same question applies as that for the second sentence of the Author’s Preface. If this is indeed the reality, why not call it that from the outset? Why did Bergson prefer, at least initially, an ‘imitation’, and what more is a ‘fair imitation’? This is precisely because it is an imitation and an imitation is better – on the whole – than a simple nomination, than the word alone, however precise it may be. If the word ‘imitation’ did not precede those of ‘mutual interpenetration’ the second phrase alone could not present the idea that Bergson intends to make the words designate. As for approximation, it works

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In other words . . . more effectively than conceptually precise language. Precision is and must remain the object of unfailing epistemological mistrust: it is the instrument of delimitation, of borders, of definitions, of sharp distinctions – in a word of discontinuity. Not even the word ‘continuity’ is left unmarred by this precision. Of the continuity in question – and it is in question – one will therefore give an idea that is all the more true because it is imprecise. Approximation is never the object of regret, still less of lament, in Bergson. If the things to be said are, precisely, impossible to say, the best we can do is get close to them. Whenever the word ‘approximation’ is pronounced, it should be understood in its etymological sense. Bergson’s poetic method is that of an asymptote. This asymptote is desirable. It is the infallible answer to what one might call an unfortunate precision. In an essential passage of Creative Evolution this question of expression is posed in an exemplary manner. As he often does, Bergson reuses words he has just used to return to them, and thereby questions the validity of their otherwise inevitable use. This concerns two words, ‘élan vital’ [vital impetus], which he obviously cannot give up, however imperfect they may seem to him at first. There are no regrets, therefore, at the mention of this imperfection. Bergson’s text makes the necessity of this approximation the object of a discussion which is perhaps more important to philosophy than this ‘élan vital’ itself, since these two words only constitute – it must be repeated, and believed – the symbolic expression of a reality that it is impossible to say by other means. Bergson regularly confesses that he can only use an image to express himself, not without specifying at the same time that it would be wrong to deplore this recourse to the image – which some would be tempted, perhaps, to consider a vain ‘detour’. Because the alternative to the image of the élan vital would be nothing more than an image (for example a concept) but still just another image. Adequacy being in principle and by hypothesis (notably linguistic) out of reach, the only thing capable of giving an idea of it would be a movement that draws close to it – that approaches it as closely as possible. If the movement of the élan vital or impetus of life is retained, it is not therefore in spite of but because of its imagistic character. And if it is preferred over any other image, it is because of its very approximation. Why should not the unique impetus [élan] have been impressed on a unique body, which might have gone on evolving? This question arises, no doubt, from the comparison of life to an impetus [élan]. And it must be compared to an impetus [élan], because no image borrowed from the physical world can give more nearly the idea of it. But it is only an image. In reality, life is of the psychological order, and it is of the essence of the psychical to enfold a confused plurality of interpenetrating terms. (CE, 257) 

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In other words . . . The approximation is, if one dares to say so, rigorous. Because we have read correctly: if the image of the vital impetus is to be preferred, it is not because it is less approximate than another, but because it is more so! The approximation gives legitimacy to the image, it is that which approaches it best; that which gets as close as possible to it. Here again, the PUF edition (EC) is disappointing. On a passage whose poetic importance – and therefore philosophical importance – is crucial, the notes miss the essential: note 239 for example, located after the words ‘it must be’ (‘it must be compared to an impetus. . .’), refers to a few pages of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion which evoke the legitimacy of this image (‘The reasons for the legitimacy of this image will be discussed again in The Two Sources’). But Bergson is not saying that this image is legitimate, he is saying that it is necessary. There is here, for philosophy in general, a somewhat disturbing proposition, as the image is not usually the preferred mode of expression in philosophy.

Of the proper, of the image; of the figurative, of the concept Bergson’s originality rests, it seems to me, in the assertion that philosophical expression necessarily contains images. One cannot pretend that his purpose is to legitimise a given image to the detriment of another image that would be less adequate, more or less approximate. It must be admitted, even if it is difficult, that he intends, here as often, to value the image over the type of expression that he absolutely rejects, even though it is favoured by most philosophers, namely the recourse to a language of abstraction (which he calls ‘conceptual expression’). If there is any doubt, reading a few lines of The Creative Mind (in ‘Stating the problems’) should be enough to convince one as it certainly says the same thing, but with even less ambiguity: Comparisons and metaphors will here suggest what cannot be expressed. That will not constitute a detour; it will amount to going straight to the goal. If one were constantly to speak an abstract, so-called ‘scientific’ language, one would be giving of mind only its imitation by matter, for abstract ideas have been drawn from the external world and always imply a spatial representation: and yet one would think one had analyzed mind. Abstract ideas alone would, therefore, in such a case, be inviting us to imagine mind on the model of matter and to think it by transposition, that is, in the exact meaning of the word, by metaphor. (CM, 48–9)

And even more explicitly, that is to say more radically, and still more difficult to accept, he states: 27

In other words . . . Let us not be duped by appearances: there are cases in which it is imagery in language which knowingly expresses the literal meaning, and abstract language which unconsciously expresses itself figuratively.The moment we reach the spiritual world, the image, if it merely seeks to suggest, may give us the direct vision, while the abstract term, which is spatial in origin and which claims to express, most frequently leaves us in metaphor. (CM, 49)

One thinks of Copernicus, whose approach tended to make it clear that to stick to appearances was to lose all chance of apprehending the cosmic truth. Copernicus, or Kant who was inspired by him, suggest that we abandon the idea that intuition is regulated by the nature of the objects that we claim to know, and that we consider, on the contrary, at least as a hypothesis, that the object is regulated by the nature of our intuitive faculty. Make no mistake: in these few lines of Bergson there is a revolution which in his mind is no less decisive. That pictorial language actually speaks ‘literally’ and abstract language, unconsciously, ‘figuratively’, profoundly disrupts not only the idea we spontaneously have of language but also the idea that we have of philosophy and its practice if it is true that it must conform to this reversal of roles. And if one thinks deeply about it one will find that the revolution in question does not only affect our conception of language, nor that of the language that suits philosophy; that it is not only epistemological or methodical in nature, but that it is the other phase of a properly philosophical revolution. This amounts to saying that theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to us inseparable. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of its object. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge which does not replace the intellect in the general evolution of life will teach us neither how the frames of knowledge have been constructed nor how we can enlarge or go beyond them. (CE, xiii)

It is therefore spirit or mind that is in question, and the means of saying something about it that are at the disposal of the philosopher. If the object to be understood were of a material nature, there would be no disadvantage in using a tool whose entirely spatial conformation reproduces that of matter. ‘One would be giving of mind only its imitation by matter’, says Bergson. I will come back to the word ‘imitation’, the history of which in philosophy is so heavy and so complicated and which Bergson consistently rejects. Let us just say for the moment that if the image can paradoxically ‘give us the direct vision’, it is only because rather than being able to say the thing in itself it allows one to approach it as closely as possible. 28

In other words . . . Here too the notes in the reference edition are interesting. After the first sentence quoted (‘Comparisons and metaphors will here suggest what cannot be expressed. . .’) a note takes stock of the distinction that Bergson makes between suggestion and expression, explaining that ‘philosophical language is not intended to adequately section off a determined reality, but to produce a certain disposition to intuition’. However, this is said without specifying that the philosophical language advocated by Bergson is that of comparison and metaphor, and without commenting on the assertion, which is nonetheless quite stunning, that thanks to them we will avoid unnecessary detours, that ‘it will amount to going straight to the goal’. As for the incredible paradox that Bergson calmly exposes (that between abstract language and figurative language, the more metaphorical of the two is not the one we think), this is attributed to the difficulty in speaking about time (which is not a question he is considering at this point of the argument) while disregarding the spatiality of language, which of course is relevant – and useful – but says nothing of Bergson’s resolute recommendation. ‘This “suggestive” use which is better adapted to images and uses them consciously (“knowingly”) offers a more appropriate means of talking about time as such’, says note 92 (EC). Here we have to repeat each word. For, finally, Bergson does not say that suggestive language ‘is better adapted to images’, he says that ‘comparisons and metaphors’ will succeed where the language of conceptual expression fails (‘[to] suggest what cannot be expressed’); nor does he say that suggestive language is ‘a more appropriate means’ than any other; he says that so-called figurative language is the only one that is valid for implementing his philosophical project; he rejects the idea that such a remedy is a ‘detour’, the means of getting out of a bad situation: he says that for him ‘it will amount to going straight to the goal’. There is obviously something in such a declaration which, if it does not trouble them deeply, irritates philosophers. This is because in their eyes conceptual expression is standard and therefore obvious.This proposal is therefore enough to make them uncomfortable. How else might one explain that the radicality, the originality, of Bergson’s words are not even mentioned? In other words, philosophy does not know how to engage well with language – at least if by that we mean the means of expression of intelligence and ‘common thought’ (CM, 96). Language in any case, says Bergson, has need of stability. It is open to philosophy; but the philosophical mind is sympathetic to the endless renovation and re-invention which are at the bottom of things, and words have a definite meaning, a conventional value relatively fixed; they can express the new only as a rearrangement of the old. (CM, 96)

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In other words . . . Forget words Bergson is well aware that, in saying – and doing – this, he is going against a philosophical tradition ordinarily understood as an attempt ‘to construct a metaphysics with the rudimentary knowledge one finds stored up in language’. He says he himself adopted such an attitude before Time and Free Will, but adds quickly that he now opposes it (‘All my philosophical activity was a protestation against this way of philosophizing’ (CM, 106)). He even claims – I will try to justify it although the proposition is rather enigmatic, and even provocative – that his philosophical life could not have begun until he knew how to renounce the seductions of language. I do not know if a professor of philosophy would map out Bergson’s career as Bergson does himself, if he would take the risk of summarising his journey by making each of the great books he wrote correspond to a new stage on the way towards his freedom from verbal constraints. I underline the last two sentences of this peculiar intellectual autobiography, they are cited very rarely: they are found on the last page of what is commonly called ‘Introduction II’ to The Creative Mind: I should never have been able to extract from my book Matter and Memory, which preceded Creative Evolution, a true doctrine of evolution (it would have been one in only appearance); nor could I have extracted from my Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness a theory of the relations of the soul and the body like the one I set forth later in Matter and Memory (I should have had only a hypothetical construction); nor from the pseudo-philosophy to which I was devoted before the Immediate Data – that is to say from the general notions stored up in language could I have extracted the conclusions on duration and the inner life which I presented in this first work. My initiation into the true philosophical method began the moment I threw overboard verbal solutions, having found in the inner life an important field of experiment. After that, all progress was an enlarging of this field. (CM, 105–6, my emphasis)

As is often the case with Bergson, in order to elucidate this almost introductory statement (although it dates from 1922), it is advisable to choose the lectio difficilior, and to accept the idea, strange as it may seem at first, that the books in question are the result of a renunciation – Bergson even speaks of a rejection – of a verbal solution to the problem of expression. According to him, it is because he was able to process language in a non-verbal way that he was able to write what he wrote, that he made the philosophical progress he here sets out. We can see, without fully understanding it, that it would be a mistake (let us confess that it is very widespread!) to read these texts as if they consist of statements functioning according to the standard mode of signification, since it is equally by repudiation that Bergson was able to produce them. To read them properly – at least to read them as a faithful Bergsonian – 30

In other words . . . we would have to forget that words are words. In reality, writes Bergson, ‘the writer’s art consists above everything in making us forget that he is using words’ (ME, 57). Now, the good philosopher is and must be above all a writer. Bergson will state this even more clearly in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). In ‘The Soul and the Body’ (in Mind Energy), he is already trying to offer a glimpse of what it might mean to make a philosophical statement that is not based on the sense of the words: The harmony [the writer] seeks is a certain correspondence between the comings and goings of his mind and the phrasing of his speech, a correspondence so perfect that the waves of his thought, borne by the sentence, stir us sympathetically, and the words, taken individually, no longer count. (ME, 57)

Who would ever read Bergson like this? Who, one dares to ask, would ever do him this justice? Let’s recognise that it is difficult for someone who has a responsibility to teach philosophy to get people to admit that the words you read do not matter; that one should only be attentive in a philosopher’s text to the waves of thought, of which words would only be the translation – or the representation. In this sense, and in this sense only, we can speak of a perfect correspondence. But, as one will have noted, the correspondence in question is neither between thought and speech, nor between words and things, it is between ‘the comings and goings of his mind and the phrasing of his speech’.

Three Figures We do not encounter here this surprising coming and going movement for the first or last time. One remembers that it was already part of the sequence of the first two sentences of the Author’s Preface to Time and Free Will, and Bergson will never fail, even in his last texts, to claim it as the promise of an authentic philosophy. Let us admit that there is enough here to disconcert minds having grown up with the idea that the explanation of a philosophical text must be based on the precise analysis of the exact terms used, of the precise concepts forged or claimed by the philosopher, who is, furthermore, rarely treated as a writer. A very special writer, in fact, if it is true that for Bergson ‘the words, taken individually, no longer count’. We will see in the last chapter of Time and Free Will that here there is the ferment of an unprecedented – and perhaps utopian – pedagogy of philosophy. Let us be satisfied for the moment to note that the language of the philosopher can in no way be regulated by the use that one ordinarily makes of it – what Bergson often calls conversation. These few words of Bergson that I have just quoted seem more like a reflection on literature. A writer like Proust – to quote an author often 31

In other words . . . linked to Bergson – would certainly not deny them; but a novelist or a playwright like Nathalie Sarraute, so attentive to inner movements and so little interested in the content of speech, would also undoubtedly have approved of them. I will have the opportunity to talk about each of these writers later.

Zigzag The case is admittedly more complicated than it looks. That this movement of coming and going constitutes a strange recommendation – especially in philosophy – should not cause us to forget that it is insisted upon and that it would therefore be wrong not to take it seriously. Especially since it is regularly mentioned at the same time as two other things, to which it is therefore related, and which are also somewhat surprising. Three movements, or rather three modes, according to Bergson, characterise, in effect, the mode of enunciation of philosophy. The first, then, is this very particular movement that Bergson sometimes calls ‘the comings and goings’, sometimes ‘the departures and returns’ of thought, sometimes, even more vividly, the ‘zigzags of the doctrine’ of the philosopher. What might be said? Something that is actually quite simple to state, even if the first wording that comes to mind may be somewhat shocking. Let’s say that if philosophers are ones who come and go, it is because they do not know what they are saying. Or rather, they don’t know what they mean. And that ignoring this, they multiply the formulations, the discourse, the books, the themes that they address in the hope, perhaps unconsciously, of approaching it a little closer each time. Because the point of intuition around which it revolves is really beyond their reach: In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his life. He could not formulate what he had in mind without feeling himself obliged to correct his formula, then to correct his correction: thus, from theory to theory, correcting when he thought he was completing, what he has accomplished, by a complication which provoked more complication, by developments heaped upon developments, has been to convey with an increasing approximation the simplicity of his original intuition. (CM, 128, my emphasis)

What is proper to the philosophical utterance therefore, according to Bergson, is an infinite series of corrections. A text like this one above is undoubtedly only a single, approximate, formulation of an otherwise unspeakable intuition. Or rather only sayable in other words, but in an unrecognisable way, because the words used would probably be different, even very different. 32

In other words . . . Such a conception of the philosophical utterance will obviously have consequences for the way in which one reads philosophers – this is indeed Bergson’s point when he pronounces these few sentences. But it also describes the process of developing a thought, if not a doctrine. In other words, it is not only the discourse that comes and goes, but the thought which, seeking itself, naturally follows the movement of ebb and flow. The temptation of the philosopher in action, of the philosopher at work, is very often that of the straight line. Logic, to which the human mind is so closely attached, and even bound, has its compelling demands, which are evidently contravened by their only being precious ‘waves of thought’. These demands explain why philosophers sometimes believe they must sacrifice to ‘the rules of a rectilinear logic’ (CM, 130). But this illusion is short-lived: then suddenly, in the face of his own affirmation he has the same feeling of impossibility that he had in the first place in considering the affirmations of others. Having in fact left the curve of his thought, to follow straight along a tangent, he has become exterior to himself. He returns to himself when he gets back to intuition. Of these departures toward an affirmation and these returns to the primary intuition are constituted the zigzaggings of a doctrine which ‘develops’, that is to say which loses itself, finds itself again, and endlessly corrects itself. (CM, 130)

This movement of perpetual correction, proper to some natural phenomena, such as that of the tides, or the progression of certain diseases, has its equivalent in language, which reproduces it according to a figure, which is often called a correction. Pierre Fontanier sometimes calls it a retroaction (the term would not have displeased Bergson), sometimes an epanorthosis, ‘a figure of speech which consists in going back over what one said so as to soften it or even to retract it completely, depending on whether one pretends to find it or whether one indeed finds it too weak or too strong, making too little sense or being too unsuitable’ (Fontanier 1977: 408–9). Bergson, as we have seen, does not describe the successive and somewhat blind repentances of the philosopher at work in any other way. He too has a vivid and crucial relationship with rhetoric, if one understands this as the set of procedures of language which maintain a complex and uncomfortable relationship of imitation with the movements of the mind.

Giving voice The second characteristic mode of a philosophy of intuition according to Bergson also bears the name of a rhetorical figure. If Bergson does not pronounce it (any more than he pronounces that of epanorthosis or that of 33

In other words . . . retroaction) he gives, while offering an example, a quite classical – I was going to say, orthodox – description of it. In any case it is unmistakable. He does this at or near the same time as he describes – and implements – the movement of epanorthosis. This passage can also be found in ‘Philosophical Intuition’, one of the essays in The Creative Mind: It seems to me that intuition often behaves in speculative matters like the demon of Socrates in practical life; it is at least in this form that it begins, in this form also that it continues to give the most clear-cut manifestations: it forbids. Faced with currently-accepted ideas, theses which seemed evident, affirmations which had up to that time passed as scientific, it whispers into the philosopher’s ear the word: Impossible! Impossible, even though the facts and the reasons appeared to invite you to think it possible and real and certain. Impossible, because a certain experience, confused perhaps but decisive, speaks to you through my voice, because it is incompatible with the facts cited and the reasons given, and because hence these facts must have been badly observed, these reasonings false. (CM, 129)

The process which consists in giving voice to that which does not have voice, in making the dead speak (Fabricius, Socrates), abstract things speak (conscience, remorse), inanimate objects speak (a boat is speaking in ‘The Drunken Boat’ by Rimbaud; a pipe is speaking in ‘The Pipe’, in Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire), is known in rhetoric as prosopopoeia. Philosophical intuition, which is the subject of Bergson’s lecture included in this collection, takes hold at this point in his intervention. It comes alive, speaking to the philosopher, it is talking, calling him ‘you’. This is characteristic of prosopopoeia, which is a voice that is addressed to someone or something, therefore assuming the presence of two authorities in the discourse: the imaginary and lively voice itself, and the consciousness that hears it, sometimes answering it. The philosopher is here imagined by Bergson at the moment they embark on their work. But he immediately specifies that if the voice is heard when intuition, that is to say the work, takes shape (‘it is at least in this form that it begins’), it does not cease to make itself heard at every decisive moment (‘in this form also that it continues to give the most clear-cut manifestations’). This prosopopoeia of intuition is remarkable. First, because it places the text that gives it a voice under the, so to speak, tutelary protection of Socrates, the wisest among the wise, and an almost obligatory reference for any traditional philosophical enterprise; but above all because it lends its tone not only to the entire lecture which bears the name of the authority that Bergson endows with this persuasive voice, but to all of Bergson’s work, and no doubt, if one were to believe him at least, to every philosophical enterprise. If we stick to these two figures of epanorthosis and prosopopoeia, and if we credit them with a minimum of verisimilitude, we should consider the 34

In other words . . . writing of a work of philosophy in a similar manner to how we imagine the composition of literary works. But there is undoubtedly a little more to this. Or rather we must consider the ultimate epistemological consequences, and what it means for a philosophical text (its writing, its reading, its reception, its innumerable interpretations) and the hypothesis, which was evidently that of the jury of the Nobel Prize of 1927, that its nature is literary. No philosopher would seriously claim that philosophical writing does, could or should do without figurative language – that it would ideally operate without figures. And indeed, metaphors, metonyms, antitheses, symbols are commonplace – even if problematic – in all major philosophical works. But Bergson’s thesis goes further. The two figures – to speak only of them for the time being – whose support he claims are not, for him, ornaments that the philosopher would have the leisure or latitude to integrate or not into his text to make it more understandable, more pleasant, more easily understood; the philosophical text is not figurative only because a language without figures is properly unthinkable, or because, using language, it falls within the scope of the law masterfully formulated by Beckett according to which ‘all language is an excess of language’ (Beckett 1955: 159). On the contrary, these two figures combine to define the essential condition of its situation. In other words, a philosophical text which did not proceed through comings and goings, through infinite corrections, would be without importance; a text which does not proceed from prosopopoeia – that is to say according to prosopopoeia – cannot be called authentically philosophical. Philosophy cannot do without either of these two figures without running the risk of an irremediable vanity. In other words, and this time using words which are not Bergson’s, if the language of the philosopher is figurative, it is because the thought with which he is trying to achieve a certain adequacy is itself figurative. It is thought which, before language, proceeds in zigzags; it is thought which, in order to be formulated, must be attentive to a ‘voice’ whose injunctions determine its process. And these movements, which are, so to speak, natural, also inform the language that the philosopher creates.

To fabulate At the risk of disturbing somewhat the beautiful ordering of the Bologna conference, which was the occasion of the formulation of this original conception of philosophical enunciation, I would now like to evoke a third and final mode of the discourse of the philosopher, according to Bergson. For this, I will use a notion coined by him several years after this conference, which he expounded in his last work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). 35

In other words . . . I confess that I am about to make a slight misappropriation. Firstly, by relating two texts that are more than twenty years apart (1911–32) and which have neither the same object nor the same purpose; but above all by putting forward the hypothesis that a tool forged by Bergson for one determined purpose might well be valid for another. In ‘Static Religion’, the second chapter of The Two Sources, Bergson gives a particular designation to an activity of the mind which he says is natural, most particularly with regard to what is commonly called the imagination, which he resolutely names ‘fiction’ or ‘fabulation’. He questions the purpose, that is, the social function – one could almost say, reading it closely, the anthropological function – of fabulation. He therefore speaks at length, from this chapter on, of the ‘fabulising function’ [fonction fabulatrice].3 His discussion, at this moment in his argument, concerns psychology – a psychology he summons to shed some light on superstitious beliefs and practices. He at first deplores that psychology does not care enough to base its distinctions on movements or natural phenomena: ‘But does not the difficulty lie precisely in the fact that our psychology is not sufficiently concerned with the subdivision of its subject in accordance with the lines laid down by nature?’ However, Bergson speaks of storytelling as a ‘natural cut’ (TS, 89). This precaution is for me invaluable: storytelling or fabulation, to which it is now necessary to turn, even if the thing is not really common when one approaches the work of a philosopher, shares at the very least one condition with epanorthosis and prosopopoeia: it is natural. This does not discourage me from pursuing the parallel and relating, so to speak, epistemologically, the principle of fabulation to the figurative writing of thought. What is in question then when Bergson speaks of the fabulising function? Basically, something quite simple. When he asks to what use storytelling ‘is naturally put’, he begins by noting that ‘To this faculty are due the novel, the drama, mythology together with all that preceded it’ (TS, 89). He adds – and this is obviously decisive: But then, there have not always been novelists and dramatists, whereas humanity has never subsisted without religion.Very likely, therefore, poetry and fantasy of all kinds appeared as extras, benefiting from the fact that the mind knew how to make myths, but religion is what accounts for the fabulising function: faculty standing to religion in the relationship of effect and not of cause. (TS, 89, translation modified)

3. [I have modified the original English translation from ‘myth-making function’ to ‘fabulising function’ throughout, since the word ‘myth’ conveys limited connotations that do not fully account for all the possible varieties of storytelling. Trans.]

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In other words . . . The fabulising function is therefore closely, even essentially linked to religion, which is one of the two objects of Bergson’s last book. But it is necessary to insist on the order and the implications which this reconstitution presupposes: if art proceeds from the fabulising function, Bergson clearly specifies that this function itself proceeds from religion (which is, he says, the ‘raison d’être’ of this function). This consubstantial link that the fabulising function maintains with religion is of the utmost importance in defining the status of philosophy, because philosophy and religion are obviously partly – one would even be tempted to say, naturally – linked. To separate them would be to do violence to something Bergson considers essential – what he calls ‘a natural cutting-up of continuous reality’ (TS, 173). In the invaluable and decisive anthropological reconstruction that he proposes in this second chapter, it is sometimes the religious that is born from the philosophical (‘Spirits once having been admitted, humanity passed, so it is said, from belief to adoration: hence a natural philosophy, animism, from which religion sprang’ (TS, 148)). Sometimes it is the philosophical which is born from the religious: In those cases where religion really became philosophy among the ancients, it rather discouraged action, and renounced what it had come into the world to accomplish. Was it still religion? We may attribute what meaning we like to words, so long as we define their meaning first; but it would be a mistake to do so when we happen to be dealing with a word which corresponds to a natural cutting-up of continuous reality. (TS, 173)

What is certain is that, in one way or another, the fabulising function seems to govern the production of art as well as that of modern philosophy, both being the result of religion. That philosophy may have a problem with this natural function of inventing infinitely diverse fictions, stories, myths, gods and heroes undoubtedly turns the idea that we usually have on its head. Yet this is what emerges from the second chapter of The Two Sources, and it sheds important light on Bergson’s paper delivered at the Bologna conference, ‘Philosophical Intuition’, to which it is time to return. To the two ‘natural’ figures whose mechanism Bergson describes in order to clarify for his colleagues the figurative principles which govern the philosophical utterance, it is therefore appropriate, in my opinion, to add a third. If epanorthosis (the figure of ebbing and flowing) and prosopopoeia (the figure of the voice) are paths that the philosopher must necessarily follow, it must be admitted that storytelling, which corresponds to ‘a natural cutting-up of continuous reality’, is another one. All this indicates that this fabling principle should be accorded the status of a figure. This is what Pierre Fontanier, cited above, does without hesitation in relation to epanorthosis. ‘Fabulation’, he says, ‘consists in somehow giving 37

In other words . . . seriousness and reality to what is in fact only an imaginary invention, the fabulous in a word, a kind of fable’ (Fontanier 1977: 408). Bergson, I think, would not have objected if it had been demonstrated to him that the use of the word ‘fabulation’, defined here through its relation to ‘imaginary invention’, risked dragging the theory of philosophical discourse along hazardous paths. The pages of The Two Sources where the fabulising function is described in principle go precisely in this direction, and they alone would justify Fontanier’s remark, however outlandish it might seem. A Fontanier whose audacity – an audacity for which he is rarely given credit – goes so far as to make him add that ‘Fabulation does not belong so thoroughly to poetry that prose does not sometimes make use of it. We can find examples of this even in moral or philosophical works’ (Fontanier 1977: 408, my emphasis). What Bergson’s discreetly disturbing propositions allow us to glimpse is not so shocking, then, that a mind which lived, thought, wrote almost a century before him was unable to conceive it. But it must be conceded that because this way of understanding discourse, and the figures that organise or structure it, does not come from a philosopher it is somewhat less disturbing. Yet the fact that, in the era of Russell and Wittgenstein, a philosopher could claim for philosophical discourse the status of a work of the imagination is genuinely surprising, and one immediately sees the immense questions – concerning truth, the univocity of discourse, and, quite simply, the specificity of the philosophical – to which this claim can lead. This position is neither unthinkable nor unjustifiable; but it is necessary, in order to perceive its logic, to return to two principles that are sometimes considered to be intrinsic to philosophical discourse: that of the absence of figures, which a certain philosophical tradition considers to be only ornaments that are unnecessary to a discourse of truth and that it associates, more or less explicitly, with sophistry; and that of abstention from the imagination, since this ‘madwoman in the attic’ is difficult to reconcile with the principle of logic, truth, science, which is often taken as a model for theoretical, for example epistemological, discourse.

Thinking through the imagination A final word on Pierre Fontanier, whom one may be surprised (so much the worse!) to see cited as a precursor of Bergson. The three figures to which Bergson’s philosophy claims to be particularly indebted, namely prosopopoeia, epanorthosis and fabulation, constitute, for Fontanier who set out to think the nature of ‘figures of speech’, a group apart. He first places them in the broad category of ‘non-tropes’ or ‘figures of thought’ (which as a distant 38

In other words . . . disciple of Aristotle he contrasts with ‘tropes’ or ‘figures of words’). And in this large category of figures of thought, he invents a more reduced one – restricted in fact to these three figures – of ‘figures of thinking through the imagination’. The first merit of this denomination is that it does not consider the field of rhetoric, understood in the broad sense, and that of thought, even speculation or morality, as being necessarily heterogeneous. There are therefore, according to Fontanier, figures whose virtue is to allow an adequate formulation of realities other than the material or poetic. But this merit is not the only one; and what is essential is probably not found here. The category of ‘figures of thinking through the imagination’ authorises not only conceiving philosophical discourse and the laws of its enunciation differently, but conceiving thought itself differently: a thought which would proceed naturally by figures, that is to say which would progress according to figures whose principle would be natural, and therefore would not contravene the very nature of the mind. Finally, a thought which would welcome the principle of the imagination, to which philosophical tradition has often struggled to offer a status when it encountered it on its way, and which, far from threatening it, would on the contrary guarantee its authenticity. It is because it is natural that the Bergsonian fabulising function acquires its claims to nobility; it is because it is based on it that the philosophical enterprise ultimately conforms to the different propositions it professes. As paradoxical as it may seem, it is because it proceeds – without doubt – from this fabling principle that philosophy is justified. Precisely because this principle is natural. Philosophy undoubtedly emanates, in fact, from this principle of the fabulising function. Bergson himself does not make this connection explicit. But we will see that many other textual or theoretical clues invite us to go in this direction. ‘In those cases where religion really became philosophy among the ancients . . .’ If it is true that modern philosophy is born from ancient philosophy, that it proceeds from it, then it must be admitted that the ancient philosophers, of whom Bergson is the heir, have in fact, like artists, based their approach on religion; and that from here, the fabulising function, which is a consequence and not the cause of religion, was able to display the multiple and complex splendours of its infinitely varied inventions. What this anthropological hypothesis in Bergson’s last book allows the intelligence to glimpse is something that must be really shocking for it, if it is true that to take it seriously would be to admit that fiction plays a role in the elaboration of a system of thought, even a simple theoretical proposition, and that this role is neither anecdotal nor marginal; that the fiction brought into play by the imagination is perhaps even the necessary condition for developing a theoretical discourse, whether it be moral, aesthetic or philosophical. 39

In other words . . . If we compare it to epanorthosis or prosopopoeia, fabulation certainly poses particular problems: these are roughly those which are linked to the story, or, to speak like Ricoeur, to creating intrigue – it is not possible to speak of Bergson’s work without referring to it; I will have the opportunity to come back to it in the third chapter. What is remarkable about this conjunction of the three ‘figures of thinking through the imagination’, all of which are claimed in one way or another by Bergson, is that such a conjunction invites a radically different conception of philosophy.This is because it would be difficult to demonstrate that the use of these figures, which do not affect a word or an expression but rather a thought in action, is not purely ornamental, and that a statement in which we would unmask them could be ‘translated’ into another which would abstain from their use. The very definition of the philosophical act is affected by the mere assumption of the existence of ‘figures of thought’. How could one begin to imagine that an entire book, which formulates a strong idea, might be informed, from its base to its pinnacle, by figures of this kind, or even by their scholarly and harmonious conjunction? Because the nature of the figures of thinking through the imagination – if their existence were proven – would be precisely to go beyond the dimension of one or even a few words. ‘You will see’, says Fontanier (but Bergson hardly thinks otherwise, he says nothing different to his colleagues in Bologna), ‘. . . you will see that the figures of thought are not strictly circumscribed within the limits of a sentence or a phrase, and that sometimes it is even necessary that they extend more or less beyond’ (Fontanier 1977: 454). And in fact it would hardly be difficult to find, outside of Bergson’s texts, works that conform, as long as they are understood as a whole, with the principles he sets out in ‘Philosophical Intuition’. Is Clio by Charles Péguy, for example, anything other than a vast prosopopoeia where, from beginning to end, History enters into dialogue ‘with the pagan soul’? Is not Plato’s oeuvre itself a vast prosopopoeia of Socrates, who had already died several years before his disciple began writing it? In the ignorance and abstraction of the mythical stories that it invents, comments on and interprets at leisure, would this oeuvre be thinkable in other terms? And let us think for a moment of this or that work by Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days), whose poetic principle is to come back to what we have just seen or heard in order to continue a moment, to go further, indefinitely – how can one deny that epanorthosis gives them life and plausibility? Fontanier, always surprising, goes still further, and the horizons, of which he is only able to offer us an idea, provoke vertigo. What he suggests allows one to glimpse the possibility of a figurality that is imperceptible and yet real and effective; a figurality which would determine not the form of the discourse but this discourse itself in its intellectual 40

In other words . . . organisation; and if such a thing were thinkable, of a figurality that is in real terms indifferent to form! You will also see how little they relate to this or that form of discourse, and how much the discourse could vary or change in this respect, without their feeling the mildest assault; you will see, I say, that their existence is entirely intellectual, and that if it is through discourse that they manifest themselves, it is of little importance for this manifestation, as to whether the discourse is materially or physically of such or such a kind. (Fontanier 1977: 454 [my translation])

It is obviously not a question of claiming that thought is figurative without being able to prove it, or even illustrate it, by putting our finger on a certain word or group of words. Discourse, says Fontanier, clearly manifests the figure which orders it; but the form, the contours of this manifestation are, so to speak, indifferent. Discourse, in other words, is only discourse, and without saying that it is only a sort of mediating image in relation to thought, Fontanier does say that it matters less than the wholly intellectual (Bergson would say, spiritual) principle which it obeys. One sees that the examples that can be summoned to give a plausible idea of these paradoxes belong to different types of discourse: if Péguy is a philosopher, and a great thinker of history, it is not as a philosopher that he is usually known let alone studied; and if Plato is – if he was, at least if one is to believe Diogenes Laertius – a poet, it is, despite everything, as a philosopher that he is generally read and commented upon; as for Beckett, if he interests philosophers, he does not cease to be a playwright, novelist, filmmaker, translator, even on occasion an art theorist, and none of the philosophers would claim that he is one of their kind. What Fontanier causes to gently tremble, by formulating his theory of figures that affect thought without precisely informing it, is this border, which he does not seem to take as essential, between the speculative text and narrative or poetic text. Figures are certainly said by him to be of thought. But since they are such by virtue of the imagination, it is clear that the osmosis between these supposedly sealed fields is not only probable but certain. One can suddenly claim that the poet or the playwright creates works of thought; above all, one can consider that the philosopher, who thinks according to the same principles, that is to say according to the same figures as the poet and playwright, formulates, like them, a work of the imagination. And this time it is not Fontanier who says it, but Bergson for whom the fabulising function, the principle of the religious and the mythological, and the probable origin of philosophical speculation, is a natural given of the human.

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In other words . . . The Words of Philosophy, the Words of Life Language and reason For such an enterprise, it is therefore a question of inventing an unprecedented form of expression – unprecedented in any case in philosophy – which, in order to profitably move away from the standard modes of designation, definition, description, naming, in order to give itself the means of credibly expressing a nonlinear or rectilinear movement, will grasp in a heartfelt way the principle of a natural figuration. Let it be understood: if Bergson intends to make room for fabulation, images, music with its rhythms and harmonics, it is not because he dreams of making philosophy an art, it is because he rejects on philosophy’s behalf the language of reason and science. Language in effect bears the mark of reason, this function of which it is the instrument, and which knows only the precision of limits, only the clearness of outlines (which it is adept at identifying, defining, delimiting, circumscribing), which intends to proceed by proofs, deductions and logical sequences – but which ignores everything to do with overlapping, with equivocity, and is never adroit when it comes to apprehending ‘phenomena which do not occupy space’. A language whose principle is precisely that which it is concerned with mercilessly challenging and fighting against: discontinuity. This is why it is not uncommon to find among the flow of Bergson’s pen developments which very simply aim to demonstrate the inadequacy of standard rational language to the philosophical enterprise. These passages never constitute gratuitous attacks on a particular philosophy, or a particular trend, or such and such a conception of philosophical language. There are in reality many occasions where one might take stock of major philosophical problems, where the epistemological is in dispute with the methodological and the philosophical enunciation with the poetic. I will give two examples, which are sufficiently different to justify not limiting myself to only one. The first example is a passage from the second chapter of Creative Evolution (‘The Divergent Directions in the Evolution of Life – Torpor, Intelligence, Instinct’) where a close reflection on the distinction between prerogatives, functions, limits and the constraints of instinct and intelligence is the occasion for a brief but decisive theory of language. The presence of such an argument at this point in the book is justified by the necessity to which Bergson finds himself bound, to progress with his reflection, to explain the part of instinct and of intelligence in the activity of knowledge and transmission of this knowledge. In this valuable text, Bergson comes to the judgement, so to speak without appeal, that if language is a tool that is perfectly suited to an instinctive life or to the work of scientific intelligence, it on the other hand 42

In other words . . . moves outside its natural functioning when it comes to saying something about ‘creative evolution’ – these are the last words of the excerpt: That is why the intellect always behaves as if it were fascinated by the contemplation of inert matter. It is life looking outward, putting itself outside itself, adopting the ways of unorganized nature in principle, in order to direct them in fact. Hence its bewilderment when it turns to the living and is confronted with organization. It does what it can, it resolves the organized into the unorganized, for it cannot, without reversing its natural direction and twisting about on itself, think true continuity, real mobility, reciprocal penetration, in a word, that creative evolution which is life. (CE, 170)

The expression which serves as the title of the work appears in this precise form only twice in the book: in this passage from the second chapter, as well as in the following chapter at the heart of an argument which says that ‘life in its entirety’ would only be ‘expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event’ (CE, 236). This singularity is remarkable, and the proximity of the two passages rich in meaning. It would be difficult to dispute, if we read them closely, that the crucial question of the book is indeed that of its mode of expression – in any case that the problem posed by life in its mobility and perpetual renewal demands that philosophy bring into being a radical expressive revolution. And since it is the very subject of the book . . . In the first case it is intelligence, the only language philosophy knows how to speak, which is said to be unfit for the current philosophical enterprise; in the second, which considers things through a symmetrical bias, it is life itself that challenges the orders of geometry and finality, where language is a recourse and a tool that is so natural and appropriate. One thing is clear in any case, and its implications cannot be ignored: creative evolution itself requires the creation of a new language, and Bergson’s book jointly conducts these two operations of knowledge (how to think evolution) and of poetics (the creation of this tool of language). So what is this theory of language that in Bergson’s eyes discredits language for a genuinely philosophical enterprise? Language is first and foremost the means of communication between individuals living in society. ‘By language community of action is made possible’ says Bergson. But he hastens to distinguish between societies where ‘each individual is riveted by its structure to the function it performs’ – these are animal societies, which are entirely based on instinct – and those where ‘fabrication and action are of variable form’, ‘where each individual must learn his part, because he is not preordained to it by his structure’ (CE, 166).There are human societies which need, in order to function according to their needs and accomplish what they exist for, a language ‘whose signs – which cannot be infinite in number – are extensible to 43

In other words . . . an infinity of things’ (CE, 166), this is the language of intelligence and science. Bergson says that the sign of an instinctive language is an ‘adherent’ sign; while that of an intelligent language is a ‘mobile’ sign (CE, 167).

On metaphor Now, this mobility of words, that makes them able to pass from one thing to another, has enabled them to be extended from things to ideas. Certainly, language would not have given the faculty of reflecting to an intelligence entirely externalized and incapable of turning homeward. An intelligence which reflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over and above practically useful efforts. . . . Language has greatly contributed to its liberation. The word, made to pass from one thing to another, is, in fact, by nature transferable and free. It can therefore be extended, not only from one perceived thing to another, but even from a perceived thing to a recollection of that thing, from the precise recollection to a more fleeting image, and finally from an image fleeting, though still pictured, to the picturing of the act by which the image is pictured, that is to say, to the idea. Thus is revealed to the intelligence, hitherto always turned outwards, a whole internal world – the spectacle of its own workings. It required only this opportunity, at length offered by language. It profits by the fact that the word is an external thing, which the intelligence can catch hold of and cling to, and at the same time an immaterial thing, by means of which the intelligence can penetrate even to the inwardness of its own work. . . . From the moment that the intellect, reflecting upon its own doings, perceives itself as a creator of ideas, as a faculty of representation in general, there is no object of which it may not wish to have the idea, even though that object be without direct relation to practical action. (CE, 167–8)

Human language, that is to say that of intelligence, is described here in a striking but also ambiguous way. The page is clearly written to express the incapacity of language to apprehend certain objects, to carry out certain undertakings: it clearly expresses the excessive ambition of a faculty which believes it can embrace all things, forgetting that the natural condition of language is ‘to designate things and naught but things’ (CE, 168) So intelligence, even when it no longer operates upon its own object, follows habits it has contracted in that operation: it applies forms that are indeed those of unorganized matter. [. . .] And that is what intelligence expresses by saying that thus only it arrives at distinctness and clearness. (CE, 169)

The two italicised words (by Bergson) disqualify philosophy itself: ‘clear and distinct ideas’ are those of Descartes of course. If we relate this distinction 44

In other words . . . and this clarity to the tool (language) that causes them to appear, and if we give credence to the thesis of the spatiality of language (which discriminates, which distinguishes, which isolates and which in fact makes things clearer), the Cartesian enterprise will appear unfounded. And therefore its results will be without probative or convincing value. Such is the manifest, incontestable intention of this theory – a theory which, as we saw in the preceding quotation, is the fruit of intelligence itself, and the consequence of which can be nothing other than the renunciation of a type of language too closely linked to matter and the space it necessarily occupies.This renunciation itself implies the invention of a new language or the subversion of the old one. This passage does not exclude – one will perhaps have to read between the lines – such an accommodation. Or rather such an invention. Language as Bergson theorises it here carries within itself all the elements that would allow it to be somehow subverted, diverted for ends that both transcend and enhance it. First, it is rich in metaphorical power (metaphor is etymologically what allows the word, in one way or another, to be displaced or transported from one object to another that evokes it). It is not only ‘displaceable’ – such is its properly metaphorical function – but it is also ‘free’.This freedom, which is not really expected in a discussion of the fundamental materiality of language, allows that it might be used for metaphysical ends, that is to say, in proposing itself to be an object of ‘phenomena which do not occupy space’ (Time and Free Will nominated freedom as one of these objects). Yet language is not only capable of metaphor which, on balance, is better than abstract or conceptual language; it will be noted that it is also the instrument of self-reflection: thanks to it the intellect can in fact have access ‘to the inwardness of its own work’ (CE, 168). This is the very condition of the philosophical exercise. Language is therefore the performative instrument par excellence; one has seen, and will see again, that for Bergson it is, if not an explicit claim, at least a useful and necessary, in any case constant, practice. There are few pages of his work that do not theorise, along with the world, the practice of writing and the intellect which allows one to say something about it. A last word on this point must be said regarding the end of the passage. ‘There are things’, says Bergson, ‘that intellect alone can seek. Intellect alone, indeed, troubles itself about theory; and its theory would fain embrace everything – not only inanimate matter, over which it has a natural hold, but even life and thought’ (CE, 168). This, one would be tempted to say, marks the limits of the intellect. This astonishing sentence precisely defines the threshold beyond which the intellect cannot go: the understanding of life and thought. Everything else is accessible to it. The intellect is in its domain when it sets out to say something about ‘raw matter’. The tool of language 45

In other words . . . it uses is made for this kind of understanding, and thanks to it the intellect obtains results whose importance Bergson never seeks to minimise. But this operation is not done without a remainder. ‘Intellect alone, indeed, troubles itself about theory; and its theory would fain embrace everything.’

Language and continuity What might be done with this desire, if it is true that it is characteristic of an intellect that by hypothesis is deprived of the means of achieving it? What treatment should be reserved for this ‘anxiety’ which is absolutely unable to be shared? Before answering, let’s try to put it another way: the desire to ‘embrace everything’ comes, so to speak, from the idea of the intellect. This ‘everything’ that his language will never allow him to grasp can be expressed, or glossed like this (Bergson gives the impression, with these two words, of describing the climax of a crazy dream): ‘life and thought’. Now, what is the object that Creative Evolution sets out to achieve if it is not this impossible connection, this unthinkable solidarity of life with thought, of thought with life? In the first lines of his Introduction Bergson poses the problem of the book he is beginning: We shall see that the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools [. . .] [F]rom this it must also follow that our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself? (CE, ix–x, my emphasis).

If the book which develops an exposition of this difficulty proposes despite everything to think ‘the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement’, and if this book is entitled Creative Evolution, it is because thought has found ways to circumvent this major epistemological obstacle. The book can therefore be considered as involving, at the same time, an attempt to grasp a problematic object, and the invention of a language which, without compromising the intellect, in effect allows it, in understanding it, to reform itself – and to go beyond its own limits. The comparison of these two quotations (that from the Introduction, and that from Chapter II on the respective prerogatives of the intellect and instinct) shows in any case that the writing of the book – and the mere fact of its existence – testifies to the 46

In other words . . . effectiveness of a different faculty, which is capable not only of acting (creative evolution is the result of this action) but of creating a new and adequate use of language. Here, as often, we see that Bergson does not separate his enterprise of thought from the means he gives himself of carrying it out, nor this thought from its implementation. The second example of this interweaving of philosophical theory and practice can be found in the first pages of the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, where Bergson, far from concealing from himself that he is struggling when he tries to say something about self-awareness, on the contrary endeavours to implement a device that will thwart the traps of standard expression. This text first appeared in 1903 in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Bergson brought it back before the public thirty-five years later when he began to collect, under the title La pensée et le mouvant [The Creative Mind], texts that had become difficult to find. This return is moreover the occasion of a first development of his vocabulary on this subject: ‘One is free to give words the meaning one wishes, when one is careful to define that meaning.’ All knowledge, in this note on the text, is resolutely called ‘scientific’ which ‘arranges its object with measurement in view’, and ‘metaphysics’ is defined as an enterprise which ‘frees itself of any thought of relation and comparison in order to be in sympathy with reality’ (CM, 305, Note 20). The passage that I want to give as an example of this remarkable and typical work by Bergson concerns what the philosophical tradition, roughly since Descartes, calls the ego. We know that for philosophers or apprentice philosophers this is an obligatory philosophical problem. Now, here is how Bergson designates this object: There is at least one reality which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own person in its flowing through time, the self which endures.With no other thing can we sympathize intellectually, or if you like, spiritually. But one thing is sure: we sympathize with ourselves. (CM, 191)

‘It is our own person in its flowing through time’, ‘the self which endures’. One might think that with these paraphrases, exemplary indeed of Bergsonism in that one alone would be manifestly insufficient, everything would be said and that one would grasp, with the small sequence that they constitute, the adequate expression of the object such as it must appear to be in the philosophical space that, in 1903, Bergson still tries to legitimise through such examples.We would be wrong.This roundabout way of designating the object is only a first formulation. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that the essay as a whole is an attempt to both define the object more precisely and to put in place this very particular language – those ‘other words’ of which the Author’s Preface of Time and Free Will speaks – whose invention the project 47

In other words . . . of trying to name duration makes necessary. The ten pages which follow are indeed only a series not exactly of variations but of successive corrections – a vast epanorthosis, in short – each correction bringing to all the preceding an additional touch which is in itself insufficient but whose approximation precisely makes necessary the risk of a following correction. Alas, it is impossible to provide an analysis of these pages where the verbal ebb and flow often masks the demanding rigour of thought. I will cite only the second of these variations, trying to clarify how the correction it constitutes does not shy away from other syntactic, sonorous, rhythmic, etymological, rhetorical means. But I will not do so without first listing, naming them as precisely as possible, all the successive waves of this infinite correction. Nor without saying to what end the global movement of these pages tends. After these two paraphrases, the second of which corrects the first but without at all invalidating it, Bergson proceeds to a first approximation. An approximation that is all the less adequate because in order to make itself understood it resolutely adopts the spatial scheme which it nevertheless calls into question: the consciousness which examines itself first perceives, ‘like some superficial encrustment, [. . .] all the perceptions which come to it from the material world’ (CM, 191); memories interpret these perceptions, memories ‘detached from the depth of my person and drawn to the periphery by perceptions resembling them’ (CM, 192); consciousness ‘becomes aware’ of ‘a crowd of virtual actions more or less solidly bound to those perceptions and these memories’; these elements are ‘Turned outwards from within, together they constitute the surface of a sphere which tends to expand and lose itself in the external world’ (CM, 192) (I underline the spatial images which in principle invalidate these formulations).

Infinite correction This first correction – it must in fact be considered as such, since a first and double formulation has indeed been stated a few lines above – is immediately followed by a second, whose stylistic detail I will return to, which introduces, through the metaphor of the flow, something of duration: ‘What I find beneath these clear-cut crystals and this superficial congelation is a continuity of flow comparable to no other flowing I have ever seen’ (CM, 192). This metaphor, whose benefits are discreetly gathered along the road it travels, is nevertheless very quickly judged inadequate in its turn (‘To tell the truth, it is neither a winding nor an unwinding, for these two images evoke the representation of lines or surfaces whose parts are homogeneous to and superposable on one another’ (CM, 193)). 48

In other words . . . It is therefore followed by that of ‘a spectrum of a thousand shades, with imperceptible gradations’, the second last word being certainly more important than that of ‘gradation’ (CM, 193). But these nuances being doomed to remain ‘always [. . .] external to each other’, the need for a new correction is imposed. Bergson then invites us to imagine – this is the word he uses, and we will have to come back to it, for it is used resolutely, it is rigorously premeditated and its implications are important – ‘an infinitely small piece of elastic, contracted, if that were possible, to a mathematical point. Let us draw it out gradually in such a way as to bring out of the point a line which will grow progressively longer. [. . .] This time we shall have a more exact image of our development in duration’ (CM, 193–4). Duration, installed in this way in the landscape of consciousness, is nevertheless that which will discredit not only this last correction but its very principle. At this stage of the argument, Bergson pauses his series of corrections for a moment to take stock of what all those he has been led to make have in common. This is, if you like, a correction of another order: And yet that image will still be incomplete, and all comparison furthermore will be inadequate, because the unrolling of our duration in certain aspects resembles the unity of a movement which progresses, in others, a multiplicity of states spreading out, and because no metaphor can express one of the two aspects without sacrificing the other. (CM, 194)

All the first wave of corrections had in common that they were images (a crust, a flow, even an unwinding, a spectrum of a thousand colours, an infinitely small piece of elastic). Each of these images had merit, they were less and less unfaithful to the meaning they were supposed to convey, and their succession manifested a gradual liberation from the spatial condition of language. But still they were, and remained until the last, images, which, for Bergson, signifies their essential inability to say several things at the same time. Each new image says something that the previous one did not say, it adds a trait, a nuance, it reorients; but in doing so, it erases, it tends to make people forget the novelty that each of its predecessors carried with them. Like all erasures, it makes that whose place it is taking disappear (‘no metaphor can express one of the two aspects without sacrificing the other’). So let’s call the metaphorical principle – however multiplied or profuse the manifestations – a first attempt at expression. And just as each image, however just it might be, however close to the real, nevertheless cried out for correction, so to speak, at a higher syntactic level, so too the metaphorical principle calls for its own correction. In this way the remarkable lesson in expression Bergson offers to philosophers continues. 49

In other words . . . Now, if images are disqualified, what about the concepts? Would they not be the solution? ‘The inner life’, says Bergson at the end of this first movement, is ‘all that at once, variety of qualities, continuity of progress, unity of direction. It cannot be represented by images’ (CM, 194). But the following sentence unambiguously points out how vain any correction of the metaphorical principle by the conceptual would be: ‘But still less could it be represented by concepts’ (CM, 195). As always, it is remarkable that the vanity of this correction is stated, that it is argued, and that this argumentation is the occasion for the implementation of other principles, those of an expression of philosophy ‘in other words’. The first complaint formulated against concepts is that ‘they are really symbols which take the place of the object they symbolize and which do not demand any effort on our part’ (CM, 195–6). The second is they are at their core disguised metaphors: ‘Each of them is seen to express, even more than does the image, a comparison between the object and those objects resembling it’ (CM, 196). The concept is still irreparably wrong in that it works from abstract and arbitrary generalisations: ‘The concept can symbolize a particular property only by making it common to an infinity of things. Therefore, it always more or less distorts this property by the extension it gives to it’ (CM, 196–7). But the most serious of its faults is undoubtedly that its principle is division, a division whose corollary is juxtaposition – that is to say, the very negation of the continuous, and therefore also of duration: ‘by juxtaposing concepts to concepts we shall recompose the whole of the object with its parts’ and ‘obtain from it, so to speak, an intellectual equivalent’ (CM, 196). Rather than enumerate, in a series of comparable corrections that vary the images, all the concepts that one might call on as reinforcements so as to say something about the ‘self which endures’ (CM, 191), at the origin of his poetic reflection on adequate philosophical expression (Bergson quickly names ‘concepts of unity, multiplicity, continuity, finite or infinite divisibility, etc.’ (CM, 196)), he chooses to consider successively multiplicity and unity as being capable of characterising ‘our own person in its flowing through time’ (CM, 191). It’s as if one of these two concepts can correct the other. They are of course deployed back to back (‘Neither separated nor re-united have they made us penetrate duration itself ’ (CM, 199)).

Intuition, image, concept So what is the ultimate theoretical aim of this long meticulous, prudent, daring and rigorous treatment? It is not surprising. Yet it is remarkable that Bergson insists on formulating it in the terms – almost – of the most clearly demonstrated 50

In other words . . . philosophical tradition. Drawing a provisional lesson from the impossibility of a simple and definitively adequate formulation of its purpose, he writes: It is enough for us to have shown that our duration can be presented to us directly in an intuition, that it can be suggested indirectly to us by images, but that it cannot – if we give to the word concept its proper meaning – be enclosed in a conceptual representation. (CM, 198)

Images would therefore be able to ‘suggest’, no doubt better than other devices of language, what duration is – but it has been noted that this suggestion would necessarily be ‘indirect’. The only direct ‘presentation’ – Bergson often calls it ‘immediate’ – that we can have of it is that of intuition, the name he gives to the faculty of knowing ‘phenomena which occupy no space’. One thing is certain in any case: the philosopher must undertake his final mourning, not only for the concept, not only for conceptual expression, but for ‘representation’ itself – or, if you prefer, for mimesis. Against the ‘representation’ of consciousness, which is impossible since the only medium it has is language, Bergson therefore plays the card of its direct ‘presentation’ by intuition. But the question remains as to what links this spatial tool of language might have with thought – which is not always spatial. It is in this tiny interval, the one that separates thought, in the rare moments when thought is free from all spatiality, and language, which is never free of it, that Bergson’s philosophical work is written. But in the end, how? How could an ‘expression’ of this thought freed from the spatial condition of language escape the very condition of language to which it must have recourse? What could this be other than a regrettable and unstable compromise? Multiple corrections – which I attempted to give an idea of in the previous summary – is a first answer. Every formulation, whether metaphorical or conceptual, says something about the truth; the descriptive accumulation of such formulations is likely to say a little more, even if the exercise can sometimes appear to be without real relevance; even if the solicitation it demands of our intelligence, of our intellect, is so disturbing that it can discourage readers of goodwill. Bergson, who knows the obligation of the philosopher to the place of language and that the philosopher is dedicated to written expression, does not in fact reject either images or concepts. It is necessary to insist on these plural forms – they are vital. It is not foolish to believe that a thousand scattered images might do what a singular image cannot do: No image will replace the intuition of duration, but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the

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In other words . . . convergence of their action, to direct the consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, since it would then be driven out immediately by its rivals. (CM, 195)

In these few lines there is not only a handbook for the use of language by the philosopher of goodwill, there is also a brief but demanding reading manual.The pages of this ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ are written according to this principle of diverse and disparate images. And even if, as we will see, this is not enough to give an exhaustive account of them, we must recognise that it greatly helps us to read them. It is easy to see why one can speak about Bergson, as I did above, as possessing a discreet radicalism. The image is not challenged in soft, hazy, shy, vague terms; it is really, and essentially one might say, disqualified. And it is radically disqualified. This does not mean, however, that images will not play a determining role in his work – both in his theoretical apparatus and in his modes of exposition.This is because the image, whose use is almost natural in expression, is also an essential human psychic phenomenon. One might say more or less the same thing about the concept. The formulas that disqualify it are numerous, and often even more categorical than those I give above. Yet Bergson never forgets that he is a philosopher and that as such his condition is verbal. If standard language does not suit philosophy, if the images are inadequate not only to his project but to philosophical expression in general, if the concepts (often simple words, more or less accepted expressions, functioning with reference to their use in a tradition that is itself well attested) are therefore in their very principle contested, this evidently does not mean that Bergson will give priority to orality nor that he renounces the elaboration of a language that suits the object he intends to promote and towards which he is working to give a philosophical status, namely intuition. If we dared, we would compare this experience and dilemma to those of Pascal – at least to the Pascal whose papers have remained scattered, disparate, sometimes contradictory. What is Pascal’s problem when he ventures outside the fields where he excels, the polemic or the treatise? It is to implement a language which convinces not only in terms of things of the mind, intelligence and logic, in short, a language which would be classed under the order of reason, but also in terms of things of the heart. Pascal is a scholar, he is a rationalist, he knows the tricks of the language of demonstration, proof, logical and irrefutable deduction; he enjoys jousting and debate, he does not disdain the verbal duel where one intelligence enters into competition or rivalry with 52

In other words . . . another – he is used to the exercise of the finest, the most eloquent and the most effective rhetoric. Yet he candidly admits (in ‘The Art of Persuasion’) that he does not feel capable of writing according to the rules which would govern the language of the heart – what he calls ‘the manner of pleasing’: ‘But the manner of pleasing is incomparably more difficult, more subtle, more useful, and more admirable [than that of convincing, according to the method Pascal calls geometrical]; therefore, if I do not treat of it, it is because I am not capable of it; and I feel myself so far disproportionate to the task, that I believe the thing absolutely impossible’ (Pascal 1910: 403).Yet his personal conviction that he is disproportionate to the task, and the obviousness, in his view, of the impossibility of formulating the rules of the art of pleasing, in no way prevents him from seeking them out and implementing them empirically. This hypothesis could serve as a common thread for a reading, which would be as plausible as many others, of the intense and ardent atelier that has come down to us under the title – obviously inadequate, since it is not Pascal’s – Pensées. Far be it from me to assimilate Bergsonian intuition into the order of the Pascalian heart. But if we are willing to credit both thinkers with an epistemological concern, we will recognise that it was important for them to argue that there exist (alongside measurable objects, whose existence is demonstrable, whose contours are understandable through the intelligence and apprehensible by the language of science) objects of another ‘order’ (this is Pascal’s word), and that therefore pertain to another way of speaking (or of speaking ‘in other words’), to make known, to demonstrate. For both of them in any case the challenge is to assemble the pieces of a new language, a language which remains language – that is to say shareable, accessible, intelligible – but which, taking its starting point from the indirect, from suggestion, from a certain approximation, allows the mind to open up not to what goes beyond it (a formula that would apply to Pascal alone) but to what is foreign to it (intuition is not an object, still less a faculty that the geometer would recognise). This is why Bergson does not intend to deprive himself of images – people differ from animals in that they share their images with other people – but to use them as he pleases, for example by making them proliferate; and if he claims to ‘free himself ’ from concepts, it is to the extent that they are ‘inflexible and ready-made’ (CM, 198) (like those which it is precisely the task of metaphysics to overcome). Just as ‘many different images’ (CM, 195) cannot be equivalent to the sum of images, each of which is in principle inadequate, so too the tools forged by the philosopher for the metaphysical enterprise will differ ‘from those we usually handle’ (CM, 198); rather – this is the properly Bergsonian alternative to the concept – ‘flexible, mobile, almost fluid representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms of 53

In other words . . . intuition’ (CM, 198) [représentations souples, mobiles, presque fluides, toujours prêtes à se mouler sur les formes fuyantes de l’intuition (PM, 188)].4

Bergson’s Languages Language and music And let us be careful not to consider the sonorous work carried out through these various vocables to be negligible. It is essential, if it is true that they define the very mode of expression advocated for philosophising; it is not only the sign of the path to follow, but this very path itself. ‘Supple’, ‘mobile’, ‘fluid’ [Souples, mobiles, fluides] – every consonant here is made liquid by the accompanying l, and the matter they designate made alive, current, essential and ephemeral; but this insistent instability cannot deny – quite the contrary – the precious permanence, although ceaselessly escaping, of intuition: this is what the ear hears in the succession of fs (fluid fleeting forms). Impossible even to hear ‘mould’ [mouler] as if the word did not synthesise ‘supple’ [souples] (both carry the u [ou]), ‘mobile’ [mobiles] (both carry the m), ‘fluids’ [fluids] (all carry the l, the ui also, which anticipates that of intuition).This is how the sentence must render itself adequate to its object (Bergson states it here as a law); but this is also how words fit together adequately for their purpose (Bergson at the same time puts this law into action). This language work, which to my eyes – and my ears – constitutes both the originality of Bergson’s enterprise and its price, determines each important moment of his texts. The ten pages in the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ where, at the same time, he gropes towards saying something about his object and the language suitable for grasping it, are characteristic of an approach which, long before anyone spoke about performative language, barely separates – never separates in fact – its purpose from its method. I will read with these eyes and with these ears, and only as an example – because all of these ten pages should be analysed in detail – of what I referred to above as the ‘second correction’ of this passage. What I find beneath these clear-cut crystals and this superficial congelation is a continuity of flow comparable to no other flowing I have ever seen. It is a succession of states each one of which announces what follows and contains what precedes. Strictly speaking they do not constitute multiple states 4. [The figures of speech referred to below, such as assonance and consonance, require reference to the French original and so I reproduce the original, where necessary, in square brackets here and in the following pages. Trans.]

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In other words . . . until I have already got beyond them, and turn around to observe their trail. While I was experiencing them they were so solidly organized, so profoundly animated with a common life, that I could never have said where any one of them finished or the next one began. In reality, none of them do begin or end; they all dove-tail into one another. It is, if you like, the unrolling of a spool, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming little by little to the end of his span; and living consists in growing old. But it is just as much a continual winding, like that of thread into a ball, for our past follows us, becoming larger and larger with the present it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory. (CM, 192–3) [C’est, au-dessous des ces cristaux bien découpés et de cette congélation superficielle, une continuité d’écoulement qui n’est comparable à rien de ce que j’ai vu s’écouler. C’est une succession d’états dont chacun annonce ce qui suit et contient ce qui précède. À vrai dire, ils ne constituent des états multiples que lorsque je les ai dépassés et que je me retourne en arrière pour en observer la trace. Tandis que je les éprouvais, ils étaient si solidement organisés, si profondément animés d’une vie commune, que je n’aurais su dire où l’un quelconque d’entre eux finit, où l’autre commence. En réalité, aucun d’eux ne commence ni ne finit, mais tous se prolongent les uns dans les autres. C’est si l’on veut le déroulement d’un rouleau, car il n’y a pas d’être vivant qui ne se sente arriver peu à peu au bout de son rôle, et vivre consiste à vieillir. Mais c’est tout aussi bien un enroulement continuel, comme celui d’un fil sur une pelote, car notre passé nous suit, il se grossit sans cesse du présent qu’il ramasse sur sa route ; et conscience signifie mémoire. (PM, 183)]

A brief reminder before carefully analysing the functioning of this passage: its end – provisional end, it must be repeated, because we are only reading here the second of the many ‘corrections’ to the definition of the ego proposed above – its end is the formula that closes the extract I have chosen: ‘and consciousness means memory’ [et conscience signifie mémoire]. From a rhythmic point of view, this clause has been prepared by another verbal coin, struck on the same syntactic model in the previous sentence, and which constitutes its foreshadowed signal: ‘and living consists in growing old’ [et vivre consiste à vieillir]. The vocabulary used in both, and moreover the type of sentence whose articulation it makes possible, are here reassuring for a traditional philosopher: abstract words, an absence of metaphor, the statement of a general law, let us even say a universal law, establish between the words retained for their formulation an essential relation. It indeed falls to the philosopher to say what things are. Note that there is, despite everything, a major difference between these two similar and visibly related statements. This difference is sonorous, which in no way implies that one can refuse without prejudice to hear it – quite the contrary! Between the infinitives to live [vivre] and to age [vieillir], continuity is ensured by the play of vowels and 55

In other words . . . consonants (v, i, vi); this continuity, which does not contravene the consists which unites them, is in the image of the very subtle play that Bergson makes on the words and the syllables throughout this passage – the most obvious being that on the words winding, unrolling, span [enroulement, déroulement, rôle], etc. On the contrary, the final clause brings together, on an identical formal model, two words that relate neither the play on sonority nor of course – and this is the essential thing here – the philosophical tradition: consciousness [conscience] and memory [mémoire]. The word memory is thus placed by Bergson at the end of his treatment as a sort of unexpected emergence, almost an incursion; it is, in relation to this passage, the unquestionably intrusive word. The passage ends, rather abruptly, through a series of gradual, almost imperceptible substitutions, and thus signals, very discreetly but very clearly, that the sonorous equivalence must give way to something else. This remarkable break immediately precedes a brief theoretical argument which states, precisely under the heading of homogeneity (referring to the homophony and assonance from the previous passage) and of superposition (referring to the constant but unreasoned use of verbs of equivalence: it is, consists, constitute, etc.), the illegitimacy of the metaphor of winding: ‘To tell the truth, it is neither a winding nor an unwinding, for these two images evoke the representation of lines or surfaces whose parts are homogeneous to and superposable on one another. Now, no two moments are identical in a conscious being’ (CM, 193). How did we get here? The first correction, it will be recalled, compared the set of perceptions reaching consciousness to ‘some superficial encrustment’ [une croûte solidifiée à la surface] (CM, 191). The correction that I am analysing, a contribution to this first approach, begins as follows: ‘What I find beneath these clear-cut crystals and this superficial congelation is a continuity of flow . . .’. The ‘superficial encrustment’ [croûte solidifiée à la surface] is varied in this second correction in ‘clear-cut crystals’ [cristaux bien découpés] and in ‘superficial congelation’ [congélation superficielle]. The ‘continuity’, one of the key words in the passage, is therefore first of all sonorous. It is this which allows the new equivalence that Bergson proposes to give to the idea of consciousness. It rests entirely on a verbal series whose syllables call and answer each other: découpés, écoulement, s’écouler, déroulement, rouleau [cut, flow, flow, unwind, roll], and the same role [rôle] that Bergson understands here – at the same time as he makes it understood quite differently – in its etymological sense (from the lower Latin rotulus, ‘roll’ in English, ‘rouleau’ in French). The insistent doubling of the s throughout this passage plays more or less the same role: it matches together vocables which only have sonorous links between them, and at the same time these prepare the formula which poses an essential 56

In other words . . . equivalence (‘consciousness means . . .’ [la conscience signifie]): ‘our past follows us, becoming larger and larger with the present it picks up on its way’ [notre passé nous suit, il se grossit sans cesse du présent qu’il ramasse sur sa route] (CM, 193). Each of these sonic doublings must, as usual with Bergson, work on two levels. First mimic what is in question, namely consciousness as memory: each memory is, with its object, in a relationship comparable to that which constitutes the appearance of a ‘flow’ [d’écoulement] that is afterwards ‘cut’ [découpé], or ‘unrolling’ [déroulement] after the word ‘flow’ [d’écoulement]; it is only the word ‘memory’ itself that finally ends the series and does not contain this mute repetition. But this mime does not omit any more here than elsewhere to involve in its process the very writing of the page one reads: the unfolding in question is given as ‘a succession of states each one of which announces what follows and contains what precedes’ (CM, 192); this is precisely the case with these resonating words whose sequence and implications constitute the poetic basis of an unprecedented philosophical utterance. But this utterance also makes us think of this series of corrections, of successive retouchings, each returning to the other not at all to cancel it but to rectify it, to specify it if not to perfect it. One will have noticed that the word ‘consciousness’, which has been so often used by the philosophical and epistemological tradition and which is at the origin of these long, meticulous and inventive expressive considerations, cannot be used without infinite precautions. And, in fact, Bergson hardly ever uses it without reservation. He says, for example, twice in the third chapter, ‘For want of a better word we have called it consciousness’ (CE, 250). This is a reservation or attenuation which is never the expression of a scruple, but rather the rigorous consequence of a requirement for epistemological and linguistic accuracy. I spent a little more time reading just a few lines of these pages than is usual when commenting on a philosophical text. This perhaps calls for a few remarks. They are of various kinds, none being less important to me than the other. I deliver them now, my analysis only anticipated them.

Care of the symbol First remark: it will have been noted that, if this extract from the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ does indeed include a theory of ‘consciousness’ – it may even be written only for that – the analysis which I have undertaken has not proposed at any time to comment on this theory. Bergson, I think, would answer this objection better than I – if this remark indeed is an objection. I recall that in his eyes the conceptual expression is ‘necessarily symbolic’. However, the 57

In other words . . . definition he gives of metaphysics (the text I have cited obviously participates in this definition), excludes concepts, precisely for this reason: If there exists a means of possessing a reality absolutely, instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view toward it, of having the intuition of it instead of making the analysis of it, in short, of grasping it over and above all expression, translation or symbolical representation, metaphysics is that very means. Metaphysics is therefore the science which claims to dispense with symbols. (CM, 191, my emphasis)

A reading of Bergson which would be based on the description, on the explanation, on the definition, even on the criticism of ‘concepts’ (but which concepts? Can one accept that this is not in question when commenting on a philosophical text – especially if Bergson is the author?) would therefore be, at least from the point of view of its author, absolutely unfounded. Second remark: if this hypothesis is given even a little credit, one will need to consider its consequences – and certainly not all of them are philosophical. Epistemology, poetics, pedagogy will necessarily be affected by this determination, by the implementation in any case of this hypothesis. I just want to point out one of these possible implications here. It concerns how Bergson can be read outside France and outside the French language. If we are willing to admit that the work accomplished on punctuation, on sonorities, on rhythms, on harmonics, manifests something other than a skill testifying to his taste for beautiful language, if we recognise in it the value of a philosophical proposition, translators all over the world will have to take care not to miss any of these subtle nuances, of these melodic discoveries, of this perpetual and very fruitful linguistic invention. The translation of philosophical texts is almost always the business of philosophers. And the major preoccupation of philosophers is, rather, to take care of the conceptual rigour, the precision of the tools of reason, the exactitude of the demonstration, than strictly literary matters with which everyone is nonetheless familiar, even if these things are not alike and do not claim to do the same things. Each case is certainly particular, and Bergson’s case should indeed be considered on its own terms.

Bilingual Bergson Regarding this question of translation precisely, I add that even if the thing is not said frequently (it never is to my knowledge), Bergson is, like Marcus Aurelius, or Descartes, or Arendt, or Wittgenstein, a bilingual philosopher. I don’t mean by that that he spoke both languages with the same ‘naturalness’ and ease (which is however recognised: we know that he only communicated 58

In other words . . . with his mother in English), but that he had two languages in which he might express himself philosophically and that, if it is true that he did not use them equally, he nevertheless used both. The number of lectures he gave in English (in the United States or Great Britain, where he travelled on several occasions) is certainly not negligible. The French editions, which, as is usual, publish these texts in a French version, without always pointing out that they are not the ‘original’ versions, do not seem to consider it interesting to note that Bergson – or someone else, but who? and when? – translated them. Henri Gouhier is often an exception: his Bergson dans l’histoire de la pensée occidentale (1989) points out the strangeness of this lack of attribution – without however specifying who was the translator for the French version of the famous ‘Gifford Lectures’. This incuriosity with regard to the language of original composition is undoubtedly regrettable but is in my opinion also harmful. The two languages in which Descartes writes are certainly not interchangeable (Descartes, as we know, himself justifies the difference, explaining precisely in the Discourse the reason for this asymmetry); Hannah Arendt’s writings in German are not of the same philosophical tone as her writings in English; and the same point could of course be made about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of his two languages. Why should it be any different for Bergson? The texts he wrote and then spoke in English also have a particular tone, a particular inspiration, and the hypotheses that he explores or formulates there manifest a proximity, if not a kinship, with Anglo-Saxon philosophy and, especially, psychology, which illuminates the rest of his work with a precious light. This proximity passes through languages, through translation or adaptation – all practices that should be related to the concern Bergson constantly manifests in the area of expression. Quite a number of the texts in Mind Energy, for example, were first written, read and eventually published in English. Here, for example, is what Bergson says – in French – of ‘La conscience et la vie’, the first text of the collection: This paper was given in English. It appeared in that language under the title ‘Life and Consciousness’, in the Hibbert Journal of October 1911; it was reproduced in the volume of Huxley Memorial Lectures published in 1914. The text we give here is sometimes the translation, sometimes the development of the English paper.

The current reference edition (PUF, 2009) of course reproduces this note by Bergson. The only accompanying note is a discussion of ‘Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)’, whose proximity to Bergson is noted along with the quoted passages from his work. As for the difference between the English and French texts, it also appears in this edition – but only in the form of an indication of the passages ‘deleted’ or ‘added’ in the French version. The added passages are indicated in the footnotes, and apparently considered to be the 59

In other words . . . text of the article; the deleted passages (which were therefore published long before the translated and adapted text, with Bergson as author) appear without any comment other than the following: ‘We reproduce here the rather long and clearly identifiable passages that Bergson deleted or completely rewrote in the version retained in 1919 for L’énergie spirituelle. We restore them here in the translation given by Martine Robinet [in Les Mélanges]’ (ES, 369). A single note adorns these passages which Bergson chose not to keep as they stood in the 1919 edition: it concerns a certain Oliver Lodge, whom Bergson cites favourably. These variants do not appear in the notes of the ‘text’, but in what Arnaud François calls ‘the critical apparatus’, which, it seems to me, has the effect that the reader (and they must be a curious reader, and very patient!) will tend to regard them as negligible. First, perhaps, because their translation is not by Bergson; then because their relegation to the very end of the volume, and the absence of their description in the body of the text or in the notes, transform these passages into a kind of pre-text – which, strictly speaking, they had never been until 1919 and which, probably still today (2022) they are not for readers of English, since they are indeed part of the text published by Bergson himself under his name and in the English tongue. The final perverse effect of this relegation is to help make Bergson (École normale supérieure, Académie française, Collège de France, etc.) read not as a primarily French writer, but as a uniquely French writer – as if English were an anecdotal circumstance of the genesis of some of his texts. A scholarly work that would like to do Bergson full justice should, it seems to me, give a more important place to the texts that he delivered and published in English and seek to understand how this complex thought was developed not in spite of languages, or in one language, but in languages. However, this peculiar bilingualism (translation/adaptation, exactly like Beckett!) is not the subject of any philosophical, linguistic or literary commentary. The two versions are compared only in terms of volume (‘deleted’ passages, ‘added’ passages). No hypothesis or commentary is made as to the reasons, importance or implications of these deletions and additions. As for the ‘fully rewritten passages’, they are unfortunately not marked as such, and do not give rise to any reflection – which would nevertheless have been invaluable! – on this process of rewriting, a writing of which the other language is at least the occasion.

Reading Bergson I will make a third remark about the commentary, which may have been deemed formal, about this passage from the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’: it 60

In other words . . . would be wrong to believe that this page is unique; that I distinguished it only because it reveals, more and better than others, this tireless and, one would say, almost never satisfied requirement within the space of philosophical poetics. While it was not chosen absolutely at random, it must be admitted that it is not exceptional. And that the concern to which it testifies is the very one that Bergson points to at every key moment in his work. Decidedly, what matters to him is not to ‘speak well’ or to ‘write well’ but to write differently, or ‘in other words’. The more one enters this work, the more one becomes dedicated to reading it while paying attention to the apparatus of language that it builds, the more the thing is confirmed: Bergson hardly distinguishes the exercise of thought from an acute reflection on its means of expression. It is also from this angle that we could speak of his bilingualism. To read Bergson – by which I mean any page of Bergson – through describing his work as a writer is therefore not to betray him but to do him justice, or rather to read him according to the demands which he wished his fellow philosophers would make their own. One could put it another way – and it would certainly not be more inadequate: to speak of Bergson in strictly conceptual terms (time, duration, evolution, morality, mysticism, matter, etc.) would be to do him a grave injustice. Never forget: consider thought – that is, its movement, its flow, its incessant and inventive becoming – rather than proceeding to its artificial reconstruction (ES, 48). The final point for what might be called a respectful reading of the principles on which Bergson set out to write his work is that it also involves teaching philosophy in a different way. I do not want to say – I do not mean at all – that it is necessary when teaching philosophy to consider the part of the literary and the conceptual in the texts of the great philosophers, or to pay homage, when and if necessary, to their art and style; but it is necessary to begin reading them with regard to this work of language without which there is no valid philosophy, from this necessary creative invention which sometimes borders on craftsmanship, in order to be able to get as close as possible to the movement of their thought. I will come back to this question at greater length and more precisely in my final chapter. I just wanted to point out here that such a requirement does not arise from a personal fantasy or whim but from a very lively, sometimes very anxious attention to what is probably – I am resolutely Bergsonian on this point – the essence of philosophy. I have no doubt that it was a comparable attention that made Bergson such a respected, admired teacher. What is certain is that one would hardly find any texts by Bergson where this question of expression is absent. It can be, as we have seen, the subject of explicit reflection; this is the case with the startling opening of the Author’s Preface to Time and Free Will and many other texts – I have cited only a very 61

In other words . . . small number. But it can also be at the origin of remarks on the advisability, the legitimacy, even the relevance of such and such a stylistic or rhetorical process in approaching a problem or a particular object: the metaphor, prosopopoeia, fabulation, epanorthosis, which I cited, are only examples, and I will have occasion to evoke others. Finally, it might elicit, in a particular discussion, a comparison with other disciplines, other practices, other modes of expression. We have seen that this is what Bergson has in mind when he speaks of the difference, for him essential, between science and philosophy, which regularly leads him to distinguish between animal language and human language, between the prerogatives of instinct and those of intelligence, and especially between spatial phenomena and those ‘which do not occupy space’. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this last distinction is really at the origin of his philosophical approach, which is therefore also, as we have begun to see, an epistemological and a poetic approach: it is never indifferent to the question of a philosophical poetics. One of his benchmarks or points of comparison when approaching this crucial distinction is striking in its constancy and is an index of the value which he seems to afford it. So, I will now turn to a discussion of what Bergson sometimes presents as a simple tool of comparison, but which he also sometimes – and not so rarely – offers as a model of expression for the philosopher: art.

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2 ‘. . . in the same direction as art’

In a conference paper ‘on the human soul’, given in Madrid in 1916, Bergson draws a parallel between art and philosophy: ‘Philosophy is not art’, he says, ‘but it has deep affinities with art’ (M, 1201 [my translation]). It is no exaggeration to say that these affinities were at the heart of his reflections throughout his career, and that they troubled his thinking and informed his writing from Time and Free Will (1889), where the relationship between art and nature is already the subject of paradoxical remarks, through to The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), an essential passage of which proposes that musical writing should be a model for the philosopher.

Art and Thought As always with Bergson, the ‘theme’ of his argument is inseparable from the poetic considerations for which it is the support or the occasion – for which it might also be the pretext. It is true that no book, no chapter, not even any article is devoted exclusively to art, but there are very few of his texts which do not include a line of argument, more or less long, more or less central, either on art in general or on a particular artistic practice – sometimes music, sometimes painting, sometimes poetry, and so on. These considerations, without being completely ignored by Bergson’s commentators, are rarely placed at the heart of their analyses or their hypotheses. They are, however, at the intersection of fields and questions which, however diverse they may be, lie at the heart of his philosophical enterprise: questions of creation, imitation, nature, thought, expression, beauty, emotion, knowledge, and even of morality, science and religion. I do not propose here to set out Bergson’s point of view on art, his relationship or his affinities with such and such an artist or writer – it seems to me that this is done, and very well done, regularly – but to examine the role which he gives to art and artists in some of his essential discussions. The point of view I choose is therefore not that of doctrine, but of textuality. Because from one text to another, art is charged with a different role. Even if it is rather rare, it can happen that Bergson envisions art for itself; but more often the evocation or even the thought of art allows him to advance on the new 63

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ theoretical path he has chosen. Talking about art obviously makes it easier, perhaps in a less abstract and less conceptual way, to gain access to the propositions and hypotheses that are the most difficult to state, the least plausible in the eyes of an ordinary rationalist, the most paradoxical or, to be honest, the least philosophical in appearance. Art first allows Bergson to define, through a game of resemblances and differences which is constantly in motion (sometimes turning to the advantage of art, sometimes to its detriment), the boundaries separating thought from science, philosophy from reason, emotion from knowledge, and so on. It happens, quite often, that he is driven by a point of comparison to approach the nature of thought; and then he distinguishes one art from another, the essential difference visibly passing through a distinction between verbal and non-verbal arts. One should not be surprised that art is for him ultimately a model of perfect enunciation. Even if this model is not often explicitly proposed to philosophers, the mere fact that it sometimes is should be enough to prove this. Bergson could hardly argue for a model which he does not himself strive to follow, and the thought of this model is present even when art is called upon for other purposes – and even when there is no question related to art. There is no page in Bergson’s work which does not testify to his concern with rhythm, cadence, melody, the principle of variation; neither is there any page that does not attempt to approach philosophy from the angle of vision. According to the Bergson of ‘Philosophical Intuition’, there is in every philosopher a visionary and a musician. At least. This cannot remain unmentioned in the reckoning of a text which claims such a thing – of any text, in fact, emanating from one who considers it to be obvious and even true. One might well, for the convenience of the exposition, try to dissociate art from other things in order to define the prerogatives of science, of philosophy; seeing art as a model for thought, or as a methodical indication of the ideal philosophical enunciation; this last function – it is not exactly a function – will necessarily affect the others, all the others. When Bergson seeks to distinguish science from philosophy, philosophy from art, duration from space, emotion from perception (all these distinctions are equivalent in this context), he obviously does not escape from the requirement that he has made his own: to speak about it in a way that defies the laws of ordinary language, which is precisely what artists do, whether they are painters, sculptors, musicians, photographers or poets. It is hardly surprising that a philosopher addresses questions of emotion, feeling, passion, imagination, creation, politics or morals by referring to the experience of artists, who, for their part, frequently make these phenomena the subject of their works. It is less expected that a philosopher who sets out 64

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ to speak of science does so by evoking, even invoking, art, in opposing geometers to artists.

The measurable and the unpredictable Yet this is how Bergson proceeds in Creative Evolution. From the first pages, he seeks to pose the question of the existence of living things in new terms. As always, the pitfall that he tries to avoid is the one that would consist, in order to shed light on the debate, in mentally fragmenting what is in his eyes – we know that this is the heart of his research – absolutely indivisible: pure duration. To speak of causes, consequences, chains, laws, necessity is in his eyes the most damaging error, the one which prevents thought from embracing reality. Because if each moment of our lives is, compared to the one it follows, totally new, it is also unpredictable: Doubtless, my present state is explained by what was in me and by what was acting on me a moment ago. In analysing it I should find no other elements. But even a superhuman intelligence would not have been able to foresee the simple indivisible form which gives to these purely abstract elements their concrete organization. For to foresee consists of projecting into the future what has been perceived in the past, or of imagining for a later time a new grouping, in a new order, of elements already perceived. But that which has never been perceived, and which is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable. (CE, 6–7)

This unpredictability of our states, and therefore of our lives, ‘an original moment of a no less original history’ (CE, 7), is precisely what defeats science as it is ordinarily conceived. Bergson never ceases to show that ‘the biologist who proceeds as a geometer’ will, in his speculations, only ever achieve results that – while certainly precise, and admittedly general – will always stumble on the question of individuality. It is true, he says, that defining is the business of geometers, but it is none the less the case that their definitions apply ‘only to a completed reality’ (CE, 13). Essentially, everything is here. Already here.With the equation of life being posed in these terms, ‘geometrical biology’, if one might risk this formula, is in fact disqualified. And it is definitely disqualified, because ‘vital properties are never entirely realized, though always on the way to become so; they are not so much states as tendencies’ (CE, 13). The stage is set for the appearance of a character who, without these theoretical preconditions, one would not have expected: the artist, and in this case, the portrait painter. As described by Bergson, his activity will make it possible – 65

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ we are here in the first ten pages of the book – to understand how insufficient, always inadequate, a scientific thought is that is based on the predictable nature of a living state. The reasoning is simple: we can no more predict the way in which a living organism will evolve than, seeing the painter’s model, we could anticipate the portrait the painter will make of that model: The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colours spread out on the palette; but, even with the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would have been to produce it before it was produced – an absurd hypothesis which is its own refutation. Even so with regard to the moments of our life, of which we are the artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. And just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed – in any case, is modified – under the very influence of the works he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form that we are just assuming. (CE, 7, my emphasis)

I add a remark. It does not concern Bergson’s thesis but his manner. The unexpected appearance of the portrait painter, in the expository scene of a book which deals with ‘the true nature of life’ (first page of the Intro­ duction, x), is no different in principle from the state of living things, which the state that preceded it could not predict. The use of portraiture is a poetic illustration of an epistemological thesis that philosophical and scientific traditions have indeed made absolutely implausible. It is clear, however, that the word illustration only applies imperfectly here. The portrait painter, however surprising but also convincing their presence may be, could not be replaced by another character, nor above all by a different artistic activity (artisanal, political, educational, etc.). In the sentences above I underlined the word creation which Bergson obviously does not use by chance. The figure of the portrait painter, on the frontispiece of the French edition, is the mysterious double, the shadow if you will, of the geometer, whether they be a finalist or a mechanist. For those who read between the lines – let’s learn to read philosophy between the lines! – the portrait painter is called on to become and to remain the bad conscience of the biologist who holds fast to the principles of geometry. After all, isn’t the book about creation? And isn’t Bergson’s thesis entirely contained in its title? A title that it would be wrong to consider a metaphor. If geometers are incapable of grasping ‘the true nature of life’ it is because their strictly logical principles will always keep them away from the unpredictable. Evolution, at least as suggested by this title, is not a series of states from which a single and general principle would make it possible to predict order, nature, duration – it is a permanent creation, a continuation interrupted by 66

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ remarkable discoveries that are impossible to anticipate; it is not like a work of art, it is a work of art. The word ‘genius’ characterises them both. Evoking once again, in the third chapter of the book, the roles – equally harmful – of mechanism and finalism, Bergson is led, for once, to distinguish them. If he challenges mechanism as being incapable of distinguishing itself from geometry – and therefore of producing nothing other than a thought satisfying intelligence alone – he is more nuanced in speaking of finalism: In its highest forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work of art we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet they can only be expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event. Life in its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution, is something analogous; it transcends finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance. The category of finality is therefore too narrow for life in its entirety. It is, on the other hand, often too wide for a particular manifestation of life taken separately. (CE, 236)

Here one sees that, contrary to what one might spontaneously think, it is not art which is the ‘analogue’ of life, but life which is the ‘analogue’ of art. Art for Bergson is ‘the other’ of life, and it would not be pertinent, from this point of view, to attempt to establish the antecedence of one over the other. Art does not copy life any more than life imitates art: both are part of the same logic – the ‘logic of the living’, in short – because ‘be that as it may, it is with the vital that we have here to do’ (CE, 236, the emphasis is Bergson’s). Saying this, Bergson is very close to one of the two James brothers (let’s say right away, before coming back to this at greater length in the next chapter, that it is not William), for whom it is only through art that one might explain nature: At that time many things in England struck me as reproductions of something that had originally existed in art or literature. It wasn’t the painting, the poem, the fictional page that seemed to me to be a copy; these things were the originals and the lives of happy and distinguished people were made in their image. (Henry James, cited by T. Todorov in his introduction to James 1969: 351)

This essential analogy of life and art is certainly, for Bergson, a way of clarifying his point, but it is much more than an alibi, or a convenient parallel. The status of art can neither be thought of nor illuminated other than in correlation with the life of which it is one of the forms. This necessarily implies that we cannot speak of one or the other independently: to think of life is to make a work, and even a free work (we will have noted that ‘a free action or a work of art’, for Bergson, is the same thing); as for truly talking about art, this 1. [Todorov cites this passage from James without indicating the English source. I have been unable to find the English source and so this is my translation. Trans.]

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ is impossible unless one sees it within its living dynamics. To put it in a way that is no doubt a little tenuous, but which corresponds to the poetic logic of the enterprise, the best way to speak of art is to restore its living force to the gaze of intelligence, to discuss it in a book about the élan vital – to write Creative Evolution.

Art and science It should come as no surprise that the unpredictability of becoming is a touchstone for both art and life. To be more precise about the epistemological aim of the enterprise, this is what allows Bergson to distinguish not only between art and science, but, if we dare say so, between science and science. As long as science sticks to the inert, or matter (as in physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics), predictability is the rule; and the more often it is verified, the more science will conform to itself, the more true it will be, the more legitimate congratulating itself on its existence seems; but if science claims to embrace the living (this is of course the case for biology, about which many works are referenced, analysed and commented upon in Creative Evolution) it will have to do so in an artistic way: We say of astronomical phenomena that they manifest an admirable order, meaning by this that they can be foreseen mathematically. And we find an order no less admirable in a symphony of Beethoven, which is genius, originality, and therefore unforeseeability itself. (CE, 236–7)

If one thinks about it a little, invoking Beethoven when one would expect – for the sake of symmetry – that biology might be named instead is somewhat unexpected (‘unforeseeable’ would be the word). There is, however, no mistake here, of course, no effect of style, no desire to surprise or shock; only the implementation of an epistemological hypothesis: if art and life are ‘analogous’, then, to this very extent, one is interchangeable with the other. Naming one while expecting the other is not so much a way of making this understood as of manifesting it. One final point. This time it concerns the history of philosophy, from which Bergson never removes himself for very long. That a Beethoven symphony here parallels the ‘admirable order’ of ‘astronomical phenomena’ makes art the new, though rather surprising, equivalent of moral law. We see that the opposition is no longer here, as in Kant, between what is outside of me and what is in me, but between what is foreseeable and what is not; or between what is thinkable without reference to freedom and what is not; or again 68

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ between what occupies space and what does not. Or to put it more vividly: between what implies a creative act and what does not. Art is therefore, like all the objects or phenomena that Bergson summons, examines, questions and analyses in his work, both a way of thinking (the world, duration, truth, life) and very precisely that which is to be thought about, with one never being in any way dissociable from the other.

Art is an anti-concept This manner of associating art and science in the act of thinking, which thereby clarifies both of them, signals, as it were, but without dwelling on it, another essential characteristic of art. It will perhaps have been noted that if finalism is ‘too narrow’ to embrace ‘the true nature of life’, it is also ‘too wide for a particular manifestation of life taken separately’ (CE, 236). One will remember that the concept was, like finalism, liable to the same reproach: that of extending too widely. The function of the concept is to encompass, as broadly and even as precisely as possible, a universal reality – so universal that even Bergson sometimes wonders whether it designates something real. We can put it another way, as Bergson sometimes does: if the concept is decidedly lacking in validity, if it is absolutely the case that, while it should not necessarily be removed from its traditional functions, it should be criticised, it is because it seeks to imitate geometric tools in its operation. But while the mathematical formula will always state exactly the hypotheses and the results of its approach, the concept will omit – necessarily omit – those aspects of reality that escape it and which should nevertheless, in the eyes of a philosopher, constitute the essential material of the quest.The point is that ‘life transcends [déborde, ‘overflows’] intellect’ (CE, 49). This overflowing [débord] should help distinguish a scientific approach, which is situated in its role precisely by failing to consider it, from a philosophical approach which seeks to apprehend ‘the phenomena which do not occupy space’. Evolution may well be of interest to science; it will approach it with its spatial and definitive tools, nevertheless neglecting what is proper to it: precisely its unpredictability. So as to point to this difficulty – this contradiction – Bergson mentions the evolution of our person, which for him signifies life itself: The feeling we have of our evolution and of the evolution of all things in pure duration is there, forming around the intellectual concept properly so-called an indistinct fringe that fades off into darkness. [.  .  .] Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and indistinct, it should have more importance for philosophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds. (CE, 49)

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ The concept therefore incurs the same reproach as science. Philosophy, if we understand it and especially if we practise it as a discipline tending to geometric accuracy, will like science fail to grasp this ‘delicate and indistinct’ fringe, and the price of this clearly exceeds that of the kernel of truth on which it would be wrong to continue to focus its efforts. And art in effect helps us to think one and the other. It is again in Creative Evolution that art is proposed to philosophy to incite it, admittedly discreetly, to concentrate on the essential, this time called by its name (I emphasise it at the end of the following quotation): An artist of genius has painted a figure on his canvas. We can imitate his picture with many-coloured squares of mosaic. And we shall reproduce the curves and shades of the model so much the better as our squares are smaller, more numerous and more varied in tone. But an infinity of elements infinitely small, presenting an infinity of shades, would be necessary to obtain the exact equivalent of the figure that the artist has conceived as a simple thing, which he has wished to transport as a whole to the canvas, and which is the more complete the more it strikes us as the projection of an indivisible intuition. (CE, 95, my emphasis)

Bergson here places the theories of mechanism and of finalism back to back, with both prevented from grasping something other than by decomposing – however precisely – the objects and phenomena they propose to account for; that is, both are unable to see a work of art in the life they study. The reasoning is as follows: one will necessarily fail if one undertakes to study a work of art (a painting for example) by decomposing it, quite simply because the intuition which gave rise to it is indivisible, not fragmentable – it is fundamentally unanalysable, since the very principle of analysis is decomposition; science will also fail in its endeavour to express life, duration, freedom as long as it persists in its refusal to consider them as realities in perpetual evolution, that is to say caught in a fluid and indiscriminate continuity. Let us note in passing that the disqualification of the principle of analysis will necessarily have important pedagogical repercussions. I will come back to this in the final chapter. But I wanted to indicate now that if the considerations that Bergson develops here and there may appear, at least to whoever perceives them and takes them seriously, somewhat disturbing, they are nonetheless not unrelated to the rest of the philosophical enterprise. The readings Bergson makes when trying to give his listeners or students an idea of his teaching practice are never analytical. The text of a philosopher does not have to be dissected, broken up, disassembled into its parts. It is, as soon as it exists, one of the objects of the world. It is a matter of seeing it as a whole, not of

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ disjoining its sentences, its subdivisions, its various bones and organs, since it is true that it cannot be equal to the sum of its parts. The word ‘intuition’, then, makes it possible to indicate a proper path for philosophy: paying systematic and keen attention to that which can only elude science. If intuition is taken as the measure of truth, science is supplanted by both art and philosophy, which at this stage of reflection there is no reason to consider separately. In order to understand, or simply admit this, let us return to these ‘deep affinities’ which unite them in the conference paper of 1916 ‘On the Human Soul’: Philosophy is not art, but it has deep affinities with art. Who is the artist? He is a man who sees better than others, because he looks at reality naked and unveiled. To see with the eyes of a painter is to see better than common people. (M, 1201 [my translation])

A question of vision Affinities therefore are related to the quality of the gaze. ‘See’, ‘look’, ‘sight’, ‘vision’, ‘eyes’ – such vocabulary is not the most common, nor the most expected, when one is speaking of the activity of the philosopher. The painter, says Bergson, sees better than others. Sees what? The answer will not come as a surprise: unlike the ‘common people’, the painter sees ‘reality naked and unveiled’. To express it using a word dear to Bergson’s heart, his vision is therefore immediate. The word is essential: the data of consciousness which have interested Bergson from his first book are those that are immediate; he only mentions the others to better characterise these movements of consciousness which interest him, less in themselves than because they force us to think differently. This is because there is seeing and seeing. Common people call ‘seeing’ the process of recognising an object, distinguishing it from another ‘for the convenience of life’. What makes this ordinary perception possible are ‘conventional signs’, which come between the object and us, preventing immediate vision. ‘But’, says Bergson, ‘the one who sets fire to all these conventions, he who scorns the practical use and conveniences of life and strives to directly see reality itself, without interposing anything between it and him, this one will be an artist.’ If such are the affinities that align the artist and the philosopher so closely, can one say that the portrait painted in this way is that of the painter alone? – ‘. . . this one will be an artist. But he will also be a philosopher, with the difference that philosophy addresses itself less to exterior objects than to the interior life of the soul!’ (M, 1201 [my translation]) 71

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Here, then, the respective tasks and fields of art and philosophy are defined. But instead of art being mostly presented by Bergson as a natural gift – an opportunity, an exception, he sometimes says, a privilege – philosophy, more democratic in a sense, will have to do violence in order to behave with the spontaneity of the artist. ‘The Perception of Change’ (1911, collected in 1934 in The Creative Mind) does not only describe the activities of one creator or the other; the text also sets out a practical programme, prescribing an effort whose direction is indicated precisely. Bergson then proceeds in the reverse order of how he will proceed in Madrid: it is in parting from the exigence that he assigns to philosophy that he comes, as if naturally, to speak of art. And this analogy (from art to philosophy or from philosophy to art), this reciprocity, is in itself an indication. No ‘like’ connects art and philosophy; analogy is decidedly not metaphor. The order of their convocation is, if not arbitrary (textual logic dictates its laws, despite everything), at least interchangeable. It is that – let’s say it one last time – talking about one or the other is equivalent. Not that one is worth the other, not that one might be the equivalent of the other. To speak trivially, but by somewhat subverting the use that one ordinarily makes of the expression, their analogy is a postulate whose correlate is that to speak of one or the other amounts to the same, this same being more important than each of them – and equally valuable. In the same trivial spirit, we could also say that philosophy is a means like any other of reaching the truth – on condition, it will be understood, of not hearing behind this like any movement, any temptation to compare. In ‘The Perception of Change’, Bergson begins with the observation – so often overlooked by his commentators – that the conceptual game is futile, that philosophy has nothing to gain from it: ‘Since’, he says, ‘any attempt at purely conceptual philosophy calls forth antagonistic efforts, and since, in the field of pure dialectics there is no system to which one cannot oppose another’ (CM, 157), he proposes abandoning the conceptual ground and coming back, so as to progress things, to the question of perception. But just as there is ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing’, let us imagine that there is ‘perceiving’ and ‘perceiving’: But suppose that instead of trying to rise above our perception of things we were to plunge into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it. Suppose that we were to insert our will into it, and that this will, expanding, were to expand our vision of things. (CM, 158, my emphasis)

Make no mistake: Bergson is not talking about artists, painters, poets or musicians here. What he describes is indeed a programme for philosophers: We should obtain this time a philosophy where nothing in the data of the senses or the consciousness would be sacrificed: no quality, no aspect of the

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ real would be substituted for the rest ostensibly to explain it. But above all we should have a philosophy to which one could not oppose others, for it would have left nothing outside of itself that other doctrines could pick up; it would have taken everything. (CM, 158)

Such a programme, as we now know, cannot remain a pure programme. It will have to involve, for its own validity certainly, its own implementation. I quickly draw attention to the passage that I have underlined: ‘and that this will, expanding, were to expand our vision of things’. The extension operation described here is certainly neither logical nor geometric. It is also not conceptual. The work that makes it thinkable, that is to say perceptible, and believable, is work on words themselves. A perfect chiasmus – and not an unerring reasoning – indeed operates this transformation: on either side of the central double ‘expanding/expand’, and therefore responding rigorously, united by this coming together which affects them simultaneously although differently, the ‘will’ and the ‘vision’. The vision of philosophers cannot be expanded without the intervention of what artists do not need (their art is a given): the will. Vision which in the common mind is very often thought of as being a passive vision for the artist becomes, by the grace of chiasmus, an active vision. And the rest of the text shows that the chiasmic operation, far from being only verbal, is also plausible, since both non-philosophers and philosophers often attempt and perform it: It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That’s the objection. – It is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has been precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists. (CM, 159)

Since the art in question is ‘not of technique but of vision’ (Proust 2001a: 464) there is no longer anything really overwhelming from a literary perspective. But it is less expected that this should be the case in philosophy. This conception of philosophy as a means – or rather as an activity – of vision has two remarkable consequences. On the one hand, it encourages the philosopher to work differently, on assumptions other than those which they have probably inherited. On the other hand, it gives those who want to read their work properly a valuable methodical index. On the first point, Bergson is not stingy with detail or precision. But what he says prevents him from saying things in an unequivocal way that is immediately verifiable through logical reasoning. Since the tasks of the artist 73

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ and the philosopher are analogous, it is a question of finding a tone, a vocabulary, a principle of enunciation which is valid for both at the same time. If it happens therefore that one hesitates to attribute to one rather than the other the remarks made, this is not imprecision, negligence, damaging approximation, it is on the contrary a resolute theoretical proposition. It is in any case – I choose almost at random two of Bergson’s striking formulations that are found in the same text – sometimes about showing us, ‘in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness’ (CM, 159), so as to ensure that: all things acquire depth, – more than depth, something like a fourth dimension which permits anterior perceptions to remain bound up with present perceptions, and the immediate future itself to become partly outlined in the present. Reality no longer appears then in the static state, in its manner of being; it affirms itself dynamically, in the continuity and variability of its tendency. What was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion. Everything comes to life around us, everything is revivified in us. A great impulse carries beings and things along. We feel ourselves uplifted, carried away, borne along by it. (CM, 186)

Will the first quotation be said to relate to art, or to philosophy? And what should one think of the second? Is it philosophy it is aiming at, or art? The truth is that at this stage of the reflection, the principle of analogy must help us to admit that the question is really irrelevant, and that in seeking to state a sensible proposition about one or the other, one cannot in fact precisely aim at either of the two, but at something else, and that neither one nor the other is this other thing, but that both help to think it. The only thing that matters is the principle that must be admitted, namely ‘that an extension of our faculties of perceiving is possible’ (CM, 160). What painters make us perceive – perceive, says Bergson to distinguish this aesthetic experience from our daily experience of observation – is not the fruit of their imagination, of their ‘fantasy’; they do not at all create it, rather they reveal it; they convince us and move us because we have perceived, before them and without them, ‘at least in the nascent state, all that they describe to us’ (CM, 160). The new task of philosophy will therefore be to proceed a like extension through its own means. It will from now on be the other way of getting there. As for the second point, it concerns how we might read philosophers. The analogy in question invites another revolution in our mental habits. Reading a philosopher should no longer be (provided one admits that the philosopher too is a visionary, a seer if you will, but neither of these two terms is perfectly adequate: artists and philosophers only make manifest what without them would remain invisible) reading a philosopher: it should no longer involve 74

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ glossing, commenting on, analysing their doctrine, their hypotheses, comparing them to others who resemble or are near to them, but rather seeking to see, so to speak, under the veil of their discourse, the vision from which their approach proceeds: ‘And if we try to imitate this attitude, or better still to assume it ourselves, we shall see as far as it is possible what the philosopher saw’ (CM, 129)). I cannot help but relate this fundamental formula to another one, which is found in the third essay of Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic: What the artist has seen we shall probably never see again, or at least never see in exactly the same way; but if he has actually seen it, the attempt he has made to lift the veil compels our imitation. His work is an example which we take as a lesson. And the efficacy of the lesson is the exact standard of the genuineness of the work. (L, 162)

In the final chapter, I will attempt to provide a glimpse of the implications of this mutation of the gaze and the mind. I will only indicate here that it proceeds from this deep and crucial analogy which combines art and philosophy in a common epistemological process. What is certain in any case is that this revolution – let us not hesitate to call it one – is also a farewell to the concept, to any philosophy that relies on and is built on it. In the utopian epistemological landscape that so many of his texts paint, Bergson dreams of a philosophy for which ‘the senses and consciousness, urged on by this philosophy to an exceptional effort, would have given it more than they furnish naturally. To the multiplicity of systems contending with one another, armed with different concepts, would succeed the unity of a doctrine capable of reconciling all thinkers in the same perception’ (CM, 158). To put this another way, using different words which are equally important to it, philosophy must mourn the indirect which is its unreflective condition in order to adopt the ‘more direct’ point of view of art, which makes a very measured use of ordinary perception because of which it ‘perceives a greater number of things’ (CM, 163). The discussion of art therefore makes it possible to put science and philosophy in a reflexive relationship. The first thus becomes aware not of its imbecility, or of its inadequacy, but of the necessarily relative significance of its assertions and propositions. The second, for its part, sees the prospect of a true revolution opening up, which is at once epistemological and poetic. The philosopher, like the artist, will have to place himself ‘back within the object by a kind of sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the barrier that space [in which language participates] puts up between him and his model’ (CE, 186). This does not mean that the artist is a philosopher, nor the philosopher an artist. In any event, the artist remains a being for whom 75

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ ‘aesthetic intuition [. . .] only attains the individual’ (CE, 186–7). It is precisely this difference which allows Bergson to state, in a striking formula, the ideal of the philosophical approach: But we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life in general for its object, just as physical science, in following to the end the direction pointed out by external perception, prolongs the individual facts into general laws. (CE, 187, my emphasis)

Art is an anti-concept.

Art and Philosophy In the third chapter of Laughter, Bergson attempts, without explicitly naming philosophy, to identify what in his eyes makes art unique: So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. (L, 157)

Symbols are indicated here by a double character: on the one hand, they are ‘utilitarian’, and this utility is ‘practical’; on the other hand, they constitute an obvious epistemological obstacle to those who want to grasp a reality like the one with which art is concerned and which it manages to define without their aid. This sidelining of the symbol does not mean that it is necessarily harmful or always unwelcome. It has its definite utility, but this usefulness is strictly practical, and its function is above all social. In other words, for Bergson the symbolic activity of art is comparable to that of language, whose communication function is also one of social utility (hence the difficulty of adapting it to the philosophical enterprise); but also close to that of science and the cognitive faculty at work in its construction: intelligence. Even if he does not speak here of philosophy, Bergson sets up a theoretical framework which, broadly speaking, will remain the same in the books which will follow: philosophy is on of those discourses which cannot be accommodated through language as it functions in the everyday world. The need for symbols is common in those activities of the mind which hold on to the prerogatives of intelligence and reason; it becomes irrelevant when it comes to anything other than communicating. I quoted above a remarkable passage from the Bologna conference (1911) in which Bergson qualifies ‘conceptual expression’ as ‘of necessity symbolical’ (CM, 129) and deplores the fact that intuition must nevertheless sometimes resort to it ‘to provide “explanations”’. We see 76

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ how the rapprochement is necessary between the two texts: the symbol is both what is repugnant to art and what characterises – necessarily characterises – the conceptual expression of ordinary philosophy (that which explains, distinguishes, separates, disjoins; that which analyses, defines, delimits, and so on). Art is therefore at the same time what makes it possible to characterise philosophy as it is and what suggests a possibility for transforming it – in particular by taking into account, like art, ‘a certain immateriality of life’ (L, 157). This is, we will remember, Bergson’s idea of drama, even in its most bourgeois forms: under the social veneer, immobile and stiff, under the mass of rules and conventions which make a society live and endure, are boiling forces, instincts, aspirations, impulses carrying crises – the very same that drama stages. These latent elements are in art (theatre is only one example) the equivalent of what are for philosophy those movements of consciousness – mobile, subtle, intangible, moving infinitely – that no thought of thought could approach using its ordinary tools. If art in general is such an interesting practice for the philosopher, it is because, like philosophy, it lies at the border between the particular and the universal. To put it a little bluntly: we would obviously underestimate the importance and the scope of aesthetic experience if we reduced it to a simple particular experience, if we did not seek to elucidate the reasons for the universal interest that it arouses; but one would be greatly mistaken if one persisted in defending the ‘chimera’ (the word is from Bergson) of a universality of philosophy, for it is this which for him is the cause of its bankruptcy – in any case of its powerlessness to impose a doctrine or a system that would enjoy universal approval. How do things look for the artist, for his audience? And, to put it symmetrically, for the philosopher, for his commentators? What art seeks, says Bergson, is always the individual: What the artist fixes on his canvas is something he has seen at a certain spot, on a certain day, at a certain hour, with a colouring that will never be seen again. What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his, and his alone, and which will never return. What the dramatist unfolds before us is the life-history of a soul, a living tissue of feelings and events – something, in short, which has once happened and can never be repeated. (L, 161)

The insistence on this point, which seems only to state the obvious, comes from the fact that the individual is here understood as that which undermines generality in the sense that one commonly understands it when it is claimed. What art does not care about are ‘generalities, symbols, or even types’ (L, 161), so many procedures which for Bergson ‘form the current coin of our daily perception’ (L, 161). One recognises here the division which profoundly organises his thought: on the one hand, symbolic representation (the indirect 77

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ procedure par excellence and therefore a priori suspect); on the other, the representation which has chosen not to describe or define, but to ‘give us a glimpse’ of a reality that ordinary life spontaneously puts under wraps. This is how Bergson describes the emotion of the tragic viewer: What has just interested us is [. . .] the glimpse we have caught of ourselves – a whole host of ghostly feelings, emotions and events that would fain have come into real existence, but, fortunately for us, did not. It also seems as if an appeal had been made within us to certain ancestral memories belonging to a far-away past – memories so deep-seated and so foreign to our present life that this latter, for a moment, seems something unreal and conventional. (L, 160)

The symbolic is the enemy! So be wary of the generality of which it is the instrument. Even though philosophy is not named here, it is obviously the target. It will be remembered that one of the main complaints against conceptual expression is that it is ‘of necessity symbolical’; it is also often believed that metaphysics as Bergson understands it is ‘the science which claims to do without symbols’. Here, then, art and metaphysics are joined in the project of apprehending a ‘deeper’ reality, which they can only seek ‘beneath our superficial and utilitarian attainments’ (L, 160–1). To deny art a general aim is therefore not to disqualify it. But nor does that deprive it of all pretence that it is telling the truth. And this is where the paths of art and philosophy intersect. Nothing could be more unique than the character of Hamlet. Though he may resemble other men in some respects, it is clearly not on that account that he interests us most. But he is universally accepted and regarded as a living character. In this sense only is he universally true. The same holds good of all the other products of art. Each of them is unique, and yet, if it bear the stamp of genius, it will come to be accepted by everybody. (L, 161–2)

These remarks concerning the tragic character and tragedy do not equally apply to comedy, which also aims, but in its own way, at the singular and the general. At the risk of upsetting received ideas somewhat, it almost seems that the comic model is closer to the philosophical than the tragic. Comedy indeed ‘instinctively proceeds to what is general. It chooses such peculiarities as admit of being reproduced and consequently are not indissolubly bound up with the individuality of a single person, a possibly common sort of uncommonness, so to say’ (L, 170). The notion of a ‘common sort of uncommonness’ is remarkable, so little agreed upon in any case that Bergson sees fit to attenuate its paradoxical effect with a ‘so to say’, which is often useful to him in this kind of circumstance. He goes so far as to say that the comic work is 78

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ not content with being distinguished by ‘the generality of its subject-matter’ (L, 150); he also suggests without directly saying so that he is thinking of philosophy when he notes comedy’s ‘scarcely confessed or scarcely conscious intention to correct and instruct’ (L, 170). We are very far, it will be said, from the philosophy which does not care about the singular, which in order to advance and, it is thought, to be fulfilled, quickly subsumes events or particular examples under general categories. This is not, however, Bergson’s idea of his discipline. If he says art is analogous to philosophy, if he sees ‘deep affinities’ in these two distinct practices, it is precisely because, on this point (individual vs universal), they are also close. Philosophy is no more generalist than art is individualistic. ‘To make of philosophy an ensemble of generalities which goes beyond scientific generalization, is to insist that the philosopher be content with the plausible and that probability be sufficient for him’, says Bergson in ‘Philosophical Intuition’ (CM, 145–6). Never, he says again, will philosophy be itself if it aspires only to carry ‘the results of science to a higher degree of generality’ (CM, 146). The examination, and the sincere taking into account of a single event, however small and apparently insignificant, will be more precious for metaphysics than a laborious, necessarily superficial generalisation: Instead of surface states covering successively some neutral stuff and maintaining with it a mysterious relationship of phenomenon to substance, it will seize upon one identical change which keeps ever lengthening as in a melody where everything is becoming but where the becoming, being itself substantial, has no need of support. (CM, 150–1, my emphasis)

It is through this consideration of the singular that philosophy will agree with itself. We see that the thought of art (I have underlined the comparison with the melody) is not foreign to this focus. Some of Bergson’s texts are even more precise. No doubt, he says for example in ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, it is natural that metaphysics is inspired by the will of science to reach a kind of universality by aiming at ‘reality in general’; but he adds immediately, ‘it will in no way proceed to universal mathematics, that chimera of modern philosophy. Quite the contrary, as it makes more headway, it will meet with objects less and less translatable into symbols’ (CM, 225–6). ‘Universal mathematics, that chimera of modern philosophy . . .’ Bergson here throws a small stone in the garden of Bertrand Russell and of those who, like him, hold that logic must be the touchstone of philosophy. Such a thing is not sufficiently common to go unremarked. It is, whatever the case, those objects that are refractory to any symbolisation, and whose singularity is a problem, which will put philosophy on its own path. The space of metaphysics is therefore, like that of art, an intermediate 79

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ theoretical space between the universal and the singular – the singular can be defined here simply as that which forms part of the universal, in its principle and in aims.

The singular, the universal Obviously, there is still a problem – one that is neither small nor secondary: it’s that there is no adequate form of language for such a programme. It cannot be said enough that for Bergson, starting from here (I refer again to the opening words of the Author’s Preface to Time and Free Will), this question calls for an appropriate answer.The indications given by the texts formulating this essential difficulty all point in the same direction. If the affinities of philosophy with art are deep, it is not only because their aims are analogous, and their objects, fundamentally, the same, it is because both have keen and constant concerns for their methods. Immediately after these reflections on the need to take into account the singularity of the intuitive phenomenon, Bergson once again states this imperative: intuition once grasped must find a mode of expression and application which conforms to our habits of thought and which furnishes us, in well-defined concepts, the solid basis we so greatly need. (CM, 226)

Curiously, the need for this coming and going, or rather this balance between the universal and the singular, can be formulated as clearly, if not even more clearly, through the evocation of the experience of thought undertaken by other philosophers, however diverse they might be, sometimes even distant from Bergson’s own thought. In the 1911 text he devoted to Pragmatism by William James, recently translated in France, he returns, this time without alluding to the aesthetic experience, to this agreed opposition between the general and the singular. ‘For him [i.e. William James] those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought’ (CM, 253). Bergson credits James with formulating and implementing his own conception of truth. However, the truth, which indeed consists in a certain adequacy to the real, can neither for James nor for Bergson who appreciates him for this, be stated in general terms. Because the real is singular: ‘What is real is any determined fact taking place at any point in space and time, it is singular – it is changing. On the contrary, most of our affirmations are general and imply a certain stability on the part of their object’ (CM, 253). The establishment of what we call truth therefore always makes room ‘for the 80

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ individual contributions of a great number of inventors’ (CM, 256); it passes through a whole series of lived experiences and Bergson does not even hesitate to say that, had these experiences been different, the same truth would undoubtedly have been formulated although under other forms: ‘these realities are only the ground in which that truth grows, and other flowers could just as well have grown there if the wind had brought other seeds’ (CM, 256). Once again Bergson does not take this opportunity to reiterate his admiration for and faith in the creative practices of artists who spontaneously embrace the individual and the universal in their works. But it is striking that this essay on pragmatism – which, as we can see, uses the same schemas, brings into play the same oppositions, sets out the same hypotheses, as the texts I cited above – is for him a new opportunity to emphasise that this radical change of perspective is correlated with the need to reform language. We speak, we think, as if what we observe and what we are used to is the regular verification of laws (physical, moral, mental) that theoretical reflection (scientific or philosophical) would have the task of discovering and enunciating. But, says Bergson, this constancy is by no means assured, the mechanistic is no more obvious here than elsewhere: The first to venture to believe in this invariability and independence made a hypothesis: it is that hypothesis which we currently adopt every time we use a substantive, every time we speak. Our grammar would have been different, the articulations of our thought would have been other than what they are, had humanity in the course of its evolution preferred to adopt hypotheses of another kind. (CM, 257)

The prerogative of artists, whether their art is verbal or not, is to be able to adopt these ‘hypotheses of another kind’: poets are not satisfied (they cannot in truth be satisfied) with grammar and language when they operate according to the laws of ‘universal reporting’; painters do not come to terms with a reality governed only by the rules of reason and statistical probability. Bergson does not say of James (I am speaking here of William, Henry’s turn will soon come) that he invented a language that challenges its ordinary use, but he suggests quite clearly that what he is aiming for through such remarks are not so much ordinary language, or even the language of scholars, as that of any thinker in love with ‘truth’ as James understands it: And this has to do not only with scientific truths. We cannot construct a sentence, we cannot even today pronounce a word, without accepting certain hypotheses which were created by our ancestors and which might have been very different from what they are. (CM, 257)

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Forging a language heavy with ‘very different hypotheses’ from those which govern our common language: this is the programme that would be imposed on anyone who would like to take up Bergson’s suggestions. If Félix Ravaisson is not one of them, it is clear, reading Bergson’s tribute to him at least, that he resembles them to the extent that he might be mistaken for one of them. No doubt the commentator forges, as often happens, his model in his own image (Bergson, it is said, confessed to having fairly ‘Bergsonised’ his subject), but it must be admitted that few philosophical works would be as helpful to his own interests. It is about Ravaisson in fact that he writes: ‘Throughout his whole work rings the affirmation that instead of diluting his thought in the general, the philosopher should concentrate it on the individual’ (CM, 266–7). It is useless to insist on the paradoxical and disturbing character (for a philosopher) of such an assertion: it is the exact opposite of a philosophical tradition which strives to be indebted as little as possible to the singular, and which never evokes the particular except as a starting point which is only convenient for moving towards the law, towards the universal proposition, towards the generally true statement, towards the idea, towards the noumenon, towards the thing in itself, and whose reflex, whose tacit injunction, is to forge the tools which make it as easy as possible to achieve this end. ‘To concentrate on the individual’ is in fact the opposite operation to what philosophers call ‘to subsume’, and which properly consists in placing the particular event or phenomenon under a general heading. But focusing on the individual is also (let us remember Laughter) the characteristic of a playwright – of any author, of any artist in general. And if Ravaisson is in Bergson’s view such a dear and precious philosopher, it is because his thought is impregnated through and through with the idea of the excellence of art – of its philosophical value, one might say. Few philosophers in fact would wholeheartedly subscribe to statements of this type – the following may be from Ravaisson, but it is also certainly from Bergson: From the contemplation of an antique marble can spring more concentrated truth, in the eyes of a real philosopher, than is to be found in the diffused state, in a whole philosophical treatise. The object of metaphysics is to recapture in individual existences and to follow even to the source from which it emanates the particular ray which, while it confers on each one its own particular shade, attaches it by that means to the universal light. (CM, 268)

The operation described here is indeed contrary to the ordinary. Instead of the philosopher rising from the singular object to its ideal being, from the example to the law that it illustrates, the artist, through a strictly opposite movement, goes back to the source, his reflex being not to turn towards the 82

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ heaven of ideas but towards the profundity of depth. The sentence I have quoted (it is not by Ravaisson!) is certainly much less explicit than mine: this is because Bergson maintains an ambiguity about the subject of the infinitives ‘to recapture’ [ressaisir] and ‘to follow’ [suivre]. The philosopher has certainly been named, but only to be sidelined (he is incapable of ‘concentrated truth’); the artist has not been named, but the antique marble was not carved by an idealistic theorist. ‘To recapture’ and ‘to follow’ ‘the particular ray’, such are the desirable movements . . . of metaphysics. From which one can deduce, even if the thing is not said clearly, either that the true philosopher must be an artist (and Ravaisson was one! A pupil of Chassériau, a friend of Ingres . . .), or that the artist is the true metaphysician. So much so that every statement that relates to art can be assigned to philosophy – and vice versa of course. When he wants to talk about the art of Leonardo da Vinci – officially this is da Vinci as interpreted by Ravaisson – Bergson writes for example: True art aims at portraying the individuality of the model and to that end it will seek behind the lines one sees the movement the eye does not see, behind the movement itself something even more secret, the original intention, the fundamental aspiration of the person: a simple thought equivalent to all the indefinite richness of form and color. (CM, 273)

One is struck by the similarity of the movement described here with the idea that Bergson regularly seeks to give of metaphysics or philosophy: thought is concerned above all with individuality which for thought is only the privileged access to underground movements, to this ‘original intention’ of the person – which so strongly resembles the intuition of the philosopher, and which the commentator has so much difficulty in grasping, even if he himself is a philosopher. The following sentence should therefore come as no surprise: ‘How can one help being struck by the resemblance between the aesthetics of Leonardo da Vinci and the metaphysics of Aristotle as interpreted by Ravaisson?’ (CM, 273–4). Here one passes from art to philosophy in such a gradual and at the same time so natural way that one hardly notices. One understands then (when one moves between paragraphs) that Leonardo was only there for Aristotle – and therefore, no doubt, Ravaisson was only there for Bergson.

The life and the work This discreet passage, which might go almost unnoticed, from one paragraph to the other, is also that which Ravaisson lived. In Bergson’s edifying reconstruction of an episode in his life, he recounts that Ravaisson, enamoured of 83

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ the plastic arts, sculpture in particular, and wanting to talk about it knowledgeably, decided to practise clay modelling so that he might finally acquire real know-how. ‘The opportunity soon presented itself for him to turn it to the advantage of art and even, by an imperceptible transition, of philosophy’ (CM, 292). This ‘imperceptible transition’ is of course the work of Bergson himself, who, in the form of a concerted allegory, makes a firm and well-­ argued proposition. The word allegory moreover describes the entire article that Bergson devotes to Ravaisson, each sentence of which is as valid for the former as it is for the latter, and in which everything that is said of art also applies to metaphysics, just as everything that is said of metaphysics applies to art. For example: The whole philosophy of Ravaisson springs from the idea that art is a figured metaphysics, that metaphysics is a reflection of art, and that it is the same intuition, variously applied, which makes the profound philosopher and the great artist. (CM, 274)

Let us therefore retain this, which is certainly an allegory but also clearly defines the analogy that we have not stopped meeting since we read Bergson’s propositions on art: the same intuition makes the profound philosopher and the great artist. It is not irrelevant that Bergson does not express himself here in his own name – that he lends to another what he perhaps could not say plainly (the first version of this text dates from 1904), or, to put it in his terms, that he ‘Bergsonises’ Ravaisson. Allegory – which I mean here in its etymological sense: everything that is said about one thing must be understood as also valid for another thing – is one of the innumerable methods used by Bergson to divert language, in this case so as to make it function according to criteria which leave open the possibility of equivocity. We must pay attention to another enunciative peculiarity of this text. Bergson calls it ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’, and he keeps to his programme. In the text he devotes to him, it is indeed a question of the life and work of Ravaisson – and of the relationship to one another the life and the work obviously had. Let us quickly note, before returning to it at greater length in the next chapter, that this relation is not very often the object of a question for philosophers. Illuminating the work of an artist by referring to their life, be they a poet, a musician or a sculptor, is in no way shocking; and if it is true that certain theoretical currents (structuralism for example), certain creators even, contest this way of considering works, it is no less the case that this attitude was a reaction to a practice which was perhaps not as old as art but which had been well established in the critical landscape since the nineteenth century. There is nothing of this kind in philosophy. 84

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers: the exciting title of Diogenes Laertius’s work is not very often a subject of reflection for teachers of philosophy. Just as the enunciative apparatus chosen by the philosophers whose texts they learn to read (dialogue, geometrical treatise, autobiography, aphorism, letters, etc.) is almost always held to be negligible – since it is judged to be independent of the thoughts and theoretical, epistemological and conceptual contributions that it allowed to develop – in the same way, their life may well provide a few stories, but these will be fundamentally unrelated, if not anecdotal, to their philosophy. A thinker thinks; they may have a personal life, but this is not important to clarifying their philosophy, which remains a purely mental matter. Abstract would be the word, so long as it is understood as abstracted from . . . (biography, time, the thousand and one circumstances that make up the fabric of a life). Certainly Bergson does not go so far as to say that Ravaisson’s thought can only be appreciated through a consideration of his life, the exercise of his talents and the weight of the encounters he made in artistic circles – but the fact is, as we have seen, that he speaks of all this and that when he arrives at what in his eyes constitutes Ravaisson’s outstanding merit, he does so in terms which allow one to imagine a individual and a unique life: Ravaisson took possession of himself, became master of his thought and his pen the day that this identity revealed itself clearly to his mind.The identification occurred the moment the two distinct currents carrying him toward art and philosophy merged in him. And the junction took place when the two geniuses who, in his eyes, represented what was most profound in philosophy and highest in art, Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci, seemed to him to interpenetrate and be animated with a common life. (CM, 274)

One will say that this is a reconstruction, probably plausible, but after all fictitious. And one would be right, in a way. Bergson cites no document, mentions no confidences or testimonies, that would support the hypothesis of this key moment, of the circumstances that made it possible. Fiction is one of the circumstances. But we should at least consider the hypothesis that far from contesting it, one might on the contrary argue that the philosopher can have recourse to fiction. In my opinion, this is what the apparently modest title that Bergson chooses in discussing his master allows. No doubt not because he knew him, but because the philosophy he professed indicated this personal path. There is indeed a certain coherence in evoking in a personal form the thought of a man for whom – to believe at least his most famous disciple – the border separating art from philosophy was so thin, and so indecisive; a man above all who revered Aristotle precisely because he was seeking ‘in the heart of individual beings, by an intuition of the mind, the characteristic thought impelling them’ (CM, 274). Ravaisson is himself, in this final text 85

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ of Creative Mind, an individual being within whose depths Bergson seeks to rediscover the ‘characteristic thought’ that animated him. This enunciative device, more complex than it seems, is a kind of homage, fervent yet discreet; but it is also the statement – or rather the implementation – of a firm theoretical determination. Ravaisson may have been – who knows? – an avatar for Bergson, who didn’t discourage such a conclusion. Jacques Chevalier, who re-edited this text in 1932, sheds light on this appropriation by suggesting ‘the only way to clarify the subject was by extending it’. Another delicate theme!

The philosopher and his model The reading of one philosopher by another is almost always a detournement. But this detournement is rarely admitted to. The philosopher as reader of another (the history of Western philosophy is perhaps only the interminable continuation of these readings, of the readings of these readings, and of comments on these readings of readings, ad infinitum) is a philosopher as much as he is a reader, and Bergson reading Ravaisson is all the more faithful to him through this detournement. What Ravaisson (perhaps) did not say but which Bergson lends to him becomes one of the building blocks for an edifice whose outlines Bergson probably did not yet see in 1904. The homage will have put him on the – on his – way. What he imputes to his master (‘Ravaisson took possession of himself, became master of his thought and his pen the day that this identity revealed itself clearly to his mind’), we might be entitled, after everything, to impute to Bergson himself, and to claim that the artist philosopher whom he likes to portray will have been for him not at all an alibi, but the material of a decisive proposition that few lived experiences apart from Ravaisson’s would have allowed him to articulate so firmly. Far from any dialectical process, ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’ makes it possible not to overcome, not to accommodate, still less to synthesise but to ‘reconcile’ the reputedly contradictory demands of art and philosophy in saying that they are not comparable, nor even complementary, but analogous (Bergson speaks here of the ‘relationship between the true and the beautiful, philosophy and art’, CM, 277). Only a ‘harmony sensitive to the heart’ (CM, 299) can water down the demands of the intelligence, for which the terms structuring such thoughts are decidedly ‘irreconcilable’. One will not be surprised that Bergson concludes his text by evoking the pitfall constituted in this type of configuration by the enunciative choices, inevitably unusual, which are forced to operate by this preference for the 86

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ harmonious coexistence of art and philosophy: ‘The language it speaks when it lends its voice to philosophy is not understood in the same way by everyone. Some think it vague, and so it is in what it expresses. Others feel it precise, because they experience everything it suggests’ (CM, 299). This is the statement of a difficult and demanding programme. How can we fail to see that this programme is as much that of a philosopher as of a writer worried about his methods, aware that, by attacking the enunciative apparatus (roughly logico-grammatical) of philosophy, he risks discrediting himself among philosophers? Which, as we know, did not happen infrequently . . . The admission of the ‘vague’ is not remarkable only because the word does not mix very well with philosophy, but because it is explicitly associated with expression. What the postulate of the analogy of art and philosophy proposes is therefore also that, with thought revealing itself through discourse, philosophy must renounce privileging what it says about itself in favour of taking into real and keen consideration what it does not say, and how the language it has forged will allow it to suggest the idea. This distinction between what is explicitly expressed, the content of thought, if you will, and what a language might suggest through the constraints of its function of expression is for Bergson fundamental. However, this very general claim would be difficult to make, or understand, without reference to poetry or music – to those arts characterised by formal invention. This principle serves as a guide for the reading Bergson undertakes of philosophers – whose work is approached like those of artists – and perhaps for the way in which they should be read; it also allows him to show, however approximately, his poetic philosophical ideal.

To Philosophise as an Artist One very often comes across, in the detours of a passage of Bergson, a paragraph, a page, which makes this distinction between what is said and the means used to say it the object of poetic considerations. It would be wrong to think that it is always related to art – the most striking formulation that he gives of this principle that I mention above is addressed to an audience of fellow teachers of philosophy – but it is true that art is most often associated with this theme. Moreover, the art in question is not always what one would expect. One of the first appearances of this theme in his work is related to comedy (and once again one is astonished that, rather than tragedy, or poetry, comedy is the genre most closely resembling philosophy). For example, in Laughter: An Essay on The Meaning of the Comic, we find this very enlightening focus on the rapport between comedy and language. Reviewing the different 87

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ types of comedy (gesture, situation, character, etc.), Bergson contests the category, however widely accepted, of ‘the comic in words’ (L, 103). At first, it is difficult to discern what is at stake in this dispute. It comes fairly early in Bergson’s oeuvre (the book is from 1899), at a time when the philosophical issues of expression are still far from having been formulated in a very articulate way. When one has in mind all the subsequent developments on the theme, one has the feeling, on reading these lines, that the allegorical principle, even if unconsciously, is already at work there. There is no question here of philosophical writing, but what is described, or postulated, is the possibility of the ‘creation’ of a language capable of freeing itself from its condition and of manifesting something that its ordinary use does not allow: We must make a distinction, however, between the comic expressed and the comic created by language. The former could, if necessary, be translated from one language into another, though at the cost of losing the greater portion of its significance when introduced into a fresh society different in manners, in literature, and above all in association of ideas. But it is generally impossible to translate the latter. It owes its entire being to the structure of the sentence or to the choice of the words. It does not set forth, by means of language, special cases of absentmindedness in man or in events. It lays stress on lapses of attention in language itself [les distractions du langage lui-même]. In this case, it is language itself that becomes comic. (L, 103–4)

The essential opposition, and one that Bergson will never renounce, would therefore put expression (‘the comic expressed [. . .] by language’) and creation (‘the comic created by language’) face to face. In a scarcely different form, one rediscovers here his fundamental preoccupation, compared above with that of Mallarmé, which consists in distinguishing between the social, useful and necessary function of language as communication and its creative or literary function. Mallarmé, for his part, referred to ‘this elementary use of discourse serving the universal reporting in which, except for literature, all genres of contemporary writing participate’ (Mallarmé 2007: 210; this is my emphasis, remembering that these lines were written soon after Time and Free Will and just before Laughter). What can, ‘if necessary’, be translated from one language to another – and a bilingual philosopher says this! – is the meaning, the content, in short everything for which language is the correct and undisguised means of expression; what is ‘impossible to translate’ (notice to Bergson’s translators!) is what depends on ‘the structure of the sentence or [. . .] the choice of the words’, in short, what depends on individual poetic decisions, taken by an artist anxious to make words say what they are not made for. Le distrait [The distracted one] would therefore be, could therefore be, the title of a comedy in which language is the main character (‘it is the 88

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ language itself that becomes comic’).2 Bergson goes so far as to say that this essential absent-mindedness [distraction] is the quintessential comic springboard, the condition of all comedy. This idea of ‘lapses of attention in language’ is remarkable (Mallarmé speaks, in the same period, of ‘language’s deficiencies’, and holds that the function of poets is to ‘make up’ for it (2007: 209)). It does not seem to me to be an exaggeration to say that this is the principle of Bergson’s formal initiatives, of the tireless injunctions and recommendations that he addresses to his colleagues, to his readers, to anyone to whom he wishes to bring joy through philosophy – it is his distinctive originality. Even if his intention in Laughter is not to formulate a programme intended for philosophers, it is remarkable that, in order to characterise comedy, he is led into offering a description of language that will justify opening up another way, outside the ordinary one, of philosophising: the structure of sentences, the choice of words, are then the daily bread of comic poets; if we add to them the figures, the rhythms, the echoes, the puns, the alliterations, we will have an idea of the formal task incumbent on the metaphysician. If the ‘lapses of attention in language’ – a decidedly luminous formula – are the subject of all authentic comedy, if they are (according to Mallarmé) the very condition of poetry, they are also an opportunity for philosophy to philosophise according to a mode – finally! – that corresponds to something other than the simple, useful, functional expression that does not concern it at all. It is perhaps not so surprising, after all, that comedy is more easily compared to philosophical invention than tragedy. Bergson says of comedy that it is ‘the only one of all the arts that aims at the general; so that once this objective has been attributed to it, we have said all that it is and all that the rest cannot be’ (L, 149, Bergson’s emphasis). Besides its verbal preoccupations, comedy therefore shares its general aim with philosophy. Bergson goes so far as to say that on this point it differs not only from tragedy, but from all the other arts: To prove that such is really the essence of comedy, and that it is in this respect opposed to tragedy, drama and the other forms of art, we should begin by defining art in its higher forms: then, gradually coming down to comic poetry, we should find that this latter is situated on the border-line between art and life. (L, 150)

Tragedy is what it is because the playwright, being an artist, sees what ordinary people do not see, and has unmediated access to the realities of 2. [This is a reference to the comedy Le Distrait, by the seventeenth-century French playwright Jean-François Régnard, which is mentioned by Bergson in Laughter. Trans.]

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ consciousness and of being: ‘What drama goes forth to discover and brings to light, is a deep-seated reality that is veiled from us, often in our own interests, by the necessities of life’ (L, 157–8). Bergson never mentions a particular use of grammar or language in connection with drama: a ‘lapse of attention in language’ is not at all what it does. On the contrary, it is what the comic poet does; and it is also, which is more astonishing, the condition of possibility of a philosophical language finally freed from spatiality. Basically, it is from duration that language is distracted. The philosopher in search of a means of expression that allows him to ‘make up’ for this lapse that is consubstantial with language is therefore, in his way, a comic author . . .

Art, empathy; metaphysics, sympathy Perhaps it is when Bergson speaks of metaphysics that he comes closest to art. Let us say rather that undoubtedly nowhere do we perceive this more clearly in his work than in the ‘deep affinities’ that philosophy maintains with art. The ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ is from this point of view an essential text; one often cites it when one wants to recall the main principles of Bergson’s thought and reveal the originality of his contribution. It is remarkable that in such an important text art plays such a prominent role. My view is that without this reference to art, Bergson would literally not have been able to say what, for him, metaphysics is. What it is therefore a question of thinking, in a text like this one, is the closeness of the connection that exists between the example and the subject, or more broadly between the thought and the figures used to express it. The first version of the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ appeared in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in 1903, shortly after Laughter, and shortly before Creative Evolution; Bergson, who considers it important, collects it in 1934 in La pensée et le mouvant (Creative Mind). He then delivers the text without modifications, contenting himself with recalling, in an initial note, the context of its first publication. He takes the opportunity to distinguish, once again, between two kinds of knowledge: one which ‘arranges its object with measurement in view’, the other which ‘frees itself of any thought of relation and comparison in order to be in sympathy with reality’ (CM, 305). He calls the first science, the second metaphysics. It is obviously metaphysics that calls for art – or art, metaphysics. The word sympathy comes up often in Bergson’s work, and we also find it in the texts which speak of metaphysics (whether the word is pronounced or not) or of art: it designates an immediate knowledge, a kind of mental fusion of consciousness with the object. 90

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ The word empathy hardly existed in 1903. It was, it seems, created by Robert Vischer in 1873 – the French word ‘empathie’ is the accepted translation of his Einfühlung – to designate precisely the type of relation that a spectator, a reader or a listener might have with a work of art so as to have access to it, by immersing oneself in it. Freud, as we know, will not take long to seize upon it; we find it under his pen from 1905 in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (the comic again. . .). Bergson clearly does not know the word – the best proof is that he does not use it, which he would not have failed to do if he had known it. Not only because empathy means exactly what he means by immediate knowledge – or metaphysics; but also because the term was coined by a philosopher curious about aesthetics. Originally the word is indeed at the crossroads of philosophy and art, which is precisely Bergson’s point of view. It is remarkable that, without using the word, he offers a description of metaphysics which is inspired by it, and which therefore offers an important place to art. Since Bergson is not always disdainful of the play on words, on letters, on sounds – it is not impossible that, had he known the word ‘empathetic’, he would in any case have preferred the word ‘sympathetic’. In French ‘sympathique’ is a near anagram of ‘métaphysique’ . . . The definition he gives to begin with of the two types of knowledge is interesting because, without explicitly speaking about art, it sets up the device that will allow it to be taken as a point of reference throughout the essay. The first way of knowing a thing, says Bergson, ‘implies going all around it, the second [which is precisely sympathy], entering into it’ (CM, 187). A word of commentary on each of these two definitions. Regarding the first, there is a figure of rhetoric which consists precisely in making a detour to designate what is difficult: rather than naming his stepmother by name, in Phedra, by Racine, Hippolyte speaks of ‘the daughter of Minos and of Pasiphaë’. Periphrasis is, precisely, and etymologically, what makes it possible to go ‘all around’ a thing, that is to say, to designate it by one or other of its characteristics, its qualities. This definition of the first type of knowledge, without being definitively devaluing, nevertheless cannot satisfy a mind wishing to grasp an object in itself, for what it is, and not for any of its attributes. If it is the absolute, if it is the immediate that one is enamoured of (and one knows that these two words would define metaphysics well enough for Bergson), periphrasis, which necessarily implies mediation, can obviously work satisfactorily. We must very quickly add that to speak is to periphrase if it is true that common language is, in this extended sense of the word, periphrasis, which obviously makes it unsuitable for metaphysics. Regarding this first type of knowledge, Bergson specifies that it ‘depends on the view-point chosen and the symbols employed’ (CM, 187). That’s why he 91

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ can say ‘it stops at the relative’. ‘Conceptual expression’, let us remember, is for him ‘of necessity symbolical’. We can see that it, too, is disqualified from the metaphysical enterprise. The second way of knowing consists of a kind of immersion, of fusional diving. To designate this metaphysical operation, Bergson uses from the first lines of the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ the words ‘coincide’ and ‘coincidence’, but he also sometimes speaks of fusion, even of confusion. It is remarkable that the philosopher has no other tools than periphrases, or metaphors, to advance on a ground where symbolism is banished. ‘Periphery’, ‘metaphors’, as much to say ‘figures’ – or ‘tropes’, or ‘turns’, two words which one uses to say, and which say better than a long discourse on the matter, that to figure is to ‘go all around’ the thing. If the philosopher, whose condition is verbal, is doomed to periphrasis, or to the figure, this does not mean that the knowledge whose idea he wishes to convey is necessarily so. But this implies that there is no ready-made language device for the metaphysical operation. This knowledge, Bergson adds, ‘is taken from no view-point and rests on no symbol’, which is why he says, ‘it attains the absolute’ (CM, 187). Hence the importance of art in the philosophical exposition to which this double definition serves as a springboard. This is not simply a way of putting things: art is present from the beginning to the end of the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’. The text begins as if the philosopher could do without evoking an aesthetic practice, and it uses a first example that Bergson borrows from science, and more precisely from physics: ‘Take, for example, the movement of an object in space’ (CM, 187). The movement in question is not the point, as we can see. This is just one example. An example through which Bergson first tries to give an idea of the absolute he has in mind. He very quickly gets rid of the idea that we can apprehend this movement from the outside, ‘[according to a] system of axes or reference points’ (CM, 187); and he recommends, for more accuracy and truth, that it be grasped from ‘within’ (CM, 188). From this moment, metaphors invade the text. They are openly accepted and the narrator makes no effort to hide the need for them: ‘I attribute to the mobile an inner being and, as it were, states of soul’ (CM, 187). We can indeed speak of a narrator: he has his desires, his dissatisfactions, his reflexes – he also has his mental, emotional, imaginary life: I am in harmony [sympathise] with these states and enter into them by an effort of imagination. [. . .] And what I feel will depend neither on the point of view I adopt toward the object, since I am in the object itself, nor on the symbols by which I translate it, since I have renounced all translation in order to possess the original. (CM, 187–8)

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ If Bergson has little difficulty in saying what is involved with an external grasping, we see that he accumulates in order to speak of an ‘absolute’ hold (this is the last word of the paragraph) a vocabulary, one could almost say a scenario, which in relation to this first part of the statement, somewhat detonates: the body in movement has states of mind, we sympathise with them, we insert ourselves into them through the imagination – a new faculty of knowing. It should come as no surprise that this first attempt to express movement in absolute terms is followed by a second – what I called in the first chapter, a correction. One should not be surprised that this first correction develops from a second example, this time borrowed from the world of art and more precisely from the creation of a novel. ‘Or again, take a character whose adventures make up the subject of a novel . . .’ – so begins the correction. It must be understood: it is no more a question of saying what ‘the movement of an object in space’ is than what the deeds and actions of a hero in a novel are or could be. The appeal to physics and then to literary creation opens up two avenues, two biases no doubt, for saying something else. Another thing that is never named except by one or another of its attributes: ‘absolute’, ‘original’, ‘simple and indivisible’; never glossed except by periphrases: ‘what is properly itself ’, ‘what constitutes its essence’ (CM, 187); or by metaphors: ‘the piece of gold for which one can never make up the change’ (CM, 190).The text deals of course with an object that its title designates, but an integral part of this object is the impossibility of naming it otherwise than obliquely. The variety of means implemented (examples, figures) is both an indication of the acuity of the question and a form of solution. Speaking of poetics, or of expression, yes, we are talking about metaphysics (‘it’s the same thing to talk about technique or metaphysics’, Roland Barthes will say in one of the Critical Essays, on ‘La vie de Rancé’ (Barthes 1972)). Let us say it right away, art is treated at the beginning of the text almost exactly like the movement of an object in space: for Bergson it is a way of understanding an impossibility (say the object of metaphysics) and to say in what terms this impossibility can be formulated. The two artistic activities evoked successively after movement in space (immediately after the novel, Bergson takes the example of photography) can therefore give the idea of the impossible, rather than circumventing it. The end of the text, on the contrary, takes up the example not exactly of the character in a novel, but of literary composition, an exercise presented no longer as a means of saying the impossible but of decreeing the possibility of ‘immediately [placing] oneself in the very heart of the subject’ (CM, 235). We can therefore read the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ as the indication of a voyage which goes from the statement 93

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ of a problem to its resolution. The story thread is never let go along the way. The novel therefore makes it possible to pose the problem, to take the path that leads to its solution, and finally, to reveal it. I will be careful not to take the step of saying that this ‘Introduction’ is a story, but there is little doubt in my eyes that storytelling does not only play an exemplary role in it. The ‘effort of the imagination’ (CM, 187) mentioned in the paragraph on the movement of a body in space allows the transition through this first correction, in which the character of the novel is the main protagonist. Or again, take a character whose adventures make up the subject of a novel. The novelist may multiply traits of character, make his hero speak and act as much as he likes: all this has not the same value as the simple and indivisible feeling I should experience if I were to coincide for a single moment with the personage himself. The actions, gestures and words would then appear to flow naturally, as though from their source. (CM, 188)

Coinciding ‘with the personage himself ’ corresponds to ‘I will be what the object is in itself ’ in the previous paragraph on capturing the movement of a body. But ‘to coincide with’ is not exactly ‘to be in’. This is how the character of the novel constitutes, in relation to movement, a step towards the elucidation of the problem.The states of the body considered were successive, whereas the ‘actions, gestures and words’ of the character in the novel are, so to speak, his very person. He retains his identity: his character, his being endure whatever his attitude, whatever he says or thinks. A word he says, the description of a feeling he experiences, will be the various manifestations of the novelist’s idea of him. Each step of the narration allows him to emerge immediately: by coincidence, says Bergson, ‘the character would be given to me all at once in its entirety’ (CM, 188). It is precisely this use of the character of a novel that constitutes the importance and value of this paragraph. Bergson subtly alternates the indicative and the conditional tenses.The indicative is used to express all that concerns unsatisfactory ways of saying and doing: ‘I get a different point of view regarding the person with every added detail I am given’; ‘All the traits which describe it to me, yet which can only enable me to know it’; ‘Symbols and points of view then place me outside it; they give me only what it has in common with others’ (CM, 188); etc. The conditional is entrusted with the statement of the metaphysical ideal: ‘the simple and indivisible feeling I should experience if I were to coincide for a single moment with the personage himself ’; ‘They would no longer be accidents’; ‘the thousand and one incidents which make it manifest [. . .], would, on the contrary, seem to me to fall away from it’; ‘Only by coinciding with the person itself would I possess the absolute’ (CM, 188–9).

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Photography and translation This distinction between what is and what could be is indeed, at this stage of Bergson’s metaphysical meditation, somewhat mysterious. How might it be explained that the same character can sometimes be given in its entirety and sometimes only be seen from afar and from the outside? Looking at it a little more closely, we see that the indicative is more the work of the novelist, or of ‘they’ (‘they give me only’, etc.), whereas the conditional rather concerns the narrator – I use the word for convenience but I realise that it is very imperfect. We must therefore admit that the novel is not given here as an unsurpassable example of what should be done, or of that which one would benefit from imitating, but as an indication of a mental, perhaps even epistemological, attitude that one could adopt in relation to the narrator. In relation to the narrator, in other words, who despite everything is also a reader. The coincidence that Bergson speaks of, theorists of reading call ‘identification’. The novelist is not proposed as a model of a metaphysician, but he offers a means of imagining what it would take to become one: to behave before the world like a reader before a novelistic universe. Or again: the work of the novelist will bear all its fruits only if, faced with what the novelist creates, the reader agrees to forget themself so as to lose (immerse) themself in the heart of the fictional world. The following paragraph proposes a series of new corrections, as if, with the character of the novel, all had not yet been said of the mental revolution necessary for the advent of metaphysics: Though all the photographs of a city taken from all possible points of view indefinitely complete one another, they will never equal in value that dimensional object [exemplaire en relief], the city along whose streets one walks. (CM, 189)

If this correction is necessary, it is because it adds a new precision to the previous one: metaphysics is not cubism! The multiplication of points of view of the object cannot take the place of the object. The word ‘example’ [exemplaire] reverses, so to speak, the interpretation that could be made of this reference to photographic art: it is not the photographer’s practices and achievements that are exemplary [exemplaires], even if, of course, he can print many copies [exemplaires]; rather, it is the real. And this real only exists in a single copy [exemplaire]. The play on words seems intended to me. It is impossible to give worthy ‘examples’ of a reality that is itself exemplary. Here one touches on what Bergson sometimes calls ‘empiricism’. One understands from this passage why metaphysics and empiricism, far from contradicting 95

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ one another, on the contrary reinforce one another: true metaphysics makes the true experience of the true world. The ‘dimensional’ [en relief], like the promenade, are there to express this. The translation of the photographic gesture is a two-dimensional image, into which one can only immerse oneself through imagination. The object of metaphysics is three-dimensional. I don’t walk around in the photographs of a city; whereas in the city that was photographed, I can wander, stray, lose myself – I am among it, I am part of it. All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original. (CM, 189)

This new correction is also, as we will have noted, a theory of correction. The practice of translation is certainly not taken as a chance reference by the bilingual philosopher Bergson. The difference between translation and photography is, of course, first of all that the translation is verbal and in this respect is similar to the writing practice of the philosopher. But the most important difference is undoubtedly the type of multiplication to which each of these activities gives rise: the photographic images [clichés] ‘indefinitely complete one another’, yet without their multiplication bringing those looking at them closer to the object; each of them only gives a ‘view’. Translations of the same text do not complement each other – they correct each other. It would be wrong to overlook this difference. Bergson himself is a practitioner of correction. The passage we are reading – like many other texts, written in the same spirit, according to the same poetic principle – is a series of corrections which give ‘an increasingly faithful image of the poem which they translate’. This almost asymptotic movement Bergson sometimes calls ‘approximation’, and it is precisely this word that he uses when he wants to give an idea of the impossibility of grasping philosophical intuition. With intuition indeed, ‘the whole is brought together into a single point, which we feel could be ever more closely approached even though there is no hope of reaching it completely’ (CM, 128, my emphasis). This warning applies first of all to the commentator of course, but the philosopher himself is also subject to this condition. He multiplies books, articles, lectures, in the hope that he will finally manage to meet what incites and moves him. But he is, like the translator of the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, condemned to perpetual correction, to infinite rectification. All in all, he will never have done anything but approach, ‘convey[ing] with an increasing approximation the simplicity of his original intuition’ (CM, 128, my emphasis). There is very little difference in substance between this phenomenon of multiple corrections of successive translations and the condition of a philosopher driven, as we remember, to ‘correct his formula, then to correct 96

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ his correction: thus, from theory to theory, correcting when he thought he was completing, what he has accomplished’ (CM, 128). I do not do violence, I believe, to Bergson by associating his evocation of translation with his work as a writer and teacher. In the lines that follow these considerations on the infinity of translations, he is quite close to doing it himself: If I wish to explain to someone who does not know Greek the simple impression that a line of Homer leaves upon me, I shall give the translation of the line, then comment on my translation, then I shall develop my commentary, and from explanation to explanation I shall get closer to what I wish to express. (CM, 189)

The presence of the words ‘commentary’ and ‘explanation’, which are themselves subject to this movement of infinite epanorthosis, does not deter us from seeing in these few lines a description of the work, or rather of the conditions of the process of writing, to which Bergson devoted himself all his life. What is certain in any case is that we are once again in the presence of a text which finds it impossible to dissociate its strictly philosophical purpose from the question of its expression. I immediately correct this formulation, which poorly accounts for Bergson’s original contribution to philosophy: no discourse (no discourse of his, in any case) can rightly be said to be ‘strictly philosophical’ if it does not include in its process this reflexivity which we never cease to notice, as we progress in our readings, is always at work – so much so that the idea necessarily comes to us that it is the work. Because this critical focus on the textuality deployed for the expression of thought is, of course, itself philosophical. Without it, let’s say it boldly, Bergson’s words would literally have no object. The end of this important text returns via a final correction to literary composition. It is the art of the novelist which seems to be taken as a reference this time – not the Proustian-type novelist, with whom Bergson has so often been compared, but the naturalist novelist, for whom the word ‘experiential’ is as important as it is for him: ‘metaphysics has nothing in common with a generalization of experience, and yet it could be defined as the whole of experience (l’expérience intégrale)’ (CM, 236) (these are the last words of the text).

On literary composition This demand for experimentation, investigation, for a good deal of preparatory work, also aims to move away from an overly abstract idea of metaphysics,

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ as a superficial reading of the article’s many aesthetic considerations might suggest: Let it be said, in conclusion, that there is nothing mysterious about this faculty [intuition]. Whoever has worked successfully at literary composition well knows that when the subject has been studied at great length, all the documents gathered together, all notes taken, something more is necessary to get down to the work of composition itself: an effort, often painful, immediately to place oneself in the very heart of the subject and to seek as deeply as possible an impulsion which, as soon as found, carries one forward of itself. (CM, 235)

Literary composition is not exactly art. But it succeeds in combining what art alone struggles to bring together: methodical and reasoned work at the same time as a decisive mental relaxation which should lead the artist to the ‘heart of the subject’. It is therefore the reference to this effort by the artist which has made it possible to write the last word of a text which, moreover, theorises the inexpressible (‘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 consequently inexpressible in it’ (CM, 190, Bergson’s emphasis)). If this work of literary composition is not what Bergson practises in theory, it must be admitted that it closely resembles it. He speaks of it moreover as if he himself practised it regularly, and even ‘with success’, as if it were his daily bread as a philosopher. His evocation of it does not fail to specify that this writing (like his, therefore, as one continues to verify) involves self-reflection: ‘it [the metaphysical impulse] develops, analyzes itself in terms whose enumeration follows on without limit; the farther one goes the more is disclosed about it; never will one manage to say everything’ (CM, 235). And this unequivocally attests to kinship: ‘What in this case matches the notes and documents of the literary composition, is the collection of observations and experiences gathered by positive science and above all by a reflection of the mind on the mind’ (CM, 236, my emphasis).This ‘reflection of the mind on the mind’ necessarily evokes ‘the thought of thought’, a formula through which Aristotle defined philosophy that Bergson liked to cite. None of Bergson’s texts say better than ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ that philosophy should go ‘in the same direction as art’. The border between art and philosophy has never been so thin, so indecisive as in this quasi-programmatic text. When we read the last lines we are not quite sure whether it is one or the other: if one turns around suddenly to seize the impulsion felt, it slips away; for it was not a thing but an urge to movement, and although indefinitely extensible,

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ it is simplicity itself. Metaphysical intuition seems to be something of the same kind. (CM, 235–6)

This ambiguity, or at least difficulty, in distinguishing art and philosophy in many of Bergson’s texts does not prevent one from reading texts that were not necessarily written with the idea of confusing them in parallel. It is unlikely that, in writing the essay that became Laughter, Bergson thought of saying anything about the writing of philosophers.Yet certain later texts, written and published fifteen, twenty or even thirty years later make art and philosophy strangely resonate.When, so many years apart, the same terms, the same metaphors are used to talk about art – even if it is only art – and philosophy – even if it is only philosophy – it is difficult to resist the temptation of allegory, and to not read them as if the oldest were, in this work which has never ceased to question itself on the language proper to philosophical practice, advanced signals of the theses that Bergson will formulate for example in Mind Energy or in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Because such is the ultimate translation of this injunction, despite everything that is unusual, given to the philosopher to orient his research ‘in the same direction as art’: to answer it, he will have to fabricate, with his hands and for his own ends, a tool of expression that will function like the one used by artists – poets and novelists are not necessarily the best models, since, like the philosopher, they use words. But even in this case, which borders on his own, Bergson suggests possible biases. At the time of Laughter, he did not yet explicitly link questions of art and philosophy. In an astonishing page (L, 154–6), which is apparently not very concerned with the meaning of the comic, he offers a theory of aesthetic language whose terms will hardly vary over time and which will be of use to him later, without major modifications, as a way of offering the philosopher something like a poetic art. As we will see, he characterises each field of art according to that of the five senses by which ‘the artist [is] usually wedded to art’ (L, 155), because the matter is above all that of the relationship that thought can maintain with perception. There is art when and only when ‘the soul no longer cleave[s] to action by any of its perceptions’ (L, 154). I would not take the trouble to go into the detail of this argument if the terms of the problem as Bergson poses it were not so close to those which arise for the metaphysical-minded philosopher. When he imagines a state in which perception is in fact disconnected from thought, Bergson says, for example, that such a soul would be that ‘of an artist such as the world has never yet seen’ (L, 154). Of this utopia it is perhaps not entirely unreasonable to think that it also designates – since it will designate it almost term for term a few years later – metaphysics, with which 99

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ he will not fail to closely associate artistic activity. Each of the arts mentioned will bring to the enterprise, which will soon be called metaphysics, a specific and precious contribution – but it will never be possible for a single artist to combine all these qualities, to implement all these virtualities at the same time. Indeed, the world has never seen such an artist before – by which we have to understand: an artist who has all at once the faculties of seeing like a painter, of saying without mediation like a poet, of grasping the rhythm of life itself like a musician. It is useful, I think, to examine the way in which Bergson speaks of each of these arts, since their reunion – utopian, let us repeat it with him – will come about precisely in metaphysics.

‘We artists . . .’ The essence of art The painter is given to see, through colours and shapes, ‘the inner life of things’, which he will insinuate ‘[l]ittle by little [. . .] into our own perception, baffled though we may be at the outset’ (L, 155), thus revealing nature. The poet’s talent is to provide access to states of the soul, to the ‘thousand rudimentary actions’ that are feelings; the use he makes of words provides precious information about what a language suitable for metaphysics might be: ‘by rhythmical arrangement of words, which thus become organised and animated with a life of their own, they tell us – or rather suggest – things that speech was not calculated to express’ (L, 156, my emphasis). We know that this dream of the deviation of language is the primary impetus of Bergson’s philosophical enterprise, and we have seen that the Author’s Preface to his first book is already calling for it. It is tasked here to the poet. This should not prevent us from hearing it with a philosophical ear, because what the existence of poetry makes manifest is that there is indeed a way – it is creative – to use language, so to speak, against itself. It is towards such a use of language that the metaphysician must work. If they managed to use words as the poet does, the question of expression would become moot, since only suggestion would then matter. As for the art of the musician, Bergson teaches us that, were such a practice even possible, it would be less valuable than one which could do without words: the musician ‘delve[s] yet deeper still’ than the poet, he says. Because what the musician grasps, which is infinitely precious, ‘has nothing in common with language’: these are ‘certain rhythms of life and breath that are closer to man than his inmost feelings’ (L, 156). The impregnable merit of music is to allow us to penetrate into the living heart of things, to force it 100

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ upon our attention, to ‘compel us, willy-nilly, to fall in like passers-by who join in a dance’ (L, 156–7). Art, in short, ‘whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music’ works to ‘bring us face to face with reality itself ’ (L, 157). One remembers that this is also the task of metaphysics and that if these two tasks are not exactly comparable, they are nevertheless analogous. It is remarkable in any case that, even if metaphysics is not the object of Laughter, the book provides material for thinking about it that Bergson will reemploy without major changes nearly thirty years later, in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; and that his reflections on art focus above all on their respective modes of expression. It would doubtless not be correct to say that the main problem of metaphysics is that of its expression, but there is no doubt that, so long as this problem remains unsolved, there can be no question of metaphysics except in the conditional, in an indirect and figurative language, inspired by that of artists – whether these artists use words or not. One would hardly find in Bergson a discussion of art that does not have the question of expression for one of its subjects. In The Two Sources, for example (TS, 34–7), it is related to emotion, which, as usual, pushes the intelligence to its limits, ‘vitalising’ the intellectual data with which it aspires to being intermixed. It is emotion, Bergson goes so far as to say, that compels ‘the enunciation of the problem to expand into its solution’ (TS, 34). This formula is immediately followed by a short discussion which relates less to art than to the difficulty of expression which it naturally overcomes: ‘And what about literature and art? A work of genius is in most cases the outcome of an emotion, unique of its kind, which seemed to baffle expression, and yet which had to express itself ’ (TS, 34). Art can do what ordinary language cannot, and that is obviously why it is so precious. Now, why should what is possible for an artist not be possible for a philosopher? Language is apparently not so fixed that it cannot be, so to speak, turned against itself, in twists which, without disfiguring it, allow it to function for a purpose other than expression. Two cases are to be distinguished, of which only the second is of interest to art – or philosophy. To convey this, one will not be surprised that Bergson returns once again to literary composition: Anyone engaged in writing has been in a position to feel the difference between an intelligence left to itself and that which burns with the fire of an original and unique emotion, born of the identification of the author with his subject, that is to say of intuition. In the first case the mind cold-hammers the materials, combining together ideas long since cast into words and which society supplies in a solid form. In the second, it would seem that the solid materials supplied by intelligence first melt and mix, then solidify again into fresh ideas now shaped by the creative mind itself. (TS, 34)

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ It is not – not yet – a question of writing philosophy; but we see that all the conditions are met for it to be thought of in the new terms Bergson calls for. Textual moments when the materials provided by intelligence ‘solidify into ideas’ are not uncommon in this work; it should probably even be said that the entire work is written according to this principle. In any case, we see that these textual experiences are the result of work and that this work, like all work, involves effort, perhaps even meticulous effort. The whole difficulty lies in bringing together the words that exist before thought – those in the dictionary, which serve as tools for ‘universal reporting’ – with these ideas for the expression of which they are clearly not made. If these ideas find words already existing which can express them, for each of them this seems a piece of unexpected good luck; and, in truth, it has often been necessary to assist fortune, and strain the meaning of a word, to mould it to the thought. In that event the effort is painful and the result problematical. But it is in such a case only that the mind feels itself, or believes itself, to be creative. (TS, 34, my emphasis)

This explains the paradoxical comment: ‘the writer’s art consists above everything in making us forget that he is using words’ (ME, 57). This ‘straining’, which we now understand should be a methodical principle of writing, can take various forms (sound, etymological, rhythmic), but all are related to art and creation. And if the mind of the philosopher does not necessarily feel or believe itself to be a ‘creator’, this seems to be out of modesty or discretion, since his gestures and sentences obey the rules of the art. In a remarkable passage from Mind Energy, Bergson formulates in hardly different terms the formal requirement that must govern the enterprise of writing philosophy. Here we find not only the need to subvert language, to make people forget that the material we use is verbal, but also – how could it be considered surprising by now? – the claim of art.‘In this consists the whole art of writing’, he says. ‘In this’? What does this mean? The answer unequivocally indicates that it is indeed the writing of philosophers that is in question here: ‘when we try to seize hold of our thought in order to grasp it all living and make it pass, still living, into the soul of another . . .’ (ME, 56–7). We know this ‘we’, it is the subject of the Author’s Preface to Time and Free Will, and it is the first word in all of Bergson’s work. It does not designate the common people – only, among them, those spirits who, careless to communicate the content of ‘thought itself ’, on the contrary attach themselves to grasping its movement, the ‘states’, the ‘directions’; Bergson at one point says, so as to designate this group: ‘such of us as she [nature] has made artists’ (L, 155).This ‘us’ is held to whenever he undertakes, whether teaching or publishing, to transmit his proposals, his hypotheses, to share his thoughts. Once again, the question concerns the adequate expression, the right language and 102

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ words to use; and it is remarkable that it is asked in the passage below about the philosophical gesture itself: The words may then have been well chosen, they will not convey the whole of what we wish to make them say if we do not succeed by the rhythm, by the punctuation, by the relative lengths of the sentences and parts of the sentences, by a particular dancing of the sentence [toute la chorégraphie du discours], in making the reader’s mind, continually guided by a series of nascent movements, describe a curve of thought and feeling analogous to that we our selves describe. (ME, 56–7)

Words as they have come down to us do not suit the philosopher: their logic and their functioning make them ill-adapted to art as well as for a thought willing to work ‘in the same direction as art’. The task of ‘the writer’ is certainly not to augment them, but to make them appear in a new, creative configuration, in which the rhythms, the sounds where they are made to resonate, will be worth more than the words themselves, and where the punctuation will no longer have to account for the syntax. With regard to the expression ‘choreography of the discourse’ – let us note in passing that it constitutes, from the pen of a philosopher, a rather unusual claim! – the word ‘choreography’ matters more than that of ‘discourse’. Choreography is precisely what prevents words from being perceived and functioning as discourse. Words have nothing to say – for there is nothing to say, there is only suggestion. This work of suggestion is directed at the reader who does not have to understand, or learn, but to follow the writer’s ‘curve of thought and feeling’. The novel formal work that Bergson recommends is therefore concerned with working towards a conformity between what the writer describes and the effect it may have on a reader. If Bergson’s texts were to be read according to this poetic logic, care should be taken not to consider them as an assembly of words reduced to their signifying function (since ‘the words, taken individually, no longer count’ (ME, 57)), but as a verbal device capable of producing not within the mind but throughout the whole person an empathic disposition which would make the reader the analogue of the philosopher.The ideal reading situation is one where ‘there is nothing left but the flow of meaning which runs through the words, nothing but two minds which, without intermediary, seem to vibrate directly in unison with one another’ (ME, 57). The situation is one of ‘communication’, if you will, but on condition of hearing the word as in the expression ‘communicating a movement’: the philosophical text of course would be this device of words allowing the movement of the writer’s thought, or feeling, to be communicated as such to his reader. Might one say of the philosopher who works rhythmically and choreographically that he is a musician? Yes and no. What Bergson describes is not 103

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ exactly the art of the musician, ‘it is somewhat like the art of the musician’ (ME, 57, my emphasis). We can see the common points, but what are the differences? ‘[B]ut do not believe that such music is simply addressed to the ear, as is usually supposed.’ One doesn’t talk so much about art as about thought, ‘we are dealing with something quite other than a material harmony of sounds’. The word harmony, like rhythm and choreography, does belong to the musical register, but there is harmony and harmony. The one to which the philosopher aspires and works ‘is a certain correspondence between the comings and goings of his mind and the phrasing of his speech, a correspondence so perfect that the waves of his thought, borne by the sentence, stir us sympathetically [communiquent à la nôtre]’ (ME, 57). Here again the sentence describes what must be done at the same time as it does it: ‘us’ [la nôtre] also designates the thought of the philosopher (it is they who speak, who write, who say they speak, say that they write) as well as that of the reader (perceiving this wave or signal which they do not themselves emit). By virtue of the mere word ‘ours’, the empathy in question is in fact realised. Bergson adds to this description, so precise and so rigorous, a particular remark. It is given as proof of what he claims, but it might also characterise the philosophical text; in any case, it gives useful information to his readers, and to his translators: A foreigner, however trained his ear may be in music, will not recognize the difference between the prose we find musical and that which is not, between what is perfectly written in our language [en français] and what is but approximately so, evident proof that we are dealing with something quite other than a material harmony of sounds. (ME, 57)

A remark that’s difficult to interpret, to translate in Bergson’s own words. It seems one has to understand that the translator-philosopher doesn’t attempt to ‘render’ in his own language, whatever it may be, what is of the order of acoustics or sound harmony, and that he should be, as a good philosopher, sensitive above all – in fact, exclusively – to the conceptual or speculative content of the statement. This can be understood in two ways. Either the translator, even as a philosopher, is ‘deaf ’ to the musicality of the text being translated, and is insensitive to the quality, or even perhaps the correctness, of what he is translating, and so will not bother to give his reader in the translated language an idea of the language spoken by the philosopher whom he translates. Or else this musicality is intrinsic to the discourse, it can never be added as an ornament or a means of seduction, to a thought which is, so to speak, woven from it. I lean of course, with Bergson, towards the second hypothesis.

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Bergson translator It should never be forgotten for long that Bergson is a bilingual philosopher, and that although he wrote most of his work in French, he also lectured and wrote articles in English, which he then translated, adapted, modified, even rewrote himself. A few remarks, a few notes from him, admittedly scattered, testify to his interest in this question of translation – and to what he no doubt considers, in the very principle of this operation, as the inevitability of a loss, or at least an approximation. We know, for example, that he read William James, that he corresponded with him, discussing both James’s work and his own, and that he even wrote, on the occasion of its translation into French (1911), a preface to Pragmatism (a text collected later in Creative Mind, ‘On the Pragmatism of William James’). I will cite two remarks from this preface. The first concerns an English verb (to experience [English in the original]) that Bergson is careful not to translate by using a single verb which corresponds exactly to it. This is what he says about James’s conception of truth: In English: ‘For him those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought’ (CM, 253). In French this becomes: ‘Celles des vérités qu’il nous importe le plus de connaître sont, pour lui, des vérités qui ont été senties et vécues avant d’être pensées’ (PM, 244), where ‘experienced’ is translated by ‘vécues’ (‘lived’). He does not allow himself to justify his abstention from ‘faire l’expérience’ (for example), neither through his knowledge of James’s language nor because of any musicality to which he would be keen to remain faithful; he is content to quote one of James’s commentators (Émile Boutroux) who, in a very Bergsonian way, draws the attention of his readers to the false friendship, for a careless or poorly informed French mind, of the two words ‘experience’ and ‘expérience’. They are indeed different, in spite of appearances, and Bergson specifies that it is because the English word, ‘which means, not coldly to observe a thing happening outside us, but to undergo, to feel within oneself, to live oneself this or that manner of being’ (CM, 306), cannot be conveyed by the French word expérience. The second remark also concerns the idea of truth from a pragmatic point of view. Bergson strives to shed light on this by distinguishing between two French words: It seems to me one could sum up all that is essential in the pragmatic conception of truth in a formula such as this; while for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention. (CM, 255, Bergson’s emphasis)

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ This definition is an opportunity to clarify an important point. Bergson speaks and writes English, he knows James well, he has a clear conscience to use on his behalf, and on a crucial point of his doctrine, a word he does not use; but to miss an author’s literal sense does not necessarily mean to betray him: I am not sure that James used the word ‘invention’ nor that he explicitly compared theoretical truth with a mechanical apparatus; but I believe that this comparison is in keeping with the spirit of the doctrine, and that it can help us to understand Pragmatism. (CM, 306)

For doctrine is not the spirit of doctrine. Rather this involves the musical sense of a reader or a commentator, more sensitive to the aesthetic organisation of thought than to its strictly theoretical device, who will ‘hear’ what the text does not say, precisely because in a text the essential is not in what is said. To claim that this essential element is held in what the text does not say can go so far as to point out the absence of a word in it, can even go so far as to reclaim this word, so that, by pronouncing it, a true and authentic daylight might be shed on a thought which will be itself only in meeting another. In this way, ‘guided by a series of nascent movements’ (ME, 57), the commentator will be able to describe a curve of thought and feeling similar to that described by the one he is commenting on or translating, even if it means imputing to the original author a word he doesn’t use. This is one way (among many possible) of ‘making us forget he is using words’ (ME, 57).

Bergson musician All these considerations about music should be kept in mind when reading what is arguably Bergson’s most explicit text – and least agreed upon – concerning the writing of philosophy. This is a passage from The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and more precisely from its third chapter ‘Dynamic Religion’. It is impossible, as we will see, to tackle such a subject outside the thought of art, and more precisely that of music. Here more than anywhere else philosophical research is ‘turned in the same direction as art’, here more than ever it would be difficult to dissociate one from the other. If art and philosophy are closely intertwined in this chapter, it is because they are both in the presence of mystical thought. Mystical religion is for Bergson the opportunity to return to a number of points which he had discussed in previous texts. How does one think this connection of religion, music and philosophy – or rather the writing of philosophy? All in all, 106

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ things flow together quite naturally. The word that connects all things is the ‘inexpressible’. Bergson contends that the philosopher would gain much by speaking with the mystical believer. We could even say that mysticism is only mentioned, in his final book, for the gains that philosophy might reap (it remains Bergson’s major and constant preoccupation) if it were to interrogate questions of its limits, its methods, its categories, its ways of doing and – I will especially insist on this – of saying. The philosopher could soon define this nature [the nature of God according to mysticism], did he wish to find a formula for mysticism. God is love and the object of love: herein lies the whole contribution of mysticism. About this twofold love the mystic will never have done enthusing. His description is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable [inexprimable]. (TS, 216)

The artist and the philosopher will soon be put in the same philosophical boat, but one sees that the mystic and the philosopher are at first carefully distinguished. We quickly understand that the distinction is only made to dangle a substantial gain before the eyes (of the soul) of the philosopher. The difference between the philosopher and the mystic lies of course in the tenor of their respective discourses: faced with a phenomenon that one does not know, the first instinct of the philosopher is to define – and it is soon done; the mystic does not define, but describes, and since the object of their description is ‘ineffable’ [inexpressible], this description is ‘interminable’. One is entitled to ask, reading these lines and seeking to situate them in relation to the work as a whole, whether Bergson is not attempting, in the manner or under the guise of mysticism, a new approach to philosophical intuition. The interminable character of the description cannot fail to make one think of what Bergson says of the activity of the philosopher – and he speaks here of all philosophers – which consists precisely in giving one, thanks to words, the idea of that which has no relation to language. Hence, his multiple and varied attempts, hence a certain tendency to rehash. Here we have, so to speak, the epistemological origin of epanorthosis: infinite correction is the philosophical equivalent of the mystic’s endless description of divine ‘twofold love’. Their objects are obviously not the same, but if it is possible to speak of them in almost the same terms, it is because they share a certain concern for the inexpressible. It would not be betraying Bergson – it would even be validating one of his most vivid theses – to suppose that speaking of one or the other, he does not speak, strictly speaking, of either one or the other, but of what they have in common, and that these variations on the theme of this informulable community are so many corrections.

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Concerning the philosopher, then, he says that what he has to say, to which he attaches so much value, rests in a singular point that it is impossible to grasp by ordinary means: In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his life. He could not formulate what he had in mind without feeling himself obliged to correct his formula, then to correct his correction. (CM, 128)

‘And that is why he went on talking all his life . . .’ This formula, so banal, so unphilosophical in appearance, therefore states the linguistic condition of both the philosopher and the mystic. It explains the tenacity and perseverance of the one and the other at the same time as it seeks to explain the, sometimes off-putting, complexity of their doctrines or their discourses. The impossibility of saying leads both to forge devices, to hatch periphrases, which, even with the best will in the world, will never allow more than an approximation: ‘All the complexity of his [the philosopher’s] doctrine, which would go on ad infinitum, is therefore only the incommensurability between his simple intuition and the means at his disposal for expressing it’ (CM, 128). A return to art, which is totally foreign to periphrasis, constitutes a tempting solution, at least for theoretical discourse, to the problem of expression. Faced with the mystical phenomenon, the philosopher is more or less in the situation where the incommensurability of their methods to their object regularly places them – since this object is beyond the reach of reason, of intelligence, of categories, which owe the rigour of their logic and the fixedness of their statements to space. It will therefore be necessary, when they seek to grasp this elusive point, for them to become an ‘artist’. This allows one to say that Bergson uses the same terms, the same recommendations and the same tools to speak of the linguistic condition of the philosopher as he does for mysticism, for intuition or even for the work of another philosopher, and that his discourse on art is another discourse on philosophy. In short, it is one allegory among many. Just as it is absolutely necessary to read the lines that Bergson devotes in ‘The Soul and the Body’ (in Mind Energy) to ‘the art of writing’ as a poetic and philosophical manifesto, even though he tries at this moment to say that what he is describing is a psychological reality, so too we must read without fail the long passage he devotes in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion to how the philosopher should speak of mysticism as a true poetic art. It is music that from beginning to end on this page (TS, 216–17) provides the material for the argument. The passage begins, for once going against his

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ customary way of expressing things, by relating the art of the musician to the work and benchmarks of intelligence. Against the idea that art is entirely intuitive and vague, conforming as if effortlessly to the emotion it is tasked with expressing, Bergson insists on the constraints that the mind imposes on the artist at the very moment when they are occupied with shaping their work. ‘What is there more systematically architectonic [construit], more reflectively elaborate [savant], than a Beethoven symphony?’ (TS, 216). We know the end of this text, we have also read the page in ‘The Soul and the Body’ that Bergson devotes to the art of writing (of the philosopher), and we are careful not to forget the fundamental principle of allegory: we therefore know that, speaking of music, he speaks of philosophy; and that, referring to the work of Beethoven, certainly the only musician he has ever cited, it is likely that he is thinking of his own work and of the idea that he has of philosophical work in general. That the work of a musician is ‘constructed’ [construit], that it is ‘elaborate’ [savant], brings it closer to science and places it conveniently in the set of activities of the mind that Bergson has never ceased to compare, to put into relation with one another. That the work taken as an example is a symphony is no doubt no accident: in ‘The Soul and the Body’ Bergson already used this example to give an idea of the complexity of mental life. It is in fact in art – and in music perhaps even more than in the visual or verbal arts – that the insufficiency of ordinary cognitive categories to account for the mind’s part in reality is most clearly made manifest: The work of the brain is to the whole of conscious life what the movements of the conductor’s baton are to the orchestral symphony. As the symphony overflows the movements which scan it, so the mental life overflows the cerebral life. (ME, 58)

It is in this direction that the page in The Two Sources concerning the art of philosophising – that is, of writing philosophy – is heading. One of the facets of a musician’s work is intellectual. Correction, and the corrections of this correction, are not foreign to the musician’s art – music has this in common with philosophy; and it is their succession, it is the multiple and scrupulous hesitations, that constitute its cerebral phase. But we wouldn’t talk about art if the work was limited to this intellectual activity: But all through the labour of arranging, rearranging, selecting, carried out on the intellectual plane, the composer was turning back to a point situated outside that plane, in search of acceptance or refusal, of a lead, an inspiration; at that point there lurked an indivisible emotion which intelligence doubtless helped to unfold into music, but which was in itself something more than music and more than intelligence. (TS, 216–17)

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ The composer, like the philosopher, cannot limit their work to the intellectual level.There is no creation without this movement of ‘turning back to a point situated outside that plane’; likewise, there is no philosophy which does not presuppose this anabasis – a remarkable constant of the work. Reading Bishop Berkeley, for example, Bergson urges his listeners to make this ascent just as he himself had done (and as Berkeley, he suggests, had done before him): let us rise with it, go up to the point where everything that was given extended in the doctrine contracts in tension: we shall picture to ourselves this time how from this centre of force, which is moreover inaccessible, there springs the impulse which gives the impetus, that is to say the intuition itself. (CM, 142)

Doubtless there is no question in ‘Philosophical Intuition’ of Berkeley’s ‘inspiration’ or ‘emotion’, any more than in The Two Sources is Beethoven’s ‘intuition’ mentioned. But we can clearly see that the ‘point’ up to which it is a question of rising is the same: ‘indivisible’ absolutely, it is in both cases located vertically from intelligence, and it is this which helps show that intelligence, like music, is not in itself sufficient. Intelligence which, without denying itself, exceeds intelligence is metaphysical research; the music which, without violating it, surpasses measure, the rules of counterpoint and harmony, is the kind that makes us cry; it is that of the completed symphony, performed, listened to, heard, which blurs intellectual and affective points of reference. Symphony, one might say in parodying Bergson, is very much like sympathy. What is certain in any case is that in art, in philosophy, Bergson notes this division between the impression, the intangible feeling on the one hand, and the intellectual work of giving something form in space on the other. To create, to write a work of philosophy, is thus always to go from the ‘source’ (a Bergsonian word par excellence) to the concrete realisation which results from it, and which must be structured intellectually. The source is incorporeal, it is simple, it is abstract: ‘The author writing a novel, the dramatist creating his characters and situations, the musician composing a symphony, the poet composing an epic, all have in mind, first of all, something simple and abstract, something, so to say, incorporeal’ (ME, 212), of which the work is the ‘translation’: For the musician and poet it is a new impression, which they must unfold in sounds or in imagery. For the novelist and the dramatist it is a theme to be developed into events, a feeling, individual or social, to be materialized in living personages. (ME, 212)

This last phase of work is that of intelligence, an aspect of what Bergson sometimes calls the ‘cerebral’. This is exactly how the musician works; and so the philosopher as well. 110

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ For Bergson, in order to think art, to think philosophy, to think mysticism, to think the functioning of the brain and the human soul, it is necessary to distinguish between two types of emotion: ‘the one below intellect [infra-intellectuelle], which is mere restlessness following upon a representation, the other above intellect [supra-intellectuelle], preceding the idea, more than idea, but which would burst into ideas if, pure soul that it is, it chose to give itself a body’ (TS, 216). Supra-intellectual emotion is another name given to the ‘source’; it is akin to intuition, which has such difficulty in dealing with words. Now, the distinction made here has the precise function of giving a status to the speech emanating from this source which must, despite language, find its way through it. By putting words to the test, what precedes the idea can in fact ‘burst into ideas’, and provide itself with the appropriate language resources for this. This voluntary and risky transformation is also inevitably mutilating. It is through excess of intellectualism that feeling is made to hinge on an object and that all emotion is held to be the reaction of our sensory faculties to an intellectual representation. Taking again the example of music, we all know that it arouses in us well defined emotions, joy, sorrow, pity, love [sympathie], that these emotions may be intense and that to us they are: complete, though not attached to anything in particular. (TS, 29)

As soon as thought attaches itself to objects which ‘go beyond’ the limits of the intellect, it is confined in language – which itself emanates from it and is made for it. ‘Joy, sorrow, pity, sympathy’ are convenient words, but they are only words, they are clumsy when they seek to designate what concerns the supraintellectual, they are made to express generalities alone; Bergson goes so far as to evoke a sort of ineluctability about them: ‘words which we must call upon to express what music makes us feel’ (TS, 29), he says. What they designate is not of the same order, ‘it is we who, in order to express them in words, are driven to compare the feeling created by the artist with the feeling most resembling it in life’ (TS, 29). One sees what philosophical writing consists in: putting into words what exists without them and which words will only ever render imperfectly. The writing activity of the philosopher, like that of the mystic, is therefore paradoxical: ‘expressing the inexpressible’ is, as we have seen, one of the formulas which enunciates this paradox. In The Two Sources, Bergson positions himself to express it from the point of view of action: Yet the writer will attempt to realize the unrealizable. He will revert to the simple emotion, to the form which yearns to create its matter, and will go

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ with it to meet ideas already made, words that already exist, briefly social segments of reality. (TS, 217–18)

Yet for this incorporeal reality, words are decidedly too restrictive a clothing: ‘How can these elements, each unique of its kind, be made to coincide with words already expressing things?’ (TS, 218). Formulated in these terms, the problem is without a solution – at least without a solution that would be universally valid. What Bergson advocates is therefore a laborious solution, requiring effort and tenacity; it is this that inspires him to write about the art of the musician. Beethoven, in order to remain faithful to the supra-intellectual emotion which is the impalpable material of his universe of sound, ‘had to make a constantly repeated effort, such as the eye makes to rediscover a star which, as soon as it is found, vanishes into the dark sky’ (TS, 217). It is such an emotion, and such a creative activity, that ‘the philosopher must bear [.  .  .] in mind when he compresses mystic intuition more and more in order to express it in terms of intelligence’ (TS, 217). Whether or not the emotion in question is mystical, as here, does not really matter. As we have seen, the schemas of thought and preconceptions are the same when it comes to the philosopher venturing into a universe that ignores the categories of space and therefore of grammar. Bergson understands any writing enterprise which must adapt to the spatial, (infra-)intellectual condition of language from the perspective of philosophical intuition, or duration, or freedom, or mysticism. Philosophical writing is obviously one of these. And this is ultimately the sole object of this page where Bergson endeavours to suggest the rules, to which it would be in the interests of such writing to conform, of a plausible poetics. This is what makes it so valuable. Here too, it is important to distinguish between two possible ways of writing. The one that suits an object of an infra-intellectual nature is obviously not the one this passage promotes, but neither is it simply its foil: He generally keeps, when writing, within the sphere of concepts and words. Society supplies ideas ready to hand, worked out by his predecessors and stored up in the language, ideas which he combines in a new way, after himself reshaping them to a certain extent so as to make them fit into his combination. This method will always produce some more or less satisfactory result, but still a result, and in a limited space of time. (TS, 217)

‘The sphere [region] of concepts and words. . .’ Such a sphere, as we now know, is that of ‘symbolic’ expression, that is to say a region where it is not possible to indulge in metaphysics (this ‘science which intends to do without symbols’). This region is not one that cannot be visited and Bergson does not 112

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ intend to discredit it; but its epistemological geography is reserved for science or rational intellectual discourse – which is based on measurement. There is nothing there that we don’t already know. Yet Bergson adds at this point a note that prepares a different approach. In this conceptual region where one can use language without an ulterior motive, the appropriate method – logical, grammatical, immediately intelligible and shareable – ‘will always produce [. . .] a result, and in a limited space of time’. ‘Now there is another method of composition, more ambitious, less certain, which cannot tell when it will succeed or even if it will succeed at all’ (TS, 217). If this other method is that of the musician, the mystic, the metaphysician, if it is true that it does not necessarily obtain results and that its research might take an indefinite amount of time, how is it credible that a philosopher might plead in its favour? ‘He may not write music, but in general terms he is a writer’ (TS, 217, translation modified) says Bergson, which is why he needs to use another method.The philosopher, like the musician (the word ‘composition’ is common to them), operates according to this movement of anabasis, which will become familiar to us; his method in fact consists ‘in working back from the intellectual and social plane to a point in the soul from which there springs an imperative demand for creation’ (TS, 217). The philosopher is now on the way to transforming his verbal tools. What is striking first of all is the uncertainty attached to this manner of proceeding. It is difficult to conceive a method, then to praise it, and end by adding that it is unlikely to ensure any outcome. This recommendation goes against a whole philosophical and methodical tradition which usually praises a method while hoping its use will result in substantial and rapid gains: so it is with Descartes’ method, which does not conceal its ambition to build an edifice that may be new but will also be solid, stable and secure on its foundations; and that of Kant, who undertakes, on a propaedeutic basis, to obtain incontestable results (in metaphysics in particular), in order to determine what reason can and cannot do, and so on. Few philosophers have laboured to elaborate an impoverished and uncertain method. It is remarkable that Bergson, not content to confess this weakness, validates it. The philosopher who is keen not to fail in his mission must indeed agree to be ignorant of where he is going, perhaps even of whether he will get anywhere at all: ‘And, even so, success can never be sure; the writer wonders at every step if it will be granted to him to go on to the end’ (TS, 218). The portrait drawn of the philosopher here could equally be that of a more or less romantic artist, in search of inspiration, dreaming of the perfect work, but uncertain of its means – and often even of its end. When Bergson goes into detail about the work that the philosopher will have to effect on words, this resemblance to the figure of the artist can only be accusatory. 113

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ If the philosopher does not renounce the idea of putting into words ‘a unique emotion, an impulse, an impetus received from the very depths of things’ (TS, 217), if he does not intend to shirk the demand which this gives rise to, it is necessary, Bergson says, that ‘new words would have to be coined, new ideas would have to be created, but this would no longer be communicating something, it would not be writing’ (TS, 217).‘Coining words’ does not frighten all philosophers – a lot of them do this! But Bergson, as we know, is not known for this. His vocabulary is precise, but orthodox; his syntax is not contorted; there are no overly technical words for him, and he has an instinctive distrust of all jargon. It would be difficult to find a passage in his work which even dreams of honouring such a programme. It is therefore remarkable that he nevertheless formulated it. One then understands that this paradox (a writing which would not be one, a language which would not respond to the function of communication, etc.) stands as a warning to metaphysicians not only of the high stakes involved but of the breadth of the difficulty they face. Here is another formulation of this imperative: ‘He will be driven to strain the words, to do violence to speech’ (TS, 218). So there is a violent Bergson! However, unless we consider that he deviates from the principles he sets out clearly in this poetic text, we must go so far as to say that this violence characterises both the project and the writing of this project, and read each of his texts as a resolute series of subversions, attempts at forcing or diverting. That this violence is discreet is not proof that it is only decreed. We must believe, under penalty of reading Bergson against himself, that it is at work in every sentence, even if it seems peaceful or accommodating. There is indeed violence and violence. Bergson never calls for the ruin of the established intellectual order, or even for a clean slate. He only hopes – like any philosopher who, seeing things differently from those who have philosophised before him and feeling himself to be invested with a singular task and responsibility – to work for a kind of revolution of the mind. This hardly threatens the usual ways of thinking. And there would be no need to speak of violence if this reversal of epistemological priorities did not go hand in hand with a remarkable poetic radicalism.The apparent discretion of this radicalism is perhaps the curse that hangs over the work that proceeds from it. But this should dissuade neither philosophers of any school, of all persuasions, nor readers of goodwill, nor anyone, from respectfully taking it into account. If Bergson’s work deserves this respect, it is not, as some of his readers sometimes say, because he ‘writes well’ and his sentences are elegant and clear – basically, so French! – it is not because his thought is fluid and (relatively) accessible to many, it is because this violence that he inflicts on language is, itself, his work. Unlike those questions asked by so many philosophers that precede him, the question 114

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Bergson poses to metaphysics does not concern its objects, or the method to be adopted to define them or to reach them; fundamentally the question does not even concern the epistemological conditions of its possibility (which he never questions or calls into question). No, the question he poses to metaphysics concerns the language at its disposal – which it can arrange [disposer], which it must organise [disposer]. What Bergson teaches us, if we read him without intentionally ignoring or just minimising his essential propositions, is that this question is eminently philosophical.The philosopher’s choice of this or that enunciative device [dispositif] (Which language? Which genre? Which sentence? Which dictionary? Which figures? etc.), far from being anecdotal, or constituting an occasional parameter of thought, on the contrary engages with thought itself. If we insist (against Bergson, let’s note) on keeping alive and operative the notion of doctrine or system as a way of characterising a given philosophy, then it will be necessary to admit that the choice or the creation by the philosopher of a particular mode of enunciation does not say anything about the doctrine, but that it is this doctrine already at work. If language was not above all a tool of communication, if it was like colour for the painter or timbre for the musician, exclusively a tool of expression, the question of enunciation would not arise so sharply in metaphysics. At the risk of simplifying, we could formulate the philosophical question that Bergson poses as follows. How might one change language without changing it? Or, how might one change it in such a way that it no longer corresponds to the sole function of communication, but without inventing new words, without overturning grammar, so as to keep open the possibility of communicating? To this question, Bergson responds with art, more precisely with music. To speak concretely, it will be a question of infusing the philosophical discourse with rhythm, the play of sounds, with figures, harmonies, silences, with the repetition of certain formulas, of certain words, with a concerted practice of equivocation, of polysemy, of a thousand other means yet to be invented, something which, passing through language, nevertheless exceeds it on all sides and should have the effect of causing it to be forgotten. This answer is Bergson’s own. It is intelligent, it is resolute, it also suits its purpose and its enterprise. But it must be confessed that it is risky. If language continues, apparently, to function normally, if no attack is made either to syntax or to words from the dictionary (Bergson watches over this constantly), won’t the negligent or merely inattentive reader be tempted to read these statements, forged in the spirit of subversion, as if the language of which they are made were that of ‘universal reporting’? The risk is real. I would like to help ward off it with this book. It seems to me that many misunderstandings about Bergson’s work, which we read too often as if no musical intention 115

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ informed it, as if one of its major concerns were not that of the expression of thought, come from this indifference to its poetic dimension. However, it appears from reading the texts devoted to Bergson’s works, or the edited editions of them, that this dimension is rarely taken into account. In any case, that it is not sufficiently taken into account for the ‘doctrine’ (Beckett writes as the last words of The Lost Ones, ‘if this notion is maintained’ (1995: 223)) to be measured by its own yardstick. The fact that dictionary words are preserved does not of course imply that Bergson will give them the meaning they usually carry. But this is obviously not his normal way. Each philosopher enriches, so to speak, the common lexicon by giving the word he uses a meaning which no one before him had dreamed of giving it: time in Kant is not time in Bergson, or in Heidegger, or in Ricoeur; and the same can be said of all the words likely to appear in a dictionary of philosophy. It is not quite so with Bergson, although of course it is tempting to act as if things are no different for him. If music accurately describes the creative functioning which gives rise to the text of philosophy, the philosophical text should also be read according to this mode. The word grasped in itself will hardly have any meaning without considering the page on which it appears, the rhythm which lends it relief, the words which surround it, those with which it is associated through etymology, its sounds, the frequency of its repetition, its rarity, and so on. In the first chapter, we read certain texts that it would be damaging to read in ignorance of or forgetting this aesthetic principle of creative composition. To take just one example, the word ‘fusion’ [fusion], in the last pages of the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, can neither be read nor heard as if it were not surrounded, in a very brief space, by ‘melt’ [fondre], ‘foundation’ [fond], ‘sounding’ [sonde], ‘profounds’ [profonde]. The words ‘sympathy’ and ‘coincidence’ are undoubtedly the most important in these two concluding paragraphs, even though Bergson does not write them down. I was going to say, he takes the trouble to not write them down. Likewise, each word of a figure cannot be reduced to the meaning that the dictionary gives for it; it is the figure which makes the sense, much more than the lexicon, as in the chiasmus of ‘The Perception of Change’ (‘this will, expanding, were to expand our vision of things’ (CM, 158)) already quoted and commented on above. The music of the page, in other words, that is to say the principle of its writing, is the implementation of a philosophical thesis that is unsayable in any other way. This musical resolution is audible everywhere, it is an infallible key to reading Bergson. It may happen that it takes a surprising turn, which would perhaps make many duly accredited readers shrug their shoulders. On the same page we have been discussing in The Two Sources, Bergson says, ‘he [the philosopher] thanks his luck for every partial success, just as a punster might 116

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ thank the words he comes across for lending themselves to his fun [jeu]’ (TS, 218). Here, then, the writing activity of the philosopher is equated with a game, and this game itself is compared to another, the pun. Ah yes! And Bergson himself doesn’t always disdain playing [jouer] on words – much like trying to give play to [jouer] a machine that has seized up with rust or through an over vigorous tightening of parts. In a famous and often-cited passage from Creative Mind, Bergson attacks Homo loquax (he alone, he says, has earned his antipathy), ‘whose thought, when he does think, is only a reflection upon his talk’ (CM, 100). This long, very Proustian diatribe against conversation is put in relation with the function of language that feeds it, ‘the function is industrial, commercial, military, always social. The things that language describes have been cut out of reality by human perception in view of human work to be done’ (CM, 94). This has nothing to do, therefore, with the musical language that The Two Sources will call for, because ‘the philosophical mind is sympathetic to the endless renovation and re-invention which are at the bottom of things, and words have a definite meaning, a conventional value relatively fixed; they can express the new only as a rearrangement of the old’ (CM, 96). If nothing new can happen in a conversation, however sparkling it may be, one might call it conservative. ‘One currently and perhaps imprudently calls “reason” this conservative logic which governs thought in common’ (CM, 96). We understand at this point that all the preceding discussion is based in fact on a play on words, a play on words which is only formulated at the end, when its meaning and intention is revealed: ‘conversation greatly resembles conservation’ (CM, 96). Without saying that the whole of philosophy is based on puns, I would nevertheless point out that many passages of an etymological bent in Plato, but also in Heidegger, hardly operate differently. And I will also recall, for the record, the famous die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht (‘the history of the world is the tribunal of the world’), a poetic formula (from Schiller) which Hegel did not disdain making into a philosophical statement. Laughter develops a theory of puns long before The Two Sources. Bergson, without relating it to philosophical writing, compares the merits of the play on words to those of ‘poetic metaphor’ or ‘instructive comparison’: Whereas an illuminating comparison and a striking image always seem to reveal the close harmony that exists between language and nature, regarded as two parallel forms of life, the play upon words makes us think somehow of a negligence on the part of language, which, for the time being, seems to have forgotten its real function and now claims to accommodate things to itself instead of accommodating itself to things. And so the play upon words always betrays a momentary lapse of attention in language, and it is precisely on that account that it is amusing. (L, 121, Bergson’s emphasis)

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‘. . . in the same direction as art’ Unlike the comparison and metaphor, which seek to situate themselves in a verbal space where language would seemingly coincide with itself, the pun would claim the formidable merit of surprising language in one of those rare and precious interstices where something can be heard that is foreign to it without, all the same, turning to some other authority to make it manifest. The pun therefore would only consist in playing with this famous distractedness or ‘lapse of attention in language’, which closely relates to the effort at musicality that Bergson requires from the philosopher. One does not immediately see how a pun is ‘musical’. And in fact, if one gives the word music its common lexical meaning, it hardly is. But through music’s virtues something happens in language which, without being part of it, can nevertheless be manifested only through it. This is precisely what is required of a writing that must go back to the source from which metaphysical research emanates. And in that, yes, the pun is indeed a musical instrument. ‘We artists . . .’ So said Nietzsche, whom Bergson rarely quotes. It is an understatement to say that, in the modern lay of the land, philosophy and art do not form a particularly plausible household. Nietzsche’s formula, like, as we have just seen, all of Bergson’s work, invites us to reconsider this division and to remember that it has not always been this way. One could, like Nietzsche, blame Socrates for this deplorable split. He quotes this passage from Diogenes Laertius several times (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol. 1 Book III), which tells of Plato’s philosophical vocation: It is stated that Socrates in a dream saw a cygnet on his knees, which all at once put forth plumage, and flew away after uttering a loud sweet note. And the next day Plato was introduced as a pupil, and thereupon he recognized in him the swan of his dream. At first he used to study philosophy in the Academy, and afterwards in the garden at Colonus (as Alexander states in his Successions of Philosophers), as a follower of Heraclitus. Afterwards, when he was about to compete for the prize with a tragedy, he listened to Socrates in front of the theatre of Dionysus, and then consigned his poems to the flames, with the words: ‘Come hither, O fire-god [Hephaestus], Plato now has need of thee.’ From that time onward, having reached his twentieth year (so it is said), he was the pupil of Socrates. (Diogenes Laertius 1972: 281)

One might date from this mythical moment the necessity, for anyone who intends to philosophise, of renouncing poetry, or art in general. Two things strike me as remarkable in this brief fable. First, the dream of Socrates announces the coming of a swan ‘uttering a loud sweet note’, that is to say of a talented poet, without this inciting the dreamer to receive him badly. Plato effectively renounces his creative activity, but it is by quoting The Iliad! (his invocation to Hephaestus is a parody of Book 18, 392, where Thetis comes to 118

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ ask the god of fire to forge weapons for his son Achilles: ‘Hephaestus, come quickly! Thetis has need of you’ (Homer, The Illiad, trans. A. S. Kline). Plato therefore remains a poet as long as he can . . . And then, it should be noted that Plato takes this decision without being invited to do so by Socrates; that he gives up the art in which he excels because he believes that this is the price to pay for gaining the esteem of the one to whom he wishes to be devoted. The fable does not prevent us from thinking that in any great philosopher there might be a disposition towards art that is incompatible with thought – the latter having to remain free from all connection with poetry, beauty, melody, rhythm. The necessary but not sufficient condition of philosophy would therefore be a voluntary sacrifice: the philosopher should stifle the artistic fibres within to devote himself without rivalry or jealousy to the speculative exercise. This is the distance between, say, a Hesiod and Plato. There are passages in Hesiod’s poem that today seem scientific in tone; others, astronomical; others, mythological or religious; still others, which speak of wisdom and morality, philosophical. What Diogenes Laertius relates is the end of this felicitous confusion, through the need, henceforth, for a border, a precise distinction between disciplines or fields of knowledge. Many philosophers have in this way believed that they should throw their poems into the fire. But those of them who were also artists are not so rare. We think of Nietzsche, of course, a poet and a musician. If some of his poems do not relate directly to his books and are published separately, others, on the contrary are resolutely integrated within what are properly speaking his philosophical works. We know that he was also a pianist and composer and that some of his compositions (piano sonatas, fragments of oratorios, lieder) have for some years been played by great performers. But we could also name here Heidegger, whose poems addressed to Hannah Arendt are very closely intertwined with the philosophical work he wrote after their reunion in 1950. I would also like to add here the name of Descartes, to whom is sometimes attributed (there are hardly any philosophers who support this ‘sometimes’, I must admit) the authorship of a poem written in 1649 to celebrate both the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the anniversary of the Queen Christina of Sweden, entitled ‘The Birth of Peace’, which served as the libretto for the ballet danced in Stockholm in her honour. Regarding Descartes, I would add, moreover, that in the first days of this same Thirty Years’ War, in 1619, he was able to write that poets, ‘even those who do nothing but fool people’, are ‘full of sentences that are more serious, more sensible and better expressed than those found in the writings of Philosophers’, even adding – who would expect this from the great philosopher of reason? – that among the poets ‘the seeds of wisdom (which are found in the minds of all men, like sparks of fire 119

‘. . . in the same direction as art’ in pebbles) [spring] with much more ease, and even much more brilliance, than Reason in the Philosophers might allow’ (Adrien Baillet, Descartes’ biographer, relates these remarks in relying on notes from Descartes which he had to hand). We have read correctly: the seeds of wisdom ‘which are found in the minds of all men’ (in the Discourse on Method, it is ‘good sense’ which is found in the minds of all men (Descartes 1968: 27)) spring up more readily, and more brilliantly, from among poets than from among philosophers. And it would be wrong not to count among the number of philosophical artists those who were philosophers and novelists or playwrights or poets (Badiou, Camus, Lucretius, Sartre, even Russell). Bergson’s work should be read, in my opinion, within this tradition, which is much older than that which defines, separates, distinguishes, discriminates, isolates, marginalises, when it does not simply exclude, everything that deviates a little from the straight and cold line of reason. His claim to art, which is constant and firm, even resolute, should not be interpreted as a factor that is likely to discredit a project whose tone is more or less vague or evanescent. For Bergson, art is not a way of making philosophy lovable or attractive, but rather a method that touches the very foundations of metaphysical research. Which even touches it so aptly that it would often be difficult to make the distinction – if that unfortunate idea arose – between what, in thought, concerns philosophy and what relates to art.Thought must care about art, because art as much as philosophy (and perhaps better than it, if the young Descartes is to be believed) cares about thought, longs for the truth.The route by which it is accessed ignores the symbol, it is direct, the idea of mediation is absolutely foreign to it. This is why art is not, for the philosopher, an indication, or even exactly a model, but an epistemological imperative. An unstoppable methodical necessity. The method being, as we know from Descartes precisely, both the way to an objective and this objective itself.

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3 An effective fiction

On the Imagination in Philosophy The faculty that enables art is a certain form of imagination, which an entire philosophical tradition has become accustomed to calling ‘active’, or ‘creative’. This is distinguished from the imagination that is often called ‘passive’, which, for its part, populates the mind with vain, hallucinatory, illusory, disordered images, which impress themselves into the mental landscape without one being able to predict their moment, duration or their very nature. This distinction is found in almost all philosophers who have sketched, more or less precisely, a geography of the imagination. It is easy to understand then, that they tend to value the active and generative imagination at the expense of the passive imagination, which is sometimes called ‘fancy’. To generalise, let’s say that those philosophers who often take the imagination as an object – because no epistemological approach can do without a reflection on its nature, on its function, on the use that might be made of it – do not spontaneously enumerate its merits. Philosophers generally only speak about the active and creative imagination to describe its functioning, and thus illuminate, through contrast or comparison, understanding, reason or even perception. As it is rather rare for them to call themselves artists, they have little reason to consider the use one might make as a philosopher of a faculty that philosophers and artists may well have in common, the necessarily regrettable effects of which the philosopher will have to take care to limit as much as possible within a project that cannot be founded on anything other than reason. To say of the work of a philosopher that it is a matter of the imagination is therefore to heavily discredit it. Malebranche, for example, in the third book of The Search after Truth, unabashedly mocks philosophers of all kinds (commentators, authors, system makers) who, believing they are doing new or original work, have never done more than let their imagination speak: There are, then, three types of persons, who apply themselves to study. The first are those who are inappropriately biased with regard to some author or some useless or false science. The second are preoccupied with their own fantasies. Finally, the last, who normally come from the two other types, are those

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an effective fiction who fancy they know everything that can be known, and who, persuaded that they know nothing with certainty, conclude generally that no one can know anything with certainty and look upon everything that is said to them as a matter of simple opinion. It is easy to see that all the faults of these three types of persons depend upon the properties of the imagination I have explained in the preceding chapters. (Malebranche 1997: 154)

As for the passive imagination – that which is at the origin of our dreams, of our more or less waking reveries, of various visions or hallucinations – it obviously has to be banned in philosophy, precisely because it is passive and the things it makes us ‘see’ are vain chimeras. To lay claim to the imagination, even the creative one, would be, for a philosopher, to behave like a poet; not to repudiate the passive imagination a priori would run the risk of passing for a dreamer, perhaps even a madman. I know these statements are too general. Nietzsche, for example, who one always finds among offenders, was able to lay claim to – and indeed practise – poetry; he was even able to invent, under the guise of a scholarly reconstruction, the conditions of hallucinatory trance which enabled the birth of tragedy, a highly recommendable model for the Dionysian philosopher. Yet even without speaking of Nietzsche, one might discover that this ignorance of the role of the imagination in the elaboration of thought – and even of conceptual thought – is not so general, that it is in any case not universal, and that, among the greatest philosophers, the use of the imagination is not so violently derided as it is in Malebranche, in Kant, or, closer to us, in analytic philosophers – in Russell in particular, who developed such a sarcastic and scathing grievance with Bergson about it. The case of Descartes is remarkable in this respect. We saw in the previous chapter that during his studious and enthusiastic youth he made so much of poetry that he thought he saw more lively and brilliant sparks of wisdom in poets than in the greatest philosophers – one is speaking here of course of the creative imagination, that is to say, after all, the least reprehensible kind. But there is more. His biographer Adrien Baillet (1691, vol. 1: 81–6) tells us that at the time he both conceived of the philosophical project on which he would spend his whole life and made these remarks about poets, which it would be too convenient to attribute to juvenilia, in one single night, 10/11 November 1619, he had three consecutive dreams which made a lasting impression on him. He imagined, says Baillet, that these dreams could ‘only have come from above’, and he immediately attributed a value of truth to them that would not contradict the Discourse On Method, which was written according to the logic of the ‘good sense’. The interpretation he makes of these three dreams, which Baillet reports in detail, shows not only that they were taken very seriously by 122

an effective fiction the young dreamer but that their content guided him onto the right path – the one he would come to call ‘method’. One finds in the Discourse at once discreet but sure traces of these dreams (if only in the form of reflections on the status of dreams in general), and a methodical – that is also to say, generic – hesitation which perhaps proceeds from this. This hesitation, all the more interesting as it is tacit, concerns the status of the narrative – which Descartes resolutely adopts – and more precisely of the fiction that this narrative obviously always presupposes. If he recognises that ‘the grace of fables awakens the mind’ (Descartes 1968: 30), he soon adds, as a distant descendant of Socrates, that he is wary of works of the imagination and says that he cannot give credit to fables, which ‘make one imagine many events to be possible that are not’, and condemns ‘those who base their own behaviour on the examples they draw from [them to] risk falling into the extravagances of the paladins of our novels’ (Descartes 1968: 31). He also adds something disturbing about this, for anyone who knows that the Discourse is written under the memory of the admittedly distant but always living dreamlike and enthusiastic events of the autumn of 1619 which are, at least factually, its point of origin: even the most accurate historical accounts, while neither changing nor amplifying the value of things in order to make them more worth reading, at least almost always leave out the basest and least illustrious circumstances, with the result that what remains does not appear as it really is. (Descartes 1968: 31)

We now know for certain, as has been documented, that the second part of the Discourse, which relates the conditions under which it was (perhaps) planned and developed, certainly does not relate – let us say that it even omits some of them. . . – all the circumstances of that moment, which were crucial for its author, when he first conceived something which resembled it. It is not a question of saying that the enthusiasm, the dreams, are ‘lower’ or ‘less illustrious’ circumstances than those reported in the Discourse, but only of noting that neither are mentioned there. Will one say that the Discourse on Method is one of the ‘most accurate historical accounts’? Yes, without doubt! Descartes takes great care to tell us that what he is about to pass over in silence, far from impeding the reliability of the story, is on the contrary one of its normal preconditions. It is the, perhaps good, reason why he chose the narrative genre when it came to expounding his method. Descartes does not have much difficulty in confessing that his distrust of fables is not total: he says he only offers his writing ‘as an historical account, or, if you prefer, a fable’. He even adds that he hopes it is useful and that his ‘frankness will be well received’ by all his readers (Descartes 1968: 29). 123

an effective fiction If I wanted to recall the singular writing experience of the Discourse, and its ambivalence with regard to things of the imagination, it is because Descartes is, in my opinion, to be classified among the philosophers who, with regard to the imagination and what proceeds from it, know that it is advisable, in good philosophy, to balance things. What is striking about him is that the nuanced stance he takes is not just a principled stance, but a committed stance. The text he writes to explain this is both ‘accurate’ and fictitious, and it is the knowledge of the danger linked to the exercise of the narrative that allows him to resort to it – only narrative allows, I repeat, the escape from narrative.

The imagination from a semantic point of view Bergson’s case is obviously not in every way comparable to Descartes’ – and even if he theorised the fable, he probably wouldn’t think of presenting any of his essays as falling under this category.Yet one observes in him, when he is read closely, an ambivalence which throws a rare light on his own method. It is in the second chapter of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion that he takes the imagination as an object. Its purpose then is to assess the role it may have played in the emergence of religion, myth – and all that proceeds from them. The remarks made on the faculty of imagining are implicated in a movement which is certainly not without relevance to it: it is to support the thesis (already mentioned in my first chapter) of a close relation between the fable, religion, superstition, myth and even philosophy (itself proceeding from religion) that Bergson focuses on the faculty that holds them all together. The development of the tool he calls ‘fabulising’ could not be done without a clarification of the different statuses, the different functions of the faculty that is ordinarily, and somewhat summarily according to Bergson, called the imagination. This page of The Two Sources therefore develops a small device that will allow the plausible and convincing continuation of a theory that goes far beyond the object that it temporarily adopts as a tool to progress in its discourse (the fable). It is indeed on morality and religion that new light is being shed, and, moreover, in accordance with the various theses supported by Bergon’s other books. It is a ‘small device’, then, if one considers it in terms of the space it occupies in Bergson’s final book – only a few pages; but these are of undoubted importance if one relates them not only to the thesis of this book – of which it is one of the mainstays – but to any theoretical discourse by this author who implements it at the same time as he states it. We find in this ‘little device’ two essential features of Bergson’s style. The first feature consists in taking a semantic question as the starting point of a major theoretical development. Let us remember: on the one hand, 124

an effective fiction Bergson like almost all philosophers insists that one must always agree on the meaning of the words one uses; on the other hand and above all, he thinks that if the philosophical project avoids such adjustments, which are then not strictly at the level of the word, it will be condemned to reproduce in its discourse the reductions to which ordinary language condemns thought – and therefore to produce a vain or tautological work. The second trait peculiar to Bergson, which we have seen several times, involves his being a fully-fledged writer – that is to say, a person who, while writing, constantly takes care of the conditions of their utterance and ensures that their speech is in agreement with the description they make of their object. In other words, a discourse on the imagination will not disguise what it owes to the imagination; or one concerning the fable, what it owes to the fable. Bergson’s focus therefore begins with problems that one might think are only semantic. To the question of how an intelligent being might also be a superstitious being, Bergson strives to give an answer that is valid both for the individual, for the society in which he lives, and for a more global epistemological theory: The representations which produce superstitions possess the common characteristic of being phantasmic. Psychology relates them to a general faculty, imagination. It will also place under the same heading the discoveries and inventions of science and the achievements of art. But why should we group together such different things, give them the same name and thus suggest the idea of a mutual relationship? We do so merely for convenience of speech and for the entirely negative reason that these various activities are neither perception, nor memory, nor logical operations of the mind. Let us then agree to group phantasmic representations separately, and to call ‘myth-making’ [fabulation], or ‘fiction’, the act which produces them. This will be a first step towards the solution of the problem. (TS, 88)

The temptation of fancy Bergson, closely attentive to his object, is led to extend the field of his reflection to all cognitive faculties. This extension allows him to specify, once again, the limits of common language and psychology, the latter being too inclined, in his view, to endorse the distinctions of the former. It is this precision that makes him bring together, without relating them explicitly to the tradition I touched on above, the words ‘phantasms’ [fantasmes] and ‘imagination’. He proposes, for greater clarity, and also for greater relevance, not to put in the same epistemological bag the faculty that produces phantasms and that which 125

an effective fiction gives birth to the objects of art.We find here, under similar terms, that imagination called ‘passive’ by classical philosophers (Spinoza in particular) and that they called ‘active’ or ‘creative’.We saw in the previous chapter that the merits of the active, or creative, imagination are in Bergson’s eyes so large and so extensive that he regularly suggests that philosophy conform to it as a model of thought. The page cited above from The Two Sources focuses on the type of imagination to which the philosophical tradition has hardly given any credit: the faculty from which dreams, hallucinations and phantasms of all kinds are derived, which he calls ‘fabulation’, or ‘fiction’. At the same time as he gives this faculty a name different to that consecrated by tradition, he carries out a rather unusual rehabilitation of it. The distinction he makes is therefore not entirely new, but it has two merits. It allows, on the one hand, the consolidation of the theory of the epistemological weakness of common language and of all the disciplines which are based on it: if psychology sees a ‘kinship’ between phantasmatic and aesthetic productions, it is only, says Bergson, ‘for the convenience of speech’ (TS, 88). But on the other hand, the theory of fabulation leads him to consider afresh a faculty which, because it is natural, cannot remain outside the field of empirical philosophy to which he has never ceased to lay claim. If fabulation does not have the merits of the creative imagination, it is nevertheless essential to the thought of all fictitious objects (‘to this faculty are due the novel, the drama, mythology together with all that preceded it’, he says (TS, 89)), none of which can be indifferent to philosophy or its exercise. This is what is at stake in this passage of The Two Sources. I will add a brief parenthesis here – I concede that one will no doubt find this absurd, and perhaps use it to discredit a project which suggests that Bergson, as well as being a bilingual philosopher, is a genuine writer, a writer in the fullest sense, in a word, a creator. What prompts me to make this point despite this is that this rehabilitation of the ‘passive’ imagination is extremely unusual in the intellectual domain, be it philosophical or aesthetic. I would point out, however, that a writer who is also bilingual has attempted, discreetly but resolutely, a similar rehabilitation. Samuel Beckett, in a little-known text (one of the few which is not translated into French), also tries to distinguish the respective advantages of ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’, a word that corresponds in English to what is meant by the passive imagination in French. In All Strange Away (1964, in Beckett 1995: 169–81) – a sort of prequel to Imagination Dead Imagine published a few years later and whose title is in itself a whole programme – a man locked in a geometric space imagines a personage who, in order to populate his solitude, tries the virtues of imagination and fancy in turn. The limits of the imagination having been quickly reached, the phrase Fancy is his only hope comes to the mind and lips (the phrase 126

an effective fiction becomes Fancy is her only hope in the second part, where it is a woman who is imagined). The English language, or more exactly English culture, is more familiar than French not so much with the distinction between the active imagination and the passive imagination as with the two terms that allow it to speak without ambiguity of one (imagination) or the other (fancy). It is rare for a French theorist to use the word fantaisie in the sense of the English word fancy, as Beckett does in All Strange Away or in Comment c’est, whose French version uses the word fantaisie in this sense. Now, this is precisely what Bergson does in this second chapter of The Two Sources. The word phantasmic, which we encountered in the last passage quoted, is of the same etymology as fancy (phantasia, in Greek). Bergson uses the word fancy [fantaisie] several times, something which might not have come spontaneously from the pen of a non-bilingual French philosopher. It is religion, as we saw in the first chapter, which is at the origin of the fabulising function; and it is this function that allows mythology to invent its characters and its stories. Bergson explains that: each god of ancient Greece has his physiognomy, his character, his history. He moves about, does things quite outside the mere performance of his functions. His adventures are told, his intervention in our affairs described. He lends himself to every fancy of the artist and the poet. (TS, 165)

The word fancy is in its place here. It unambiguously indicates that aesthetic creations, in the same way as mythological accounts, fall under this ‘division’ of the imagination that Bergson calls fabulation, and which is therefore very fruitful, even if it is linked to an old, even primitive, state of religion: ‘Very likely, therefore, poetry and fancy of all kinds appeared as extras, benefiting from the fact that the mind knew how to make myths [fables]’ (TS, 89, translation modified. I underline this new occurrence of the word fancy). This sensibility, very English I believe (it was the English Romantics, Coleridge in particular, who established this exclusive distinction between imagination and fancy), is not the only point which allows Bergson to be brought closer to writers – and even to novelists. And it is Bergson himself, as we can see, who invites us to think this.

The imagination from an anthropological point of view This redefinition of words corresponds of course to a new epistemological division: ‘We have said of this fabulising function that it would be wrong to define it as a variant of imagination. This last word has a somewhat negative meaning’ (TS, 165, translation modified). If the thing is said quietly, it is none the less firmly said: when tradition, or at least common sense, devalues fantasy 127

an effective fiction in favour of the imagination, Bergson does exactly the opposite. But once again, for this epistemological reversal to be possible, it is necessary to overcome the prejudices to which language has made us slaves: Since such representations depict neither a present object nor a past thing, they are all considered in the same light by common sense and given the same name in ordinary speech. But the psychologist must not for that reason group them in the same category, or connect them with the same function. Let us then leave aside imagination, which is but a word, and consider a very clearly defined faculty of the mind, that of creating personalities [personnages] whose stories we relate to ourselves. (TS, 165–6)

So, it is only this ability to create characters that holds Bergson’s attention. Not because he is particularly interested, in The Two Sources, in the art of the novelist, in the simplicity or the complexity of the characters they invent, but because the fabulising function is closely related to religion, which is the one of the two objects of study of the book, and because, surprising as it may seem, religion and the novel are in fact associated. Let us not forget that philosophy also has its place in this quasi-anthropological reconstruction – this is obviously where I am going, and Bergson makes it easy for me. Here, for example, is how we get from the god of mythology to the character in a novel (let’s admit that their differences are very slight; thinking of certain science-fiction novels, one could even say that they do not exist). The god of mythical tales indeed would be, more accurately, a character in a novel, if it were not that he had a power greater than that of mortal man and the privilege, at least in certain cases, of interfering with the regular working of the laws of nature. In a word, the fabulising function of the mind has in the first case stopped short, in the second it has continued its work. But it remains the same function. It will resume, if need be, the interrupted work. (TS, 165, translation modified)

The fabulising function is therefore likely either to stop at a given point (in the case of the god of mythology) or to ‘continue its work’ (in the case of the character in a novel). Which means that ‘fancy’, far from being a more or less exact equivalent of the passive imagination, is on the contrary an active and creative faculty! Let us not believe, however, that Bergson is content, in order to develop this new mental geography, to simply reverse the roles devolved to one and the other of the imagining faculties. The fabulising function must in fact be linked to that other which, in tradition, closely linked fancy and hallucination. It is in relation to the creations that result from this that Bergson employs a totally improbable, literally unthinkable, and yet perfectly adequate expression. The oxymoron is undoubtedly one of the means 128

an effective fiction that the philosopher can use to bend language to a design that would force it outside of itself: speaking of the difficulty experienced by certain novelists or playwrights in getting rid of a character once their work has been completed, Bergson writes that ‘it is he who controls them, not they who control him’ (TS, 166). This imagination is therefore passive, and the fact is that it is the object of constant philosophical contempt (‘These writers are not necessarily those whose work is of the highest quality’ (TS, 166)). But, he says finally, ‘better than others, they enable us to put our finger on the existence, at least in some of us, of a special faculty of voluntary hallucination’ (TS, 166, my emphasis). The fabulising function is therefore a faculty that is both passive (since what it generates is a hallucination) and active (since it is voluntary). The role of the will is decisive here, and it is this which allows Bergson to speak about the status of objects or characters who originate from the faculty of making fables: they are real. But just as there is fable and fable, there is real and real. One touches on what is essential here: We have seen how the ancients witness, unconcerned, the birth of this or that god. Thenceforth they would believe in him as they did in all the others. This would be incredible, if we supposed that the existence of their gods was of the same nature to them as the objects they saw and touched: It was real, but with a reality that yet hinged in some degree on the human will. (TS, 169)

One of the subjects of this second chapter of The Two Sources is therefore the nature of the objects resulting from the creative activity of the imagination. Bergson speaks of the gods, of characters in novels, he also speaks of the narratives in which both evolve. And all of this is ‘real’. He talks less explicitly about ideas, theories – if not religious theses or beliefs that help promote mythological fables. I would not have dwelt on this ‘voluntary hallucination’ if he had not also made the inventions of art and philosophy depend on it, indirectly no doubt, but indisputably. He does this in two ways, a few pages apart: he successively relates literature and philosophy; then religion and philosophy. Speaking of the realisations of the fabulising function, we have seen that Bergson says it is susceptible to being developed further, in theory always susceptible to resumptions or extensions. ‘This is’, he says, ‘what happened with the introduction of Greek literature, and more generally of Greek ideas, into Rome’ (TS, 165). Greek ideas, as opposed to literature, clearly designate the philosophical works that the Romans seized upon, read, completed, accommodated, commented on, extended, varied, enriched, circulated – thus continuing, at a geographical and temporal distance, the work of fabulation started in Athens by mythological stories.

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an effective fiction One will keep in mind that Bergson speaks of that moment in antiquity when ‘religion became philosophy’. ‘From the fabulising faculty’, he says, ‘which had elaborated it, there issued, through a later development, a mythology round which there grew up a literature, an art, institutions, in a word, the essential elements of antique civilization’ (TS, 159, translation modified), a civilisation from which it is not conceivable to subtract either its philosophy or the taste of the ancients for abstract ideas, elaborate thoughts and systems of thought, such as the stories of mythology, in order to offer a plausible and therefore liveable account of the world.

Fancy and will The results of this work of ‘voluntary hallucination’, which the fabulising function, itself resulting from the mythological narratives of religion, is likely to perform, are as numerous as they are varied: there are novels, dramas, works of thought, wisdom, considerations on the world and nature – so many imaginary or phantasmal objects that Bergson does not hesitate to call ‘real’, even if he must specify, as we have just seen, that their reality depends ‘in some degree on the human will’. Here then is a productive faculty of objects of all kinds (aesthetic, mythological, philosophical) which owe to nature as much as to the will of those who exercise it the particular type of reality in which the objects of art, science – and those of ideas – participate. This is like a second stage in the elaboration of fables. Within such a configuration, we could say that primitive animism corresponds to a first development, one that is natural and spontaneous, but relatively crude, of objects which will nourish the belief of a given society. The objects which fall under ‘voluntary hallucination’ proceed, they too, from the faculty of fabulation, which explains why one finds within them elements relating to the will as well as purely contingent – in other words phantasmal – elements; which explains the infinite diversity of novels, dramas, works of wisdom or theoretical reflection. The richness of human cultural heritage is due to the ‘voluntary’ character of the hallucination which presides over its creation. But the objects resulting from a voluntary imaginative activity will not belong to the same type of belief as those resulting from the crudest fancy. In the first case, the objects conform ‘exactly to the need’ which generates them, and the belief in their existence is global, not distanced; in the second, ‘each invention, taken separately, is accepted with the reservation that another would have been possible’ (TS, 170). This last note, discreet though it may be, is no less decisive. There is hardly any audacity or originality in claiming that one loves or appreciates a novel, 130

an effective fiction a piece of verse or a drama, only to the extent that one shares, in sympathy with its author, and during the time of a reading or a performance, the aesthetic, historical, cultural, ideological presuppositions which allowed the work to be conceived and created. It is more difficult to admit this in the case of a work of philosophy, and one will perhaps object that if Bergson speaks here of ‘caprice’ (TS, 170, translation modified) he cannot be thinking of the philosopher, for whom each object of thought, of the system developed, obeys a deep necessity to which one ‘assents’ not by virtue of its plausibility but according to the degree of truth that one recognises in it (TS, 170). Certainly. Yet this page which sees works of philosophy as objects resulting from a ‘voluntary hallucination’ is not so far removed from other texts by Bergson in which he does not hesitate, at the risk of scandalising a little, to read the texts of the great philosophers not as entirely capricious, but as aleatory achievements, which one would be wrong to link to historical, social and cultural circumstances even though they permitted their birth. Here, for example, is how Bergson, in ‘Philosophical Intuition’, speaks of the work of Spinoza, whom he chooses as an example of a philosopher whose initial intuition, in Bergson’s opinion, differed greatly from the work he wrote: ‘The closer we get to this original intuition the better we understand that if Spinoza had lived before Descartes he would doubtless have written something other than what he wrote, but that given Spinoza living and writing, we were certain to have Spinozism in any case’ (CM, 134). ‘[O]ther bits of dust might as well have been raised’, he says again in a new variation on the theme, but ‘it would still have been the same whirlwind’ (CM, 132). These remarks are astonishing (they are, moreover, little commented on) but if we compare them to what Bergson says about works that the fabulising function brought into being, they will appear even more unusual. And Spinoza, of course, is just one example – I was going to add, ‘for me this is the same with Bergson’, but let’s not anticipate.

Generalised Invention Circumstance is a lure Of course neither Spinoza nor Bergson wrote what they wrote through chance or caprice, but we must accept the idea that their contribution to philosophical reflection cannot be identified with the work that has been published under their name and that one comments on while forgetting that what one would be tempted to take ‘for a constitutive element of doctrine’ is in reality only one, random, example of its ‘means of expressing it’ (CM, 131). 131

an effective fiction They wrote The Ethics or The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, but none of their inventions have any formal necessity. The word contingent would characterise them exactly: The philosopher might have come several centuries earlier; he would have had to deal with another philosophy and another science; he would have given himself other problems; he would have expressed himself by other formulas; not one chapter perhaps of the books he wrote would have been what it is; and nevertheless he would have said the same thing. (CM, 132)

What is important to keep in mind in this case is less that works of philosophy fall under the properly human and natural faculty of making fables, than the obligation placed on us by this condition of reading them and encouraging others to read them while remaining attentive not to what they say – since they would have, using other words, elaborating other systems, weaving other fables, remained themselves – but to the intuition that they express in necessarily inadequate terms, and therefore to the language work they have had to perform to get as close as possible to it. In other words (these are from Two Sources, 170), the intuition of the philosopher is necessary, but the work by means of which he expresses it is contingent. One index of this is precisely that the same pattern of thought – the same fable, if you will – can and does serve as a ‘means of expression’ for objects that are apparently very different. Let us beware of believing that these cases are special. The distinction between the philosopher’s intuition and the random forms it can take; between the natural principle of the fabulising function and the invention of particular fables that it allows, each of which could have been different; and finally, as we have just seen, between necessity and contingency – this distinction organises the discourses that Bergson is led to hold to for almost all the objects of study that the current proposition requires him to encounter. Art, and more particularly poetry, is the first of these objects. This is what he says about it in the final chapter of Creative Evolution; this time the role of necessity (or of intuition, or of the natural principle) is held to by the generating idea of the poem; that of contingency, of the phrases that compose it: The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency and choice. Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen. (CE, 338)

But just as Spinoza’s doctrine is not the intuition that led him to invent it; just as a god of mythology is not the primitive religious principle behind its invention; in the same way the words, the images, the metaphors of a poem 132

an effective fiction will always miss the simple idea of its source: ‘All these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative idea’ (CE, 338). But there is more. This same distinction also informs the long, compressed, difficult, and absolutely primordial discourse that Bergson makes, still in Creative Evolution, concerning the connection between the single vital principle of evolution and its manifestations. With regard to this evolution, and, at the foundations of life itself, as it is given to us to see, contingency is general: The part played by contingency in evolution is therefore great. Contingent, generally, are the forms adopted, or rather invented. Contingent, relative to the obstacles encountered in a given place and at a given moment, is the dissociation of the primordial tendency into such and such complementary tendencies which create divergent lines of evolution. Contingent the arrests and set-backs; contingent, in large measure, the adaptations. (CE, 268–9)

Yet, regarding this universal contingency, one can say exactly what one said about the various figures of gods in books or mythology, or even the concepts a philosopher may have produced at a given time and in a given geographical area: it does not prevent the unity of the intuition that arouses them and with which, in various ways, the writer-musician-philosopher strives to agree. What takes the place of intuition here, or of the primitive religious principle, or of the ‘generative idea’ of the poem, is ‘the unique impetus [élan]’, it is ‘the impulsion’, it is ‘life’: It is therefore conceivable that life might have assumed a totally different outward appearance and designed forms very different from those we know. With another chemical substratum, in other physical conditions, the impulsion would have remained the same, but it would have split up very differently in course of progress; and the whole would have travelled another road, – whether shorter or longer who can tell ? In any case, in the entire series of living beings no term would have been what it now is. Now, was it necessary that there should be a series, or terms? (CE, 271)

‘The impulsion would have remained the same’, Bergson says it exactly as he says that Spinoza, had he lived in the sixteenth century, would have produced other books, invented other concepts, wrote another work, without however depriving us of Spinozism. Let us insist on this before considering the various modes that the Bergsonian fable can take: the distinction made in Creative Evolution is not a distinction comparable to that which Bergson uses to speak of philosophical intuition, or of poetic creation, or of mythological invention, it is this very distinction itself. It seems to me that one can interpret the thing in two different ways. Or one might say that, in the presence of a major epistemological or theoretical 133

an effective fiction difficulty, Bergson tends to have recourse to the same tool, to the same more or less pictorial way of expressing himself – and we will infer that this regular reprise, under the form of subtle variations, manifests the difficulty, often mentioned by Bergson himself, that a philosopher sensitive to the inadequacy of language as a means of expression for a metaphysical enterprise will encounter. Or one will say, while being more Bergsonian than Bergson and taking him, so to speak, at his word, that each of the texts in which this distinction operates is in itself one of those accidents, one of those contingent phenomena which are only intelligible when related to an immutable and necessary element, which is inexpressible other than in these aleatory forms.We see in any case, wherever we look, that under these conditions fiction is not some fluency, some ornament decorating with more or less felicity or accuracy a subject whose abstraction would be an otherwise insurmountable obstacle. Rather, it is the exigency of philosophy, its necessary condition. It is what makes philosophy philosophy. And it seems to me that, in order to read Bergson without falsifying this necessity, it is more important – even if it is undoubtedly less easy – to think of the similarity of the discourses held on these different objects than of the similarity of these objects themselves. Let’s put it a little more vividly, even if one finds this unnecessarily provocative: schema and fable are, if we take the point of view of poetic invention, two more or less equivalent words to designate this similarity. One might say more readily, more spontaneously, that the same schema is at work in Bergson’s discourse on mythological invention and on the doctrinal content of Spinozist philosophy. But it is a fact that this schema is a fable – and that a tool forged by Bergson (that of the fabulising function) would allow us to say, just as precisely, that the same fable informs the discourse relating to poetic creation and that relating to vital evolution. What is remarkable of course, as usual, is that the thing is theorised at the same time as it is implemented. This is because, yes, this theory of the fable is a fable. And, yes, only fable can break free from fable. This is why it is not surprising to note that the fable is, for Bergson as for Descartes, both the best and the worst, the worst at the same time as the best of things.

Fiction is a counter-power It was Bergson’s discussion of the fable that provided the occasion for this methodical clarification. An ambiguity of this order should not be concealed, nor that it is likely to lead us to believe in a precedence that, however, nothing justifies. Such an argument, in fact, which the ordering of my discussion endeavoured to make plausible, may perhaps have had the effect of suggesting that the fable provides the measure of all of Bergson’s work. This is not 134

an effective fiction the case, of course. Of the different figures that are organised according to the distinction ‘necessity vs contingency’, none has a capacity to prevail over another: neither the vital impetus [l’élan vital], nor the fable, nor intuition, nor the natural primitive principle of invention, nor the generative idea of the poem. What Bergson says of ‘the élan vital’, namely that the impetus is an image but that ‘no image, borrowed from the physical world, can give more nearly the idea of it’ (CE, 271), we should also try to think about intuition, about the fable – about all the theoretical objects which Bergson causes to play, in this or that place in his works, an active and decisive role. All are ‘inventions’, all are thought to be able to come as close as possible to, but none designates or precisely circumscribes, the object that it seems to name. In reality they constitute variations on a theme that is impossible to locate, let alone fix in place. It is not by chance that musical variation plays such a structuring role in Bergson’s work: it manifests in another way the impossibility of defining or making understood or grasping a central or original theme. And it appears more and more, when one reads this work closely, that this impossibility is the uncertain ground of its foundation. It should be added that variation is itself variation on a theme that varies in different ways all the contingencies named in relation to metaphysical, biological, anthropological and moral developments; that it is, formally, one of these contingencies. And whether it is named, in Creative Evolution, in relation to the diversity of species of Hymenoptera or forms of life does not change anything: We seem rather to be before a musical theme, which had first been transposed, the theme as a whole, into a certain number of tones, and on which, still the whole theme, different variations had been played, some very simple, others very skilful. As to the original theme, it is everywhere and nowhere. (CE, 181)

That the theme is everywhere is obvious. An attentive reader has the feeling of stumbling upon it at any point, even if it is characterised by a certain latency. That it is nowhere does not in any way lessen it: this theme can never be isolated, named or even described. Therefore, I don’t hesitate to hear the sentence which immediately follows this passage as if it also relates to Bergson’s fundamental problem, that of expression: ‘It is in vain that we try to express it in terms of any idea [representation]’ (CE, 181). Let us say that the impossibility of representing – the impossibility of mimesis if you will – is the poetic conviction on which this philosophical project is founded. One sees this not only when it is a question of the means at the philosopher’s disposal to carry it out, but in every place where he encounters a word and is struck by its inadequacy, or – this is basically not so different – is struck by the absence of a suitable word. The passage I have just quoted is only one, almost arbitrary, almost banal, of these innumerable places. 135

an effective fiction Let us return to this principle of fabulation, which philosophical tradition certainly helps us to understand, but without explaining that it might play such an important role in a major philosophical project. As has been said, philosophical tradition can only be wary of a faculty from which fictitious works proceed; fiction is the business of creators – novelists, playwrights, poets – certainly not philosophers. Bergson seems to situate himself within this lineage when he calls any production of this faculty hallucination. The originality of his point of view consists in asking the question of its possible usefulness – to speak, quite simply, of a fabulising function. So, what is this function? If it is true that the ability to make fables is ‘natural’, what vital need does its existence correspond to? Let us take, then, in the vaguely and doubtless artificially defined realm of imagination, the natural ‘cut’ which we have called fabulising and see to what use it is naturally put. (TS, 89, translation modified)

Bergson’s response is not surprising if we relate it to his overall method, which gives it an indisputable coherence; but it is of great consequence if we agree to measure his work as a whole by this yardstick. And the scope of his hypothesis would obviously be even more astonishing if we accepted the idea that the answer he gives would be valid for any philosophical work. What does this second chapter of The Two Sources tell us decisively? It must be noted that fiction, when it is effective [de l’efficace], resembles an incipient hallucination: it can thwart our judgment and reason, which are the strictly intellectual faculties. (TS, 89, translation modified)

Fiction, first of all, can be ‘effective’ [de l’efficace]. In other words, the fictitious nature of a work does not have the consequence of discrediting it ipso facto. Perhaps the hallmark of fiction is its ability to have an effect. It is, says Bergson, like a ‘incipient hallucination’. Let us understand that this hallucination can only be beneficial if it does not last. It would be like a first – necessary – stage in the process of the elaboration of the truth. ‘All knowledge begins with fiction’ would be the parodic but serious formula of this obviously fictitious epistemology – I will come back to this fiction in a moment, it is in my eyes the essential point. The ‘power of fables’, their impregnable virtue, therefore lies in this formula which makes fables an other side, but an ‘effective’ other side, of reason (‘it can thwart our judgment and reason’, says Bergson). For a philosopher who has never ceased to insist on the limits of ‘strictly intellectual faculties’ (TS, 89), it must be admitted that there is a certain logic in valuing a disposition which proceeds in its ignorance. The thesis is therefore convincing if one adopts the point of view of its author. 136

an effective fiction Faced with an intelligence always threatened with gravely ignoring certain facts that its rational scaffolding consistently misses, fiction is a counter-power. Nor should we be surprised that this hypothesis is stated precisely in the form of a fiction. In this fable – this passage in The Two Sources is indisputably one – nature is the main character. It is she who sees the danger, it is she who makes it possible to avoid this danger by producing objects which, without belonging to her, do not fundamentally contravene her: ‘Now what would nature have done, after creating intelligent beings, if she had wanted to guard against certain dangers of intellectual activity without compromising the future of intelligence?’ (TS, 89). Nature behaves here like a divinity, who, having given birth to an imperfect being, strives to compensate for its faults by endowing it with a faculty which softens them. Man, nature tells herself, is the champion of ‘apparent facts’, of what she calls the ‘ghosts of facts’ (TS, 89); she also tells herself that in order to avoid these excesses, to limit this arrogance, she must light a counterfire, that ‘failing real experience, a counterfeit of experience had to be conjured up’ (TS, 89). Nature goes even further! For a surer advent of the truth, without trembling she works on the development of tools (these are fictions) which will, by virtue of the imitations for which she has shaped them, know how to impede the facts and gestures of an intelligence that is too sure of what it thinks it sees. ‘A fiction, if its image is vivid and insistent, may indeed masquerade as perception and in that way prevent or modify action’ (TS, 89). This is nature’s plan for the sake of a creature whose mind blinds it and risks leading it to a dead end.Yet, it must be said, does this not seek to ward off one danger through a graver danger? For if this is indeed the scenario ploddingly plotted by nature, one would have to admit that she is working here, against true experience, in favour of falsity itself – and not accidentally or possibly, but consistently, constantly. And deliberately. ‘But yes’, replies nature, but yes, I say this without hesitation, since it is really what I think, ‘A systematically false experience, confronting the intelligence, may indeed stop it pushing too far the conclusions it deduces from a true experience’ (TS, 89). One tells oneself that one is in a fiction, and that one should perhaps not take such clearly iconoclastic allegations too seriously – but still! . . . one has read correctly: here is a philosopher who is in favour of hallucination, a philosopher who pleads for the haunting vivacity of fiction, a philosopher adept at systematic falsehood . . . And one cannot even tell oneself that these are gratuitous imaginations, since they are stated in the very form they advocate. The end of this new ‘prosopopoeia of nature’ coincides with a resumption of the discourse of the narrator: ‘It is in some such fashion that nature has proceeded’ (TS, 89), he says. The conditional, a tense dear to Bergson, is the sign that we are indeed reading a fable. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion is a book that one should not hesitate, if one attaches importance to the 137

an effective fiction enunciative mode retained by many philosophers, to compare to The Birth of Tragedy, The Birth of the Clinic, The Archaeology of Knowledge, The History of Madness, and even On The Genealogy of Morality, that is to say of works proposing, in the field chosen by their author, a sort of historical, mythical, sometimes anthropological reconstruction, and then proceeding in a more or less narrative form. Fiction is certainly not always claimed there, but the fabulising function is nevertheless at work, since it is from this that the activity, human par excellence, which consists in forging and telling stories proceeds. Is the book as a whole anything more than an anthropological hypothesis capable of shedding light on ‘the two sources’ of morality and religion? To return to these origins, the narrator grasps to his breast broad periods of the history of humanity, which he characterises through formulas that are arresting and reach for the greatest rigour, but which also testify to a desire to lend to those events and systems of thoughts that are summoned for the demonstration of the hypothesis a meaning which serves it: the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, ‘primitive’ societies, ancient wisdoms, are in turn evoked, characterised by lines regularly oriented and reoriented in the direction of the thesis. Bergson is cautious, no doubt. He is also learned and cultivated. If one can speak – if he speaks himself – of fable, or of fiction, it is not to say that he invents, that he makes up, that he omits, that he arranges, again less than he falsifies – even if systematic falsity is indeed, as we have seen, one of the tools which a philosopher who refuses to keep himself ‘within the limits of mere reason’ (Kant) can use. Well? The fable consists in inventing notions (the fabulising function is one of them), in giving new life to old words or cognitive instruments which will have to serve a new form of epistemology (instinct, intelligence; closed, open; static, dynamic; etc.), have to choose the convincing historical or cultural elements (Platonism, Stoicism, Christian religion, polytheism, etc.) and arrange them on a narrative line which destines them to a meaningful and uplifting end. This is what Paul Ricoeur called, translating Aristotle’s mimesis, ‘la mise en intrigue [emplotment]’. This narrative shaping of thought explains the large number of passages in the book, in the work as a whole, that are written in the conditional; it also explains the recourse to formulas such as ‘could’, ‘might’, ‘without doubt’ – so many precautions which only serve to bring about the recourse to the fictitious hypothesis, to the system of concerted falsity. For example, here is a passage – it is in no way unique – where these precautions abound, attesting that the side of the fable has been decidedly embraced (I underline words or expressions which undoubtedly indicate this fabulising condition): It may be that no single one of these elements has ever manifested itself externally in an unadulterated state, that it would have immediately come up against

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an effective fiction simple elements, of the same origin, with which it will have amalgamated, or it may even have been seized upon, either alone or with others, to be used as raw material for the never-ending work of the fabulising function. Thus there are in existence certain themes, some simple, some complex, supplied by nature; and, on the other hand, we have the countless variations played upon them by human fancy. To these themes doubtless may be traced back the fundamental beliefs met with almost everywhere by the science of religions. As to the variations on the themes, they are the myths and even the theoretical conceptions, with their endless diversifications according to time and place. There is no question but that the simple theme we have just indicated combines immediately with others to produce, prior to the myths and the theories, the primitive representation of the soul. (TS, 110, translation modified)

One will say that the subject of Bergson’s final book lent itself particularly well to storytelling; that Bergson, in implementing it, only conformed to the thesis he elaborated so as to justify the idea of storytelling. Things are a little more complicated. Without going so far as to say that all philosophy is fable – let’s not give in to temptation just yet! – I would say despite everything that Bergson’s work, if we consider it as a whole, proceeds according to a poetics which, although formulated late and discreetly, is nonetheless a structuring principle of his thought. I do not only mean by that that his books are full of anecdotes or scenes which, classically in short, relate to the theoretical material of the subject, but that their material is fictitious through and through. We saw in this last quotation that ‘the theoretical conceptions, with their endless diversifications according to time and place’ – and therefore those of Bergson himself – fall, like the myths, under the fabulising function. If I have spoken at length about The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, it is because the book provides tools for thinking about all the others. But my conviction is that all of Bergson’s important texts are written according to this fabulising principle, giving a plausible philosophical content to the first two sentences of the Author’s Preface to Time and Free Will which I used as a point of departure. The fable, an essential condition of philosophical discourse, is also, due to the infinite diversity of its variations, a means of avoiding the traps of language that hinder and disqualify its spatial condition.

Evolution is a fable Creative Evolution, so different in its purpose, in its expository design, in its objects, in its very conclusions, from The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, is nonetheless also a fable. This might hardly be contested. The title alone states it without ambiguity. The word ‘evolution’ gives a narrative (and therefore fabulising) impetus to the entire plan. The opening lines of the Introduction 139

an effective fiction trace the line that the book will never let go of, except seemingly – and never for long: The history [histoire] of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been formed, by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends through the vertebrate series up to man. It shows us in the faculty of understanding an appendage of the faculty of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex and supple adaptation of the consciousness of living beings to the conditions of existence that are made for them. (CE, ix)

It will therefore be a question of a story [histoire] – that of the evolution of life. And it is because this story is incomplete that an original narrative is possible, and even that it is necessary. Through this narrative, these first lines name the two main characters: life, intelligence. These opening lines immediately assume that both are subject to evolution. The evolution of life will never have another name; as for that of intelligence, which differs from it, the narrator here names it ‘progress’, meaning by this ‘a more and more precise, more and more complex and supple adaptation’ to the conditions of their existence within life. There would be no need to undertake the writing of a fable if the two protagonists were going at the same pace, each on their respective path; if the observer could, ultimately, observe a perfect adequation of the mechanisms of the intelligence to the complexity of life. Like all fairy tales, this one begins with the relationship of an initial tense situation, which this beginning indicates is about to change, in showing the features of a disagreement, be it invisible, between the two protagonists, and indicating, through successive touches, the possibility if not, certainly, of mutual recognition, then of accommodation. For the fact is that thought ‘in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement’ (CE, x, second paragraph of the Introduction). If in spite of everything some hope remains possible, if there is space in which to write stories, it is because, each at their own time and according to their own capacities, other characters will intervene, whom the Introduction names less precisely. These are ‘certain powers that are complementary to the understanding, powers of which we have only an indistinct feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will become clear and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the evolution of nature’ (CE, xiii). These powers, which are not horrified by intelligence, nevertheless naturally differ from it. The book imagines all the possible means of cooperation between them. And it is this cooperation that alone is likely to lead the narrator and his readers towards a denouement.

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an effective fiction The title of the book in reality indicates a little more than the outline of a story, a little more than the principle of its progress, in the form of a redistribution of roles, with an indication as to how each might meet its destiny. The evolution of life is indeed creative. It would be wrong to think that this titular word is used metaphorically. Bergson will never say that life is like an artist, a sculptor, or that life is like a poem. That evolution is creative indicates two important things: first that, as a good fable, Creative Evolution will carry a moral, a ‘lesson’; second that it will have to be classified among an unprecedented (at least in philosophy) literary genre. The title indeed brings together two words that no rational or moral approach would risk associating. The title therefore offers a précis of the thesis that the book supports, which goes something like this: the secret of evolution is that it is a creation and that this creation is continuous. The responsibility for this summary is of course not only attributable to me, since Bergson writes: ‘it might be said of life, as of consciousness, that at every moment it is creating something’ (CE, 30); and, earlier in the same paragraph: ‘the more we fix our attention on this continuity of life, the more we see that organic evolution resembles [se rapprocher] the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents’ (CE, 29). This ‘resemblance [rapprochement]’ of life and consciousness allows for the use, which is often noticeable throughout the book, of prosopopoeia. Life, as we saw with nature earlier, behaves and reacts like a consciousness – it would not be betraying Bergson here to say even as consciousness; nor to add that this consciousness is an artistic consciousness. He specifies in a note: ‘In his fine work on Genius in Art, M. Séailles develops this twofold thesis, that art is a continuation of nature and that life is creation.We should willingly accept the second formula . . .’ (CE, 30 Note 2). Yet the title is also a declaration of a decided poetics: talking about creative evolution is a bit like talking about a puss in boots – Oh right? Do cats wear boots now? – or a blue beard. Creative Evolution therefore falls under what one might call, thinking of science fiction, a genre of ‘philosophy-fiction’. I do not mean – far be it from me to claim, very far even – that philosophy never throughout its practice resorted to fiction. This recourse is frequent, it is perhaps universal, it is undoubtedly even necessary; but in the end it is a remedy, something that comes to the support of a thesis or of a demonstration of which it is not the principle. On the contrary, Creative Evolution indicates that the fable is the principle of its writing. The improbable, but overtly displayed, character of the alliance of these two words might even pass for a revindication of this principle. How marvellous is that in philosophy . . .? 141

an effective fiction As for the marvellous, a thousand processes generate the feeling. The conditional, as we have seen, is one of them; it often accompanies the verb power [pouvoir, as in the form pu être below], which, used in the past tense, is responsible for establishing the plausibility of the reconstruction, at the same time as it assumes its fictional character: There would hardly be more difference between this vitality, vague and formless, and the definite vitality we know, than there is, in our psychical life, between the state of dream and the state of waking. Such may have been [Telle a pu être] the condition of life in our nebula before the condensation of matter was complete, if it be true that life springs forward at the very moment when, as the effect of an inverse movement, the nebular matter appears. (CE, 270, I have underlined indices of fiction)

These stylistic precautions are a tiny part of Bergson’s writing system. Many pages, in passages he devotes to life (or to consciousness precisely), or to what a certain romantic tradition would call psychology, are written in the form of veritable scenarios: the protagonists bear abstract names that give them a traditional psychology (past, memory, childhood, etc.); conflicts which oppose them, differences which move them, also belong to this field, but a sagacious and fine novelist might equally, better even than a practising psychologist, forge ‘little dramas’ out of them, and possibly write dialogues that draw them to the surface. It is difficult to read, for example, these few lines at the beginning of the first chapter without thinking of Nathalie Sarraute, who seems to have coined the notion of tropism (which one would say is described precisely here) while thinking of Bergson: In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared – in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares. But, even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us. (CE, 5)

A ‘door’ then separates all movements in us relating to the access of the past to our present consciousness, as the present remains deaf to the past’s desire to push the door open, at least a crack. Fortunately, there are ‘messengers’ between the two spaces, between two groups that are not very inclined to communicate, let alone merge. And even if they do not agree with one 142

an effective fiction another, they still work to attack the seal of the wall that separates them from what they are nevertheless a part of. If in this imaginary spatial configuration we replaced psychological movements with words that correspond to them, we would perhaps have a scenario comparable to the following: Words, perfectly autonomous living beings, are the protagonists of each of these dramas. As soon as words come from outside, a wall is erected. Only words capable of properly receiving visitors are on this side. All the others leave and are locked behind the wall for safety. But the wall is transparent and the excluded watch through it. At times, what they see makes them want to intervene, they don’t care anymore, they call . . . Open. [My translation]

One recognises here the prologue to Nathalie Sarraute’s book Ouvrez [Open] (1996), which I am quoting here in its entirety. If the similarity of the two scenarios is striking, it is because the approaches are not really that different. Bergson’s work presents, like that of Nathalie Sarraute, situations, characters, more or less developed dramas, that have language as subject and as the stakes. One of the following two quotes is from Bergson, the other from Nathalie Sarraute. Let’s face it, it’s hard to say which is one, which the other: Where this language extends its power, stand the concepts learned, the names, the definitions, the categories of psychology, sociology, morality. It dries up, hardens, separates what is nothing but fluidity, movement, what spreads to infinity and on which it never ceases to gain. To maintain the struggle on equal terms, the latter ought to express themselves in precise words; but these words, as soon as they were formed, would turn against the sensation which gave birth to them, and, invented to show that the sensation is unstable, they would impose on it their own stability.

. . . and let us recognize that a work which rebels against the ‘power of language’, its inability to express the ‘fluidity’, the ‘movement’ of the things of consciousness (it is Nathalie Sarraute who uses this vocabulary, in ‘The Returned Glove’ (1996: 1704)), may well weave a scenario similar to that which, recognising the inability of ‘precise’ words to express the ‘unstable’ nature of sensation (it is Bergson who speaks like this (TFW, 132)), forges a language, fashions a fable, which is capable of extracting from the rut in which it has been stuck for ages a philosophy which remains in reality the hostage of language. Nathalie Sarraute relates some of these tribulations of words, vocables or more or less fixed expressions in Ouvrez (in Oeuvres Complete), but she only describes more dramatically what she implements in all her other books, which she calls ‘tropisms’. Tropism is very nearly that movement of consciousness that Bergson talks about everywhere and that common language 143

an effective fiction will never apprehend, except by inventing a form that leads it astray and makes it encounter resources that it ignores. In a gripping passage of Creative Evolution, Bergson recounts, with a rigour and precision worthy of a great novelist, the path that intelligence had to take to discover language, perceive its virtues, and adapt to it so as to make it a tool which will lead to its own bankruptcy, here called by its Cartesian philosophical name: ‘the clear and distinct’. How did intelligence come to be? It’s really quite a story that Bergson recounts blow by blow. It all starts, of course, with a meeting between intelligence and language. The novel only exists because this encounter upset from top to bottom the foretold destiny of intelligence. The irruption of language into its mental landscape caused intelligence to discover lands that without this it would have thought beyond its reach. This is how the story is told: before language came to disturb it, intelligence lived in a sort of daydream, staring in a quasi-daze at objects external to itself, all belonging to a universe that it knew perfectly well and for which it seemed to have been made. ‘Without language, intelligence would probably have remained riveted to the material objects which it was interested in considering’ (CE, 167). It is therefore language which, if one wants to put it this way, awakens intelligence from its materialistic slumber: ‘It would have lived in a state of somnambulism, outside itself, hypnotized on its own work. Language has greatly contributed to its liberation’ (CE, 167). How did this liberation come about? How is it that language, while itself obeying the laws of matter and modelled according to an unfailing spatial pattern, made this reversal of intelligence possible? It is because the words that make up the dictionary are ‘mobile’, ‘transferable and free’ (CE, 167). Unlike animal language, which is purely instinctive, and whose signs are ‘adherent’ (each with a unique meaning and function), the language which arrived to disturb the life of the intelligence has the faculty of swarming about the concrete object that it associates first of all with a different object, which resembles it or to which it is in some way comparable, but also to ideas, to objects which do not have a palpable existence or which are not immediately perceptible by the senses. I have already quoted the passage where Bergson relates how the eyes of intelligence have, so to speak, been opened. If language was able to seduce it so easily, it was because it provided intelligence with the tools that would allow it to observe its own functioning. Dazed at the idea of everything that had suddenly become possible, intelligence makes an alliance with language and decides, with language’s complicity, to completely change its occupation: Thus is revealed to the intelligence, hitherto always turned outwards, a whole internal world – the spectacle of its own workings. It required only this opportunity, at length offered by language. It profits by the fact that the word

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an effective fiction is an external thing, which the intelligence can catch hold of and cling to, and at the same time an immaterial thing, by means of which the intelligence can penetrate even to the inwardness of its own work. Its first business was indeed to make instruments, but this fabrication is possible only by the employment of certain means which are not cut to the exact measure of their object, but go beyond it and thus allow intelligence a supplementary – that is to say disinterested work. (CE, 168)

Opportunistic, shrewd, calculating, intelligence immediately sees the advantage it can derive from language. It is less hesitant to ‘take it while on the move’ as it has long awaited this opportunity. The pact that it makes with language will thus make the objects of consciousness – or ‘phenomena which do not occupy space’, inaccessible to instinctive language – ‘pass from darkness to light’ (CE, 169). If things stopped here, it is not clear where the tragedy would be. But the story obviously includes a fall. And it is not a happy one. You do not change crafts with impunity: So intelligence, even when it no longer operates upon its own object, follows habits it has contracted in that operation: it applies forms that are indeed those of unorganized matter. It is made for this kind of work.With this kind of work alone is it fully satisfied. (CE, 169)

It therefore continues, as it has always done, to apply to moving, unstable, fleeing, fluid, continuous realities the same words, the same patterns as those it applied to material things – to things. Oh woe! The result is not long in coming: it is philosophy! Philosophy with everything about it that is unsatisfactory, unworthy of its own ambitions, even its true capabilities. Intelligence would almost take pride in it. For example, we hear philosophy say that it is only in this way – it means by taking advantage of this mobility of words that it seems unaware of – that ‘it arrives at distinctness and clearness’ (CE, 169). It is Bergson who underlines these two Cartesian words, where so many philosophers recognised themselves before him but where in Bergson’s eyes all the sadness of the drama is concentrated, and its failure is conveyed. The moral of the tale: intelligence will never progress on the path of metaphysics by using words as they are given to it. Or, more radically: ‘The intellect is not made to think evolution in the proper sense of the word – that is to say, the continuity of a change that is pure mobility’ (CE, 171), this evolution that the title calls ‘creative’. And yet here we have it, intelligence is made like this. ‘It does not admit the unforeseeable. It rejects all creation’ (CE, 171). At this point in the story it must therefore leave the stage. For the subject of the fable is the evolution of life, and ‘The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life’ (CE, 174, Bergson’s emphasis). 145

an effective fiction It is just that there is mobility and mobility; the misunderstanding comes from this. Mobility, this remarkable property of words which has won over the gullible mind so easily, is not the ‘pure mobility’ of life itself. Mistaking these two is habitual, and if it is understandable, its consequences are genuinely damaging. They would even be irremediable if ‘other terms’ could not duplicate the agreed terms; if intelligence was not called upon – and in a situation – to step back in favour of the other great character of the book, which, for its part, can lead ‘to the very interior of life’: intuition. Only intuition may enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate the means of supplementing it (CE, 187). This is how the narrative (the fable, if we adopt the vocabulary of The Two Sources) progresses towards its denouement; this is how Bergson proceeds, a fabulist in his philosophical guise. I have recounted here the main stages of what Nathalie Sarraute and I would call a drama, which is in reality only one of the acts of the great narrative that is Creative Evolution. The two protagonists, intelligence and language, in fact behave like characters: each has its story, its traditions, its personality, its impatience, its preferences; they watch, they hope, they are mistaken; their error leads to the dead end that prepares for the arrival of the main character: intuition. The rest of the narrative will show that intelligence, after having vested so much hope in language, must consider a new alliance, and, so as to better approximate vital evolution, compose its work with intuition, which has an intimate access to it. But this character, whose presence is indisputable, and which asserts its advantages, must itself adapt its behaviour to a situation which it cannot overcome on its own. Once liberated by the language of strict materiality, intelligence must take a further step in the direction of intuition, ‘turn inwards on itself, and awaken the potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it’ (CE, 192). As for intuition, it initially sees its ambitions reduced by consciousness which, crammed within its linguistic envelope, decidedly narrows its scope in assimilating it more or less to instinct, thus condemning it to ‘embrace only the very small portion of life that interested it’ (CE, 192). The narrator adds, full of compassion for it, that this kiss [baiser] – because it is a kiss, yes. . . – is a long way from fulfilling the desire that carries the kiss towards the great lady life: ‘and this it kisses only in the dark, touching it while hardly seeing it’ (CE, 192, translation modified). This is how intelligence and intuition, which were unaware of each other, gradually become accustomed and resolve to consider, under the vigilant gaze of consciousness, jointly conducting this search, which they will therefore undertake ‘in the same direction as art’. 146

an effective fiction Bergson’s Ghost Philosophy1 Some characters, who one might think secondary, make brief appearances at the turn of a particular page or this or that chapter, and we hardly notice. Consciousness, on the worksite where it constructs a theory of knowledge, brushes against, on several occasions, one of these entities that one would hardly expect to find in a work of philosophy, but that an attentive and curious gaze will nonetheless find in this work. Here is one of those fleeting appearances: [A] theory of knowledge must take account of these two faculties, intellect and intuition, and [. . .] also, for want of establishing a sufficiently clear distinction between them, it becomes involved in inextricable difficulties, creating ghosts [fantômes] of ideas to which there cling ghosts of problems. (CE, 188, translation modified)2

These ghosts, it will be said, have nothing to do with ‘real’ ghosts. To call them ghosts is only a way of speaking: the word, better than any other, is for Bergson a means of describing the vanity of ideas or problems that lie in wait for any philosopher who ignores the complementarity of our two protagonists. Here a thorny theoretical problem arises. I will be careful not to evade it. If it were a question of reading this single page of Creative Evolution, it would be easy – it would be comfortable – to hold to this reading: ghosts are not real ghosts, they are ‘only’ metaphorical. Unfortunately, it seems to me that this position cannot be sustained for long, nor with tranquillity. First, because no one can explain with precision what ‘real’ ghosts might be: in ghost stories, the ghost stories3 which were legion in Bergson’s time, ghosts obviously stand for something else; they are indisputably fictional material that novelists and short-story writers use to probe the otherwise poorly lit layers of the psyche of the living. Most of Bergson’s readers – both at the time and today – do not ‘believe’ in ghosts, so they are convinced that there are no ‘real’ ghosts. For them – but let’s face it, from the perspective of

1. English in the original. 2. [The French word ‘fantôme/s’ in the following is translated in English by three words/ phrases that appear in English versions of Bergson’s or Henry James’s works: ‘ghost/s’, ‘phantom/s’, or ‘phantasm/s of the living’. These words/phrases are here understood as being exactly synonymous and are used interchangeably to align with particular effects generated in Clément’s reading or in relation to particular English versions, though of the three Clément himself prefers the English word ‘ghost’, which he uses in English on a number of occasions. Trans.] 3. English in the original.

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an effective fiction common sense – to speak as Bergson does of ‘ghosts of ideas’ is an almost conventional way of speaking of empty ideas; to make them correspond to ‘ghosts of problems’ is to classify them in the category of problems without relevance, without real content. To say that Bergson uses the words ‘ghosts’ or ‘phantoms’ or ‘phantasms of the living’ in a metaphorical sense is nevertheless embarrassing if one pauses to recognise that one does not know how its ‘literal’ meaning would vary from this ‘figurative’ meaning. There is a second reason why we should not be too quick to expel these, however ‘metaphorical’, ghosts; it is the declaration which I have already quoted from Bergson, relativising – it is the least that one can say! – the difference between proper language and ‘figurative’ [imagé] language: going so far as to say that ‘there are cases in which it is imagery in language which knowingly expresses the literal meaning, and abstract language which unconsciously expresses itself figuratively’ (CM, 49).

London, just after Bologna This last sentence makes it all the more difficult to reduce to a flavourless and insignificant ‘metaphor’ the ghosts of ideas or problems in Creative Evolution. The difficulty thickens when one considers that in 1913 in London, Bergson delivered, before the very serious Society for Psychical Research, a paper precisely entitled ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’. The question of ghosts, of their more or less probable existence, of the role they can play in the life of the living, and of what they can teach a psychologist or a philosopher about the human psyche, was at the beginning of the twentieth century at the centre of research and investigations of all kinds. The strictest occultism, the most institutional philosophy, experimental psychology, scientific studies on the functioning of the brain all over the world, but more especially the Anglo-Saxon world, were interested in this question on which there was therefore an abundant bibliography, even at the time when Bergson gave this lecture before a learned society, which he even chaired for a year. Bergson is therefore not alone in his interest in hypotheses and theories on the subject. Let’s say that, to say the least, this complicates things a bit for those whose instinct would be to take lightly – if not completely ignore – the many references to ghosts found in his work. One can easily imagine the arguments of commentators on Bergson’s work who might be somewhat embarrassed by the existence of this text. Bergson was very interested in all research in the field of psychology, in particular in psychic experiences not elucidated by science, and he was a friend of several eminent members of the Society for Psychical Research, the equivalent of 148

an effective fiction which had been founded in the United States a few years earlier by William James, a friend and admirer of Bergson (who prefaced the French translation of James’s major work Pragmatism). He was a publicly celebrated philosopher, who was notoriously interested in the science of his time, which fascinated him but on which he constantly set limits. It was therefore foreseeable that the Society in question would seek to attract him, that he could not easily ignore their invitation, and that he would not refuse to honour with a paper the meeting which the chair had proposed to him and which he had accepted. Yet to pretend – I still imagine the arguments of Bergson’s commentators not particularly seduced by the idea that the author of Matter and Memory might have taken seriously the work of this Society which he nevertheless mentions without any ironic distance – to move from there to then claim that this text deals with questions that are important to his own philosophical research is a step that very few commentators have dared to take. The most common attitude among the Bergsonians consists in insisting on the extreme carefulness of the paper (which Bergson nevertheless insisted on collecting in Mind Energy, published six years later), to relativise the scope of its hypotheses and arguments, and to limit to a few texts (one or two, hardly more, ‘Dreams’ [in ME] being most often cited) the connections that any scholarly commentary must make to establish or confirm the coherence of a philosophical approach. Without going so far as to say that Bergson, in paying homage in 1913 to the work of his British colleagues, gave a speech that was to occupy a crucial place in his work; without taking the step myself of making this intervention a philosophical manifesto likely to shed light on the entire work; without even claiming that Bergson’s philosophy would not be the one we know, love, explain and are pleased to facilitate access to if this text did not exist, whose title includes such an unphilosophical word; without therefore aligning myself with any camp, I will adopt here again a position which is textual rather than doctrinal. I maintain – let’s say on principle, but a close reading of the text provides a certain plausibility to this conviction – that we cannot pretend that the immense importance of the ‘metaphor’ or of ‘the image’ of the ghost in Bergson’s greatest writings was unrelated to this 1913 intervention, even if it is certainly not one of the most frequently cited of his texts. Before reading this ill-loved text closely, I will content myself, to add a little consistency to what I have just said (regarding the immense importance of the reference to ghosts in Bergson’s work), with quoting a few lines which would almost go so far as to identify philosophical activity with a particular attention one might pay to ghosts – at least to some of them. These are the very last lines of ‘Philosophical Intuition’, a text written only two years before the 1913 conference of the Society for Psychical Research. They constitute the conclusion – the peroration, if you will. The textual movement at 149

an effective fiction this moment of the envoi is that of a hopeful incitement to philosophising differently, at the same time as the expression of a living faith in the virtue of the true epistemological revolution advocated by the text which is coming to an end. It is impossible this time to claim that the subject is more or less anecdotal, that it concerns scholars or friends whose research matters to the philosopher but whose views and convictions he does not share. Bergson agreed to make the trip to Bologna to talk about philosophy to his fellow philosophers. This particular text is often quoted and its decisive importance in his work as a whole is generally recognised. I will come back in the next chapter to the somewhat strange but remarkable pedagogical propositions for which it seems to have been written; I will now focus on the equally unexpected idea – unconventional, to say the least – on which Bergson wanted to conclude. It is, we will see, a series of urgent exhortations expressed in the imperative followed by some verbs in the conditional – the mode which ultimately prevails: let us grasp afresh the external world as it really is, not superficially, in the present, but in depth, with the immediate past crowding upon it and imprinting upon it its impetus; let us in a word become accustomed to see all things sub specie durationis: immediately in our galvanized perception what is taut becomes relaxed, what is dormant awakens, what is dead comes to life again. Satisfactions which art will never give save to those favoured by nature and fortune, and only then upon rare occasions, philosophy thus understood will offer to all of us, at all times, by breathing life once again into the ghosts which surround us and by revivifying us. In so doing philosophy will become complementary to science in practice as well as in speculation. With its applications which aim only at the convenience of existence, science gives us the promise of well-being, or at most, of pleasure. But philosophy could already give us joy. (CM, 152, translation modified)

What comes into view here is what one might call a ghost philosophy. On the model of the ghost stories written, for example, at the same time by the brother of William James, Bergson indeed proposes that we practise a whole philosophy aimed at these creatures taken as dead by everyone, but which philosophy must for reasons of merit, virtue – even as its task – seek to revive. ‘In a word’, says Bergson. What word then? What formula, rather? Sub specie durationis. Obviously, you shouldn’t translate a motto, the effectiveness of which also depends on the language in which it is spoken. But let us note despite everything that it is ‘duration’ [durée] which transforms the ‘taut’ [raidi] (almost its exact sonic inversion in French) into a flexible, mobile creature, which its new relaxation also brings to life.Where we usually see nothing and no one, only philosophy knows how to see not the dead but ‘ghosts’; only philosophy is able to give them back the vital breath they lack. 150

an effective fiction It is difficult to think that less than two years after writing this text Bergson could speak of the ‘ghosts of the living’ familiar to his British psychologist colleagues without relating them to these ghosts in ‘Philosophical Intuition’ to which it is incumbent on philosophy to pay salutary and joyful attention. This will cause many shoulders to shrug. This is a reverie, they will say. A gratuitous paradox once more. Let’s not confuse everything: in one case (the first, in Bologna) the ghosts merely designate – metaphorically – reality not as we commonly see it, but whose true nature we might perceive, were our gaze more attuned, above all more attentive and rigorous; while in the second case (in London) ‘phantasms of the living’ is only a citation (Bergson borrows the expression from his British colleagues and he is careful, giving in by including it in his title, to put it in quotation marks). It is a quotation intended to designate a problem rather than to name a reality. However, in both cases we can say that reality is in question, in play and in question; we can even add that in both cases – and once again – the problem arises of what we want to call a ‘metaphor’, an ‘image’, ‘real’ or ‘figurative’. In Bologna, the reality that no one sees is designated by the name of an entity that stories or films that involve them often place in this position: the ghost is indeed there, but only the main character of the short story or the novel sees it. In London, the nature of reality depends on the veracity of the ghost stories told by summoned witnesses. It is more than likely that the speaker and his audience do not attach the same stakes to the same words, to the same formulas. For the audience of scientists and researchers (already mentioned in Bologna: concerned only with ‘the convenience of existence, science gives us the promise of well-being, or at most, of pleasure’) it is a matter of questioning an enigmatic psychical fact and, via this light, to illuminate the functioning of the human psyche; for the speaker, we will see, it is rather the status of reality that is at issue. The ghosts he talks about and evokes are not quite the same as those of his esteemed colleagues. Do we say that he deploys the word in an (invisibly) metaphorical way? I propose that working methodically we temporarily renounce this distinction, which moreover is so often called into question by Bergson himself, and that we closely examine the text of the conference – that we admit for a moment, and for the clarity of the reading, that a philosophical truth is above all textual.

The ‘ghosts which surround us’ and the ‘phantasms of the living’ However, what we can see, as usual with Bergson, is that his text interweaves theoretical hypotheses on the theme of the conference (say, for short, telepathy) and questions on the mode of their expression. Bergson in fact uses 151

an effective fiction various procedures to explain his point of view: historical considerations, citations from scholarly literature, self-quotation, fable, and finally allusions to his personal involvement in the reflection on the phenomena studied by ‘psychical research’ (which he is keen to distinguish from psychology) and in the debates it gives rise to. This is where I will start, since it seems to me that, as often, it conditions both the reflection and its intrigue. Bergson devotes the first lines of his intervention to the usual thanks in such circumstances: thank you for inviting me, thank you for trusting me, I feel very honoured that you have asked me to be your president . . . But he fulfils this obligation of protocol by immediately projecting himself into the heart of his subject. And that’s obviously one way to begin treating it: How is it, then, that you have come to choose me to succeed the eminent men who have occupied in turn the presidential chair, all experts in these studies? I suspect that there is in this a case of telepathy or clairvoyance, that you felt from afar the interest I was taking in your researches, and that you perceived me, across the two hundred and fifty miles of space, attentively reading your Proceedings and following with keen curiosity your work. (ME, 75)

This is how the very scene of the conference is transformed from the start into a more or less phantasmal scene: you invited me because you had a certain vision of me from a distance. We are going to talk about telepathy, but we are actually already in telepathy. What we are going through is undoubtedly taking over. It is a light-hearted manner of course, but we know Bergson’s manner, a manner which despite everything is seriously committed, and almost obliged to point out from the outset that one can by no means stray from the object under consideration. The reader of these few opening lines, no doubt more than the listener who heard and saw Bergson in the room of the Psychical Research Society on 28 May 1913, will experience the sensations of reading the beginning of a story whose reality does not simply rest within the date indicated, or in the version printed by PUF, at the beginning of the section, or in the notes recounting the nature of this learned society. Bergson insisted that his intervention be placed under the sign of a kind of fiction, but one which does not deny its occasional nature. In other words, more accurately, he hoped that the actual occasion did not disqualify a fictional frame, which he knows necessarily surrounds all theoretical considerations, especially those on the subject of telepathy. The end of this first paragraph is perhaps more edifying still. I have read somewhere the story of a sub-lieutenant whom the chances of the battle, the death or wounds of his superiors, had raised to the honour of

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an effective fiction the command of his regiment: all his life he thought of it, all his life he talked of it, the memory of those few hours suffused his whole existence. I am that sub-lieutenant. (ME, 76)

The fiction is this time clearly assumed. You think you have before you an intellectual, a philosopher who is a friend of science and of truth, curious about things of the mind. I am nothing of the sort: the man who is speaking to you is a simple soldier on whose shoulders circumstances have placed a burden that exceeds his strength. Modesty, of course, is essential in this kind of exordium. But here too, it is necessary to relate the texts to the texts. This evocation of the simple soldier, of the humble sub-lieutenant who is raised beyond his mission, is in reality the signal of a moment – perhaps the most important – of the text yet to come. This strange incursion of military matters into the heart of a scholarly debate indeed prepares one of the key passages of the paper. This is a fable which Bergson recounts a few pages later. Through the character of a ‘learned doctor’, this fable also brings science to the fore; in that of an officer, who appeared under fabulous conditions, it reveals one of those ‘phantasms of the living’ to which Bergson, citing his colleagues, wished to give titular importance. Presenting the narrator – or the orator, or the president, or the guest, or the philosopher – as a non-­ commissioned officer therefore also makes him, a little before his time, and in a way, a ‘phantasm of the living’: he was ‘seen’ at a distance by people obviously endowed with telepathy, and now he appears to them, as will in a moment the officer whose exact rank we will never know, ‘at the head of a valiant regiment’. This exordium is not the only place in this paper, as we will see, where Bergson takes the stage. But if he chooses to paint himself from the outset as a ‘phantasm of the living’ and as an officer, that is to say both as an object of research and as an active subject of the fable, it seems to me difficult to consider this beginning as purely rhetorical, and much more difficult to say that it is not profoundly connected with the speech itself, its cautious theses, its imaginary hypotheses, its focused questions; and I would even be tempted to add – Bergson himself invites us to think this – it connects with all his past work. Apart from the apparently purely speculative passages of the paper, where the question of telepathy is considered in all its psychological, scientific, philosophical complexity, the paper includes two relatively long narrative passages – two fables if you will – on which I am going linger a little. The first is presented as an authentic anecdote, but it is indeed a fable, a classical fable, with a positive character and one who is clearly less so, a fable with apologue and moral; it follows some considerations on the method 153

an effective fiction required to apprehend an object as little expected in philosophy, or even psychology, as telepathy; it serves as a starting point for a focused reflection and allows some firm considerations to be formulated on an uncertain subject. The second narrative is given as purely imaginary but never loses sight of the reality which must always serve as a guide to the spirit of philosophy; it is rather a kind of – more or less waking – reverie; it is located at the end of the paper and leads into its conclusion. So I will quote the fable itself first. It features a very respectable and esteemed character who plays the role of a sceptical scholar; a naive young girl who listens to the anecdote he tells; and a narrator who draws a somewhat developed moral from all of this. The title I use for it is taken from Bergson.

‘The little girl and the learned doctor’, a fable Some time ago, I was at a dinner party at which the conversation happened to turn on the phenomena which your Society investigates. There was an eminent physician present, one of our leading men of science. After listening attentively, he joined in the conversation, expressing himself, as nearly as I remember, in these words: ‘All that you are saying interests me very much, but I ask you to reflect before drawing a conclusion. I also myself know an extraordinary fact. I can guarantee its authenticity, for it was related to me by a lady highly intellectual, whose word inspires me with absolute confidence. The husband of this lady was an officer. He was killed in the course of an engagement. Well, at the very moment when the husband fell, the wife had the vision of the scene, a clear vision, in all points conformable to the reality. You may perhaps conclude from that, as she herself did, that it was a case of clairvoyance or of telepathy? . . . You forget one thing, however, and that is that it has happened many times that a wife has dreamed that her husband was dead or dying, when he was quite well. We notice cases in which the vision turns out to be true, but take no count of the others.Were we to make the full return, we should see that the coincidence is the work of chance.’ The conversation turned off in I know not what direction; there was no question of philosophical discussion, it was neither the time nor the place for it. But, when we left the table, a young girl who had been listening attentively came and said to me, ‘It seems to me that the doctor argued wrongly just now. I do not see what the fallacy in his argument was, but there must have been a fallacy.’ Yes, indeed, there was a fallacy! The child was right and the learned doctor wrong. (ME, 82–3)

I will come back in a moment to the moral, which develops and explains this ‘fallacy’. But first a word about the narrative device. It is complex, not to say devious. There is in fact not one, but two fables: the one told by the ‘learned doctor’ from an anecdote which he witnessed and from which he himself draws the moral; and the one told by the narrator, based on another 154

an effective fiction anecdote which he also witnessed, and from which he in turn draws an obviously divergent moral. The fable of the ‘learned doctor’ is embedded in the overall system: the main fable begins before it and ends after it. The last word therefore falls to the narrator and his own fable. These two fables are not addressed to the same audience. That of the ‘learned doctor’ is a general public, unfamiliar with scientific procedures, and ready to trust a man who in their eyes embodies science and knowledge. The ‘little girl’ is part of this assembly. The lesson of this fable in the eyes of the narrator, who undoubtedly invents it as he invents the ‘learned doctor’ (no edition consulted says anything about the authenticity of the anecdote, nor of the identity of the protagonists, which moreover, matters little), its lesson therefore is not to blindly trust a learned speech. Not because that speech might be sceptical or dissenting, but because, without itself being in any way learned, by cupping an attentive ear to nature it aligns itself with an intuition that presents itself to the mind. As for the audience of the second fable, it is none other than the assembly of colleagues who have come to listen to the lecture by their new president: this time it is an assembly of scholars, who cannot be turned into simple believers. By virtue of this device, the ‘learned doctor’ of the first fable, becomes, in the global fable, the one who does not know – a new Goliath. He is no longer in a position to give lessons, now finding himself faced with two types of questioning: that of the learned world, raised by Bergson to the rank of arbiter; that of the naive goodwill of the ‘little girl’ – a new David. The fabulist’s argument does not matter as much as the device he has devised and which alone wins support. I will say something about it, anyway. Bergson seizes the opportunity – he only fashioned it for that! – to organise a face-toface meeting between philosophy and science. This face-to-face takes the form of two discourses. That of the ‘learned doctor’ is a prosopopoeia (Bergson does not conceal that his character has not spoken the words he puts in his mouth); that of the philosopher is a kind of manifestation, the ‘phantom of the living’, which is put in its true philosophical place. It therefore becomes evident that the expression covers in the mind of the invited speaker realities of a different order than that of strict telepathy. In the speech that the philosopher narrator lends to the ‘learned doctor’, the main argument concerns statistics: ‘And consequently, if the vision proves true, it is necessary, in order to be sure that it is not an effect of chance, to have compared the number of true cases with the number of false cases’ (ME, 83). The narrator sees in this an undue reduction to mathematical abstraction: ‘Ah, if we accept this transposition into the abstract, we must then indeed compare in abstracto the number of true cases, with the number of false [. . .] But this abstraction consists in neglecting the essential, the picture which the lady perceived, and which was found to reproduce a complicated scene very distant from her’ (ME, 84). 155

an effective fiction We can glimpse here that which links the case of the ‘phantasms of the living’, or that of telepathy, to the objects which Bergson struggles to name – and in very much the same inappropriate terms: duration, life, art, mysticism, intuition, freedom, etc. The fable repeats ‘in other words’ (the expression comes back to Bergson’s pen precisely at this time of the conference) what the rest of his work expresses in so many other forms without ever claiming to have isolated the theme that it varies. Two points are essential in this response from the narrator to the ‘learned doctor’: on the one hand, the logical or probabilistic consideration is in the circumstances totally inappropriate (‘I do not need to compare the number of “true cases” with the number of “false”; statistics have nothing to do with it; the unique case which is presented to me is sufficient, provided I take it with all that it contains’ (ME, 85)); on the other hand, a healthy method requires trusting in the imagination – in this case, that of the artist (‘Well, the lady who had the vision of a part of a battle was in the situation of that painter; her imagination executed a picture. If the picture was the reproduction of a real scene, it must, by every necessity, be because she perceived that scene or was in communication with a consciousness that perceived it’ (ME, 85)). It would be a mistake to think that this statistical improbability resembles the unpredictability which, according to Bergson, characterises both vital development and artistic creation: it is, literally, the same. And the narrator’s objection to the learned doctor does not differ from that which, in Creative Evolution, the philosopher opposes to the finalists or to the mechanists whom he reproaches, in the name of intelligence, for refusing the unforeseeable, for ‘reject[ing] all creation’ (CE, 172). The officer’s wife, on the contrary, accepts the vision of her dying husband as true; and what credits her vision is precisely that it is that of an artist. We remember the Madrid conference: ‘To see with the eyes of a painter is to see better than common people’ (M, 1201 [my translation]), and therefore better, let us not doubt it, than an eminent scientist for whom statistics would be the keyword of the truth. What ghosts, then? Those whose existence preoccupies Bergson’s colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research? Those that the philosopher, as we will see, keeps passing on his way having assumed a more or less metaphorical appearance? My position is that the notion of ‘real ghost’, or ‘literal ghost’, is irrelevant here. The way in which Bergson speaks of ‘phantasms of the living’, that is to say first of all taking care to maintain the quotation marks (this expression translates the title of the edited collection which helped found the Society for Psychical Research, Phantasms of the Living, by Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore and Frederic William Henry Myers), but also, as we have seen, by presenting himself as such a ghost, shows that the framework of his reflection is in reality larger than that of the society before 156

an effective fiction which he communicates. He alludes to his own work to explain a number of phenomena that he relates to the ‘true hallucinations’ he has already spoken of. Here for example is how, in ‘“Phantasms of living” . . .’ he evokes Matter and Memory (published in 1896): But what I say of memory is equally true of perception. I will not enter here into details. It will be enough if I say that everything is obscure and even incomprehensible in perception if we regard the cerebral centres as organs capable of transforming material vibrations into conscious states; while, on the contrary, all becomes clear if we see in those centres (and in the sensory contrivances with which they are connected) instruments of selection charged with choosing, in the immense field of our virtual perceptions, those which are to be actualized. (ME, 95)

The ghost has, if one dares put it this way, no chance of life without a crucial distinction existing, being valued and operating: that between the mind and the brain. Now, this distinction, which Bergson uses here to speak of ghosts, he forged for objects that then he never called ghosts, or that, it may be said, he only called ghosts in a figurative way. Indeed. Yet it turns out that when he comes to speak about ‘real’ ghosts, in front of an audience of scholars who do not doubt or systematically ironise when they hear the word, who in fact collect testimonies relating to it, the same argument is used. Exactly the same. The question that the parallel reading of texts in which ghosts are here ‘true’ or ‘real’ and there ‘figurative’ or ‘metaphorical’ leads to is embarrassing, but it does not fail to arise: what should one think of an object designated by a word that is also used to designate other, apparently different, objects, while in both cases, so as to justify their existence and describe their nature, using not only the same word or precise synonyms of it, but the same arguments, the same diagrams? Shall we say that the ‘real’ ghosts, those whose existence is questionable in the eyes of scientists, are for this philosopher a particularly valuable material in support of a thesis he has long put forward about other realities? Or will it be said that the word – the same word, let us repeat it – used figuratively, accompanied by new and innovative psychic considerations, justified in advance or at the same time by questions, applies to objects which are not then directly named, but which fall under the same, difficult to formulate, law? Naturally, that is to say, without the help of metaphor (which is always better able than the concept to say what escapes the intellect), of fable (which derives from a function that is more natural than abstract discourse) or music (which without belittling meaning is forbidden to pass through common language to offer access to it), ‘indirectness’ would make the link between all these modes. The question risks being taken as only theoretical, even artificial, in the absence of the texts 157

an effective fiction where Bergson ventures into the field of perception, memory, dreams, intelligence, intuition. So let’s take a closer look.

The creatures of dream To begin to describe the way in which one of these true hallucinations studied by the members of the Society for Psychical Research might come about, here is how one could explain that a ‘phantasm of the living’ might ‘arise’ in the eyes of someone. I quote another excerpt from the London speech: Now, just as certain useless memories, or ‘dream’ memories, may slip into the field of consciousness, availing themselves of a moment of inattention to life, may there not be around our normal perception a fringe of perceptions, most often unconscious, but all ready to enter into consciousness, and which do in fact enter in exceptional cases or in predisposed subjects? [. . .] Now and then, however, one of these images might pass through as contraband, especially if the inhibiting mechanisms were functioning badly; and with such a fact ‘psychical research’ would be concerned. It may be that this is the way veridical hallucinations are produced and ‘phantasms of the living’ arise. (ME, 96–7)

Now here is another type of ‘veridical hallucination’: it is one where the dreamer is the spectator every night. In ‘Dreams’, a text written following a conference paper given more than ten years earlier (in 1901) to the l’Institut general Psychologique, and also collected in Mind Energy, Bergson describes how some of the ‘invisible phantoms’ of our mental space – they are legion, according to him – appear to us distinctly in our sleep: But, behind the memories which crowd in upon our present occupation and are revealed by means of it, there are others, thousands on thousands of others, below and beneath the scene illuminated by consciousness. Yes, I believe our past life is there, preserved even to the minutest details; nothing is forgotten; all we have perceived, thought, willed, from the first awakening of our consciousness, persists indefinitely. But the memories which are preserved in these obscure depths are for us in the state of invisible phantoms. They aspire, perhaps, to the light: they do not even try to rise to it; they know it is impossible, and that I, a living and acting being, have something else to do than occupy myself with them. (ME, 116, my emphasis)

For there to be vision, a ‘true’ vision, it is necessary, in the case of the dream as in that of the appearance of a ‘phantasm of the living’, that a break occur in the ordinary chain of psychic events as they are studied by psychologists. In the fable fashioned by Bergson in an attempt to make the appearance of ‘phantasms of the living’ plausible, he evokes, as we have seen, ‘a moment 158

an effective fiction of inattention’ of consciousness, whereby certain useless memories might slip into it; and he refers once again to this ‘fringe’, indistinct, vague ‘of perceptions, most often unconscious, but all ready to enter into consciousness, and which do in fact enter in exceptional cases’ (ME, 96); in the case of dreams, the appearance of ‘phantoms’, a completely normal phenomenon, quite banal, and which no one doubts, one can only speak of ‘rupture’ or ‘dysfunction’ because the mechanisms of institutional psychology, which at the turn of the century sought to constitute itself in science, are not alone sufficient to account for this. Bergson imagines, like Freud at the same moment, that sleep, and therefore dreams, correspond to a sort of temporary abdication of consciousness. Freud speaks of ‘the extinction of interest in the entire world’ and Bergson says ‘I am disinterested in everything. To sleep is to be disinterested’ (ME, 126). This is an ordinary dysfunction, but an incontestable rupture with the order of wakefulness. It is as a true novelist that Bergson describes the emergence of these creatures who, like vampires, wait only for darkness to lift the lid of the sarcophagus where they are imprisoned during their daytime lives. They too would like the door that separates them from conscious memories to finally open a crack, they too would say, ‘Open’: But suppose that, at a given moment, I become disinterested in the present situation, in the pressing action, in both of the forces which concentrate on one single point all the activities of memory; suppose, in other words, I fall asleep: then these repressed memories, feeling that I have set aside the obstacle, raised the trap-door which held them back below the floor of consciousness, begin to stir. They rise and spread abroad and perform in the night of the unconscious a wild phantasmagoric dance. They rush together to the door which has been left ajar. They all want to get through. But they cannot; there are too many of them. (ME, 116–17)

In both cases, an exceptional conjunction of events is required (Bergson uses the word in addressing his colleagues in London) for the vision to occur, which disturbs reason so much: in the first case, ‘the inhibiting mechanisms were functioning badly’, ‘this is the way [. . .] “phantasms of the living” arise’ (ME, 97); in the second, ‘among the phantom memories which aspire to weight themselves with colour, with sound, in short with materiality’ (ME, 117), one might merge with an element (sound, colour, light . . .) of external reality; ‘When this union between memory and sensation is effected, I dream’ (ME, 117). In both cases, the apparition only makes visible what was there but impeded for some reason (this is obviously not the same in both cases) from manifesting itself – that is to say from rising to the level of consciousness. Let us admit that there is not much difference between this explanation and that which Bergson attempts on a page of Matter and Memory to account for 159

an effective fiction what happens in the mental space of someone who wants to learn a lesson by heart. Let us further admit that there is very little difference between this ‘true hallucination’ and the ‘voluntary hallucination’ which characterises fantasy . . . When we strive to learn a lesson, for instance, is not the visual or auditory image which we endeavour to reconstitute by movements already in our mind, invisible though present? Even in the very first recitation, we recognize, by a vague feeling of uneasiness, any error we have made, as though from the obscure depths of consciousness we received a sort of warning. Concentrate your mind on that sensation, and you will feel that the complete image is there, but evanescent, a phantasm [véritable fantôme] that disappears just at the moment when motor activity tries to fix its outline. (MM, 99–100)

It is I, of course, who underline this use, perhaps figurative, of ‘[real] phantasm’. Perhaps it is figurative, indeed; because if it is, it will be necessary to explain that in the previous passage from Mind Energy it is meant literally, if it is true that both are describing the same phenomenon rather than comparable. In the few lines that follow in Matter and Memory, Bergson relates an experience concerning the conditions of learning to read: in an experiment a series of letters were held for a few seconds before the eyes of subjects who were asked to remember them, while, to prevent their accentuating these letters, they were simultaneously asked to repeat a given syllable ad libitum. ‘From this resulted a special psychical state; the subjects felt themselves to be in complete possession of the visual image, although unable to produce any part of it on demand: to their great surprise the line disappeared’ (MM, 100). One remembers the officer’s wife: she too had a ‘vision of the scene, a clear vision, in all points conformable to the reality’ (ME, 82). In both cases (I will return to Matter and Memory, I sense that it is necessary now to specify the point), ‘“According to one observer, the basis was a Gesammtvorstellung, a sort of all-embracing complex idea in which the parts have an indefinitely felt unity”’ (MM, 1004). We could also say that for Bergson, nothing good is done, said, understood, explained – nothing is really thought – without phantoms or ghosts: not learning to read, nor dreaming, nor the evolution of life, nor, therefore, if one believes the conclusion of ‘Philosophical Intuition’, of philosophy itself. Bergson always prefers an approach that is more difficult to express but that, so to speak, takes into account more rigorously the imperceptible and the elusive. In this he acts like a character in a novel. He resembles, for example, Fleda, the wonderful young woman in The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James, who realises that if the eponymous estate, while sumptuous and desirable,

4. The citation is from W. G. Smith, ‘The Relation of Attention to Memory’, Mind, January 1895.

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an effective fiction has in the end turned out to be so disappointing, it is because it lacked what carries the ordinary, albeit discreet, value of places and things. To Mrs Gereth, the friend who asks her to say more, to be a little more explicit about this essential lack, Fleda gives an answer whose accuracy is precisely due to her hesitation, and the subsequent corrections that she brings to bear: ‘It’s a kind of fourth dimension. It’s a presence, a perfume, a touch. It’s a soul, a story, a life. There’s ever so much more here than you and I. We’re in fact just three!’ ‘Oh, if you count the ghosts!’ ‘Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double – for what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at Poynton’, Fleda went on. ‘That was the only fault.’ (James 1983: 180)

Beware, Bergson might say, beware of a philosophy that animates no intangibles, that lacks these perhaps invisible, hardly speakable, yet vital elements. ‘Look with some reserve,’ I imagine Bergson saying here, ‘look with some reticence at a philosophy too obviously sure of its means, of its contours, of its basis, of its legitimacy, too clearly trusting in its posterity, a philosophy that would not become unquiet in the presence of any unnameable, a philosophy without furrows or shadows. Reject a philosophy without ghosts.’ When Bergson talks about intuition, which all the texts he devotes to it say is unapproachable through ordinary logical or linguistic means, we can bet that a ghost is prowling around. Intuition is obviously a true reality for the philosopher; but this reality is not easily perceptible by consciousness, the instruments of indexed knowledge – concepts, intelligence, language, all indirect, do not allow access to it. Present, active but invisible, it therefore shares with the letters of the reader, with the objects or characters of a dream, with the vision of the officer’s wife, the phantom condition. In this case too, admittedly exceptional circumstances are needed so that, in the eyes of the brilliant philosopher (genius is the exception), the spectre emerges which will haunt them all their life. Intuition is indeed, like letters for the reader, like the impossible and chimerical object for the dreamer, like the person of the dying officer for his wife, a ‘vision’ (this word, common to all, can concern appearance, hallucination and even sometimes the image): the good reader of the philosopher will be the one who, paying attention to what separates them from simple intuition as well as from the abstraction to which they are often reduced, will see again ‘what the philosopher saw’. For that, the reader will have only one tool at their disposal, ‘a certain intermediary image [. . .] a receding and vanishing image, which haunts, unperceived perhaps, the mind of the philosopher, which follows him like his shadow through the ins and outs of his thought’ (CM, 128). This image is ‘almost matter in that it still 161

an effective fiction allows itself to be seen, and almost mind in that it no longer allows itself to be touched’ (CM, 139). In a word it is a ghost, or a phantom, ‘a phantom which haunts us while we turn about the doctrine and to which we must go in order to obtain the decisive signal, the indication of the attitude to take and of the point from which to look’ (CM, 139). To ‘recapture this intuition itself ’, says Bergson, ‘[w]e have just two means of expression, concept and image. It is in concepts that the system develops; it is into an image that it contracts when it is driven back to the intuition from which it comes’ (CM, 141). The better of the two options is of course the image – which is to say (Bergson, as we have just seen, put it bluntly) a phantom. Already in Matter and Memory he attributed to the image ‘a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed half-way between the “thing” and the “representation”’ (MM, vii–viii, first page of the Foreword). His work is full of objects comparable to this one, of entities or ideas or notions whose existence is real as well as imaginary, between this and that, regularly – and fortunately – ‘half-way’. Whether or not the word phantom or ghost is pronounced ultimately does not matter. There is a phantom each time the division between matter and spirit is undecided, between life and death, between the visible and invisible, between perception and intuitive apprehension, each time there is encroachment, interpenetration (Bergson sometimes uses this word ) of what, latent, virtual, waits to manifest itself, and of the material under whose species this manifestation occurs. In Bergson’s work the phantom is sometimes an object of scientific and philosophical curiosity (as in the London conference), sometimes a character, or an element, or an object, or a textual process (it is not easy to stop at a particular name). It will be understood that my purpose aims to reduce, even eliminate, the distance separating the scientific object and the textual phenomenon, with the idea that if Bergson is interested in one, the other exists; and that if the textual ghosts are so numerous in his work, appearing in such diverse circumstances, it is because the textual, as always with Bergson, goes beyond the textual. If one wanted to limit oneself to the phantom object of scientific, philosophical, epistemological curiosity, or of psychic research, one could argue that the existence of the object in question could not depend on the perception, even particular, even exceptional, that one might have of it. In other words, if there is a ghost, its existence must be deduced from intimate scientific conviction, from its philosophical plausibility, not from the frequency of its appearances, not even from whether it appears or not: We might very well have gone on without perceiving it, and it may be that this is now our case with telepathy. But what is indisputable in any case is that

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an effective fiction if telepathy be real, it is natural, and that whenever the day comes that we know its conditions, it will no more be necessary to wait for a ‘phantasm of the living’ in order to obtain a telepathic effect than it is necessary for us now, if we wish to see an electric spark, to wait until it pleases the heavens to make it appear during a thunderstorm. (ME, 80)

‘. . . a dream I indulge in at times. . .’ Towards the end of the lecture, Bergson shares with his audience a ‘dream’ that he sometimes has that helps him to come to a conclusion. This is actually a new fable, which I want to quote for two reasons. First, because it too establishes the plausibility of an unsuspected omnipresence of ghosts. Second, because the mode chosen by the lecturer to support this plausibility is that of the dream narrative, and here we have a new proof that the mechanism of the dream is closely linked to that of the ghost and, therefore, of thought, such that one could hardly distinguish them – my hypothesis being, as I have said, that it is a question of the same mechanism. The fable in question is what one might call a rewriting of the history of science. The dreamer first imagines a story which he must pretend is known to everyone in the form he describes, then he rewrites it in reverse order. I have sometimes asked myself what would have happened if modern science, instead of setting out from mathematics to turn its direction towards mechanics, physics and chemistry, instead of bringing all its forces to converge on the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of mind – if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for example, had been psychologists. (ME, 98)

The fable is obviously fashioned so that one might consider its surprising, even paradoxical, consequences – let’s not hesitate to say: its moral. What the fabulist intends to work for is a simple inversion of values, the imaginary antecedent opening the way to an epistemological precedence: first the spirit, then matter. Or: first ‘psychical research’, then mechanics. The most general laws of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental principles of mechanics were discovered), science would have passed from pure mind to life: biology would have been constituted, but a vitalist biology, quite different from ours, which would have sought, behind the sensible forms of living beings, the inward, invisible force of which the sensible forms are the manifestations. (ME, 99)

It is not yet clear how such a fable can pave the way for the appearance of phantoms or a plausible explanation for their apparitions. That’s not exactly 163

an effective fiction the end of it. Bergson imagines, as a last step, what would be in 1913 the mental disposition of a civilisation that would have known this evolution of knowledge and research and whose points of reference would differ in every way from those of his audience, a civilisation therefore for whom ‘It is matter, and not mind, which in this case would have been the realm of mystery’ (ME, 100). Here is the fable itself: Suppose, then, that in an unknown land – let us say America, but an America not yet discovered by Europe and bent on having nothing to do with us – there had been developed a science identical with our actual science, with all its mechanical applications. It might then have happened that from time to time some fishermen, venturing far out from the coast of Ireland or Brittany, would have seen, far off on the horizon, an American ship moving at full speed against the wind – a steamship, let us say. They would have come and told what they had seen. Would they have been believed? Probably not. (ME, 100)

It is not only the history of science that is being rewritten in this way, it is the millennial legend of the ghost ship! Suddenly, and by virtue of a fiction, the world around us, with its fine and subtle technological inventions, can be fleetingly glimpsed through the imaginary eyes of sceptics, unbelievers (our inverted doubles) for whom our ordinary life would be surrounded by ghostly creatures, or creations. The reverse of the world, in short. Whether they sail the seas or interstellar spaces, all ships would be ghosts. Phantoms also our familiar manufactured objects, phantoms again our material constructions, phantoms perhaps even our thoughts, resulting from a language made to understand the logical and material functioning of things. In the eyes of such a people, ‘ghosts’ would be all realities bearing the mark of the mechanical conditions of their production. What then might one say to the sceptics who would not fail to give notice to those who believe in the reality of these impossible creations, to reproduce the conditions of their appearances? If such conditions were met, says the dreamy lecturer in preparing his moral, it would be necessary ‘to constitute a Society like yours but, in this case, a Society for physical research which would have called witnesses before it, judged and criticised their tales, and established the authenticity of the “apparitions” of steamboats’ (ME, 100–1). The if of fiction, of course, conditions the hypothesis of the omnipresence of phantoms; and it is another if, that of the dream, which allows the fable of the ghost ship. The conditional is the common mood of their appearance and it is never quite forgotten. But conditional as it is, it has the power to instil a certain vision in our minds, unusual, plausible, and not devoid of clarity. Under these conditions, which are all virtual, the phantom is where we are, it is everywhere, even if no one suspects its presence, even if no one 164

an effective fiction hypothesises its existence. No need for testimonies, or more or less proven cases, no need for ‘fables’. We live in a world of ghosts, whether we see them or not, whether or not we hear the word that refers to them. And what seems to us such a banal spectacle that one would not even think of calling it a ‘spectacle’ – a steamboat standing out against the horizon, for example – could in a way be considered ghostly.

‘. . . perhaps even death’ This ghost is no different than the one that, for convenience, one might call the textual ghost. As we have seen in several apparently heterogeneous examples, Bergson gives this name to many realities operating according to a common pattern. This pattern never fails to attest to the presence of a ghost. If we pay attention to these textual moments when a separation is brought into question, and where this separation is the object of the investigation and the hypothesis, we will indeed notice that the ghosts, whether or not they are designated by this name, are not always where one would expect them, or that – in an equivalent formulation – they are everywhere. Starting from this principle, one could say, for example, that even a text like Creative Evolution falls under what I have called, playfully, Bergson’s ghost philosophy. I am thinking, saying this, of the last page of the third chapter, in which, to express the specificity of the living, Bergson fashions a fable which closely resembles the one which allowed him to say what a dream – or a ghost – is. Life, he says, is – like consciousness, which is sometimes dreamy – an incessant ‘flow’ that, ‘like all consciousness . . . includes potentialities [virtualités] without number which interpenetrate’ (CE, 284). Life does not become life – as letters do not become intelligent text, as unconscious memories do not become dreams, as the dying officer does not appear to his wife, distant from him by several thousand kilometres – without being exceptionally favoured by an encounter; in this case, that of a flood of innumerable virtualities within matter: The matter that it bears along with it, and in the interstices of which it inserts itself, alone can divide it into distinct individualities. On flows the current, running through human generations, subdividing itself into individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense preexisted. (CE, 284)

This ‘soul’ called to become a living creature is like the memory which remains latent as long as it does not find a form in which to manifest itself in 165

an effective fiction the dream. Likewise, the soul exists, yes, but its existence will remain virtual, and it itself will remain invisible, until the moment when life finds in matter a form in which it can manifest itself. The unconscious memory is to the object of the dream what ‘virtuality’ is to living individuality. Its emergence in the form of a new creature is obviously surprising, and its appearance (we speak here, interchangeably, of images of the dream or of the creation of a living soul) seems incongruous, inexplicable. Like, indeed, that of a ‘phantasm of the living’. If the woman in the fable was able to ‘see’, dying a hundred leagues away, her officer husband, it is because his image took advantage of an inattention or a dysfunction of nature to appear. Because, says Bergson, it is ‘most likely certain mechanisms are specially charged with the duty of throwing back, into the unconscious, images so introduced, for they would be very embarrassing in everyday life’ (ME, 97). The phantasm of the living is therefore first of all, before appearing to whom it may concern, an image that nature has taken care to ‘[throw] back, into the unconscious’, like all these memories (Bergson also calls them ‘unconscious’) which are only waiting for an accident to throw themselves back, even fleetingly, into dreams, into a consciousness that has long since relegated them. The image of a dying husband, the object of a dream, the creation of a living soul can thus access consciousness only by more or less forcing the passage; Bergson says marvellously that they then pass ‘as contraband’ (ME, 97). In a sense it is this contraband that explains why intelligence, logic, reason – and even language, the tool for which they have a predilection – are, like any discipline that claims to work through them, regularly found wanting when it is a question of giving an account of the events which bring them into being, of the phantoms which they have against all likelihood made visible. In a way, the existence of ghosts supports the thesis of the defect of intelligence. Intelligence only knows about nature what nature has already produced: the phantom is quite natural, but it corresponds to a ‘calculation’ of nature (‘If such intercommunication exists, nature will have taken precautions to render it harmless’ (ME, 97)) which thwarts the laws intelligence knows. All phenomena that go beyond the frame they constitute are similar, more or less, to ghosts. Now, almost all phenomena which Bergson’s philosophy takes as objects are characterised by such an ‘excess [débord]’: the mind exceeds the cerebral; intuition exceeds perception; life exceeds necessity; memory exceeds recollection; art goes beyond linguistic expression; etc. The last sentence of this third chapter of Creative Evolution, which has intrigued, even shocked so much, given rise to so many puzzled or ironic comments, is not written in a different spirit. It adds to the thesis on the innumerable virtualities of the great vital current a truly visionary conclusion, but 166

an effective fiction it in no way contradicts the rigour of its configuration. The flow of the living is evoked in a sort of verbal flow. Although the ghost is not called here by its name, it is certainly part of the procession. And it is not in the least a problem to be elucidated. It would be rather, precisely because it also ‘overlaps’ (between life and death, between presence and absence, etc.), and because it plays with distinctions dear to intelligence, that element of reality which allows the mind to consider that new virtualities might be permanently realised – which is another way of saying that if life is indeed a series of accidents through which vital virtualities find their place among the matter carried by this flow, if it is therefore the perpetual creation of new souls, then mors ultra non erit [there will be no death]! All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and 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. (CE, 285–6)

Speaking in London in 1913 about ‘phantasms of the living’, Bergson therefore does not tackle a subject which is totally foreign to him. His interest in ‘psychical research’ is real; the compliments and encouragement he sends to colleagues who have wished for his presidency are sincere and genuine; the lecture he wrote for them is a loyal contribution to their debates, a constructive exposition of the stakes attached to their questions. And there is no doubt that the hypotheses he submitted to them without necessarily convincing them must have usefully fed into their research. My point, one understands, was not to claim this, much less to prove it. Rather, it was, focusing on the deep coherence of the oeuvre, to relate this text which is often considered a bit embarrassing, anecdotal in its reflections, and in any case rather eccentric in relation to them, with the texts where the word phantom and the themes which are attached to it are also present, if in a sometimes apparently very different way: the text from Matter and Memory on the learning of a lesson, that from Creative Evolution on the creation of a soul, that from Mind Energy on the constitution of dream images, that from ‘Philosophical Intuition’ on the nature of the mediating image, are at first sight so far removed from the conference on ‘Phantasms of the Living’ that the connection would otherwise have seemed artificial, forced. I believe, however, that, here perhaps more than elsewhere, a decidedly textual reflection can, if not elucidate the doctrine when it is in question, at least shed light on it in a way which also benefits our understanding of the thought of a philosopher considered as a whole. In other words, my question 167

an effective fiction is not ‘Did Bergson believe it?’, but, ‘How can the question of the existence of “phantasms of the living” interest a philosopher like Bergson?’ I will make two points in this connection, both being equally important to me. The first, which appears quickly when we follow this textual thread, is that Bergson uses the words ‘phantom’ or ‘ghost’ quite often, and in very different circumstances, when he intends to account for the existence and nature of objects at the centre of his theoretical concerns.We then discover that the question debated by his colleagues undoubtedly matters differently to him than to them. The way he approaches the question posed is not in the least foreign to the rest of his work; it is the same, only asked about another object. To put it a little bluntly: it would be impossible for Bergson to brush aside with the back of a rationalist or materialist hand the questions of telepathy or of the existence of ‘phantasms of the living’ without denying the main thesis of Creative Evolution. The second remark is no less important to me. I will develop it a little more at length. The word ‘phantom’ rarely enters the lexicon of philosophers, even if, at the time when Bergson is giving this lecture, many minds (renowned scholars, respected philosophers, undisputed scientists, mediums, occultists of all sects) are interested in phenomena of telepathy or visionary experiences. Let us say without fear that it relates more particularly to novelists and to writers of short stories: the ghost story is certainly a more authoritative genre than the ghost philosophy of which I have spoken.5 To put it another way, even if the matter gave rise to the writing of important books by the two James brothers, Henry would be cited here more spontaneously and more plausibly – perhaps even with more profit or relevance – than William, the elder brother, who was a philosopher, and a truly esteemed friend of Bergson, yet who was also interested in the questions posed by the then booming field of ‘psychical research’. Although nothing of course prevents a philosopher from taking up the subject, the phantom belongs more particularly to the realm of fiction. This is perhaps one of the reasons, moreover, that the text of this London conference has been ignored. A philosopher speaking about ghosts – I mean of course ‘real’ ghosts – is not quite performing their role. Ghosts are the business of authors of fiction, not of philosophers, to whom fiction is important, in principle, only as a theoretical object, and who regard even bookish apparitions with suspicion.

Literature and Philosophy Mixed I would like to suggest a different hypothesis. The word ghost, precisely because it belongs to the realm of fiction, naturally carries fiction with it. 5.  Ghost story and ghost philosophy in English in the original.

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an effective fiction It’s hard to talk about ghosts without bringing in ghosts – if only by mentioning at least one case. Without recounting it. Without appealing to the faculties of fantasy, imagination – fiction. Or, to put it in the terms of The Two Sources, without implementing the fabulising function, under which the ghosts obviously fall. And we saw that in this London conference paper Bergson’s recourse to the fable was indeed constant, concerted – it was above all the surest means of operating effectively – because there is, yes, an effective fiction. Fiction is not in this case a means of embellishing a theoretical discourse that is too abstract or too arid, it is properly the means of thinking and of progressing in thought. And above all, it is not limited – far from it – to the few obviously narrative passages of the text (‘The young girl and the learned doctor’ is only one of them). Fiction soaks this communication through and through – from his exordium (where Bergson presents himself as a phantom) to his peroration (where he engages in the breathtaking exercise of uchronia that we have seen). My personal conviction is that if Bergson so easily kept company with ghosts, it is because the subject allowed him, more and better than others, to appeal to the fabulous – to evoke it, to implement it, in short to philosophise in accordance with principles which contradict neither his mistrust of an intelligence obsessed with measurement, or an ‘incorrigibly presumptuous’ reason (CE, 50), or a conceptual expression which makes abstraction a dogma; nor his confidence in the methodical and hermeneutical powers of fantasy; nor his conviction that ‘fictions which confront and sometimes thwart our intelligence’ correspond to a ‘vital need’ (TS, 91). In his eyes, ‘the never-­ending work of the fabulising function’ (TS, 110, translation modified) not has only social virtues (it works for the establishment of religions, for example); its epistemological virtues are also certain. I believe that one can say – without, of course, too many precautions, but also without the risk of too great an approximation – that the work of Bergson, like that of Henry James, would not be what it is if it did not traverse from one side to the other this acquaintance with ghosts, this faith in their capacity to say what is happening with living beings (for James) or the living (for Bergson). James of course wrote more than ghost stories, and it has long been observed that if one collected his writings in this genre in one volume it would be shorter than any of his novels; and indeed many of his stories, including the most famous, are populated only by living men or women, whom the other world barely attracts, and whose presence does not arouse anguish or terror. It is necessary to take a closer look. It would be easy to see, I think, that ghosts are not always where they are looked for, or where it is expected or feared they might appear. James goes so far as to say that it is when they are absent 169

an effective fiction that these ghosts are most effective; this is when, he says, they are most fully themselves: That indeed, when the question is (to repeat) of the ‘supernatural’, constitutes the only thickness we do get; here prodigies, when they come straight, come with an effect imperilled; they keep all their character, on the other hand, by looming through some other history – the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something. (James 1934: 256)

We would also see that, in the absence of a ghost, it is very rare that nothing and no one takes its place: it may be a place, a country, a continent, an object, even one who, thanks to a particular circumstance, finds themselves in a position to play the role of the one who reveals the relations between humans as being sometimes less important than the difficult relationship that one or the other maintains with space. One might note, by way of example, that the short story first published in 1896 under the title ‘The Way it Came’, then again in 1909 under that of ‘The Friends of the Friends’, is based entirely on the outline of the lecture that Bergson gave in London in 1913; or rather (let’s not brutalise the timeline more than is necessary), that Bergson’s lecture has no other plot than that of James’s short story, since the two main characters have the same experience: the appearance of a ‘phantasm of the living’. It is not impossible even that the work of the Psychical Research Society served the novelist (whose brother had preceded Bergson as its head) as food for reflection, just as it served the philosopher as a support of fiction. If we did not know for sure, would we attribute to Bergson or to James the phrase which evokes ‘those inexplicable occurrences which are chronicled in thrilling books and disputed about in learned meetings’? It is indeed taken from the short story ‘The Friends of the Friends’ (James 1907–9a: 397). The words that follow it would not be out of place in the fable that Bergson tells in ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’: ‘on the part of a being just engulfed in the infinite and still vibrating with human emotion, of nothing more fine and pure, more high and august, than such an impulse of reparation’ (James 1907–9a: 397). I have compared Bergson’s lecture in London to a number of texts that he wrote without, one might suppose, thinking either of telepathy or of the ghosts of people living or dead. The text of the lecture is no further from Creative Evolution, or from ‘Philosophical Intuition’, than The Turn of the Screw is from The Golden Bowl or Portrait of a Lady, or even from a few short stories that are not particularly well known within the genre of ghost stories. Let us add that the London lecture is no further from Henry James’s fictional

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an effective fiction universe than from William James’s speculative one. Many other texts confirm this rapprochement.

The mediating figure [image] in the carpet Take, for example, The Figure in the Carpet, without doubt one of James’s most famous, and most commented on, short stories. The plot is simple: during a social gathering, a young critic (this is the narrator of the story) meets the author of the book he has just reviewed (a certain Hugh Vereker).Vereker has read the article and without particularly praising the critic nevertheless tells him that he has been touched by a certain tone, a certain way of approaching him, which leads him to believe that perhaps this critic would finally be able to say what no commentator before him has ever said; which is, in the author’s eyes, absolutely obvious, and which accounts for the unity and originality of all his work (about twenty novels at the time of this conversation). The story, of which this conversation constitutes the essential part, revolves around this ‘element’, this ‘thing’, ‘the particular thing’, this ‘idea’, this ‘general intention’, this ‘secret’, ‘this buried treasure’ (all these words or expressions are used by one or the other of the two characters), which, according to Vereker, comprises all the interest and beauty of his work, but that neither he nor his young interlocutor will ever manage to name other than obliquely. The Figure in the Carpet, the English title of the short story (long translated as L’image dans la tapis, now rather by Le motif dans la tapis), is therefore a way (periphrastic, or metaphorical) of naming that which is decidedly not nameable. In any case, that is the idea that readers of the story will guard. Hugh Vereker’s last word to the narrator is ‘“Give it up! Give it up!”’ (James 1916: 32). This figure or motif or image does exist, it even has a concrete and indisputable existence (‘“it is exactly as palpable as the marble of this chimney”’, says Vereker (James 1916: 21)), but the whole point is that it is not immediately, i.e. not directly, visible. And therefore, it is even less nameable or utterable. I am not citing this famous text only to say that, if we relate it to the work of its author (of James, therefore), we should pose the hypothesis that its unity and originality are due to a reality, of whatever order, that one might suspect, or whose presence one might deduce, in each of his books, in each of his short stories – and even (why not?) in each of the critical texts of which he is (also) the author – but which one would be quite unable to state simply, perhaps even to perceive. My purpose, by summoning this text at this moment of my study on Bergson, is not even exactly to encourage one to see in this invisible

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an effective fiction figure [motif], the presence of which is never in doubt, a sort of ghost – elusive, evanescent, but unmistakably significant. I guess I wouldn’t be the first! No. What I would like is, as simply as possible, to draw attention to the similarity of the narrative constructions of James and Bergson. I would say that the text Bergson wrote in 1911 and called ‘Philosophical Intuition’ is his ‘Figure in the Carpet’. And that this is news. Bergson in any case exposes the same enigma there, and he gives the same reasons as Vereker for abandoning the idea that the figure can be expressed other than through indirect means. Vereker and Bergson agree on the essentials anyway: [Vereker:] ‘Isn’t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely?’ (James 1916: 19–20) [Bergson:] Finally the whole is brought together into a single point, which we feel could be ever more closely approached even though there is no hope of reaching it completely. In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his life. (CM, 128)

The young and fiery critic, sure he will succeed where everyone has failed before him, seeks to be given clues: ‘“Is it a kind of esoteric message?”’ To which Vereker replies: ‘“Ah my dear fellow, it can’t be described in cheap journalese!”’ One imagines hearing Mallarmé distinguishing between the language of ‘universal reportage’ (that of journalists precisely) and that of art; or Bergson lamenting that philosophers continue to use ordinary language as the language of expression to explain themselves. The narrator of the story hopes that if the critic he is proves himself incapable of unravelling this secret, the author, who singled him out, will whisper something in his ear: [James:] [This thing.] ‘Should you be able, pen in hand, to state it clearly yourself – to name it, phrase it, formulate it?’ ‘Oh’, he almost passionately sighed, ‘if I were only, pen in hand, one of you chaps!’ [. . .] ‘But why should you despise us chaps for not doing what you can’t do yourself?’ ‘Haven’t I done it in twenty volumes? I do it my way.’ (James 1916: 24–5) [Bergson:] All the complexity of his doctrine, which would go on ad infinitum, is therefore only the incommensurability between his simple intuition and the means at his disposal for expressing it. What is this intuition? If the philosopher has not been able to give the formula for it, we certainly are not able to do so. (CM, 128)

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an effective fiction Aware of the incapacity in which this situation places the reader or the commentator of the philosophical text, Bergson gives him, as Vereker gives to the narrator, a small clue. Like Vereker’s, this clue is mysterious, and like it, it has caused a lot of ink to flow. Bergson is not talking about an image in the carpet. Such that . . . what we shall manage to recapture and to hold is a certain intermediary image between the simplicity of the concrete intuition and the complexity of the abstractions which translate it, a receding and vanishing image, which haunts, unperceived perhaps, the mind of the philosopher, which follows him like his shadow through the ins and outs of his thought. (CM, 128)

A clue that James’s imaginary novelist also gives in his own way to his equally imaginary critic:‘“Every page and line and letter [is a clue] The thing’s [. . .] stuck into every volume [. . .] It governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every comma”’ (James 1916: 23). It does not concern the role of intelligence whose importance James and Bergson, Bergson and James, downplay. This is one of the challenges of the dialogue between Vereker and his young critic, which turns successively in all possible methodical directions to overcome the enigma that this image constitutes: ‘“Is it in the style or something in the thought? An element of form or an element of feeling?”’ (James 1916: 23). Silence from the author . . . Another worried question from the critic: ‘“And a little intelligence might spoil it?”’ Vereker is a little more talkative on this point: ‘“Well, you have got a heart in your body. Is that an element of form or an element of feeling? What I contend that nobody has ever mentioned in my work is the organ of life”’ (24). Intelligence is then in both cases kept at the margins. Perhaps because life is all about . . . ‘L’élan vital’ [the vital impulse]: ‘the organ of life’, is that so different? In any case, this does not at all mean, for either of the writers, that the role of intelligence is at all contemptible or superfluous: if Hugh Vereker agrees to share with the narrator his regret that no critic has ever suspected the existence of an image in his carpet, it is because he has been seduced by the narrator’s intelligence, as he tells him on several occasions.Yet, he quickly adds, ‘“the fact of your being awfully clever and your article’s being awfully nice doesn’t make a hair’s breadth of difference”’ (James 1916: 18–19). In the wonderful story that ‘Philosophical Intuition’ is to me, Bergson takes the same point of view. Intelligence is good for science, he says, it organises the functioning of common language, but it will never take the place of intuition, which it will never contribute to approaching:‘the attitude of common-sense, as it results from the structure of the senses, of intelligence and of language,

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an effective fiction is nearer to the attitude of science than to that of philosophy’ (CM, 149), he says. Neither philosophical intuition nor the image in the carpet has anything to do with intelligence, since the truth, says Bergson, is that intelligence ‘cannot in general enter into what is being done, it cannot follow the moving reality, adopt the becoming which is the life of things’ (CM, 148). The young reviewer is astonished to hear Vereker tell him that it is by reading reviews that he can gauge ‘“what a failure I am!”’ ‘“You a failure – heavens! What then may your ‘little point’ happen to be?”’ (James 1916: 19). This is precisely the question that the narrator of Bergson’s story answers: ‘If the philosopher has not been able to give the formula for it, we certainly are not able to do so’ (CM, 128). ‘Every day’, says Proust, ‘I value intelligence less. Every day I realize more clearly that it is only from outside it that the writer can recapture something of our impressions, that is to say reach something of himself and the only way of art’ (Proust 1987 [my translation]). ‘Something of our impressions’, ‘the only way of art’ (Proust); a ‘buried treasure’, a ‘figure in the carpet’ (James); a ‘unique point’ where a philosophy ‘is truly itself ’ but which we must ‘despair of reaching’ (Bergson): all these periphrases bear witness in these authors to the perplexity which they have made the subject of their research. The name writer brings them together probably better than that of novelist or philosopher. Bergson, since he is the object of this study, does not write a text which could be the subject of a novel or a short story: he writes this story, he invents this fiction which, like Proust at the beginning of Contre Sainte-Beuve, like James in The Figure in the Carpet or The Beast in the Jungle, offers the idea that the turn, the detour, the figure, periphrasis, is a necessity. Periphrasis or metaphor. Any figure, in fact. In any case, ‘in other words’. Like Bergson in ‘Philosophical Intuition’, like Vereker in The Figure in the Carpet, Proust says that writing for an artist has no other raison d’être than this blind quest, as inventive as it is tireless. ‘A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said’ (CM, 132). And Proust: ‘the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world’ (Proust 2001b: 842). Through different forms, stories, appearances, motifs, the narrator explains to Albertine that, for a somewhat trained eye (‘constantly renewing contact with the philosopher’s thought’ says Bergson (CM, 127)), a unique identity can be seen that successive books only vary infinitely. He gives the examples of Barbey d’Aurevilly, in whom he shows the permanence of the motif of ‘the hidden reality revealed by a physical sign’ (Proust 2001b: 842); of Stendhal, in whom ‘a certain sense of altitude symbolising the life of the spirit’ (843–4) is common to Julien, a 174

an effective fiction prisoner in a ‘lofty place’, to Fabrice, whose jail is at the top of a tower, and to the Abbé Blanès, who occupies himself with astrology at the top of a church steeple; and of paintings by Vermeer, in which he sees so many ‘fragments of an identical world’ (844). It is to such an exercise, as we shall see in the following chapter, that Bergson devotes himself when he shows that, in Spinoza or Berkeley, themes or concepts, however precise or rigid, however sharp they may be, and even famous doctrines, are hardly related at all to the unique and indivisible intuition which gave birth to them without preventing the confusing diversity of its manifestations. The ‘phantasms of the living’ are in their own cases quite similar to what the narrator of ‘The Captive’ shows Albertine. And we must admit that these reconciliations once made (between texts as distant from each other as Creative Evolution and ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’, between Matter and Memory and ‘Philosophical Intuition’), and with these similarities once identified (between James and Bergson, between Stendhal and Bergson, between Proust and Bergson), it becomes difficult to envision a philosophical project as if it differed in its very principle from all creative writing – narrative or otherwise. The questions that Proust asks himself (in one of his notebooks, in 1908) before undertaking the great project of In Search of Lost Time show, moreover, that the border between genres matters less when creation is in question than this fixation on the original ‘source’ or ‘impulse’, which mocks genres, as the basis of the themes that this border leads him to explore: ‘Laziness or doubt or impotence take refuge in uncertainty in the form of art. Should we write a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Let us see no pose, no coquetry here. And let’s be careful not to put on the shelves that others have labelled before us such a work that passes for . . . another which, on the contrary . . .

Henri, Henry and William Henry James and not William is the real brother of Henri Bergson. Bergson apparently never wrote a line about him; it is not even certain he read a single story by him. This should help us to relativise the relations of influence – so often commented on, in one direction or another – between such (for example Nathalie Sarraute) and such (for example Marcel Proust) and Bergson. It is impossible to deny between she and he and they, convergences, similarities, that are more than mere resemblances. They do not signify an influence; they indicate only, at a given point in the history of literature, an identity of point of view, a community of intuition – which mocks both genres and precedence. Even though Henri Bergson and Henry James recount at the same 175

an effective fiction time what is almost the same story (The Figure in the Carpet is published the same year as Matter and Memory), one might not conclude either an influence of one on the other, or a proximity, which Henri’s friendship with William would have made possible, and literally fruitful. Rather, let us risk the hypothesis that, both being writers, living at the same period, they view their writing profession in the same way – not at all by chance, but out of an affinity of sensibility and intuition. From the point of view that I have chosen, the nature of the ‘secret’ (which image? which intuition?) matters less than the belief in its existence, and matters still less than the will of the two writers to make it a major theme that is moreover essential to their concerns. In truth, they are not considered to be different, or even distant from one another. No one even takes the trouble to call them strangers. Their proximity, perhaps masked by that, well attested, of Henri to William, but more surely by the thickness and opacity of the wall long erected to separate the field of the philosopher from that of narrative art – this proximity is, however, lively. By that I also mean more attuned to life – whether one speaks of the organ of life or of the vital impetus [l’élan vital] – than the differences, manifest and incontestable, which explain why one never speaks of one at the same time as the other.

Philosophy and philosophy William and Henri, yes, of course. Both are ‘philosophers’, they both read, met, esteemed, corresponded with one another; each wrote about the work of the other, placing it in their own path, situating it in relation to their personal approach. Many articles have been devoted to their affinities, which also never fail to mention points where their positions might differ. Talking about this ‘proximity’ offers the opportunity to specify the ideas of one, the theories of the other, their respective positioning in relation to science, spiritualism, mysticism; in short, how the doctrine of one may converge with the other, and points on which they sometimes diverge. Yet with regard to Bergson’s particular concern for an adequate philosophical language – the recommendations that he makes in this area, his initiatives, and even his original achievements – let us recognise that this is hardly a question that concerns William, and that if points of commonality between them as philosophers are not rare, they are non-existent between them as writers. This is hardly surprising. Professional philosophers rarely make the question of expression in philosophy the object of strictly philosophical considerations or comments, much less a priority. And it is also true that the exchanges between the two men never focused on this question of expression. 176

an effective fiction Philosophy and literature As for the proximity of Henri and Henry – that is to say, that of the philosopher and the novelist – it is hardly (in fact never, to my knowledge) noted, let alone commented on. We have seen, however, that such a comparison can be justified: the similarity of concerns is obvious; the resemblance of the paradoxical provocations concerning the oeuvres which are close to their hearts, disturbing. And above all the fiction that they both invent is based on the same elements, their plot or intrigue is the same – and so too their denouement. But it’s not hard to understand the reason for this abstention either. What might one do with this ‘coincidence’ (let’s call it that)? What advantage can be drawn from this close encounter between two distinct generic writings, targeting different audiences, creating works in fields whose imperviousness to one another has been thoroughly tested? ‘He may not write music’, says Bergson of the philosopher, ‘but he generally is a writer’ (TS, 217, translation modified). There you have it! If philosophers are writers and this quality is not simply discounted, perhaps we will agree to consider that writing is the primordial given, whether one is a poet, a novelist or a philosopher, and that membership or disciplinary claim matters less than this. This view would lead to the idea that writers not only have a common concern for their tool of expression, but that they also make it the subject of their work. It would not be contested for a poet, nor, no doubt, thinking of James or Duras, Proust or Sarraute, Beckett or Woolf, for a novelist. This is the reason why one should not hesitate to make Bergson a fully-fledged writer. He made the question of expression his first and main claim, and his invention was tireless, as we have seen, when it came to proposing the turns and figures, the fables capable of renewing its principles. Indeed.Yet, it will be said that his writing would still have to offer an end comparable to that of a novelist or a poet. This question is immense. The next few sentences are hypotheses, I am only stating them to help mark out a territory (the writing of philosophy) that remains largely wild and unexplored. What is it all about? I’ll discuss it a bit summarily, forgive me; sometimes this allows for greater clarity. It seems to me that what is at the heart of this matter is the very old question of the intention of the author. It is not strange that a teacher explains to his students that while it may be interesting or useful to know the intention of a poet or a novelist (an intention often reconstructed after the fact, whether by the writers themselves or by others), the interest of their work is not reduced to this. Many authors (Augustin, Proust,Valéry, among others) have said it before the professors, moreover; but the meaning of a work does 177

an effective fiction not belong more to the one who wrote it than to those who comment on it. In a way, the whole history of philosophy tends to show that this is indeed the presupposition of many readers of philosophers who regularly demonstrate that what those who preceded them wrote should not be identified with what they themselves have said about it, before commenting in turn on those their work has influenced: Bergson’s Spinoza is certainly not the standard Spinoza, any more than Balibar’s Spinoza is; Heidegger’s Nietzsche is not Foucault’s; Jankélévitch’s Bergson is not Deleuze’s; Aristotle’s Plato is not that of Kant, nor that of Derrida either; and so on.Yet, one will say, it is obvious: the doctrine of a great philosopher (the doctrine! the doctrine!) carries in itself something that might be adapted to any era, to any other doctrine which finds it on its way and undertakes a demanding and rigorous reading of it. This is even proof of its richness.

Literature and literature But if, as Bergson helps us to think, the philosopher is above all a writer, would one say that the doctrine they profess and for which they wrote alone explains this inadequacy of the oeuvre’s project, and even the innumerable successive commentaries that this oeuvre has inspired? Will one leave outside the field of reflection the very writing the philosopher implemented and continue to claim that writing is ultimately only an anecdotal parameter of the philosophical enterprise? Bergson’s whole oeuvre argues in the opposite direction. If he can say calmly that his real interest does not lie in the philosophical utterance, which, moreover, most often is that which ensures its notoriety, it is because he does not identify the doctrine that a philosophical work reveals – if it is reduced to an idea or a sum of ideas on a given subject – with this work itself. He is sensitive to its musical style, to its harmonics, to its figures, to what it does not say but of which it gives the idea – to what it suggests; the word matters to him as much as it does to James (Henry), who makes the painter of ‘The Real Thing’ (1892) express his ‘innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation [vertus suggestives in the French edition]’ (James 1907–9b: 317). It is in consideration of this faculty of suggestion that Vereker situates in the organisation of his book, in its formal constitution, that which the critics, he says, have never been able to see, but that more astute critics than them will perhaps see one day: not ‘the particular thing’, ‘the figure in the carpet’, but its exemplary representation. ‘“The order, the form, the texture of my books”’, he says, ‘“will perhaps some day constitute 178

an effective fiction for the initiated a complete representation of it. So it’s naturally the thing for the critic to look for”’ (James 1916: 20). So if one is ready to read philosophers for what they are (writers) and for what they do (the work of language), if we accept the parallel that I am sketching between Henri Bergson and Henry James – and I am well aware that this is a lot of ifs – then we will have to resolve, if only as an hypothesis, to do the same reading work on their texts as that which is done on the poems of Louise Labé, on the novels of Virginia Woolf, on the stories of Marguerite de Navarre, and focus on ‘the order, the form, the texture’ [English in original] of their works. Could one not imagine that the expressive work of philosophers is the site and object of a quest which, without constituting its own end, would not be as important as the work itself? And accept the idea that order, form, texture are, in the work of any writer, a truly ‘perfect’ ‘representation’ of that for which the writing has been mobilised? My little digression on the place and importance of ghosts in Bergson, it is now understood, was not undertaken in any other spirit. Ghosts touch upon the profound order of the text and things, yes: they are the regular indication of a sur, a sub, a visibility or a latency which matters more than the question of their very existence. Ghosts also affect form, but yes: their hybridity is not only thematic (dead vs living, visible vs latent, etc.), it is also verbal (literal vs figurative). The ghosts finally affect the texture, yes, the texture of pages and even of books which have opted, according to a concerted epistemological decision, for the vague and the undecided, which are regularly claimed, and participate in this halo, this fringe which must have, says Bergson, ‘more importance for philosophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds’ (CE, 49). The fabulising function, a notion invented by Bergson, only found its theoretical place relatively late in his work. Yet we have seen that if it is not, before that date, a subject of particular consideration, it has for a long time already played a considerable role, whether in his thought or in his writing, if it is possible to distinguish one from the other. With it Bergson fashions the tool which a posteriori clarifies in a particularly luminous way all of his work of philosophical creation. The notion comes at the right time to structure a work that one might say mixes anthropology and philosophy, but it also gives to the whole of the work, after the fact, what The Two Sources helps to consider in its light, a coherence that is perhaps unexpected but unmistakable. Let us add that this original contribution to a more general thought on the nature and the role of the imagination takes place within a long and sometimes eventful tradition on the imaginative function that it has the merit of relating to the writing of philosophy itself. Let us repeat it clearly: if the philosophers of the classical tradition have never failed to give status to the imagination or 179

an effective fiction the imaginary in the process of knowledge or creation, they have only very rarely dreamed of elucidating the links the imagination might maintain with the exercise of philosophy itself. Bergson’s original contribution is to have worked in this direction. By anchoring philosophical writing to artistic creation on the one hand, and by inventing a status for the imagination that breaks with the discredit to which it is most often subjected by philosophers on the other, it deeply renews a philosophical tradition which tends to rely, in order to progress, only on logical, rational and syntactic principles. But there is undoubtedly a little more: the rehabilitation which he carries out certainly matters to a general epistemological approach, but it also involves philosophical discourse itself. If one gives some credit to the notion of the fabulising function, if one follows Bergson and recognises with him all of its implications, it is no longer possible to consider that philosophy is or must be pure of any contact with the imaginative faculty. Provided it is specified that this rehabilitation is neither total nor unconditional. ‘We call imaginative any concrete representation which is neither perception nor memory’ (TS, 165). This definition is important. And it is necessary for the establishment of what Bergson intends to (finally) promote. He does not in the least intend to promote or work to promote a faculty whose representations only allow us to see absent or non-existent objects. For him, as for most of those who preceded him in philosophy, the meaning of the word ‘imagination’ is ‘somewhat negative’ (TS, 165). Also, the rehabilitation of which I have spoken relates not so much to this imaginative function as to that which consists in telling an invented story about imaginary characters. What Bergson says about the merits, and even the benefits, and even the necessity of this faculty, apply therefore not to the imagination but to narrative, above all to the ability to create it, to plot fictional characters and events. If it is remarkable that a philosopher might accept the important status of this faculty, it is no less remarkable that it is claimed by this philosopher, who discovers the reason for making this claim through his artistic practice. As we have seen, there are few pages in Bergson – few arguments, few notions, few reconstructions, even few theoretical passages – from which the narrative principle is absent. The fable can be presented as a story, or as the embryo or residue of a story, but it also happens, and not so rarely, that it owes its effectiveness to a character or a creature – the ghost is one of them, undoubtedly.

Critique of the Imagination, Critique of Bergson It is understandable that the philosophical world was not particularly, in any case not unanimously, enthusiastic about propositions which resulted in 180

an effective fiction a writing practice that was, to say the least, disconcerting. The ghosts are doubtless not the heart of the matter, but they manifest a part of it which goes against a whole philosophical tradition, which was very much alive at the time when Bergson published, and is very much alive still today, a tradition which would not know how to lay claim to something other than reason or logic, and which makes univocity its incontestable dogma. If ‘the glory of Bergson’6 was great, if it aroused interest in France and outside France, even a craze that lasted a long time, we know that critical voices were very quickly heard at the same time, and that these reproaches, sometimes vigorously formulated, have long weighed heavily on the critical fortunes of the philosopher. I no more intend to enter into these quarrels than I have intended, in this book, to justify or discredit Bergson’s philosophical theses.Yet from the textual point of view that I have chosen, I still find it important to spell out the formulation of a few of these, remarkable, grievances. One of the contemporary philosophers who was most virulently against Bergson was undoubtedly Bertrand Russell, who had in common with Bergson a very strong interest in science (mathematics in particular), in thinking philosophy in a certain proximity to it, and in being attentive to the place of definitions and the facts of language. I would add that Russell even ended – and this is a paradox if one thinks of the criticisms he addressed to Bergson – by sharing with him the honour of receiving (in 1950, Bergson having been dead for almost ten years) the Nobel Prize for Literature . . . Russell wrote two important texts on Bergson: the first in 1912, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’ (first published in The Monist, vol. 22); the second in 1928, an important passage from Sceptical Essays, in the chapter devoted to ‘Philosophy in the 20th Century’. In the 1912 article, Russell questions whether Bergson’s philosophy could be ‘more than an imaginative and poetic view of the world’. The end of the article, very ironically, places the whole oeuvre (Russell is thinking especially of Creative Evolution) under the sign of the poetic imagination: Of course a large part of Bergson’s philosophy, probably the part to which most of its popularity is due, does not depend upon argument, and cannot be upset by argument. His imaginative picture of the world, regarded as a poetic effort, is in the main not capable of either proof or disproof. Shakespeare says life’s but a walking shadow, Shelley says it is like a dome of many-colored glass, Bergson says it is a shell which bursts into parts that are again shells. If you like Bergson’s image better, it is just as legitimate. (Russell 1912: 346, my emphasis)

6.  La gloire de Bergson is the title of a well-known book on Bergson by François Azouvi (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).

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an effective fiction That imagination is a quality for poets or musicians is in the order of things; but it obviously cannot be the same in philosophy. Sagaciously Russell here puts his finger on two crucial elements of Bergson’s philosophy. On the one hand, its ‘deep affinity’ with art is loudly proclaimed, as we saw in the previous chapter, and obviously breaks with a rationalist tradition still very deeply rooted in the landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century; and of course it is in this tradition that analytical philosophy (including Russell) is trying to establish its foundations. Coming from an analytical philosopher, the assimilation of a philosophical work to a poetic work can only be a way of depreciating and even invalidating it. The only thing one could reproach Russell for on this point is in not making mention of the relatively iconoclastic claim made by Bergson himself of art as a model – a claim which is doubtless not entirely without antecedents (Nietzsche’s name comes once again to the lips), but about which one might nevertheless say that it is not so common in philosophy. On the other hand, the mention of the role of the imagination in the elaboration of the philosophical work, here held as a reason for disqualification, is obviously correct. We have seen that for Bergson the narrative dimension of works, thoughts, notions, even systems far from disqualifies them. On the contrary, presupposing this natural given is for Bergson one of the means of ensuring that language can, so to speak, escape language – even from its logical and narrowly metrical dimension. Before commenting on the second text Russell devotes to Bergson nearly fifteen years later, I would like to point out that in this first text he emphasises another of the characteristics of the work he criticises that is likely to explain how it is anchored in a space confined to the imagination. He notices – and I do not think that other readers at this time had noticed it – that Bergson ‘always exalts the sense of sight at the expense of the other senses’: ‘We may observe in passing’, he says, that ‘Bergson is a strong visualizer, whose thought is always conducted by means of visual images. Many things which he declares to be necessities of all thought are, I believe, characteristic of visualizers’ (Russell 1912: 330). Etymologically, intuition is indeed a visual affair, and it is a fact that Bergson’s approach to philosophical texts tends to restore as faithfully as possible not what the philosopher has said, or what the philosopher has thought, but ‘as far as it is possible what the philosopher saw’ (CM, 129). This way of considering philosophy has sometimes been compared to the way in which Proust conceives of literature: ‘style for the writer’, he says, ‘no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique, but of vision’ (Proust 2001a: 464). It must be recognised that there is an unmistakably common point between these two conceptions of writing, which proponents of a strict separation between genres will perhaps call, in order to maintain that separation, coincidence. The rest of 182

an effective fiction Proust’s text would not, I think, be disowned by Bergson when he tries to think about what he calls ‘philosophical intuition’. It [style] is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual. (Proust 2001a: 464)

Russell evidently can’t be thinking of Proust (La Recherche does not begin to appear until after Russell’s article is published), but he quite rightly perceives this affair of vision. For him, it is regrettable in more than one way: ‘vision’ is not, any more than the imaginary in which it lets itself be seen, the business of philosophers but of artists; and the use of images (which both philosophers and artists have theorised about) cannot be recommended in a discourse which should rest entirely on logic. And yet . . . Let us recognise that the logic of Bergson’s invention is restored by Russell with remarkable critical intelligence. And the fact that his article’s aim is to condemn its subject matter does not prevent the accuracy of the gaze nor that of the analysis. In 1928, the attacks will be made on the same themes, or more so. If Bergson’s work is philosophically invalid, says Russell, it is because it challenges the principle on which he believes all thinking should be based: logic. This book [Creative Evolution] contains, from beginning to end, no argument, and therefore no bad argument; it contains merely a poetical picture appealing to the fancy. There is nothing in it to help us to a conclusion as to whether the philosophy which it advocates is true or false; this question, which might be thought not unimportant, Bergson has left to others. But according to his own theories he is right in this, since truth is to be attained by intuition, not by intellect, and is therefore not a matter of argument. (Russell 1928: 64, my emphasis)

Here again, Russell is a keen reader. And this time he does not fail to point out that Bergson himself provides the answer to his major objection. In 1928 Russell could not yet say anything about the fabulising function (it did not appear until four years later in The Two Sources), but he notes – although he does so here less vigorously than elsewhere – that intelligence, whose capacities are required by science and logic, is not necessarily the faculty which must prevail in philosophy, and that this is indeed Bergson’s thesis. But as a sensitive and perceptive reader, Russell devotes a few more lines to what comprises the originality, the force of persuasion but also – he is right to emphasise this – the difficulty of Bergson’s thought, namely his enunciative apparatus:‘Bergson’s view is sometimes expressed in language which might mislead because things he regards as illusory are occasionally mentioned in a way

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an effective fiction which suggests that they are real’ (Russell 1928: 67). Bergson’s language, more perhaps than his propositions or his doctrinal contribution, is indeed that which is in question; too few people have noticed it for us not to do justice to Russell for devoting a few sentences to it here – however rapidly. The whole problem stems from the fact that this language cannot be dissociated from the theses that Bergson formulates thanks to it, and that it is even – the whole study we are working through here would like to accredit this idea – one of these theses in action. Russell is one of those philosophers for whom a philosopher’s language, without necessarily coinciding exactly with everyday language, at least tries not to contradict the principles of logic – particularly mathematics. He is therefore right to say (let us proceed as if irony is not a device he uses) that, ‘If one might venture to apply to Bergson’s philosophy so vulgar a thing as logic, certain difficulties would appear in his philosophy of change’ (Russell 1928: 67). In a sense, Bergson would agree with him. But not without specifying that, since logic is not, and should in no case be, the master faculty in philosophy, it has indeed been necessary to fashion a language which does not conform to the logical schemas which organise it, and to make room for the imagination at the same time as the right to use the fable; a language which, he would acknowledge, cares less to prove than to suggest, that is to say, to conform less strictly to the rules of logic than to the insinuating subtlety of intuition (this word has perhaps acquired important status in philosophy only because it has become necessary to have a word which makes room for intelligence). So,‘talk about illusory things’ as if they were real . . . but yes, why not? Russell is right to note that it can happen that things do indeed present themselves in this ambiguous form (the anthropological fable of The Two Sources proves it a posteriori). The function of ghosts, for example, would not be so operative if the border between the latent and visible, between dead and alive, between real and imaginary, between sight and vision were of such clarity that logic might accommodate them. Russell again gets it right, he only fails to say on what premise this ambiguity is based – he fails to say that it is concerted. The conditional is the mode of the fable, like the verb to have is that of probability, which provides it with its trembling and probable contours. The rejection of the unambiguous univocal, the mistrust of logic and intelligence which claims this univocity in a domain that is not its own, the benevolent yet vigilant reception of images, all of this contributes to the development of a more or less experimental mode of expression – he has to cut his teeth before we can say that he has proven himself – all of this Russell characterises very precisely in Bergson, even if he does not do him full justice. Already in the article of 1912, Russell pointed out the recourse to ‘picturesque and varied statements’, as well as to ‘Analogies and similes [which provide] a very large part of the whole process by which he recommends his 184

an effective fiction views to the reader’: ‘The number of similes [images in the French version] for life to be found in his works’, he says, ‘exceeds the number in any poet known to me’ (Russell 1912: 332). The image, even inadequate, even perhaps misleading, is indeed and in spite of everything for Bergson a much less damaging solution than the concept, and one can see that he justifies its use in many places; as for their proliferation, we remember that it is precisely a safeguard and that it is explicitly justified: ‘No image will replace the intuition of duration, but many different images [. . .] will be able [. . .] to direct the consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on’ (CM, 195). If it does not constitute a formal plea in defence of the imaginative faculty, one sees that this unusual poetic art legitimates itself through its usage. Images are not fables, and Bergson advocates that one distinguish between them; but for both, which are hardly welcome yet in philosophy, he reserves a decided yet cautious welcome, and Russell is not mistaken in asserting this. If of course he does not approve of this way of doing things, that is to say, of this way of writing, of thinking, he sees clearly – and is one of the very first to see this, it seems to me – that a connection, even an adequation, exists between the philosophical aim and the poetics implemented to carry it out. ‘It seems to me that in philosophy the time given up to refutation is generally time lost’, Bergson tells his colleagues in London for whom he summons, in his terms rather than in theirs, ‘phantasms of the living’ whose existence also preoccupies him (ME, 77). This phrase from 1913 on the vanity of theoretical jousting perhaps answers Russell’s vehement criticism, but I would not put things as bluntly as Bergson does here. No one will change sides or opinion when reading an opponent’s criticism; Bergson will not give up, just because Russell might have grieved him, the critique of intelligence and the search for an epistemological principle that counterbalances it; and Russell will not abandon logic – of the most rigorous kind – in order to philosophise. Despite everything, the presenting of arms will have had the merit of posing in clear terms two major problems: that of philosophical enunciation, to which both philosophers are equally sensitive; and that of a ‘Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences’ (Descartes, Discourse on Method, title). It is not certain that for Bergson ‘properly conducting one’s reason’ consists, as Descartes recommended, in using it in all fields and in all circumstances (Pascal: ‘there is nothing so consistent with reason as the denial of reason’ (1999: 62); Bergson: ‘to go beyond intelligence [. . .] by intelligence’ (CE, 202)). As for ‘truth in the sciences’, Bergson maintains that it is not necessarily up to science to say the last word about it – for him it would rather be the business of philosophy, for which science goes beyond science. 185

an effective fiction Yet that Creative Evolution is a methodical work – and therefore, in a sense, propaedeutic – there is no doubt. Bergson explains in the Introduction to the book that his wish is to bring together ‘theory of knowledge and theory of life’ (CE, xiii). And he adds, anticipating the debates that his book is sure to spark, that: a philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day. Unlike the philosophical systems properly so called, each of which was the individual work of a man of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or left, it will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting and improving one another. (CE, xiv, I underline, with a smile, Bergson’s anticipated response to Russell)

He does not present his book as the sum of results that a long investigation would have enabled him to submit to the public, but as a series of modestly methodical propositions: ‘So the present essay does not aim at resolving at once the greatest problems. It simply desires to define the method and to permit a glimpse, on some essential points, of the possibility of its application’ (CE, xiv). The fable, like writing music, forms part of these propositions. Imple­ menting them also involves putting them to the test. The method is nothing other than this conjunction.

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4 ‘. . . to transfer thought, still living, into the soul of another’

How did Bergson teach philosophy? What were his views or theories about teaching in general? Does he still have something to say to us about this today? That a text in his works dealing almost exclusively with his experience as a teacher of philosophy exists tends in any case to prove that these questions were of great importance to him. Might this text – and others relating to the same question – help us to give a more exact, more accurate account of Bergson’s work, to clarify the nature of his own contribution to the history of philosophy? Might we – why not? – use these rather unconventional views to help us read, and above all to help us read other philosophers, including those he never discussed, including those who came after him? It is with these decidedly pragmatic questions that I would like to end this essay. Reading Bergson, like reading any great philosopher, brings the mind vivid pleasures. The excitement that a demanding work arouses is such that, if we read it taking seriously its boldest, least expected hypotheses, it entirely renews our way of envisaging the task of philosophy, the work of philosophers and of teachers of philosophy. Teaching philosophy – Bergson did it all his life. Not without professing, on occasion, strong and unconventional ideas about the goals of teaching; about the method that allows one to profitably read texts, canonical or not; about the way we think spontaneously, which differs from the way we must think in order to act – and work – with philosophy. So, if we wanted to take stock of this question – Bergson the teacher, Bergson the professor – we could without too much difficulty, once these texts or these statements are identified, make a faithful and undoubtedly interesting presentation. The risk of such an approach would be to neglect the points which link Bergson’s ideas on matters of pedagogy with his entire oeuvre, with reflections he makes in fields one might believe to be very distant from these concerns, but with which they are very close from an epistemological point of view – with which they are in fact in firm solidarity.

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‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ Coincidences One might perhaps have noted that one of the axes of this essay will have been to consider Bergson’s oeuvre, which like any philosophical oeuvre is made known through a set of texts, as an inseparable whole. If Bergson’s work was chosen to show this, it is because on the question of expression, which is inseparable from that of coherence, it is more attentive, perhaps more unquiet, than many others, and that this preoccupation, far from being anecdotal, was at the very origin of his initiative in philosophy. I have tried to never consider separately, for example, the thesis or the ‘doctrine’ professed by Bergson (on duration, on the mind, on evolution, etc.) and the means he uses to express it; never to dissociate his dry speculative reflection (but let us recognise that with him it never really is) from his poetic inquietude, however general the terms which allow him to formulate it might be. This resolute determination has made it possible to perceive, at several crucial moments of the discussion, unexpected similarities which also correspond to the nerve centres of the work. This is how we were offered the opportunity to pass by phantoms in many places of the work where we would never have suspected their presence without this refusal of dissociation; and how we were able, through this bias, to express the idea that the Bergsonian ghost is a living schema rather than a fictional creature – or rather, that only this fictional creature makes it possible to propose this schema, which is essential if it is a question of thinking about life. It is also in this way that one has been able to discover that the forms of life it is given to us to see should no more be confused with life itself than Spinoza’s doctrine should be confused with the intuition of Spinozism, or the image that we remember when we wake up with the significance of the dream with which we tend to identify it. In all these cases the error would be to mistake contingency for essence or its necessary manifestation. Because one never apprehends things other than through their manifestations, and these manifestations are contingent.Yet, what it is important to grasp is what they invariably and indivisibly are. If the bringing to light of this structural proximity is troubling (it brings together dreams, life, ghosts, Berkeley’s doctrine . . .) it is because its epistemological consequences are potentially considerable. To take stock of what is at stake, let us return to the two formulas which, surprising as it may seem, allow us to speak in the same terms, and no doubt as if about the same phenomenon, about the work of a philosopher and of the élan vital. The philosopher, first. By virtue of this principle of proximity, we will admit that his name is in reality indifferent, that we could take any one and make the same demonstration about them – in any case arrive at the same 188

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ conclusion – as if we had taken the example of another. Take – for example – Berkeley: In other times Berkeley would doubtless have formulated other theses; but, the movement being the same, these theses would have been situated in the same way with regard to one another; they would have had the same relationship to one another, like new words of a new sentence through which runs the thread of an old meaning: and it would have been the same philosophy. (CM, 142)

There is obviously a different demonstration for Spinoza, but the same conclusion is reached: ‘he would have expressed himself by other formulas; not one chapter perhaps of the books he wrote would have been what it is; and nevertheless he would have said the same thing’ (CM, 132). I translate: since a philosopher can, could, might have written completely different things and yet produce the same philosophy each time, it would be wrong to act as if what a philosopher says coincides with what he writes, or what he professes. An intelligent reading, that is, one that is alert to this difference regarding the texts the philosopher wrote, is therefore an imperative philosophical necessity. Its major methodical principle is to move back from the contingency of the letter to the essential intuition. The élan vital or vital impulse now. It is therefore conceivable that life might have assumed a totally different outward appearance and designed forms very different from those we know. With another chemical substratum, in other physical conditions, the impulsion would have remained the same. (CE, 271)

I translate: since life can, could, might have taken very different forms, and still remain life, it would be wrong to act as if the vital impulse could be confused with its manifestations, which are all contingent. From here one can see that one might state, in the same terms, major theoretical propositions about realities as different and distant as life and intuition of a philosopher. What might one do with this coincidence? And is one right to call it that? When Bergson talks about life, does he also have Berkeley, Spinoza, dreams, reading, in mind? When he talks about Spinoza, and the tenor of his discourse is more clearly didactic, is he really talking about the élan vital? When is he a teacher? What does it mean to be a teacher? I will begin, to try to see more clearly, with the text where Bergson evokes in almost identical terms the works of Spinoza and Berkeley. ‘Philosophical Intuition’ is the text of the presentation which he made to his colleagues at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna in 1911 and which he decided to collect in 1934 in The Creative Mind, the last book published under his name in his lifetime. In Bologna, the audience is made up of philosophers from all 189

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ over Europe (including Durkheim, Langevin, Russell . . .), and quite often in speaking to them Bergson adopts a tone that almost sounds like professional complicity. He repeatedly alludes to his teaching experience, addressing himself specifically to ‘those of us who teach the history of philosophy [. . .], those who frequently have occasion to come back to the study of the same doctrines and to go ever more deeply into them’ (CM, 126).We therefore find in Bologna this ‘we’ which opened the work (‘We necessarily express ourselves by means of words . . .’ (TFW, xxiii)), through which, as we understood from the outset, he referred to the community of philosophers. The content of the remarks made in Bologna is therefore pedagogical, and it is from this angle that I would like to read and attempt to situate the proposals that this landmark communication is the occasion of. One knows the importance for Bergson of the teaching activity; one also knows that this teaching contributed not a little to his fame, in France and abroad. Teaching was not a side activity for him, it was not just another way of earning a living. For the epistemologist he always was, pedagogy, teaching, were obviously philosophical problems in their own right. And it is unthinkable that he never dreamed of making the connection between his actual teaching and the very coherent, albeit scattered, considerations that he laid out in his books. Here as everywhere else the handling of the discourse conforms, formally and epistemologically, to the theory which founds and legitimises it. To put it a little trivially: when he speaks of the intuition of such and such a philosopher, Bergson does not forget that he himself is a philosopher, that the intuition which moves him is at work in the moment when he writes – and that it does not coincide in him more than in Kant or in Plotinus with the necessarily contingent remarks that such a circumstance (an international congress in Italy, for example) requires him to make. ‘Philosophical Intuition’ is a special text, it is true, if only because its audience is an audience of colleagues and the subject matter is explicitly devoted to the teaching of philosophy; but if Bergson’s aim is never, outside this text, exclusively pedagogical, let us recognise that few of his texts do not deal at one time or another, and more or less at length, more or less incidentally, with the question of education. It is that this question, no more than that of writing, or duration, or freedom, or laughter, cannot be considered in abstract terms as separated from all the others, even when they seem to differ greatly from it. One has seen this on many occasions; the question of expression for example – since we have chosen as the starting point and the common thread of this essay the very same one that Bergson had taken up when he began to philosophise – the question of expression, then, is by no means a minor issue. Bergson never gives the impression of knowing what he wants to say and only wondering 190

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ how to say it; the question of expression is for him the philosophical question par excellence; to treat it separately would make no more sense than not to treat it at all. A close reading of ‘Philosophical Intuition’ (first called ‘The Philosophical Spirit’) shows that the same remark would apply for the manner of teaching, which cannot be envisaged without consideration of the thesis, the subject matter, the doctrine that is to be transmitted. One doesn’t teach mathematics as one teaches literature, says Bergson; one does not teach the science of living things (biology) in the same way as the science of inert things (physics); philosophy will obviously not be taught like science or mechanics. Philosophy, and especially metaphysics, poses specific problems. Not all human mental faculties are capable of seeking, apprehending, describing, thinking about any object whatsoever. It is therefore a matter of both defining or rather characterising this object and designating those of the human faculties capable of approaching it. There are therefore many pages in Bergson where the transmission of works of philosophy is, as in his lectures, the subject of remarks or arguments to which I propose to return. Yet there are others, and they are not uncommon, where the teaching of philosophy is seen in a more general context where the very principle of pedagogy is raised. Because if philosophy poses specific problems, it is none the less caught up in a set of disciplines, activities of thought and social practices from within which there is no reason to distinguish it. Before reading the texts in which education is specifically in question and under discussion, let us try to take stock of Bergson’s ideas about this field. The textbook here obviously goes beyond the textbook.

Teaching One of the longest discussions developed by Bergson on teaching and on the school system – on its presuppositions, methods, contradictions, shortcomings and perverse effects – is found in a text whose title sufficiently indicates that he is being methodical. ‘Stating the Problems’ is a rather long essay that Bergson wrote in 1922 and which he wanted to place at the beginning – almost – of Creative Mind. In this study we have already encountered several times extracts from what constitutes for Bergson the second part of the ‘Introduction’ to this book. It is in this text, for example, that we find the critical and ironic, and also somewhat controversial, presentation of Homo loquax, ‘the only one to which I am antipathetic’ (CM, 100). If I remind you of this, it is because the text I am about to quote immediately follows it. Soon after putting the man of conversation in his proper place – we have seen that he was also a man of conservation! – Bergson begins a fairly extensive ‘parenthesis’ on the French 191

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ education system. The fact that it is written to flesh out an already engaged criticism restores much of its context.What motivates this discussion in fact is the suspicion that the school may be based entirely on principles which have just been challenged in the clearest and least equivocal terms. ‘Old-time methods of teaching tended to form him [that is, Homo loquax] and perfect him. Do they not still tend that way to a certain extent?’ (CM, 100). The discussion that follows is written from a perspective that aims, if one dares say it, to establish distrust in the idea of conversation and that which, near or far, relates to it. This implies, as we shall see, a certain number of consequences for the school and the university, but more generally pedagogical consequences. It is impossible to quote this entire passage (Bergson refers to it as ‘too long a digression’ (CM, 102)); I simply note the way in which the suggestions, adjacent remarks and various considerations are linked together. This digression on our ‘methods of teaching’ then, follows the blacklisting of the conversational and all which, without calling into question its mode of expression, is similar to it: the objective of the teacher cannot be that the pupils know how to ‘discourse on things’ (CM, 102); it must be, on the contrary, to preserve them from ‘the illusion that [.  .  .] one knows [things] sufficiently when one knows how to talk about them’ (CM, 102). This clarification is linked to remarks on manual learning; on the limits of verbal instruction; on science education; on the teaching of literature; on ‘the art of reading’; on philosophical intuition; and finally . . . on creative evolution! This shows, better than a long discourse, that the question of pedagogy is, like that of writing, much more than a secondary or circumstantial question: just as expression must absolutely be thought out and reformed if we want philosophy to extricate itself from the bad situation in which it is necessarily placed by a language conditioned by spatiality, likewise the question of teaching deserves to be asked only because it involves something which considerably exceeds it and which in truth conditions all philosophical research.This amassed presentation might be considered forced if the parenthetical list used to explain it did not end with creative evolution. Metaphysics indeed seems to be the horizon of these pedagogical reflections. These reflections may well make sense for those who are exclusively educators, but their original scope was undoubtedly, in the mind of their author, less a reform of the existing school system than a fundamental restructuring of the philosophical landscape.

In praise of the hand The passage from one side to the other of the question of apprenticeship is done, textually, and therefore theoretically, in a continuous, fluid – in short 192

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ natural – way. Each moment, however, can be considered in itself, as it is true that each time what is at stake is unique. This is the case with the praise Bergson offers for manual labour and ‘manual training’. ‘We forget’, he says, ‘that the intellect is essentially the faculty of manipulating matter, that it at least began by being so, that such was nature’s intention’ (CM, 100, my emphasis). The word ‘manipulate’ does most of the textual work, so to speak. It makes it possible both to target a theory of intelligence which for Bergson is never more than the faculty of thinking about matter without being methodically distinguished from its laws or its principles, and to give an epistemological status to the hand. One might at first glance be surprised. If it is true that the manipulation of matter is an act of intelligence, and if it is true that intelligence must, from a metaphysical perspective, give way to intuition, in what might the superiority of manual labour over intellectual labour consist? Here again, one word prepares the way for the advent of intuition, and this is inventiveness: it is quite natural for the child to try its hand at constructing. By helping it, by furnishing it at least with opportunities, one would later obtain from the grown man a superior yield; one would greatly increase what inventiveness there is in the world. (CM, 100, my emphasis)

Inventiveness is one of the two main reasons to value manual labour. Intelligence, an entirely cerebral faculty, really does not invent anything: its behaviour and its results conform to the laws of matter to which they add nothing. Manual inventiveness is not exactly creation (the word remains in the wings for now, the moment of its entry on the scene will soon arrive), but it is definitely approaching it. In any case the inventiveness of the hand allows what is in principle beyond the reach of intelligence: the unpredictable. The unpredictable is, as we have seen on several occasions, the touchstone of a theory of knowledge which embraces not only matter but what manifests itself in it without being reduced to it – life for example – and among which, by hypothesis, intelligence cannot play any role. In manipulating matter, the hand offers access to something that does not belong to it. This is why the educator in a position to provide this training could not be a simple technician, a ‘[manual labourer] (manoeuvre)’ says Bergson, ready as he often is to play on the etymology and on the word: ‘Let us give the child exercise in manual training, but without allowing that teaching to sink to the level of a drill [manoeuvre]. Let us apply to a real master, that he may perfect the touch to the point of making it a sense of touch [un tact]’ (CM, 100).There is the same difference between touch and tact as between the manual labourer [manoeuvre] and the master, between the hand of the technician and that of the artist. 193

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ Because the hand that makes is not exactly the hand that creates, even if one might manage things so that one might become the other. That’s the whole point. A pedagogy which did not care about the possibility of this passage would have no philosophical relevance in Bergson’s eyes. The other reason manual education should be promoted is its affinity with art. Even if the thing is said less clearly, it seems that the precedence of tact over touch, of the master over the manual labourer [manoeuvre], goes in this direction. And of course one thinks of the art of the painter, the designer or the sculptor: ‘In all subjects’, Bergson says, ‘letters or sciences, our teaching has remained too verbal’ (CM, 100). Once more the dream is cherished – very discreetly it is true – of a philosophy which, in agreement with intuition, could do without language, which is too caught in the nets of matter, which it is most fit to describe and to apprehend.

Jeanne In the same year, 1921, that Bergson wrote ‘Stating the Problems’, where one might read his pedagogical reflections, Jeanne Bergson (the only daughter of Henri Bergson and Louise Neuburger), painter, designer and sculptor, deaf and mute, student of Antoine Bourdelle, exhibited her work for the first time at the Salon de la Société des artistes français. The question of the link between the life and the work, so often debated in literary studies (but never really decided), has hardly been discussed, until recently, in philosophical circles. This is undoubtedly because one considers, most often without believing oneself obliged to say it, that thought is truly abstract only when it owes nothing to anything but itself. We have seen that when Bergson speaks of Ravaisson he does not hesitate to call his homage ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’, without, moreover, this conjunction being the object of any particular argument, or even a simple remark. I tend to believe that if the question is not of crucial importance, the fact of asking it installs the philosophical text that one comments on or that one seeks to clarify in a position which makes it lose its statutory singularity. If a philosopher is a writer – and a philosopher is a writer – there is no reason not to read the texts he writes as one reads those written by poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists of all kinds, asking the same questions about them. If the biography obviously does not explain the thought, the doctrine, the conceptual invention, it does not reduce it to simple circumstance either. Thought feeds on circumstance; like the dream of daytime images, it is necessarily imbued with it, without obviously being able to say that it cannot be explained without referring to it. 194

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ Bergson’s bilingualism, another ‘circumstance’, is in my view, as I have said, a fundamental textual and theoretical datum. It seems to me that its evocation serves in helping us to read it more than it does a disservice to the thought that has made its way through its two languages of expression. To suggest that the singular experience that Bergson lived in raising and educating Jeanne, watching over her, loving her, assisting in the birth of her vocation, could have played a role in the elaboration of his thought is only a way of saying that the philosophical text is like all the texts of great writers, which are nourished by lived experience. It also brings a few drops of water to the mill of whomsoever might claim that thought is never so close to itself as when it has its source in life itself. Jeanne’s activity and reputation in an artistic field does not explain the determining role that Bergson has art play in the expression of his philosophy; the fact that she was deaf and mute does not explain his distrust of language either, expressed in his work in so many forms, when it comes to talking about things of the mind; any more than his personal bilingualism explains why his thought found its way between two cultures, between two languages, both of which as a philosopher he used; nor do they explain why he was so sensitive to the precision and accuracy of the terms and expressions he uses or fashions – and not just concerning matters of translation or rewriting.Yet these diverse experiences, like many others no doubt of which we are not aware, constitute the soil in which thought, strong through Bergson’s intelligence and his power of invention, has allowed him to find his words at the same time as recognising his predispositions, his themes at the same time as his various means of expression. Bergson is obviously not alone in philosophising from his own experience; his case, particular without being completely so, only offers the occasion of saying, almost in passing, but with a little solemnity, that a philosopher, like a novelist, makes his life the subject of his work, without of course allowing one to strictly relate, much less reduce, one to the other.

Teaching literature Since the purpose of this essay is to show Bergson as a fully-fledged writer, I will say a little about his conception of the teaching of literature to which he devotes an important discussion in this text. If this conception deserves to be singled out, it is because Bergson puts the reading of literary texts, the protocols of which he describes in detail, into relation with philosophical intuition. Before ‘discussing’ the work of a great writer, says Bergson, ‘the child will first have to reinvent it, or in other words, appropriate to a certain extent the inspiration of the author. To do so he must fall into step with 195

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ him by adopting his gestures, his attitudes, his gait’ (CM, 102). This same recommendation was addressed in Bologna to philosophers curious to learn what Bergson might mean by ‘philosophical intuition’: in 1913, he advocated ‘constantly renewing contact with the philosopher’s thought’ (CM, 127); he praised the benefits of ‘gradual impregnation’; rather than ‘circling around’, he recommended that one ‘penetrate more fully the philosopher’s thought’. It is then and only then, he says, that we will be able to see that ‘his doctrine is transformed for us’ (CM, 128). He never gave up this ideal, and it was to achieve it that he advocated in 1922, like Henry James moreover, the reading aloud of literary texts, as much as he regrets that this might pass for a ‘artistic accomplishment’ (CM, 102). Here is what James says about it in ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894): You’ll of course have perceived for yourself that one scarcely does read Neil Paraday till one reads him aloud; he gives out to the ear an extraordinary full tone, and it’s only when you expose it confidently to that test that you really get near his style. (James 1915: 30)

And this is what Bergson says about it, which clearly includes in the category of ‘literary’ texts, the kinds of texts one would not think of spontaneously: there is, on the page one reads, punctuation and rhythm. Now it is in indicating this structure and rhythm, in taking into consideration the temporal relations between the various sentences of the paragraph and the various parts of each sentence, in following uninterruptedly the crescendo of thought and feeling to the point musically indicated as the culminating point that the art of diction consists. (CM, 102)

Of all this one might say: these are interesting and new views and one sees from this kind of statement that Bergson, decidedly the true brother of (Henry) James, really liked literature, that he was sensitive to its workings and to its formal invention. But philosophy is another matter . . . And yet no! Not at all, it’s the same thing. Who can think that Bergson is thinking here of anything other than philosophy? He also inserts, after the word ‘rhythm’, a word whose nobility had not been affirmed by any philosopher by 1922, the following note. It is no less valuable than the text which it only seems to render more precisely: I have explained my views elsewhere on the fact that rhythm roughly outlines the meaning of the sentence truly written, that it can give us direct communication with the writer’s thought before study of the words has given them color and shading, – (see in particular my lecture given in 1912 on L’ame et le corps [‘The Soul and the Body’], [in] my collection L’Energie spirituelle, page 32 [Mind Energy, page 37]). I was merely giving a résumé of a lecture previously

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‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ given at the Collège de France. In that lecture I had taken as an example a page or two of the Discours de la Méthode, and tried to show how the comings and goings of thought, each in a particular direction, pass from the mind of Descartes to our own solely by the effect of the rhythm as indicated by the punctuation, and especially as brought out by reading it aloud correctly. (CM, 304, note)

It is in ‘The Soul and the Body’ in fact that Bergson speaks, while teaching then, about rhythm, about punctuation, about the ‘particular dancing of the [philosophical] sentence [toute la chorégraphie du discours]’; I have already quoted this passage (ME, 57). The pedagogical dream, formulated frankly here, involves (which should not come as a surprise) immediacy. A ‘direct communication’ with the thought of the philosopher is what matters, and is that which must come first. The text read or studied will not deliver what it has been written for until one has joined oneself to its respiration, its breath; until its spirit has been embraced. The example of Descartes gives an idea of how Bergson taught – and how he undoubtedly intended to write. He did not obviously proceed, when he was teaching, to any ‘textual explanation’, to any analysis; he only strived, invisibly and without distortion, to allow the very movement of thought: ‘to make it pass, still living, into the soul of another’. (ME, 56)

To hell with meaning, to hell with doctrine This thought is singular. Nothing is further from the spirit of metaphysics, at least as Bergson understands it, than the ordinary reflex of philosophers which is to generalise. ‘All my philosophical activity was a protestation against this way of philosophizing’ (CM, 106), he confesses in the last lines of the essay [‘Stating the Problems’]. He credits Ravaisson with having formulated and implemented this principle, which he then takes up for himself in the last lines of his homage: he holds that his lesson is to have said ‘to philosophers that generalities are not philosophical, to teachers that the whole must be taught before its elements’ (CM, 300). ‘. . . that the whole must be taught before its elements . . .’ This amounts to discrediting the division of texts, their analysis, the principle of their reconstruction, all exercises which are nevertheless common in both the school and university. This is not the case only in philosophy, but everywhere. Speaking on different occasions to this or that discipline, Bergson is led to reformulate this ideal, which one would be wrong to believe is (only) educational since it is one of the pillars of his work. In this way, in the learning of foreign languages, one should prefer what is not yet called a comprehensive method 197

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ to learning word by word, phrase by phrase. This was the method, which according to Bergson is exemplary, of Thomas Prendergast: It consists in making the pupil begin by pronouncing sentences the meaning of which he is not allowed to ask, never isolated words, always complete propositions which he must repeat mechanically. If the pupil tries to guess the meaning, he spoils the result. If he hesitates for a moment, it has all to begin again. By varying the place of the words, by practising exchange of words among the sentences, it comes about that the meaning is caught of itself by the ear in some fashion without the understanding being mixed with it. (ME, 192)

‘The spirit of form’ But this is also the method recommended and practised by Ravaisson for learning to draw. This method consists in repudiating the reflex which wants us to study curves or movement by reducing it to the geometric drawing. One misunderstands, here, what Bergson calls (apt formula!) ‘the spirit of form’, and so there is not the slightest chance of obtaining a result that makes room for genius or invention: The result is entirely different when one begins with the characteristic curves of life. The simplest of these will be, not what is most closely allied to geometry, but what appeals most to the intelligence, what is most expressive: the animal will be easier to understand than the plant, man will be easier than the animal, the Apollo Belvedere easier than a model picked at random off the street. Let us then begin by having the child draw the most perfect of human figures, the models furnished by Greek statuary. (CM, 287)

Either way, it’s about keeping the intelligence on edge. Intelligence has its obvious virtues, but it also interferes with the advancement of the mind on the path of intuition. This is the whole problem with pedagogues, who are rarely inclined to give up the resources of reason, to renounce the principles of learning that are based on it. Regarding philosophy in any case, Bergson cannot come to terms with the idea of a teaching that would treat it as if it were science, borrowing its protocols or its methods, expecting from this alignment the very thing whose principle he challenges: a result (‘This method will always produce some more or less satisfactory result, but still a result’ he says, in deploring it, in The Two Sources (TS, 217)). One can understand, moreover, that, at least if one believes the 1922 essay, if reading is reading in the sense in which it is ordinarily understood, it is also quite another thing: There is a certain analogy, be it said in passing, between the art of reading as I have just described it and the intuition I recommend to the philosopher.

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‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and rhythm of the composition, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in sympathy. (CM, 101–2)

Here Bergson again takes up Descartes’ metaphor of the ‘great book of the world’, with which the first part of the Discourse on Method ends (the text cited in note 14 of ‘The Soul and the Body’, as we have seen, which he probably has in mind while writing this passage), and this is for us one more occasion to note that equivocation is not, for Bergson, the taboo that it is for so many other philosophers. Indeed he talks about reading aloud, intonation, melody, the silences and rhythms that make the words come alive – and in this sense he does discuss the written text, of which only an atypical teacher would offer a reading that is not obsessed with meaning; but he also speaks – let us refrain from adding ‘above all’ – he also speaks about philosophical intuition, this same intuition which in Bologna he made the touchstone of the teaching of philosophy. Recall that the conference paper tended precisely, as the 1922 essay does, to downplay the letter of the text in favour of the ‘impetus’ that gave birth to it. Using a few examples, Bergson then warned his colleagues against the unfortunately common mistake of confusing doctrine with the often conceptual textual apparatus that the author invented to express it. Descartes, read according to the rhythm and intonation of his thought rather than the letter of his Discourse, is undoubtedly a good example of this pedagogical principle.Yet the case of Spinoza is even more striking because Bergson insists on the existence of a space, so large that it will appear to many to be highly improbable, between the letter and the spirit of his philosophy. Here is how he presents the letter of Spinoza’s thought, the one which forms the ordinary subject of philosophy courses, and which is, on the part of professional philosophers, the object of so many learned commentaries: those tremendous things called Substance, Attribute and Mode, and the formidable array of theorems with the close network of definitions, corollaries and scholia, and that complication of machinery, that power to crush which causes the beginner, in the presence of the Ethics, to be struck with admiration and terror as though he were before a battleship of the Dreadnaught class. (CM, 133)

The Spinoza that Bergson greets with affection has nothing to do with all of this. He would sooner resemble Ariel in The Tempest than this or that other philosopher with whom he is sometimes compared to clarify his originality. Spinoza’s intuition, ‘which no formula, no matter how simple, can be simple enough to express’ (CM, 133), is indeed ‘something subtle, very light and almost airy, which flees at one’s approach, but which one cannot look at, even from afar, without becoming incapable of attaching oneself to any part 199

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ whatever of the remainder, even to what is considered essential, even to the distinction between Substance and Attribute, even to the duality of Thought and Extension’ (CM, 133). The pedagogical equation is decidedly very difficult! Let us understand that we will only gain access to Spinoza, that we will have a chance, rather, to approach him, only when we have succeeded in detaching ourselves from everything that accounts for Spinozism in the eyes of almost all his followers, from everything which is, for them, and was undoubtedly for Spinoza himself, ‘capital’: the opposition substance vs attribute is not nothing! The difference between thought and extension, damn! This is no small task . . . But there you have it . . . ‘no formula, no matter how simple, can be simple enough to express’ Spinoza’s intuition. It is crucial to measure the stakes of such a conception of philosophy, and try to minimise its pedagogical repercussions as little as possible. If we wanted to apply it to Bergson, for example, we would have to not assent to the distinction he made between instinct and intelligence, those he established between the closed and the open, or between the static and dynamic, even between space and duration, or between the attention that we pay to what is contingent and what is said to be essential: since the intuition is elsewhere . . . The book you are reading, which does not attempt to develop a better conceptual knowledge of the work of Bergson, which does not claim to be able to say what the intuition of its author was (‘there is no hope of reaching it’, he says himself, and therefore, about himself (CM, 129)), was written in this spirit of approximation. A close, frequent and empathetic reading indeed makes it possible to reduce the distance which separates us from what Bergson calls ‘intuition’ when he speaks of pedagogy, ‘impulse’ when he speaks of artistic creation, the ‘generative idea’ when ‘he speaks of poetic inspiration, ‘élan vital’ when he speaks of evolution, and of questioning more generally what, for lack of a better word, I might call, to speak of all these objects, a similarity, or a structural proximity, or sometimes – but in the same spirit – an infinite variation. The logic that I also qualify as textual makes it possible to perceive that the discussions on ghosts are not expressed in terms so different from those that Bergson might use to speak of dreams, or of learning to read, or of memory, or of creative evolution; that the same narrative device makes it possible to talk about the intuition of a philosopher and the hidden meaning of the work of a novelist; that philosophical invention is no different, at least in the textual principle of its exposition, from that of a poem or from the evolution of life. This does not mean that Bergson’s ‘truth’, ‘the meaning’ of his work, is to be sought in these areas, but in my opinion it indicates that his contribution to the life of the mind and his philosophical originality are not 200

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ to be found in theses or propositions which he himself says are only a means of expressing what cannot be said without concerted mediation. When Bergson addresses his colleagues, philosophers or pedagogues, at the Bologna Congress, he obviously does not deny the interest in, even the need to, proceed in a more traditional or, in a sense, more orthodox way. The teaching of the history of philosophy – this is one of the key points of his communication – is the daily bread of philosophy professors; he knows this better than anyone (‘As professor in the Collège de France I devote one of my courses each year to the history of philosophy’ (CM, 132–3)), and he is not disposed to renounce the ‘aesthetic joy’, the ‘professional satisfaction’, which he experiences in practising it. The word that comes to my mind when talking about this attitude towards the teaching of philosophy is the very one I used to talk about philosophical expression: performative. To speak of philosophical expression is to truly philosophise; and philosophising is every second inventing an original answer to the question of expression. I would say in the same way that to pose the question of the teaching of the history of philosophy is to truly philosophise – and that, symmetrically, to philosophise is to invent at each step of the oeuvre a history or an episode of the history of philosophy.

To teach philosophy is to philosophise As for the first aspect of my hypothesis, it suffices to accredit it to consider, for example, that the circumstance of the Congress certainly made it possible to address colleagues and to offer a speech from teacher to teacher, but that it was above all the occasion to put to the test an original notion (it gives its title to the paper) that one might say concerns method as well as epistemology: philosophical intuition is a given that must (that should) take into account all those concerned with teaching the history of philosophy, which it relativises considerably; but the notion in question also plays a very important role in the philosophical work of its inventor. Bergson himself puts in a relation (of similitude) his philosophical vision of science, the evolution of life and his conception of thought – the very same thought which should encourage us to see the history of philosophy differently, precisely: And just as the impulsion given to the embryonic life determines the division of an original cell into cells which in turn divide until the complete organism is formed, so the characteristic movement of each act of thought leads this thought, by an increasing sub-division of itself, to spread out more and more over the successive planes of the mind until it reaches that of speech. (CM, 143)

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‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ One will say that the history of philosophy is not at stake here – let alone its teaching. One would be wrong to think this. As it would be wrong to consider that the question of expression is absent from the debate. A philosophy is only constituted historically by accident, perhaps even by chance. Contingency characterises it – and it not only affects the conditions of its birth, it also involves the technique of language that it invents to express it which also has as little relation to it (little relation does not mean no relation) as the time and circumstances of its conception. The words which a thought in gestation chooses to express itself are chosen ‘almost arbitrarily’; what counts, says Bergson, is not the words but the relation between them: ‘the same thought is translated just as well into diverse sentences composed of entirely different words, provided these words have the same relation [rapport] between them’ (CM, 143, translation modified). It is important to be aware, if one undertakes to teach or to recount the history of philosophy, that the business of philosophy is not historical but linguistic: ‘Such is the process of speech. And such also is the operation by which a philosophy is constituted’ (CM, 143). It is the notion of intuition and this alone that induces this theory of the history of philosophy that Bergson claims to teach wholeheartedly.

To philosophise is to teach the history of philosophy As for the second part of the hypothesis, we find striking confirmation of it in the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution. In this concluding chapter, there is no question of pedagogy, nor of teaching philosophy. But it is – and a good deal – about the history of philosophy. ‘A Glance at the History of Systems’, Bergson announces in the heading for this final chapter. The philosophical logic he adopts here is narrative. It appears from reading it that the story, the essential features of which he will draw out, has not yet found the denouement that would meet the metaphysical ambition that the whole book calls for – and its title in particular. The last chapter works towards this happy ending. Two preliminary remarks, before discussing this story. The first relates specifically to education. Bergson specifies, in an introductory note, that the narrative part of chapter four which concerns systems ‘is only the very succinct résumé of views that we developed at length, from 1900 to 1904, in our lectures at the Collège de France, especially in a course on the History of the Idea of Time (1902–1903)’ (CE, 287). Let us avoid saying that there is only one step from teaching to philosophical invention, since there is no distinction between the two. To teach is to philosophise, and to philosophise is to perform an act of pedagogy. The remarks are numerous 202

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ which, like this one, bridge the gap between the book and the lessons, they clearly show that a philosophy which would abstain from asking the question of pedagogy would gravely sin. The second remark concerns the narrative option that Bergson chose for the drafting of this last chapter. If one can say – I said it and do not deny it – that ‘Philosophical Intuition’ is a philosophical story [nouvelle], one will say in the same way and for the same reasons that Creative Evolution is a philosophical novel [roman] – a novel in which neither the characters, nor the episodes, nor the plot twists are missing, nor of course a denouement, to which I will come. As we have seen, the word evolution implies narration, so it should come as no surprise that Bergson provides the backstory of this final chapter; nor if philosophy – in a final performative gesture – presents itself as a variation on the theme of creative evolution (or creative evolution as a variation on the theme of philosophy; or creative evolution and philosophy as two variations among many others on a theme decidedly resistant to immediate apprehension). To speak of evolution is to speak of philosophy; to speak of philosophy is to speak of evolution. The last sentence of the book unambiguously poses this equation: ‘[philosophy] is the study of becoming in general, it is true evolutionism’ (CE, 391). Despite the regrettable denouement of this story, Bergson writes an open conclusion, refusing to see the sad situation of philosophy in 1907 as a definitive impasse. Fundamentally, the last pages of Creative Evolution closely resemble those of Germinal [by Émile Zola] . . . Philosophy must be thought of at the same time (not in parallel, not comparatively, but at the same time) as evolution. The thought of one cannot leave the thought of the other untouched if it is true that each must make room for the inventive principle of creation. In any case, that is the story this final chapter tells. The characters who act in it are placed in the situation of those heroes of traditional folk tales who happen upon two paths supposed to lead to the place where the object of their quest is located: one straight, easy, tempting; the other narrow, ill kept, discouraging. The first, as we know, is never chosen except by the evil sister, or by the envious brother; the second is chosen by the hero, who, coming after them, manifests by this little-expected choice that he is superior to them. ‘I repudiate facility’, said Bergson in 1922.‘I recommend a certain manner of thinking which courts difficulty. I value the effort above everything’ (CM, 103). However, this character who never considers taking the easy way was already there in the last lines of Creative Evolution. He came after many others who, ignoring this path, had lastingly penalised the philosophy they claimed to serve. What characters, then? Which paths? Leading to what objects? If it is true that a book is written only for its conclusion, a story told only for its denouement, we will recognise that it is this last chapter of the book 203

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ which delivers the intention of its author, at the same time as he states the wisdom that can be inferred from the journey he has required his readers to take. What he says is that all the misfortunes and setbacks of philosophy come from the fact that the course it has taken has never been in accord with itself, in truth has never cared to be in accord with that of evolution. And it is because it has regularly failed evolution, because it has persisted in its refusal to pay it tribute, that philosophy finds itself, at the time Bergson is writing his story, facing the impossibility of accomplishing its metaphysical task. If we are to believe the story we are told, everything plays out when philosophy, like one who, condemned in principle to die yet seeing the sentence commuted to a century of sleep, is still in the cradle. The long evocation of the initial situation (a technical discussion of Greek philosophy) defines, one would say forever, the conditions through which all the philosophers who follow will evolve. What appearance has that destiny taken on, which weighed so heavily, and so durably, on Western philosophy? Through a series of sequences that Bergson painstakingly reconstitutes, nascent philosophy, forever leaving aside the hypothesis that the forms of living things or of matter might be ‘simply snapshots taken by the mind of the continuity of becoming’, considers on the contrary that Ideas, far from being relative to the mind which represents them, ‘exist by themselves’. And here is destiny: ‘Ancient philosophy could not escape this conclusion. Plato formulated it, and in vain did Aristotle strive to avoid it’ (CE, 339). Aristotle is therefore the first to have found himself not exactly at the crossroads of two paths, but before a decisive alternative: we either make thought travel from top to bottom (from God to the world and its forms, living or inert) or from bottom to top (from the world to the original impulse that gave it birth and life). Bergson’s propensity, as we have seen, is always the same, whether it concerns reading a poem, thinking a movement, envisioning the philosophy of a great writer: this is the anabasis. We must always climb back up [remonter]: climb back up to the first impulse, climb back up to intuition, climb back up to the original principle. Everything is played out in this initial choice, everything will flow from it: science, knowledge, the very conception of the divine. Beneath the changing phenomena will appear to us, by transparence, a closed system of concepts subordinated to and coordinated with each other. Science, understood as the system of concepts, will be more real than the sensible reality. It will be prior to human knowledge, which is only able to spell it letter by letter; prior also to things, which awkwardly try to imitate it. (CE, 346–7)

Things will therefore only repeat themselves in slightly varied forms. At each important stage in the history of philosophy, two paths will again present 204

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ themselves to the thought of the philosopher who, always under the shadow of the same destiny, will never fail to choose the wrong one – or rather will hesitate and then finally give up on taking the right one. The case of Descartes is exemplary from this point of view. When he finds himself in a position to think about change, he has two paths: either he adopts the conception inherited from the Greeks according to which time is equivalent to ‘a degradation’, and change to the ‘diminution of a form given from all eternity’ (CE, 363–4); or else he considers all the consequences of a contrary attitude, which would see in time ‘a progressive growth of the absolute’ and in evolution ‘a continual invention of forms ever new’ (CE, 364). ‘So’, says Bergson, ‘beside the new way that philosophy might have prepared, the old remained open, that indeed which physics trod’ (CE, 364). How does Descartes pose the problem? On the one hand – I am reconstituting Bergson’s pedagogical-narrative point of view here in chapter four of Creative Evolution – Descartes, here as the direct heir of Greek metaphysics, affirms universal mechanism; on the other, he believes in free will. The first way, says Bergson, ‘would have led to the denial of free will in man and of real will in God’, the second ‘to all the consequences which the intuition of true duration implies. Creation would have appeared not simply as continued, but also as continuous’ (CE, 365). Now, Bergson says with regret, it was towards the first path that Descartes oriented himself, and along which Leibniz and Spinoza followed him. And even if, when Kant appears in the landscape, the situation seems to present itself differently, it is this same and ancient path which will be taken. Certainly, the Kantian theory of knowledge appreciably reduces the role of intelligence, which is so little suited to metaphysics; Kant ‘brought back into philosophy, while modifying it and carrying it on to another plane, that essential element of Descartes’ philosophy which had been abandoned by the Cartesians’ (CE, 378). So he in turn sees this second path, and the remarkable critical work he accomplishes even puts him in a position to take it. ‘But in this direction Kant himself did not go’ (CE, 379). So, Spencer, perhaps? He is the last character in this novel, who appears just before the final word is said on philosophy, that is, on evolution. He too sees the path that should be followed, he goes so far as to pronounce the word evolutionism, he promises a genesis, and even an anabasis (‘[his doctrine] claimed to remount and redescend the course of universal becoming’), but then he speaks neither of becoming, nor in the end of evolution. ‘He had no sooner started to follow the path than he turned off short’ (CE, 385). This is how Bergson ends his book: as a teacher, as a storyteller. I mean of course, as a philosopher. For it is with the figure of the true philosopher – the one who is the last to arrive, who will not make the mistake of those who 205

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ came before who chose the wrong path – that Creative Evolution closes. The one alone who will finally embody true philosophy, that is, in other words – but these are Bergson’s own words – true evolutionism. If the end of the book is remarkable it is undoubtedly because what is stated in this last chapter, left until its last lines and which these final pages allow him to personally inscribe, are propositions that structure Bergson’s work and thought, in which his contribution to the history of philosophy resides; but it is also remarkable because it shows in an undeniable way not exactly that to teach is to philosophise (this his courses show without it being necessary to insist on it) but that to philosophise is to teach. More precisely still one could say that what the epilogue of Creative Evolution makes manifest is that to philosophise is to ‘tell the story of philosophy’ – a formula in which neither the word ‘tell’ nor the word ‘story’ yield in any way to that of ‘philosophy’. There may even be a little more. This bias, both narrative and educational, in the denouement of Creative Evolution is obviously a formal decision, but it would be wrong to act as if a formal choice were not also a significant epistemological choice. Let us never forget that from the moment Bergson took hold of a pen to philosophise, what he regularly had to work to overcome, without fail or fault, was the spatial condition of language: storytelling is one of the modes that allow it; but the pedagogical mode (more than the tone) – perhaps because it installs the discourse in the memory of an orality which philosophy often forgets is its primary condition, perhaps also because epanorthosis is one of its necessary operating principles – also allows it to escape somewhat from the raw materiality of a language concerned only with satisfying speculative intelligence. Whether the story is explicitly fabulous (like that of The Two Sources or, more clearly still, that of ‘“Phantasms of the Living”’), or conceals, more or less, its fabulised nature behind the exterior of the lesson or of science (as in Creative Evolution), one will grant my contention that it always has a problem with time.

Time and narrative Time and Narrative, as Paul Ricoeur rightly says . . . If ordinary language is to be challenged as a tool for expressing philosophy, it is because space is its condition – Bergson has been saying this since the first sentence of his first book. Narration, precisely because narrative is a temporal matter, and duration is its material and its object, imposes itself therefore almost naturally as a recourse. A salutary remedy, no doubt, but one that is also in accordance with a demanding and difficult epistemological approach that has bet everything on words at the same time that it challenges the use that 206

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ ordinary language makes of them. As we have seen in many places, Bergson forges other tools, uses other resources (borrowing from rhetoric, music, science, etc.), showing in this exercise a power of inexhaustible invention. But it is no exaggeration to say that narrative is for the writer he claims to be the recourse par excellence. The notion of recourse consecrates that of the indirect, under whose sign all of Bergson’s work is inscribed, given his incurable nostalgia for immediacy. It is because immediacy is beyond the reach not of consciousness but of intelligence – and it is intelligence which is in control of the philosophical enterprise – that philosophy must resign itself to the idea of a mediation (the mediating image does not amount to intuition but it certainly indicates it better than other approaches); and it is because narrative is a matter of time – or time is the exclusive matter of narrative – that this mediation takes the privileged form of narrative. Narration must be elevated by philosophy to the rank of noble and necessary practices. In a sense, we could say that by resorting so resolutely to narration, Bergson confirms the main thesis of Ricoeur’s Temps et Récit [Time and Narrative], which immediately states that philosophy has never ceased to fail in its endeavour to tell the time: ‘temporality cannot be spoken of in the direct discourse of phenomenology, but rather requires the mediation of the indirect discourse of narration’ (Ricoeur 1988: 241). However, one remembers that Ricoeur’s starting point is also a certain reference to immediacy: he quotes, at the beginning of his project, the famous saying of Augustine, who declares that he has no problem with time as long as he doesn’t have to explain it, because he has a perfect intuitive knowledge of it (‘If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not’ (Augustine 1961: 194)). Being in himself logical about this, Ricoeur even decides, in defiance of the chronological order of the texts, to begin his enterprise by reading Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions, and to continue with that of Aristotle’s Poetics. This order would therefore be, to put it in terms that Bergson would not disavow, that of things themselves: an initially intuitive approach is necessarily followed by a rational and methodical one. That this approach consists of a reflection on the ‘mise en intrigue’ [emplotment] (this is how Ricoeur chooses to translate the famous mimesis of the Poetics) is obviously not unimportant. What is certain is that the narrative bias which so widely informs Bergson’s overall philosophical endeavour is also at the root of his teaching activity. The process, which is so to speak obligatory when one is a professor of philosophy, of teaching the history of philosophy is wonderfully suited to a philosopher who takes narrative as one of his privileged principles of expression. And, as we have seen, a number of important texts in his works (the last chapter of Creative Evolution is exemplary) involve so many stories in which past philosophers are characters; the problems they seek to solve are romantic 207

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ ordeals they have to go through; their invention of systems provides episodes or plot twists; and the unravelling of the succession of these philosophers that Bergson fashions is itself the intrigue. The title he chose for his book, and which his closing lines echo, is an unequivocal indication of its outcome – both as a resolution of the plot and an outline of further developments that remain coherent with it. This, it will be said, suits Bergson, who in fact taught without detaching himself or deviating from his concern for philosophical invention, and whose published work is another way of teaching. And one will perhaps admit – without drawing all the methodical consequences from it – that a teacher of philosophy may wish to use Bergson’s strange pedagogical proposals in order to read Bergson’s philosophy. But only Bergson’s philosophy. I must clarify two things here. I confess first of all that I fashioned from scratch the figure of this teacher of philosophy, of this colleague who would read Bergson with Bergson’s tools – for example by taking as symbolic everything in Bergson that relates to the conceptual; this professor who would never forget that this work was written with the thought that the words were precisely what should be forgotten if one wants to truly be a philosopher – that is to say, for Bergson, a writer. The second thing is of greater consequence. I would like it to be anyway. One may have noticed, on turning such a page, on the occasion of such an argument, that the present book is not strictly speaking an essay about Bergson; that nothing of his doctrine has been commented on, presented in a critical way, or put in relation to positions held by other philosophers which differ from his own. If I admire Bergson (and I have not tried to hide the pleasure I take in reading his texts), I am not a Bergsonian, at least not in the generally prevailing sense, which implies an adherence to the doctrine or to this or that point of the doctrine. If I chose him, it is because the bold propositions he defends on the question of expression in philosophy coincide on many points with the way I have for years tried to read the texts of the philosophers I admire. The audacity of his hypotheses far exceeds anything I have been able to construct or propose in the texts I have written, in the seminars that I have held – on Bergson or on other philosophers – at the Collège International de Philosophie or elsewhere. At this point in my journey, no writer could better convey the idea that I seek to share with as many readers as possible on the writing of philosophy than Bergson; but the truth is that one would find in many other philosophers who have troubled the question of what constitutes adequate expression material openings to the same reflection, the same questions. Other philosophers . . . In fact, I sincerely believe, all the ‘great’ philosophers could give rise to the same doubts, lead one to relativise – and sometimes greatly – the scope of their strictly conceptual 208

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ contribution to the history of philosophy. And I would tend to say that they are ‘great’, exactly, only if they have mentioned, in their own work, the formal difficulties that they had to overcome, the expressive inventions that they had to put to the test to make their works.

Bergson, Among Many Others I would like, in these final pages, to give a more precise idea of the stakes attached to this problem of expression, which Bergson was so sensitive to that he based his entire work on it. These issues of course affect the interpretation and commentary that can be made on philosophical texts, but they may also have, or should have, consequences for the ways of teaching philosophy. I therefore propose to conclude by indicating what would be, in my view, points not necessarily to privilege but not to neglect when reading, or that are proposed to aid in the reading of a philosophical text; and to show that, without making reference to Bergson, one might examine what such a text owes to the expressive apparatus that its author has fashioned to express his thought. I will refrain in these final pages from referring to Bergson – who at base will have only been one who has revealed or instigated the issues – relying instead on other works to lend substance and plausibility to the hypotheses, to the questions that Bergson formulated so sharply and so provocatively but to which every writer proposing to philosophise has had to fashion their own response.

For a written philosophy, despite everything (Plato) If it were necessary to designate with a single word, to bring together under a single heading, all the remarks which will follow, one could say that what must never be forgotten is that philosophy is above all – I imagine that this above all will cause some grinding of teeth – a textual matter. It is even precisely to avoid the drawbacks of textuality that Socrates preferred the verbal practice of philosophy to this (as we know from Plato, who wrote about it . . .). We need, however, to be more precise. If writing seems dangerous to Socrates, it is because it is material that is potentially open to a multiplicity of commentaries and interpretations, which are in principle infinite, and might potentially be unfaithful to the author’s thought. This is not to say, of course, that the oral is safe from this danger. The dialogues that Plato fashions, pretending to only relate them, show that they consist of exchanges, disputes, commentary that is often meticulous on the use of a particular word or expression, to which neither dispute nor for that matter the demon of interpretation are foreign; they also show that they are 209

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ not lacking in linguistic invention, or in the resort to fiction.When one evokes the Platonic myths, one thinks spontaneously, of course, of the invention of writing in Phaedrus, of Aristophanes’ speech about love in The Symposium. Yet I sincerely believe that all those dialogues where Plato portrays Socrates must also be read as ‘Platonic myths’, if only because it is through them that the character of Socrates became the myth that we know. A careful reading of these myths suggests, indeed, that strict orality does not exclude textuality. Let us just say simply that the words of a philosopher, even one who does not write, are not those of the common people, and that if dialogue tends to reduce the space which separates them, it implies a reflection, an exchange in which verbality is the unavoidable, and of course problematic, condition. I add, following many other commentators, that we only know the terms of this debate through someone who has chosen to contravene the advocacy he reports. The form of the dialogue that Plato resolutely adopted is undoubtedly a tribute he pays to this declared preference of his master for lively speech, a homage which he renders to him; but it is also a formal decision which, justifying its departure, thereby exposes the text it produces to the risk of plural readings, attentive to the textual facts that it carefully elaborates. We can certainly read Plato by reducing the exchanges he imagines to theses or doctrinal points that owe nothing to dialogue or to formal decisions; pretend that the puns and the ambiguities are irrelevant to the stakes of the project as a whole. This would of course to be greatly mistaken, in forgetting that Socrates is the hero of a novelistic universe that Plato fashioned: that he is no more Socrates than Diderot’s d’Alembert (in D’Alembert’s Dream) is d’Alembert, Hugo’s Robespierre (in Ninety-Three) is Robespierre, Tolstoy’s Napoleon (in War and Peace) is Napoleon, Padura’s Trotsky (in The Man Who Loved Dogs) is Trotsky; and that moreover, before being a philosopher, and, I would add, undoubtedly in order to become one, Plato was a poet; and that for him, thought does not only owe to the arrangement of words the approval that might transform something into philosophy, since Plato chooses to make it the principle of his journey towards knowledge and towards wisdom. The examples that could be given of this Platonic method are innumerable. I will only give one, it is both small and major: small because it relates to one word, only one, in the exchange I am going to quote; major because the word, which relates precisely to love, is the means of slipping in a surreptitious sign concerning the philosophical enterprise itself, at least that which Plato attributes to the Socrates whom he invents at the same time as he remembers him (‘I invented up my memories’, says one of Beckett’s narrators, wonderfully (Beckett 1957: 152)). In the last part of The Symposium, Plato has Socrates relate the circumstances of the dialogue he has had with Diotima 210

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ about love; it is his contribution to the debate in which he is only one of the actors. Diotima therefore questions Socrates: Well, Socrates, and what do you suppose is the cause of all this longing and all this love? Haven’t you noticed what an extraordinary effect the breeding instinct has upon both animals and birds, and how obsessed they are [elles sont malades] with the desire [ôs deinôs diatithetai panta thèria]. (Plato 1961: 559)

Rather than love itself, however bestial it may be, Diotima emphasises here the ‘extraordinary effect [l’état terrible]’ (deinos) into which it plunges the creatures who are its prey: they are ‘obsessed [malades]’. Socrates, having confessed his ignorance, hears this response: ‘I don’t know how you can hope to master the philosophy [deinos genesthai] of Love, if that’s too much for you to understand’ (Plato 1961: 559). Luc Brisson’s French translation – which, by the way, is excellent – does not reflect the hypothesis that Diotima (Plato) advances discreetly by attributing to this fictitious Socrates the same state of mind as that of animals in heat. Socrates wanting to know the nature of love is just as deinos as any of them. The activity or rather the philosophical quest is undoubtedly the target here; the use of the same word only a few lines apart concerns desire – and we see which desire. If this is not strictly speaking a surprise (we know that philia for example is the condition of philosophical exchange), this singularly sexualises the matter: there is in the enterprise of knowledge an indisputable libido sciendi – an expression in which it would be wrong, one realises, to minimise the scope of the word libido. The rest of Diotima’s speech should be read in this light. The double meaning, which is not exactly characteristic of philosophy, here seems to be the very principle of enunciation. The desire of the species which, being mortal, seeks to ‘put on immortality’ (Plato 1961: 559) is perhaps not foreign to those seized by the desire to know and tormented by an unfulfilled need to ‘research’ (mélétè). How else might it be explained that Diotima, speaking of love, devotes so much time, and such a precise argument, to what one might call the instinct of knowledge: When we say we are studying [recherche], we really mean that our knowledge is ebbing away. We forget, because our knowledge disappears, and we have to study so as to replace what we are losing, so that the state of our knowledge may seem, at any rate, to be the same as it was before. (Plato 1961: 560)

A daring mind would perhaps go so far as to hypothesise that the enunciative role of Diotima, which could be said to be allegorical (all that she says about love can also be understood as philosophical activity), belongs to of Plato who, placing the discussion with Socrates at the end of his dialogue, puts Socrates in a position to speak the ‘truth’ about love. The device is actually a little more 211

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ complex, because if the Socrates of The Symposium is for once the one who learns from another, he is also the one who, having received his lesson, agrees to share it with his fellow guests at the banquet, virtual disciples and hence, potential instruments of his immortality, since – let us give the ambiguity the credit it deserves – philosophical talk has the same goal as bestial love: reproduction, and therefore the perpetuation in aeternum of the discourse that carries it. One sees that an ordinary conceptual apparatus would be hard pressed to say, at the same time, everything suggested by the linguistic apparatus elaborated by Plato in The Symposium. This device is obviously not limited to the identity of a single word (deinos) capable of qualifying the state into which love plunges beasts and that which lies in wait for the philosopher; it also rests in the dialogical form, in the embedded form of the dialogues, in the concerted ambiguity, in the rigorous allegory, in the order of the discourses, in the return of a character (Socrates) that Plato makes appear here, so to speak, out of character. In short, it is due to Plato’s writing, to his fashioning of various sophisticated literary techniques [moyens de langage], that he manages to convey the idea that a given object can be approached in as many ways as there are authors, and that these methods are obviously textual. In one of my texts, which is already very old, I read, in the same spirit, that is to say adopting the idea that the apparatus of writing constitutes more of a proposition than a neutral and indifferent tool, that everything in the Theaetetus relates to method, since the famous and metaphorical claim of Socratic maieutics is found in this dialogue (Clément 2005: 35–7). A close examination of the textual arrangement of this dialogue reveals that the objects over which the two characters in the dialogue argue are understood differently and that these differences must be related to their lives, to the way they died, to their age, their experience, their art of recounting or reasoning. Basically, what is in question in this major epistemological dialogue is undoubtedly less science, or the truth, or sensation, than the method that everyone makes use of – which is not often mentioned in commentaries on this dialogue. Why else would Plato have taken so much care to relate those things that have to do with the history, the circumstances, the enunciative and syntactic precautions even, of the dialogue; to legitimise – that is to say to avoid that one might suspect – the fictitious ploy in order to accredit the way in which the story has reached the ears of the one who reports it? The relevance of the method is indebted to this fictitious apparatus, to this learned and cunning intrigue. Fiction, narrative, dialogue then become much more than negligible textual parameters: they are the living heart of thought in action. If, for example, we are justified in seeing the dysentery which killed Theaetetus as a stone in the garden of methodical (only, to my knowledge, Michel Narcy, an excellent translator of the dialogue, went so far as to claim 212

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ this), we are also right to consider that, if Diotima uses the same word to designate the state of madness in which the instinct of reproduction places both animals and Socrates’ claim to wisdom and truth, it is not without a speculative ulterior motive on the part of the one who (very probably) invented her existence, as he also invented Socrates.

The textual aporias of pure reason (Kant) One might say that Plato is an easy example, that he is, within the philosophical tradition, among the most ‘literary’, and that not all philosophical works would profit as much as his from being read like a novel. For my part, I hold that the question concerns a principle rather than a circumstance or a particular case; that no thought (philosophy is one mode of thought among others) is pure of the linguistic apparatus [l’appareil langagier] it has fashioned to make itself known; and that for this reason one cannot claim to comment on it or introduce it without analysing this. No thought, really? Even that of analytical philosophers? But yes. Even Kant’s? Ah! Let’s talk about Kant, let’s talk about this cognitive faculty which owes nothing to the senses or to experience, whose principles are universal and a priori – let’s talk about pure reason . . . One knows that the great work that Kant undertook under the title Critique Of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781) is also his most famous book. It is a text that is generally agreed to be both one of the most important in the modern philosophical tradition and one that is very difficult to read and approach. The language is abstract, sometimes arid. We spontaneously compare the apparatus developed by its author to logic, whose rigour Kant obviously wanted to adopt. However, just a few years later (in 1790, that is to say, nine years after the first publication of the book, but only three years after the revised edition which was henceforth authoritative), he evokes the difficulties of expression to which, according to him, any person is condemned who undertakes to say something about pure reason. As we know, it is only at this stage, the last of knowledge, that the most acute methodical, epistemological, expressive and even figurative problems arise. As long as the philosopher can refer to sensible experience or to understanding, he has, says Kant, no problem of expression or exposition to fear. Yet it is not the same when it comes to the concepts of pure reason: Establishing that our concepts have reality always requires intuitions. If the concepts are empirical, the intuitions are called examples. If they are pure concepts of understanding, the intuitions are called schemata. But if anyone

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‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ goes as far as to demand that we establish the objective reality of the rational concepts (i.e., the ideas) for the sake of their theoretical cognition, then he asks for something impossible, because absolutely no intuition can be given that would be adequate to them. (Kant 1987: §59, 225–6)

‘To demand that we establish the objective reality of the rational concepts’, one has read correctly, is to ask ‘for something impossible. . .’. This does not mean, of course, that the philosopher should give up saying or expositing any concept of reason whatsoever. But if one decides, like Kant himself, to follow through with one’s philosophical determination, one must never lose one’s awareness of the impossibility of an expression adequate to it. In other words – and these terms are Kantian this time – the philosopher, even one alert to this, who sets out to demonstrate the reality of the pure concepts of reason, must accept being part of a certain inadequacy; one must even face this: as soon as it touches on pure reason, philosophical expression necessarily consists of a bias; of a gap, if you will, with the reality that it is a question of demonstrating. The indirect becomes the rule. At the same time as one labours in search of the right method, and takes the part of what reason can do and of what remains beyond its reach, the philosopher must also seek the inadequate but appropriate means of demonstrating what ordinary vocabulary and syntax are unfit to express. One will of course use the same words as ordinary people, one will sacrifice to language, to its uses, to its syntax, but the words of one’s speech will be arranged in such a way that they refer to the reality in question without directly expressing it. The exposition should be constructed in such a way that it can more or less easily be deciphered, translated, interpreted, understood. This necessary ‘gap’ will obviously not leave the field open to fantasy or imagination; it will be resolved as far as possible. In the Critique of Judgment (§59) Kant sets out to define as exactly as possible the conditions of this necessarily inadequate expression. He gives the process, to which the desire for the impossible is forced to resort, a name which has belonged to philosophy for centuries but which, under his pen, is rather unexpected: he calls it hypotyposis.1 Kantian hypotyposis is not a figure whose virtue would be to make a concept more seductive or probable than its difficulty alone leads it to be; rather, it is a necessity of writing. Kant, who is not ordinarily ranked among mystical philosophers, specifies that the hypotyposis relating to pure reason is ‘symbolic’; for him too, conceptual expression – at least that which relates to pure reason – is therefore ‘necessarily symbolic’. It is a question of admitting that this indirect designation contains nothing that would belong to the intuition of the object, 1. ‘Hypotyposis: Vivid description of a scene, event or situation, bringing it, as it were, before the eyes of the hearer or reader’ (OED).

214

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ that it serves only as a means of reproduction according to the law of imaginative association; that it, in short, ‘merely express[es] concepts’ (Kant 1987: §59, 227).The epistemological consequences of this rhetorical necessity are not insignificant.To give an idea of them, I will confine myself to quoting a formula that Kant presents as the logical implication of this necessary poetics: he says that the knowledge it allows is a ‘symbolic knowledge’ (‘all our cognition of God is merely symbolic’ he says, for example (Kant 1987: §59, 228)). That the Kantian text refers, when it treats the concepts of pure reason, to something other than what the words assembled to offer an idea of it seem to say; that the law of association is its principle, and imagination its precious tool, is certainly not the ordering reflex its readers will have when it comes to thinking about it, let alone validating it. One sees, however, that one would be doing Kant a great harm if, in order to present his doctrine or his method, one did not insist on these expressive parameters, if one did not draw students’ attention to the common use of a symbolic language by poets and philosophers (at least those of pure reason), even if this means distinguishing one from the other – and this, undoubtedly difficult, distinction would be fascinating: one of the editors of the French edition of Critique of Judgment says, in a bold note, that this Kantian hypotyposis ‘signals a retreat’, and he does not hesitate to compare Kant to Hölderlin . . . (note for §59 [Kant 1985, my translation]). If I have lingered a little on the case of Kant, it is because he is not one of those authors whose textual methods are commonly scrutinised by their commentators or teachers. Yet, if Kant is so categorical and rigorous when he names hypotyposis, if he is so meticulous when he claims to use it in his writing, we can hypothesise that very few philosophers – I want to say none, of course – could be read as they most often are; that is, literally.

‘Words, words, words . . .’ Thought is circumstantial . . . On several occasions in this essay I have mentioned experiences, named works, quoted philosophers whose thought is indebted – in whatever measure – to circumstance. This circumstance might be historical (one admits it relatively easily), but it might, like that of novelists or poets, be spiritual (Descartes would be the perfect example, he who, thinking of his three dreams in 1619, decides, long before he writes the Discourse on Method, to make a devout and appreciative pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Lorette); it might be amicable (Montaigne’s friendship with Étienne de La Boétie inspires many pages of the Essays, even those which are not dedicated to him; the friendship Nietzsche 215

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ has for Wagner plays a decisive role in the enthusiastic and militant writing of The Birth of Tragedy); it might even be amorous (one thinks of Kierkegaard, of course, so many of whose pages and books owe their force of anxiety and invention to Regine Olsen; but one might also name Heidegger, whose thought, after 1950, is indebted to Hannah Arendt, from his most lively discoveries to his least expected inflections; and Hannah Arendt herself, who in her Denktagebuch, written so to speak at the same time, shows herself to be so close to the theses and words of Heidegger; or one might think of Derrida, whose ‘Envois’, in The Postcard, quiver with a desire that does not try to make people forget that it is also carnal); this circumstance might be linguistic, or cultural, and determine the language of expression of a philosopher (French or Latin for Descartes; German or English for Hannah Arendt or Ludwig Wittgenstein; Greek for the Roman Marcus Aurelius; English or French for Bergson, or even for Derrida, and so on). What status should be given to these circumstances? Does their importance exceed that given to anecdotes, to the ‘context’ that we evoke – which we believe should be evoked – in the prefaces or introductory courses to the works we want to help others read? The answer to this question obviously depends on the idea we have of a philosophical text. The thesis, most often implicit, of philosophers or teachers of philosophy is that these circumstances, however interesting they are, do not really matter. It happens that in friendly confidence things are said bluntly: ‘A philosopher’, Paul Ricoeur, with whom I raised this question, told me one day, ‘chooses to write the language which suits him best, he opts for a genre which corresponds to his mood or his tastes, but this choice has no bearing on the meaning or the scope of his work – what counts are his ideas, this is what he has to tell us’. The fundamental idea is that if philosophers write abstractly, it is because their writing is an effort to abstract themselves from circumstance. Thought must, as much as possible, be pure of the time which witnessed its birth, of the personality, language, culture, intimate convictions, political or religious opinions, or amorous life, of its author, and it is through this effort that the philosopher will know how to produce a work for all, for everyone, a work whose validity and relevance will transcend borders, transcend eras. The more strictly circumstance can be kept on the margins, blurred, obliterated, the less one will suspect its presence, and the more the work, which nevertheless proceeds from it, will have a chance of being held to be universal. The matter is all the less questionable as the philosopher indeed mostly writes in this spirit. Any attempt to relate what they write to their person, or their time, would be seen as a desire to read that work as one reads the work of poets or novelists, and therefore to reduce its scope, to relativise it, to lead it astray. 216

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ Nietzsche is, as he is so often, an exemplary exception. It is by remembering what he says in Ecce Homo about ‘trivial matters’ (these are ‘the fundamental things, of life’ Nietzsche 1924: 51–2) that I have repeatedly attempted to give the circumstance a philosophical status. I am happy to quote this somewhat iconoclastic text: You may be wondering why I should actually have related all these trivial and, according to traditional accounts, insignificant details to you; such action can but tell against me, more particularly if I am fated to figure in great causes. To this I reply that these trivial matters – diet, locality, climate, and one’s mode of recreation, the whole casuistry of self-love – are inconceivably more important than all that which has hitherto been held in high esteem. It is precisely in this quarter that we must begin to learn afresh. All those things which mankind has valued with such earnestness heretofore are not even real; they are mere creations of fancy, or, more strictly speaking, lies born of the evil instincts of diseased and, in the deepest sense, noxious natures. (Nietzsche 1924: 51–2)

. . . figural. . . As for the ancient, secular debate on the legitimacy of a philosopher using rhetorical figures, it rests on this conviction – Platonic in essence – that a language concerned with truth has no use for the artifices of language. From Plato to Levinas, rhetoric is the enemy of thought – and so the enemy of philosophy. And if it is true that a philosopher would perhaps no longer say things so bluntly today, it would undoubtedly be difficult to find comments by Descartes, Kant or Hegel which would give their figures a theoretical purpose. The figure is, on the contrary, the condition of thought. And I don’t just have in mind, saying this, epanorthosis, hypotyposis, prosopopoeia or fabulation, which were so precious in Bergson’s eyes. I am also thinking of the four figures that Vico theorises: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony; I am thinking of Ricoeur’s narratives and metaphor; of the rhetorical figures which Nietzsche claimed and used very early (‘For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure [rhetorische Figur] but a representative image that really hovers before him in place of a concept’ (Nietzsche 1993: 42). I contend, with them, that figures are the condition of thought which owes to them form, movement, dynamics, physiognomy – which owes them life.

. . . and textual Such is the idea that, in concluding, I would like to give to the philosophical text. What I have just explained – in a somewhat summary way, I am well 217

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ aware of it – in order to put into perspective the conception that we usually have of the timeless and universal status of philosophy, is based on the conviction, almost universally shared, that what is valued in a philosophical text is the thesis that it defends, the conceptual tool that it invents, the system that it works to promote, and that one tends to take for granted – what Bergson calls ‘a result’ (TS, 217). However, it is not said – in any case not said of all philosophers – that philosophical texts are beneficial to us exclusively because of the doctrine they profess, even if they generally present it as a contribution, even a solution, to a problem never (or only badly) solved before. It is not said that achieving a ‘result’ is the goal of a writer who philosophises. I contend, like Bergson, that the philosopher is ‘most often a writer’ (TS, 217, translation modified) and that the work they produce is above all textual. The experience of thought is not approachable in the abstraction of the configuration of language developed to make it known; the richness, the beauty, of the work of a philosopher, the pleasure that their texts provide, are indebted as much, no doubt even more, to the work of which these texts are the fruit – an always considerable work, never indifferent, admirable when it is created by a great writer – than they are to their purely conceptual invention. Because the concept is never pure, it always refers to what it is not, and to what it (sometimes unknowingly) serves; it indicates that it is, most often unwillingly, a sign that is at the same time necessary and inadequate. The language of a philosopher is not a tool at the service of a cause, or an idea, or a doctrine. One cannot say, any more than if it involved the work of a poet or a novelist of genius, that this language is the ‘form’ that the philosopher fashions on behalf of a ‘content’ which in the philosopher’s eyes is more important than that ‘form’; as with any writer, the philosopher’s language is only the material, that is to say the object, of their work. If this work permits a result, it must be admitted that it achieves it via an apparatus which is verbal through and through, and developed with a view to making thought take on whatever appearance this precisely configured language has known how, through the course of a work, to provide it with. More than what it asserts, the whole work is what matters. The words of the dictionary – and those of everyday language, which does not always know the definitions too well – are its lively, inventive material, that is to say also fictitious, which means that the whole mind and body are involved in the work’s reading, and that this reading is dear to them. Particular circumstances are certainly not foreign to any of them, neither to the person who composed the work, nor to the language from which it is woven, nor to the forms, nor the ideas, nor the concepts which make it exist and live exactly as the characters of the novels do: cities and imaginary spaces, rigorously elaborated 218

‘. . . to transfer thought, still living . . .’ times, meticulously plotted stories in which our mental and emotional life finds its relief, its anxiety, its nourishment, in quest for exemplars of a sage life. This is why a teaching of philosophy which left no room for its textuality would really being lacking what is essential. If anything distinguishes the philosophical text from the poetic, or from the novel, it is certainly not the importance the so-called writer of fiction would attach to the formal outcome of their text. Because like poets, writers of philosophy weigh their words; like them, they take care (and this care is sometimes maniacal) over their ordering, their rhythm, their music; like novelists, they invent: their characters are more or less conceptual, but they are indeed characters; the events they recount are not described with the luxury of detail that a writer sensitive to decor, finery, noise, smells, physiognomy, labyrinths of mental spaces would relate, but they do not involve consequences that are any less serious, or that affect their readers any less deeply or durably; like a playwright, like a dramatic poet finally, the one who writes in order to philosophise stages: they prepare and block out the drama whose framework is always alive, always taut, leading the drama to a catastrophe of knowledge, which is not so rarely commented on by an attentive and involved chorus. This like is too much, of course. Nothing justifies it in theory. Bergson nowhere says that the philosopher is like a writer, he says the philosopher is a writer. The work of the philosopher, which tends towards abstraction – such as is proper to it, without doubt – is the same as that which recounts, which works with rhythms and assonances, which figures, which uses images, which confronts and intrigues, which fantasises – in short, which imitates. Philosophy, basically, is a genre. One literary genre among many. Its material, its procedures, its concerns, its invention, its verbal anxieties are more or less the same as those of poets, from whom philosophers differ only in the very weak measure by which poets themselves differ from novelists or playwrights. None of them are in a position to dominate any of the others. Each one works in their place and with their instrument, but they are part of the same whole, they are close together with no abyss separating them, they share in any case the memories, sometimes explicit, sometimes unconscious, of the mythical time when their words were mixed. Where the fable was their common and delectable lot. Where concern for rhythm gripped them equally. Where the need to know and to understand, the thirst for meaning and wisdom, belonged to them all, to all of them and to each of them, as something inseparable from the desire for verisimilitude, harmony, beauty.

219

Works Cited

Augustine (1961) The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated by Edward B. Pusey, New York: Collier. Baillet, Adrien (1691) La Vie de M. Descartes, Horthemels (in two vols). Barthes, Roland (1972) Le Degré zero de l’écriture, suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques, Paris: Le Seuil. Beckett, Samuel (1955) Molloy, New York: Grove. Beckett, Samuel (1957) The Unnamable, New York: Grove. Beckett, Samuel (1983) ‘Letter to Axel Kaun’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, New York: Grove. Beckett, Samuel (1995) The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, edited by S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove. Clément, Bruno (1994) L’Oeuvre sans qualities. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett, Paris: Le Seuil, 1994. Clément, Bruno (2005) Le Récit de la méthode, Paris: Le Seuil, 2005. Clément, Bruno (2011) ‘Au commencement était le récit’, Études littéraires 42:2, pp. 15–29. Derrida, Jacques (1982) Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Descartes, René (1968) Discourse on Method and The Meditations, translated by F. E. Sutcliffe, London: Penguin. Diogenes Laertius (1972) Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 1, translated by R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fontanier, Pierre (1977) Les Figures du discours, Paris: Flammarion. Gouhier, Henri (1989) Bergson dans l’histoire de la pensée occidentale, Paris:Vrin. Homer, The Illiad, translated by A. S. Kline, ‘Poetry in Translation’ website. James, Henry (1907–9a), ‘The Friends of the Friends’, in New York Edition, vol. 17, New York: Scribner. James, Henry (1907–9b), ‘The Real Thing’, in New York Edition, vol. 18, New York: Scribner. James, Henry (1915) The Death of the Lion, London: Martin Secker. James, Henry (1916) The Figure in the Carpet, Boston: Le Roy Phillips. James, Henry (1934) The Art of the Novel, New York: Scribner. James, Henry (1969) Tales: Maud-Evelyn, The Death of Lion/Nouvelles: Maud-Evelyn, La mort du lion, bilingual edition, Paris: Aubier-Flammarion. James, Henry (1983) The Spoils of Poynton, London: Penguin. Kant, Immanuel (1987) Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, London: Hackett. Malebranche, Nicholas (1997) The Search after Truth, translated and edited by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mallarmé, Stéphane (2007) ‘Crisis of Verse’, in Divagations, translated by Barbara Johnson, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1924) Ecco Homo, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, London: Allen and Unwin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1993) Birth of Tragedy, translated by Shaun Whiteside, London: Penguin. Pascal, Blaise (1910) ‘The Art of Persuasion’, in Thoughts, Minor Works, Letters, New York: P. F. Collier and Son. Pascal, Blaise (1985) De l’esprit géométrique (et autres textes), Paris: Flammarion.

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Works Cited Pascal, Blaise (1999) Pensées and Other Writings, translated by Honor Levi, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato (1961) The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Proust, Marcel (1987), Contre Sainte-Beuve, Paris: Gallimard. Proust, Marcel (2001a) ‘Time Regained’, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, translated by Andreas Major and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright with an Introduction by Harold Bloom, London: Everyman. Proust, Marcel (2001b) ‘The Captive’, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 3, translated by C. K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright with an Introduction by Harold Bloom, London: Everyman. Ricoeur, Paul (1988) Time and Narrative, vol. 3, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Russell, Bertrand (1912) ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, The Monist 22:3, pp. 321–47. Russell, Bertrand (1928) Sceptical Essays, London: Allen and Unwin. Sarraute, Nathalie (1996) Oeuvres Complete, Paris: Gallimard. Sarraute, Nathalie (1996) Ouvrez, Paris: Gallimard. Vico, Giambattista (1961) The New Science, edited by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, New York: Doubleday. Worms, Frédéric (1994) ‘Les trois dimensions de la question de l’espace dans l’oeuvre de Bergson’, Épokhè 4, pp. 89–119.

221

Index

Arendt, Hannah, 22, 58, 59, 119, 216 Aristotle, 204, 207 art analogy of life and art, 65–8 analogy of philosophy and art, 71–5, 79 as an anti-concept, 69–71, 76 the character of the novel and the imagination, 93–5 comedy’s affinities with philosophy, 78–9, 89–90 comedy’s rapport with language, 87–90 the creative imagination, 121, 125–6 figure of the portrait painter, 65–6 impulse of artistic creation, 74, 110, 114, 200 and the individual, 77, 79 in ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ 90, 92–4 and literary composition, 97–100, 101–2 and metaphysics, 78, 79–80, 82–3, 84, 90–1, 99–100 the need to reform language, 81–2, 87 the philosopher as artist, 108, 118–20 the philosopher reading another philosopher, 83–7 and philosophy, 63, 76–80, 83, 98–9, 118–20, 182 the principle of analysis, 70

and the representation of reality, 100–1 and science, 68–9, 75 and showing the truth, 78, 80–1 the singular vs the universal, 77, 79–83, 89 symbolic activity of, 76–8 sympathy and metaphysics, 90–1 the thought of art in Bergson, 63–5, 69 translation of the photographic image, 95–7 the vision of the painter, 71–6 the writers task and philosophical writing, 102–3, 177–9, 194, 218 Augustine, 207 Baillet, Adrien, 120, 122–3 Barthes, Roland, 93 Beckett, Samuel, viii, 12, 21, 35, 40, 41, 127 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 68, 109, 110, 112 Bergson, Henri bilingualism, viii, 58–60, 105, 195 and Henry James, 175–6, 177–9, 196 Nobel Prize for Literature, vi, 21, 22 the proximity principle of his works, 188–9 reading of, 60–2 scholarship on, vii–ix, 16–21, 22–3

222

Index as a teacher, 20, 187, 189, 201, 208 translation of, 58–9 and William James, 176 Bergson, Jeanne, 194, 195 Berkeley, George, 174–5, 189 Bologna conference, 19, 36, 37, 76, 150, 151, 189–90; see also ‘Philosophical Intuition’ Clément, Bruno, vi, ix–x, xi comedy affinities with philosophy, 78–9, 89–90 rapport with language, 87–8 see also Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic concepts art as an anti-concept, 69–71, 76 conceptual expression as symbolic, 13, 23, 50, 57–8, 76, 78, 92 limitations of conceptual expression, 13, 21, 23, 27, 29, 51–3, 75 as metaphors, 50 precision of, 23, 26 as symbols, 50 consciousness, theory of, 48–9, 51–2, 55–8 contingency in evolution, 133 in philosophical writing, 131–2 in poetry, 132–3 Copernicus, 28 Creative Evolution allusions to teaching experiences, 189 art and philosophy relationship, 70 art and science, 68

Bergson’s theory of language, 42–7, 135 contingency and evolution, 133 evolution as a fable, 139–46 evolution in, 7, 203, 206 as ghost philosophy, 148, 165–7, 168, 175 the history of philosophy, 202, 206–7 introduction, 22–3 the measurable and the unpredictable, 65–6 as a methodological work, 186 necessity of approximation in expression, 26–7 poetic expression, 132–3, 181, 183 to teach is to philosophise, 201–6 theory of language, 42–4 Creative Mind, The, 27, 30, 34, 47, 72, 90, 105, 117, 189; see also ‘Philosophical Intuition’ Deleuze, Gilles, viii, ix Derrida, Jacques, 4, 216 Descartes, René, 44, 59, 113, 119– 20, 122–3, 198, 205, 215 Diogenes Laertius, 85, 118, 119 dreams in Descartes Discourse, 122–4 dream narrative fable, 154, 163–5 as a mode of expression, 15 and the passive imagination, 122 the phantoms of, 158–60, 200 Socrates’ dream, 118–19 ego, philosophical problem of, 47 élan vital imagistic character of, 26, 135 as the organ of life, 173, 176, 200 and the proximity principle, 189

223

Index emotion infra-intellectual emotion, 110–11 supra-intellectual emotion, 110–11, 112 empathy, term, 91 epanorthosis concept, x, 33 and the creation of a novel, 93–5, 97 indefinite correction and the limits of the intellect, 46–50, 51–2, 55 multiple corrections of successive translations, 96–7 of philosophical intuition, 31–3, 34–5, 37, 96–7, 107–8 evolution contingency in, 133 as a fable, 139–46 see also Creative Evolution expression and Bergson’s bilingualism, viii dreams as a mode of, 15 images for, 13, 15, 23, 26–8, 51–2, 53–4 indirect expressions of ghosts, 172 of the inexpressible, 107–8, 111–12 Kantian hypotyposis, 214–15 the language of novelists, 14–15, 22 and the limitations of language, x, 24–5 multiple formulations in philosophical utterance, 31–3 necessity of approximation in, 25–7, 48 of non-spatial phenomena, x, 3, 5, 9 orality vs textuality in Plato, 209–13 of philosophical ideas, vii, 1–3, 6–7, 23, 29–30, 97, 131–2, 191

scholarship on expression in Bergson, vii–viii, 16–21, 22–3 teaching as philosophical expression, 201–6 and the teaching of philosophy, 190–1 textual aporias in Kant, 213–15 fabulation the Bergsonian fable, 133–5 and the creation of intrigue, 40 evolution as a fable, 139–46 the fabulising function, x, 36–7, 38, 127–8, 132, 136–9, 179–80 the fabulising function as both passive and active, 129 fabulising function of ghosts, 169, 178, 180 fancy and will, 130–1 fiction as a counter-power, 136–7 and the imagination, 36, 38, 123–4, 125, 126 as natural, 36, 37, 39, 41 and philosophical intuition, 37, 131–2 and the production of art, 37 religion and the fabulising function, 36–7, 127, 128–30 voluntary hallucinations, 129–31, 160 see also imagination figures of thought absence from philosophical discourse, 38 and the condition of thought, 217 Fontanier’s group of, 38–9 and narrative/poetic texts, 41 and speculative/philosophical texts, 41 through the imagination, 39–41 Fontanier, Pierre, 37–9, 40–1 Freud, Sigmund, 91, 159

224

Index ghosts in Bergson’s work, 149–50, 188 Creative Evolution and ghost philosophy, 165–7 and the fabulising function, 169, 178, 180 and fiction, 147, 168–71 ‘ghosts’ of ideas and knowledge, 147, 148 in Henry James’ fiction, 169–71 indirect expressions of, 171–2 and intuition, 161–3 the metaphor of the image of, 147–8, 149, 151 the phantoms of dreams, 158–60, 200 psychical research, 148–9 see also ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ paper Gouhier, Henri, 59 Guattari, Felix, ix Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 117 Heidegger, Martin, 117, 216 Hesiod, 119 images art and the translation of the photographic image, 95–7 for expression, 13, 15, 23, 26–8, 51–2, 53–4 imagistic character of the élan vital, 26, 135 the metaphor of the image of ghosts, 147–8, 149, 151 pictorial language (imagistic), 13, 15, 23, 26–9, 51 the poetic image, 9, 12–13, 21–2 imagination absence from philosophical discourse, 38, 179–80 active/creative, 121, 122, 126, 127

and the creation of characters, 128–30 and Descartes’ Discourse, 122–4 and fabulation, 36, 38, 123–4, 125, 126 fancy and, 125–7 figures of thought through, 39–41 infinite correction and the creation of a novel, 93–5, 97 and knowledge, 92–3, 94 passive, 121, 122, 125–6, 127, 129 Russell’s critique of Bergson, 181–3, 185 semantic view of, 123–5 in the work of the philosopher, 121–2, 129, 180 see also fabulation intelligence and the development of language, 144–6, 173 and the manipulation of matter, 193 manual inventiveness vs intellectual labour, 192–4 philosophical intuition as distinct from, 173–4, 183 ‘Introduction to Metaphysics,’ 47–8, 52, 54, 57–8, 60–1, 90, 92–4, 98, 116 James, Henry The Figure in the Carpet, 171–4, 176, 178 on ghosts in his fiction, 169–70 “Phantasms of the Living” influence on, 170–1 proximity to Henri Bergson, 175–6, 177–9, 196 on reading aloud, 196 ‘The Real Thing,’ 178 The Spoils of Poynton, 160–1 ‘The Way it Came,’ 170 James, William, 80, 105–6, 149, 170, 171, 176

225

Index Kant, Immanuel, 28, 68, 113, 122, 205, 213–15 knowledge ‘ghosts’ of ideas, 147, 148 and the imagination, 92–3, 94 immediate knowledge, 90, 91, 92 Kantian theory of, 205 periphrasis, 91–2, 108 scientific, 90, 91 sympathy and metaphysics, 90, 91, 92 and the theory of life, 28

thought and, 14–16 time and narrative, 206–9 tropism, 142–4 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 75, 76, 82, 87–8, 89, 90, 99–100, 101, 117–18 literature and philosophy, vi, x, 21–3, 173–5, 177–8 reading aloud of, 196 the teaching of, 195–7 see also art; James, Henry

language abstract vs figurative, 27–9 comedy’s rapport with, 87–8 and continuity, 46–8 of everyday communication, 8, 76, 88 and the expression of philosophical ideas, vii, 1–3, 6–7, 23 intelligence’s development of, 144–6, 173 Kantian hypotyposis, 214–15 limitations of, x, 4–5, 24–5, 29–30, 42, 44, 76, 206–7 and the limits of the intellect, 45–6, 53, 101 metaphor, 44–6, 49, 50 and music, 54–7, 58, 63, 64, 100–1, 104, 196–7, 199 non-verbal expression, 30–1 as a performative instrument, 45, 54–7 pictorial language (imagistic), 13, 15, 23, 26–9, 51 and reason, 42–4 Russell’s critique of Bergson, 183–5 scientific, 112–13 spatiality of, x, 1, 2, 5–6, 17, 20, 45 theory of puns, 116–18

Malebranche, Nicolas, 121–2 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 8, 9, 21, 88, 172 metaphors, 92 metaphysics and art, 78, 79–80, 82–3, 84, 90–1, 99–100 and empiricism, 95–6 and immediate knowledge (sympathy), 90, 91, 92 poetic language, 100 sympathy and, 90–1 as translation of the photographic image, 95–7 Mind Energy, 31, 59, 99, 102 music connection of mysticism and music with philosophical writing, 106–18 and language, 54–7, 58, 63, 64, 100–1, 104, 196–7, 199 the philosopher as musician, 103–4, 109 supra- vs infra-intellectual responses, 109–11, 112 theme of musical variation, 135 and translation of text, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 118, 122, 215–16, 217 Pascal, Blaise, 24, 52–3 226

Index Péguy, Charles, 40, 41 periphrasis, 91–2, 108, 171–2, 174 ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ paper and Bergson’s own philosophical research, 149–50, 155–6, 161–3, 167–8 dream narrative fable, 154, 163–5 fiction of Bergson’s presence at the conference, 152–3, 156–7 ghost philosophy, 150–1 and Henry James’ ghost stories, 170–1 ‘The little girl and the learned doctor’ fable, 153–6, 160, 161, 166, 169, 170 metaphorical ghosts, 151, 157–8 opening lines, 152–3 for the Society for Psychical Research, 148–9, 167 and the status of reality, 151 theoretical hypotheses, 151–2, 153 ‘Philosophical Intuition’ audience for, 189, 190, 196, 201 the expression of philosophical ideas, 191 narrative construction, 172–4 philosophical intuition as distinct from intelligence, 173–4 and the teaching of philosophy, 190–1 philosophical writing Bergson’s theory of language for, 7–9, 10, 21, 42–4, 45, 50–3, 102–3, 113–16 circumstances and contexts, 215–17 connection of mysticism and music with, 106–18 as contingent, 131–2 as distinct from literary writing, 21–2, 173–5, 177–8 figures, absence of, 38

imagination, absence of, 38, 179–80 limitations of language, x, 24–5, 29–30, 42, 44, 76, 206–7 method of composition, 113–14 non-spatial language, 9–10 orality vs textuality in Plato, 209–13 the philosopher as artist, 108, 118–20 the philosopher as musician, 103–4 the philosopher as writer, 102–3, 177–9, 194, 218 the poetic image, 9, 12–13, 21–2 prosopopoeia alongside epanorthosis, 35 the proximity principle and the work of the philosopher, 188–9 role of figurative language, 35 role of lived experience, 194–5 speech-thought dialectic, 10, 11–12, 13, 14–16, 24 textual aporias in Kant, 213–15 textuality of, 217–19 philosophy analogy of philosophy and art, 71–5, 79 and art, 63, 76–80, 83, 98–9, 118–20, 182 expression of philosophical ideas, vii, 1–3, 6–7, 23 generalization in, 197 and literature, vi, x, 21–3, 173–5, 177–8 the philosopher reading another philosopher, 83–7 philosopher/mystic distinction, 106–7 and religion, 37, 39, 41 the singular vs the universal, 79–83, 89 the unity of the ego question, 25 227

Index Plato, 6, 24, 40, 41, 117, 118–19, 204, 209–13 poetry of Descartes, 119–20, 122 generative idea of, 132–3, 135, 200 poetic expression in Creative Evolution, 132–3, 181, 183 the poetic image in philosophical writing, 9, 12–13, 21–2 poetic imagination, 181–2, 200 poetic language in metaphysics, 100 Prendergast, Thomas, 198 prosopopoeia concept, x, 34 of philosophical intuition, 33–5, 37 Proust, Marcel, 31–2, 174–5, 183 psychology, 36, 148, 152, 159 puns, 116–18 Ravaisson, Félix, 82, 83–7, 194, 197 reason expression of in Kant, 213–15 and language, 42–4 religion connection of mysticism and music with philosophical writing, 106–18 and the fabulising function, 36–7, 127, 128–30 mystical religion, 106–7 philosopher/mystic distinction, 106–7 and philosophy, 37, 39, 41 rhetoric Bergson’s relationship with, 33 importance of to philosophical expression, vii, 217 Ricœur, Paul, 40, 138, 206, 207, 216 Russell, Bertrand, vi, 79, 122, 181–5, 189

Sarraute, Nathalie, 32, 142, 143, 146, 175 science and art, 68–9, 75 and philosophy in Bergson’s work, viii–ix precision in scientific language, 11, 26, 42, 112–13 predictability, 69 unpredictability of the individual, 65–6, 68, 69 Society for Psychical Research, 148–9, 170; see also ‘“Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ paper Socrates, 6, 24, 34, 40, 118–19, 209–13 space concept of in Bergson’s work, 18, 20 expression of, x, 1 limits of thought and, 1 spatiality of language, x, 1, 2, 5–6, 17, 20, 45 Spinoza, Baruch, 126, 131–2, 133, 174–5, 178, 188, 189, 199–200 ‘Stating the Problems,’ 189 symbols and conceptual expression, 13, 23, 27, 50, 57–8, 76, 78, 92 omission of from philosophical writing, 3, 6, 14 symbolic activity of art, 76–8 teaching approximation in, 200–1 Bergson as a teacher, 20, 187, 189, 191, 201, 208 the French education system, 192–3 generalities and, 197–8 of literature, 195–7 manual education, 192–4

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Index and philosophical intuition, 190–1, 195–6, 198–9 reading aloud and, 196–7, 199 reason in the principles of, 198–9 role of time and narrative, 206–8 of Spinoza, 199–200 in ‘Stating the Problems,’ 191–2 to teach is to philosophise, 201–6 textuality of philosophical writing, 219 ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson,’ 83–7, 194 theory of consciousness, 48–9, 51–2, 55–8 Time and Free Will Author’s Preface, 1, 2, 3–5, 6, 10–11, 18, 31, 102 the mode of expression of philosophy, 14 the problem of freedom, 6, 7, 9, 15–16 translation Bergson as translator, 105–6 Bergson’s bilingualism, viii, 58–60, 105

and infinity, 97 multiple corrections of successive translations, 96–7 and the ‘music’ of the text, 58, 106 and photography, 95–7 of the text (Clément), ix–x tropism, 142–4 Two Sources of Morality and Religion, The connection of mysticism and music with philosophical writing, 106–18 the fabulising function, 35–8, 128, 136–7 the imagination, 124–6, 127, 129 limitations of language, 17 on literary composition, 101–2 see also fabulation Vischer, Robert, 91 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 58, 59, 216 Worms, Frédéric, 17, 18

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