Time, Duration and Change: A Critique of Theories of Pure Movement 3031405900, 9783031405907

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Time, Duration and Change A Critique of Theories of Pure Movement Franz Bockrath

Time, Duration and Change

Franz Bockrath

Time, Duration and Change A Critique of Theories of Pure Movement

Franz Bockrath Human Sciences Technical University Darmstadt Magdalenenstrasse 27, Darmstadt, Germany

ISBN 978-3-031-40589-1    ISBN 978-3-031-40590-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Translation from the German language edition: “Zeit, Dauer und Veränderung” by Franz Bockrath, © author 2014. Published by transcript Verlag. All Rights Reserved. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Anja, Franca and Cara

Preface

This book is based on a lengthy manuscript dating back to my time as a research assistant at the Humboldt University in Berlin, from which I took the parts dealing with the relation between motion and time and revised and expanded them into their current form. Proceeding from Hegel’s thesis that motion is ‘contradiction as existent’, and hence necessarily bound up with temporal relations, my examination of this topic proves it to be of both contemporary and historical relevance. The first part approaches the philosophical problem of motion from the two opposing extremes of pure thought (Zeno) and pure perception (Bergson) and shows the contradictions that arise at both poles. The second part, by contrast, seeks to understand how these contradictions are reflexively mediated (Hegel), before turning to consider the dimension of experience through the lens of its symbolic meaning (Cassirer). This step appeared necessary because Cassirer’s philosophy of culture understands even preconceptual consciousness in terms of a ‘becoming of form’—from sensuous impression to symbolic expression—whereby the whole spectrum of experience is presented, somewhat schematically, as a function of processes of spiritual or cultural formation. However, I argue that it is only with praxeology (Bourdieu) that we are afforded an adequate understanding of the production and genesis of social practices and movements that is not one-­ sidedly based around the spiritual determination and ideal validity of symbolic forms. Although the individual chapters refer to and build on each other’s arguments and discussions, they can also be read as stand-alone studies. The first two chapters are directly related, since Bergson explicitly refers to vii

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the arguments of his opponent, Zeno, at various points, which is one reason why I discuss Bergson’s theory in greater detail than those of the other authors. The main reason, however, is that Bergson is nowadays relatively unknown outside of France and appears to have fallen out of fashion. Given that he was an important source of inspiration for authors like Cassirer and Heidegger, there is a good case for looking more closely at his critique of conceptual thought instead of rushing to dismiss it under the label of ‘intuitionism’ or ‘Lebensphilosophie’. There are, of course, already countless studies of Hegel, Cassirer and Bourdieu. But since no previous attempt has been made to develop a philosophy of motion that explicitly approaches the relation between conceptual thought and sensuous matter as a question pertaining to time, there is value in examining their respective approaches through this lens. I do not merely present Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, Cassirer’s philosophy of culture and Bourdieu’s theory of practice in turn, but show how each theory develops from the other. Since my inquiry is not primarily philological in nature, I only consider secondary literature where it is helpful for illuminating particular issues. I take the positions discussed here as springboards for further speculations and reflections, rather than as ends in themselves. For this reason, I do not present neat, self-contained accounts that I then proceed to analyse. Rather, adopting a kaleidoscope-like perspective, I pick out individual facets and link them together in constantly changing constellations, gradually revealing new layers to the topics that I have chosen to focus on. Rather than critiquing individual theories and assertions from one specific standpoint, I seek to bring out aspects that are contradictory by their own internal standards. It might be objected that this approach unfairly discards or dismisses ideas that might perhaps be worthy of preservation, particularly as I do not suggest any way out of the difficulties I reveal. The reason I nonetheless attempt to use these theories’ own resources to uncover the untruths inherent to them is that the negative power of the concept expresses an element of truth that points beyond itself. Even if the negative concept of truth lacks unifying principles and a self-contained systematic form, it does provide an insight into untruth that can be explicated based on the objects themselves, rather than becoming lost in arbitrary abstraction. With regard to formal aspects, it should be added that the relatively extensive footnotes can be read as a third part to the work. Although I believe that these notes, and the detailed comments and cross-references

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they contain, are not essential for an understanding of the text, they are intended to give as full as possible a picture of the positions that I analyse and the interrelationships between them. Unfortunately, it has become established scholarly practice to give references and sources in the most concise possible form without any further explanation, lined up in alphabetical order like beads on a string, set in dry, arid brackets, so that the author can quickly demonstrate their erudition, tick off the formal requirement of showing their sources and then move on. Here, by contrast, I have as far as possible tried to allow the authors I have cited to speak for themselves. If, after reading this work, you come away with the impression that I have merely reeled off a series of epistemological, philosophical and sociological arguments from different authors and traditions, then it will have failed in its aim. It will have succeeded, by contrast, if, by confronting established disciplines and categories of thought with each other and fostering mutual recognition between them, it manages to shake up the boundaries that divide them, rendering them fluid and shifting rather than further solidifying them. Bensheim, spring 2014 (German edition) In German, there is a saying that any pond that is murky and dark is also immediately thought to be deep. A similar view prevails in analytic philosophy, which today seems to treat metaphysical questions as largely superfluous and the continental tradition that gives particular prominence to such questions (several key figures from which are discussed in this book) as obsolete and lacking substance beneath the murky surface. But that view is wrong. Terms such as ‘time’, ‘duration’ and ‘change’ do not designate mere facts from which they are deduced as signs, nor are they something essential to which a substantial ‘being-in-itself’ is assigned. Rather, it is argued here that only reflection on the presuppositions of notional claims to validity can mark their limits. This critical point is expounded here in terms of opposing theoretical concepts and identified as a characteristic of philosophical thinking. The conclusion points to a mutable experience of time, which is not absorbed in its conceptual grounds of knowledge. Since my book first came out in German in 2014, several more studies on the ‘philosophy of time’ have been published, each with their own distinctive focus, that complement or expand on the arguments presented here. I would like to mention at least a few representative examples.

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Two German-language publications are worthy of particular note. Peter Kügler’s Zeit und zeitliche Existenz1 (Time and Temporal Existence) is critical of theories that primarily understand time as something objectively measurable. He instead argues for subjective notions of time as a phenomenon that eludes quantification, citing various examples from philosophy of mind and psychology. While Kügler does discuss Bergson’s concept of time as ‘duration’ (durée), he focuses mainly on the relationship between time (tempus) and temporal existence (temporalia) and approaches philosophical problems of time through an ontological lens. The final chapter of my own book likewise considers questions about temporal existence (albeit in terms of praxeology rather than ontology) and so at least in this respect does have some points of connection with Kügler’s book. The second German-language publication I wish to mention is Anna Fleischer’s Anders werden2 (Becoming Different), subtitled On the Concept of Diachrony in the Work of Emmanuel Lévinas and Its Relevance in the Context of the Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies. While, as this title suggests, Fleischer’s focus is primarily sociological, she does look in detail at a distinctive philosophical concept of time that I do not consider in my book. She argues that Lévinas’s notion of the ‘diachrony’ of time complicates the usual distinction between objectifying conceptions of time and subjective experiences of time, due to the contradictory relationship between ‘living time’ (past, present) and ‘death time’ (future). In Lévinas’s theory, the present (‘presence’) and alterity (‘absence’) are subjectively mediated, such that their relationship is constituted only through a process of reflection. Time must thus be understood in terms not just of its specific connection to the present but also of its relation to abstract alterity (‘non-presence’). Building on this idea, Fleischer argues that conceptions of time, in virtue of their twofold subjectivity, are phenomenologically heterogeneous. I make a very similar point in the final section of the present book, ‘The social use of time’, though without reference to the Lévinasian ‘alterity of the Other’. In the Anglophone literature, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience3 offers probably the most comprehensive overview of the topic, starting with an account of the pre-Socratics’ (non-empirical)  Kügler 2019.  Fleischer 2022. 3  Phillips 2017. 1 2

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theories of fundamental temporal experiences such as simultaneity, succession and repetition. The handbook explores the complex interrelationship between intuitive experiences of time and conceptual syntheses with reference to myriad philosophical positions and movements, and so paints an expansive overall picture. My book likewise takes temporal experiences as a starting point for exploring philosophical concepts and theories of time. But rather than reconstructing historical theories, my aim is to prompt reflection on temporal experiences and conceptual syntheses, so as to reveal things that become apparent only if we attend to oppositions between different views. The theories I consider were selected not because of their significance for the history of philosophy, but because they bring out conceptual and preconceptual aspects of temporal experiences ‘in contradiction with themselves’ (Hegel). John McCumber’s Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought4 is another primarily historical work, which looks for the unifying themes and methods of continental philosophy. One common factor, McCumber suggests, is a rejection of the absolute ‘atemporal truth’ and objective ‘eternal order’ assumed in traditional philosophical thought. He claims that authors as diverse as Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt and Adorno all share an understanding of philosophical topics as enmeshed ‘in time’ and quotidian struggles and reject any possibility of a metaphysical escape. McCumber traces this view back to the ‘collapse of Kant’s philosophy in the Critique of Judgment’.5 The system of thought bequeathed by Kant was then temporalised by Hegel, who held that reason could only be constituted in the process and becoming of the whole. In the negative part of the Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that transcendent propositions that go beyond the possibility of experience give rise to contradictions, and these contradictions mark the limits of speculative thought. Post-Kantian philosophers did not reject this argument, but they did draw different conclusions from it. Hegel, for instance, regarded contradictions between temporal and atemporal insights as the very means by which knowledge is produced. Although Kant conceived of dialectics negatively—as a ‘logic of illusion [Schein]’6—that does not mean he failed as a speculative philosopher. Only with Kant and his successors did traditional metaphysics finally become a ‘battleground of feuds that  McCumber 2011.  Ibid., p. 8. 6  Kant 1998, A 293/B 249. 4 5

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can never be resolved’,7 in which temporal and atemporal elements stand in a relation of tension, rather than forming a self-contained system of apodictic propositions and static beliefs. It could even be argued that Kant breathed fresh life into philosophy with his call for the freedom ‘to make public use of reason’ (as a precondition for enlightenment). So it would be a mistake to accuse continental philosophy of categorically excluding ‘atemporal truths’ and hence devaluing traditional philosophy en tout. The opposite is true, particularly if we consider that—according to Kant’s critical philosophy—all metaphysical claims must be assessed against the limits of their possibility of knowledge. For present purposes, what this means is that speculative notions of being, freedom or the absolute are not simply presupposed as ‘timeless constants’; rather, the possibility of their failure ‘in time’ is explicitly considered. In the present book, I discuss the relationship between atemporal validity claims and their genesis by reference to Kant’s paradoxical conception of time as a ‘form of intuition’, and show this to be a constitutive condition of possibility for answering philosophical questions about time. If my conclusions are accepted, then McCumber’s claims about the supposed unifying features of continental thought are without foundation. A final example worth mentioning is the monograph Philosophy of Time: A Contemporary Introduction.8 This wide-ranging, lucidly structured publication covers some classic topics from the analytic tradition, such as the epistemology and metaphysics of time and the relationship between language and time (the latter has received particular attention in Anglo-­ American philosophy; see, for instance, the discussion around McTaggart’s paradox), as well as some more contemporary strands of inquiry that I do not consider in my book, such as approaches to time in the philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of art. Power’s book offers a clear and stimulating introduction to the philosophy of time in all its myriad facets. Reading and reflecting on certain chapters would definitely provide a helpful grounding for the dialectical approach that I take in the present work. My translator Andrew Godfrey-Collins was of great help in conveying these thoughts into English. The translation benefits not least from the fact that Dr Godfrey-Collins is familiar with the topics covered in the book and was able to provide concise renderings into English, in terms of both 7 8

 Ibid., A 776/B 804.  Power 2021.

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content and style. Further thanks are due to Louis Räder, who checked the textual amendments in the translation and transposed them into the modified format. I am also very grateful to Dr Robin James for her splendid editorial work. My final thanks go to my academic mentor, Elk Franke, without whom this book could not have been written. Professor Franke gave me the trust that is necessary to let things grow. I would like to thank him and everyone else who has accompanied me on this path in a critical yet constructive spirit. Bensheim, summer 2023 (English edition) Franz Bockrath

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I Motion as a Problem of ‘Pure Thought’ and ‘Pure Perception’  31 2 The Immobility of Being (Zeno) 33 3 Being of Motion (Bergson) 51 Part II Motion as a Phenomenon of Transition 167 4 Motion as Phenomenal Contradiction (Hegel)171 5 Motion as a Process of Symbolic Formation (Cassirer)209 6 Motion as Logic of Practice (Bourdieu)261 Bibliography325 Index339

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Cone schema Expanded cone schema A breakdown of ‘la durée’

135 139 162

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Time is a perennial topic of concern within the tradition of Western thought. At the same time, many of the primary and secondary texts of this tradition have argued that time cannot be adequately understood by thought alone. Henri Bergson, for instance, claimed that ‘in reviewing the different systems’ he had noticed ‘that philosophers had paid almost no attention’ to ‘duration’ (the subject of Bergson’s philosophical investigations)1: ‘Not one of them has sought positive attributes in time’.2 This assessment stands in a peculiar contrast to the many philosophical and scientific publications about time and issues relating to it. Walther Christoph Zimmerli and Mike Sandbothe have argued that the twentieth century marked a turning point in Western thinking about time, in which a ‘unique parallelism of scientific and philosophical interest in time became apparent’.3 While early modern physics, in the form of Newtonian mechanics, assigned time a subordinate role—‘as that of a neutral and symmetrical parameter that has no influence on the internal structure of scientific objects’4—that changed with the discovery (in the context of the

 Bergson 1946a, p. 13.  Ibid., p. 18. 3  Zimmerli and Sandbothe 2007, p. 8. 4  Ibid. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Bockrath, Time, Duration and Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7_1

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‘foundational crisis of modern theoretical physics’5) that time was a dependent variable. It was henceforth no longer possible to conceive the laws of physics independently of time. An absolute conception of time was replaced by one that distinguishes between objective and subjective spatiotemporal events. On this latter view, while the fundamental laws of physics are taken to be invariantly and objectively valid, the same does not apply to individual experiences of time, as Albert Einstein expressed in a consoling letter to the widow of a close friend: Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.6

This is strongly reminiscent of the early Western concept of time articulated by Augustine, according to whom ‘three times’—‘past, present, and future’—‘exist in the mind’;7 on this conception, time is necessarily subjective in character. Despite all the centuries and much more besides that separates these two positions, a feature common to them both is that ‘subjective time’, whether understood as a ‘stubbornly persistent illusion’ (Einstein) or a ‘ground of experience’ (Augustine), always makes reference to something beyond itself. Within philosophy, probably the most speculative expression of this idea occurs in Kant’s thesis of the ‘infinitude of time’, which is ‘given as unlimited’.8 The reason this thesis is speculative (in the critical sense of the 5  The catalysts of this crisis included Max Planck’s quantum theory (1900) and Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity (1905). Zimmerli and Sandbothe do rightly note, however, that a ‘historical conception of nature’ was already becoming apparent ‘in the eighteenth century and then even more strongly in the nineteenth century in the fields of geology (Lyell), palaeontology and archaeology and through the establishment of evolutionary theory (Darwin) and thermodynamics (Bautzen)’, and that this conception was ‘difficult to reconcile with the time-neutral foundations of classical dynamics, the dominant approach in physics.’ Ibid. 6  Cited in Janssen and Lehner 2014, p. 24. 7  To full Augustine in full: ‘From what we have said it is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past exist, and therefore it is not strictly correct to say that there are three times, past, present, and future. It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception; and the present of future things is expectation.’ Augustine 1961, book XI:20. 8  Kant 1998, A 32/B 48. On ‘space’ as a ‘given infinite magnitude’ see ibid., A 25/B 39.

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term) is that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant characterises the concept of something’s being given as unlimited as simultaneously possible and impossible.9 The critic of ‘dialectical illusion’10 regards the idea of ‘infinite’ as contradictory. This is no simple contradiction, however, but a necessary one that is unavoidable if ‘our reason naturally exalts itself to cognitions that go much too far for any object that experience can give ever to be congruent’.11 In light of this, representations of space and time pose very serious difficulties. With his ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, Kant was probably the first to point out that any reference to something temporally or spatially given necessarily presupposes a representation of infinite time or infinite space. For instance, it is impossible to restrict our attention solely to a single point in time, such as the moment of a loved one’s death, since every event can only be thought of within a temporal continuum that includes a not-­ yet-­completed before and after. This also applies to socially or culturally determined representations of time (with regards, for instance, to the succession of generations12) that only become intelligible as a common determining ground of temporal relations when they are related to a tertium comparationis, rather than being considered in isolation. According to Kant, this determining ground cannot itself be obtained from experience: ‘For simultaneity or succession would not themselves come into perception if the representation of time did not ground them a priori’.13 The category of a priori, which in philosophical tradition refers to knowledge that is obtained independently of, and is necessary for, experience, is here also applied to time as a constitutive condition of knowledge. This step marks a momentous shift in the concept of truth, which is now, by contrast with earlier doctrines’ insistence ‘on the eternal and the timeless’, 9  In the ‘Remark on the First Antinomy’ from the ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’, Kant observes, ‘A magnitude is infinite if none greater than it (i.e., greater than the multiple of a given unit contained in it) is possible. Now no multiplicity is the greatest, because one or more units can always be added to it. Therefore an infinite given magnitude, and hence also an infinite world (regarding either the past series or extension), is impossible; thus the world is bounded in both respects.’ Ibid., A 430/B 458. 10  Ibid., A 62/B 86. 11  Ibid., A 315/B 371. 12  For instance, Émile Durkheim understands time and space as ‘collective realities’, which he attempts to derive from social relations. See footnote 2 in Chap. 6. 13  Kant 1998, A 31/B 47.

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itself connected to time.14 Although this consequence was only fully recognised in the dialectical conceptions developed after Kant, the idea of the temporalisation of truth is already present in the thought of time as an ‘organon’15 of cognition. One new, momentous insight of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ is that time is neither conceptually produced nor intuitively given, but rather represented as ‘a pure form of sensible intuition’:16 Different times are only parts of one and the same time. That representation, however, which can only be given through a single object, is an intuition. Further, the proposition that different times cannot be simultaneous cannot be derived from a general concept. The proposition is synthetic, and cannot arise from concepts alone. It is therefore immediately contained in the intuition and representation of time.17

Thus, if time, as Kant says, ‘is no discursive or, as one calls it, general concept’,18 then the possibility of a purely conceptual synthesis of temporal segments is ruled out from the outset. Time does not stand in the same relation to different times as, on the classical rule of definition, the general concept (genus proximum) does to its subconcepts (differentia specifica). While in the conceptual relation a distinction is drawn between universal and particular, this does not apply to the intuition of time, given that a ‘representation’ of time ‘can only be given through a single object’.19 As ‘parts of one and the same time’,20 different times cannot be subsumed under a concept; rather, their representations will necessarily have an intuitive component. In place of a conceptual order, the non-conceptual nature 14  Adorno 2005b, p.  8. In this passage, Adorno describes the historical status of philosophical inquiry and critique: ‘Critique alone, as the unity of the problem and its arguments, not the adoption of received theses, has laid the foundation for what may be considered the productive unity of the history of philosophy. In the progressive continuity of such critique even those philosophers whose doctrines insist on the eternal and the timeless acquired their temporal nucleus, their historical status.’ Ibid. 15  In the introduction to his Logic, Kant writes, ‘by organon namely we understand an instruction for bringing about a certain cognition’. Kant 1988, p. 15. 16  Kant 1998, A 31/B 47. Kant claims the same also applies to space, but we shall not consider that here. See ibid., A 24/B 39. 17  Ibid., A 31–32/B 47. 18  Ibid., A 31/B 47. 19  See the passage quoted above. 20  Ibid.

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of forms of intuition of space and time is characterised by a successive synthesis of given segments of space and time. Time and space are hence not more universal or abstract than specific times and spaces; rather, the latter are parts of the former.21 The talk of time as a ‘form of intuition’ or ‘pure intuition’,22 on the other hand, shows just as clearly that what Kant is concerned with is not changeable empirical sense impressions but their ‘mere form’, which he claims is ‘the only thing that sensibility can make available a priori’.23 According to Kant, the ‘mere form’ of a body that is left over when we separate off ‘that which the understanding thinks about it’ and ‘that which belongs to sensation’, includes ‘extension and form’,24 which are spatial properties pertaining to objects ‘outside us’.25 By contrast, the ‘inner sense, by means of which the mind intuits itself, or its inner state’, is directed towards time: ‘Time can no more be intuited externally than space can be intuited as something in us’.26 The reference to ‘mere form’ is necessary because any critique of knowledge that claims to be logically consistent cannot be based solely on individual sense-data and changeable contents (‘reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions)’) but also requires ‘the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts)’.27 21  In the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, Kant addresses the problem of the finitude of space and time and the infinitude of the world, which is central to the Critique of Pure Reason. The ‘proofs’ that he discusses show that plausible arguments can be given for both the thesis of an ‘infinite series’ of finite intervals of time and for that of an ‘empty time’ prior to the start of the world. The resulting ‘antinomy’ shows that our representations of time and space are not just conceptually but also intuitively determined. The first ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’, including the various ‘proofs’ and ‘remarks’, can be found in Kant 1998, A 426/B455–A 433/B 461. 22  Ibid., A 20–21/B 35 (emphases mine). Kant elaborates: ‘Since that within which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation, the matter of all appearance is only given to us a posteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind a priori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation.’ Ibid., A 20/B 35. 23  Ibid., A 22/B 36. 24  Ibid., A 21/B 35. ‘substance, force, divisibility, etc.’ are apprehended by the understanding, and ‘impenetrability, hardness, color, etc.’ by sensation. 25  Ibid., A 22/B 37. 26  Ibid., A 22–23/B 37. This idea is of central importance to Bergson, who develops a radically subjective version of it. See Chap. 3, for a detailed discussion. 27  Kant 1998, A 50/B 74. Elsewhere, he writes: ‘Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.’ Ibid., A 52/B 76.

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But how can time be imagined as a pure form of intuition? Kant’s first antinomy, concerning the finitude or infinitude of time, shows how futile it would be to attempt a positive answer to this question. The conceptual infinitude of time cannot be intuitively represented, nor does its intuitive finitude prevent it from being transcended in thought. Just as concrete intuitions cannot guarantee a ‘necessity and strict universality’,28 their abstract determination remains empty and devoid of intuitive content. In other words, the forms of intuition lack an opposite against which they can be defined. The ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ reaches its limit at the point where it ‘comes to terms with the quid pro quo of constitutens and constitutum by de-sensifying sense-perception’.29 At the same time, for every act of cognition the question arises of how concept and intuition are combined, since ‘pure concepts of the understanding […], in comparison with empirical (indeed in general sensible) intuitions, are entirely unhomogeneous’.30 The solution that Kant proposes in the ‘Schematism’, the chapter of the Critique from which the preceding quotation is taken, is extremely obscure31; here too, the ‘transcendental’ appears without any concrete material correlate. But although he claims that it is impossible to fully determine or purely intuit ‘the schema’—i.e. the ‘sensible concept of an object’32—there is a factor, necessary and actual in equal measure, common to both transcendental concepts and intuitions, such that all objects are only given to us, entirely independent of our thought, by ‘time itself’.33 Every perception and sensation, whether constant or changeable, has the ‘form of

 Ibid., B 4.  Adorno 2013a, pp. 145–146. 30  Kant 1998, A 137/B 176. 31  In the chapter ‘On the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding’, Kant places the ‘schema of sensible concepts’, which is ‘a product and as it were a monogram of pure a priori imagination’, between pure concepts and intuitions. Ibid., A 142/B 181. He himself acknowledges the difficulties that this ‘formal and pure condition of the sensibility, to which the use of the concept of the understanding is restricted’—ibid., A 140/B179— pose for our faculty of representation: ‘This schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty.’ Ibid., A 141–142/B 181. 32  Ibid., A 147/B 186. 33  Ibid., A 145/B 184. 28 29

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intuition’,34 which can only be represented ‘in relations of time’,35 i.e. in relation to past, present and future: Time itself does not elapse, but the existence of that which is changeable elapses in it. To time, therefore, which is itself unchangeable and lasting, there corresponds in appearance that which is unchangeable in existence, i.e., substance, and in it alone can the succession and simultaneity of appearances be determined in regard to time.36

And even thought (as suggested by the reference to ‘substance’ in the above-quoted passage) does not occur outside time, even if its ‘logical’37 character appears self-sufficient and atemporal. Representing an object or applying concepts of the understanding to appearances requires us to make a judgement, which takes a certain amount of, and hence is necessarily dependent on, time: ‘This significance comes to them [the categories of the understanding] from sensibility, which realizes the understanding at the same time as it restricts it.’38 By claiming that time is a constitutive aspect both of forms of intuition and forms of understanding, Kant is able to hold on to the ‘idea of otherness’ within his construction of transcendental subjectivity without ‘cognition […] deteriorat[ing] into tautology’.39 The retention of this idea in the contradictory construction of the ‘thing in itself’—the ‘merely intelligible cause of appearances’40 that cannot be grasped in its pure form using the category of causality, which Kant assigns to the subject—also marks the point of departure for subsequent attempts to understand the  Ibid., A 143/B 183.  Ibid., A 23/B 37. 36  Ibid., A 144/B 183. 37  ‘In fact, even after abstraction from all sensible condition, significance, but only a logical significance of the mere unity of representations, is left to the pure concepts of the understanding, but no object and thus no significance is given to them that could yield a concept of the object.’ Ibid., A 147/B 187. 38  Ibid. 39  Adorno 2004, p. 184. In the same passage, he writes: ‘To him [Kant] it was evident that being-in-itself did not run directly counter to the concept of an object, that the subjective indirectness of that concept is to be laid less to the object’s idea than to the subject’s insufficiency.’ 40  Kant 1998, A 494/B 522. Elsewhere, he writes: ‘Thus I do not say that bodies merely seem to exist outside me or that my soul only seems to be given if I assert that the quality of space and time—in accordance with which, as condition of their existence, I posit both of these—lies in my kind of intuition and not in these objects in themselves.’ Ibid., B 69. 34 35

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mediations between the temporally constructed and given. For even if it can be granted that the ‘object’s preponderance’ is ‘solely attainable for subjective reflection’, at the same time ‘the subject in turn is indirect— because it is not the radical otherness required to legitimize the object’.41 It is no accident that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant places the ‘transcendental’ under the heading of a ‘metaphysical exposition’.42 His contradictory construction of time as a common factor of thought and intuition is attributable not least to the difference he posits between form and content, which as ‘my representations’ are linked together ‘in one consciousness’43 but without being ‘true’ in a self-sufficient, atemporal sense: For laws exist just a little in the appearances, but rather exist only relative to the subject in which the appearances inhere, insofar as it has understanding, as appearances do not exist in themselves, but only relative to the same being, insofar as it has senses.44

Regardless of whether they are given ‘empirically’ or ‘a priori’,45 the material of intuitions that is supposed to be subsumed under the forms of the understanding generally remains indeterminate and devoid of qualities. It is this abstract indeterminacy that gives the creative, cognising mind almost unrestricted command over the disordered, sensuous ‘manifold’.46 This sovereignty does, admittedly, come at the price that the ‘a priori sources of cognition […] apply to objects only so far as they are

41  Adorno 2004, p. 185. A little further on, he notes that ‘the object takes precedence even though indirect itself [als eines doch selbst Vermittelten]’ and that ‘mediation of the object means that it must not be statically, dogmatically hypostatized but can be known only as it entwines with subjectivity; mediation of the subject means that without the moment of objectivity it would be literally nil.’ Ibid., p. 186. 42  Kant 1998, B 48. 43  Ibid., B 133–134. 44  Ibid., B 164. 45  Ibid., A 77/B 103. Kant elaborates: ‘Now space and time contain a manifold of pure a priori intuition, but belong nevertheless among the conditions of the receptivity of our mind, under which alone it can receive representations of objects, and thus they must always also affect the concept of these objects.’ Ibid., A 77/B 102. 46  Ibid., B 137. In the same passage, Kant describes the ‘relation of given representations to an object. An object, however, is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united.’

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9

considered as appearances, but do not present things in themselves’.47 Given this limit on theoretical possibilities of knowledge, on Kant’s view the transcendental claim to objectivity and validity refers not just to itself that also to that which cannot be assumed into the conditions of knowledge and so can only be defined negatively.48 Accordingly, the Critique of Pure Reason does not reject the speculative use of thought in general, but only the ‘dogmatism of metaphysics’:49 For there has always been some metaphysics or other to be met with in the world, and there will always continue to be one, and with it a dialectic of pure reason, because dialectic is natural to reason.50

The ‘dialectic of pure reason’51 does not represent a mere error of thought, but is rather a necessity that becomes apparent if the principles and rules of formal logic whose validity is presupposed are applied to different domains. Kant does not deny that the same term must refer to the same referent (law of identity) or that of two contradictory judgements, only one can be true (law of non-contradiction). Rather, he sets out to

47  Ibid., A 39/B 56. Kant accordingly describes time as ‘the real form of inner intuition […] not as object but as the way of representing myself as object’. Ibid., A 37/B 54. 48  In an instructive passage, Kant speculates about what would happen in the absence of time as ‘the real form of inner intuition’: ‘But if I or another being could intuit myself without this condition of sensibility, then these very determinations, which we now represent to ourselves as alterations, would yield us a cognition in which the representation of time and thus also of alteration would not occur at all. […] If one removes the special condition of our sensibility from it [the form of our inner intuition], then the concept of time also disappears, and it does not adhere to the objects themselves, rather merely to the subject that intuits them.’ Ibid., A 37–38/B 54. The Cartesian separation of form and content, which Kant still holds to be valid, is clearly expressed here. This separation is based on a belief in the unity of reason, which in the present example leads Kant to deny that objects have their own temporality. 49  Ibid., B xxxi. 50  Ibid. 51  Accordingly, the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ deals with the contradictions, paralogisms and antinomies of pure reason.

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reflect on conceptual thought’s relation to sensuous material (pure and empirical intuitions), as he believes this to be the ‘source of the errors’.52 Kant’s antinomy of infinitude53 is evidence of how this ‘source of errors’ leads pure thought into difficulties. As we have seen, Kant believes the burden of proof rests on the forms of intuition, which are supposed to make up for what cannot be obtained purely by thought or derived from the concepts themselves. In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he gives another example, which I reproduce below because it addresses the relation of the pure intuitions, assigning time particular significance relative to space: Here I add further that the concept of alteration and, with it, the concept of motion (as alteration of place), is only possible through and in the representation of time—that if this representation were not a priori (inner) intuition, then no concept, whatever it might be, could make comprehensible the possibility of an alteration, i.e., of a combination of contradictorily opposed predicates (e.g., a thing’s being in a place and the not-being of the very same thing in the same place) in one and the same object. Only in time can both contradictorily opposed determinations in one thing be encountered, namely successively.54

Only succession ‘in time’ leads Kant to the sceptical certainty55 that a moving object undergoing spatial change (being and not-being in one and the same place) can be neither purely intellectually comprehended nor intuitively represented. If this were a mere error of thought, it could be avoided or corrected. However, Kant believes that reason will necessarily 52  Kant 1998, xxxi. Elsewhere, he writes: ‘But the formal aspect of all truth consists in agreement with the laws of the understanding. In the senses there is no judgment at all, neither a true nor a false one. Now because we have no other sources of cognition besides these two, it follows that error is effected only through the unnoticed influence of sensibility on understanding, through which it happens that the subjective grounds a of the judgment join with the objective ones, and make the latter deviate from their destination.’ Ibid., A 294/B 350–351. 53  See footnote 21. 54  Kant 1998, B 48–49. 55  I am alluding here to Kant’s characterisation of the critique of reason as a transcendental dialectic: ‘For the skeptical method aims at certainty, seeking to discover the point of misunderstanding in disputes that are honestly intended and conducted with intelligence by both sides, in order to do as wise legislators do when from the embarrassment of judges in cases of litigation they draw instruction concerning that which is defective and imprecisely determined in their laws.’ Ibid., A 424/B 451–452.

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11

run into contradictions, which it either produces itself56 or that emerge out of the substance of a given subject matter (the Hegelian Sache selbst),57 if the critique of reason attempts to probe the limits of its own capacities. I mention the unavoidable ‘contradiction’58 between transcendental philosophy and its own validity claims here in the introduction in order to show that Kant’s attempt to salvage the objective validity of ‘those principles in accordance with which all pure a priori cognitions can be acquired and actually brought about’59 by means of a reduction to the subject did not simply fail, but instead marks the starting point for theories that attempt to understand the transcendental subject in terms of its constitutive mediation with the non-subjectively given. According to a dictum of Hegel’s, only spirit can recognise and endure the antinomies of pure reason: But nowhere does the so-called world—call it the objective, real world, or, in the manner of transcendental idealism, subjective intuition and sense-­ content determined by the category of the understanding—nowhere, however you call it, does it escape contradiction; but it is not capable of enduring it and for that reason it is left to the mercy of the coming and ceasing to be.60

Here too, it is suggested that the ‘so-called world’ cannot be subsumed into its concept. But unlike Kant, Hegel holds that not only all knowledge but also the critique of knowledge is dependent on something prior to itself that cannot be brought forth purely or immediately,61 and so must be

56  ‘For what we have to do with here is a natural and unavoidable illusion which itself rests on subjective principles and passes them off as objective, whereas logical dialectic in its dissolution of fallacious inferences has to do only with an error in following principles or with an artificial illusion that imitates them.’ Ibid., A 298/B 354. 57  That the critique of reason’s analysis of the faculty of cognition will remain tautological in the absence of reflection on that which is objectively given becomes especially clear in Kant’s treatment of the paralogisms and antinomies of pure reason. On the ‘idea of otherness’ in the transcendental construction of subjectivity, see footnote 39. 58  See Kant 1998, A 423/B 450. 59  Ibid., A 11/B 25. 60  Hegel 2010a, p. 201. 61  Kant does also stipulate certain prior conditions, for instance when he says that ‘the fact that the manifold for intuition must already be given prior to the synthesis of understanding and independently from it’. Kant 1998, B 145. However, because he one-sidedly connects the idea of the unity of reason to the principles of formal logic, on his theory the relation to objects of possible experience likewise assumes a homogeneous, systematic character. On the ‘rational concept’ as the necessary ‘form of a whole’, see ibid., A 832/B 860.

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integrated into phenomenological experience as a form of reflection.62 Instead of grounding the supposed validity of the ‘government of reason’63 in itself, the focus now shifts more to the ‘sense-content’ opposed to it, which is not subordinated, prior to all experience, to the rigid demand of unity made by theoretical claims of reason, but rather, as Hegel puts it above, is at ‘the mercy of the coming and ceasing to be’. If the validity claims of pure knowledge are no longer assumed in isolation but rather reflected on in their genesis, the ‘government of reason’ will likewise appear in a changed light: instead of the ‘unity of the manifold cognitions’ being grasped ‘under one idea’,64 ordering, classifying thought is now juxtaposed to the living, preconceptual experience out of which the concepts themselves emerged. This does not take the purely external form of (to stick with the metaphor) an ‘opposition’ to the ‘government’ that asserts its claims in the form of differing views. Just as it is only in the process of constant reflection on both itself and the ‘real world’ that thought becomes part of its own history, the ‘opposition’ becomes an integral part of its own ‘government’ if it is included in the overall process of experience formation. On this view, ‘opposition’ is not a mere ingredient, but as a contradiction or negation belongs to the content of reflection itself, a point that is systematically overlooked if, as Hegel critically remarks, we stand above ‘individual existence’ and only survey ‘the whole’.65 With the shift from the Kantian problem of constitution to ‘the permanent confrontation of the object with its concept’,66 which is no less significant than the Copernican Revolution, time itself becomes a productive, moving factor. Although this idea is already present in Kant’s reference to the simultaneously intellectual and sensuous ‘faculty of deliberately visualizing the past’,67 he did not yet infer from this that inner intuitions should be understood as a historical aspect of reason. This would require the faculty of memory to possess a consistency and order that it lacks on the 62  ‘It pertains to the structure of self-knowledge that one must have known in order to know explicitly. Only something already known can be remembered as a result and comprehended in its genesis. This movement is the experience of reflection. Its goal is that knowledge which the critical philosophy asserted as an immediate possession.’ Habermas 1987, p. 9. 63  Kant 1998, A 832/B 860. 64  Ibid. 65  Hegel 2018, p. 33. 66  This is how Adorno characterises Hegelian dialectics in Adorno 1993, p. 9. 67  Kant 2006, p. 75.

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transcendentalist conception, and that, on Hegel’s dialectical understanding of objectivity, is attained only (albeit in the deceptive consciousness of the subject–object identity68) through the constant ‘labor of the negative’69 in the arduous process of experience formation. Attending to the conceptual-intuitive phenomenon of time will not allow us to revert to an understanding of validity and genesis as ummediated. Moreover, the idea, also present in Hegel, of the practical, generative side of the productive spirit as labour70 entails that consciousness is itself practically produced, yet without being wholly subsumable into practice. Since any inference, even if it purports to refer to ‘pure practice’, must assume at least some prior understanding of time in order to yield valid propositions, it would be wrong to set validity and genesis against each other and eliminate the ‘core of time which resides both in the cognized and the cognizer’.71 A ‘right of [the] first born’,72 in which one side claims primacy, remains a problem for dialectical thought: ‘Insofar as the relation of logical validity to genesis is necessary, this relation itself belongs to logical sense which must be explained or “awakened”.’73 Taken ‘for itself’ or ‘in itself’, the subjectivity or objectivity of time can only be had at the price of deceptive ‘self-equality’74 and rigid isolation. By contrast, mediation between its subjective and objective moments allows us to recognise the ‘necessity’75 of fractures in thought and world, and understand them as the ‘determinate negative which emerges out of this movement’.76 Though this kind of approach is unsuited to an ‘edifying’ understanding of time, since a ‘positive concept’77 can neither be presupposed at the start nor expected at the end, relating time’s contradictory moments to each other and giving free rein to their dynamism does open up a perspective on the ‘mobility of time’78 (albeit one that must first be tailored to its object).  See on this point footnote 74 in Chap. 4.  Hegel 2018, p. 13. 70  See especially the chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit on the relation between ‘mastery and servitude’. Ibid., pp. 108–116. 71  Benjamin, cited in Adorno 2013a, p. 135. 72  Adorno 2013a, p. 87. 73  Ibid., p. 73. 74  Hegel 2018, p. 14. 75  Ibid., p. 22. 76  Ibid., p. 37. 77  I am alluding here to footnote 2. 78  Within the context of his argument against conceptual, classificatory thought, Bergson speaks in a similar vein of the ‘mobility of duration’. See footnote 24 in Chap. 1. However, as I shall show, the immediate, intuitive awareness of time as duration that Bergson postulates is itself abstract and hence immobile. 68 69

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The structure and line of argument of this book are based around the task I have formulated here. In Part I, I shall look at two extreme positions—Zeno’s ‘pure thought’ and Bergson’s ‘pure perception’—and show the paradoxes and contradictions that arise when they attempt to ground themselves in themselves, resulting in opposing determinations of empty immobility on the one hand and constant mobility on the other. Both positions refer to their opposite to ground their own viewpoint. Zeno argues for the impossibility of movement and change by first presupposing their positive validity and then disproving it using a priori reasoning, while Bergson argues for the experience of duration on the basis of the impossibility of conceptual knowledge of it. However, the paradoxes and contradictions that are uncovered remain incomplete and superficial in both cases, because ‘the living essence of what is at stake has been omitted’79 and each position refers to the other solely to reinforce its own view. They both absolutise their own assumptions, to which the simple negation of all that is changeable (Zeno) or all that is fixed (Bergson) is subordinated, and so neither can relate the contradictory conceptual and non-conceptual moments to each other in such a way that they transcend their own determination and are moulded and modified by their opposite. Both the hypostasis of ‘pure thought’ and that of ‘pure perception’ prevent the paradox of identity in non-identity from being resolved and pointing beyond itself through contradiction with itself. Even before the pure postulations can recognise their ‘otherness’80 in the determinations opposed to them, they are ringed in by a wall of metaphysical assumptions of identity and originality that partition off the logical unity of thought from the ‘données immédiates de la conscience’81 and prevent any concrete mediations or assimilations between them. We can therefore learn a great deal from what cannot be subsumed under the respective pure postulations and so is consequently disregarded. With regards to conceptual thought, we have already seen that movements and changes are not assimilated into the ‘immediacy of spirit’,82 but require a given or intuitive moment in order to be conceivable. And with regards to the durational life of consciousness, we can similarly observe 79  This remark comes from Hegel’s critique of simple contradictions and a ‘tabular’ mode of thought. Hegel 2018, p. 32. 80  Ibid., p. 34. 81  This is the original French title of Bergson’s first work, translated into English as Time and Free Will. 82  Hegel 2018, p. 16.

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that ‘no concept of the living can be thought unless it includes a moment of the identically persisting.’83 Hence, instead of assuming the immediacy of pure thought or perception, we should instead look for the element of unthinking instinct in ordering, organising thought and the element of conscious deliberation in flashes of intuition. This does at least allow us to avoid the idea of a simple opposition between categorial and intuitive modes of knowledge.84 Only if both discursive thought and intuitive perception are included in the overall process of experience will the paradoxes and contradictions cease to be measured one-sidedly against an abstract ‘being-in-itself’,85 and instead themselves become shifting, changeable elements of experiences that are never definitively completed.86 In Part II, I shift perspective and turn to consider relevant paradigmatic examples of theories and approaches that, each in their own way, take up the idea of mediation as ‘reflection on the very thing which definition cuts off for the sake of conceptual flexibility’.87 This idea is a core principle of Hegel’s philosophical programme. While Kantian apriorism can only conceive of time in contradictory terms as a pure form of intuition, Hegel instead focuses on experience. Through its development (or, to be more precise, through the ‘culturally formative stages of the universal spirit’88), temporality comes back into play as a living moment of fixed, rigid forms. This is possible because the movement of knowledge is not subsumed into its mere forms, but always refers to ‘something’: ‘mediation aims at the mediated’.89 In his examination of Zeno’s arguments for the immobility of being, Hegel says that ‘motion is […] contradiction as existent’.90And with sure judgement, the critic of unmediated thought exposes a ‘great abstraction’ in the Eleatic method of proof that instead of processual determinations  Adorno 2013a, p. 47.  Adorno expresses this same idea when he remarks (with regard to Bergson) that ‘in intuitions ratio recollects what it forgot.’ Ibid., p. 46. See also footnote 181 in Chap. 4. 85  Hegel 2018, p. 36. 86  An example of this is my reinterpretation of Bergson’s notion of duration ‘in itself’ as duration ‘for us’, which allows us to capture the peculiarities of non-conceptual perceptions and memories without having to adopt the metaphysical premises and conclusions of pure intuitionism. See fig. 3 in Part I below. 87  Adorno 2000a, p. 139. 88  Hegel 2018, p. 18. 89  Adorno 2000a, p. 142. For a critique of ‘mathematical truths’ and the ‘defectiveness of [mathematics’] material’, see Hegel 2018, pp. 25–27. 90  Hegel 2010a, p. 382. See also footnote 3 in Chap. 4. 83 84

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and mediations descends into ‘the abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’.91 However, speculative idealism, which is concerned with ‘the whole’,92 harbours a certain undisguised sympathy for the ‘metaphysical reasoning’93 of the Eleatic dialectic, which according to Hegel ‘has not been refuted to the present day’.94 This sympathy is, however, attributable not to the ‘principle of identity’95 on which unmediated thought relies to prove the impossibility of the non-identical, but rather to the turn to the subject as a condition for the reflective spirit. But while it is true that an object can only be ‘known through consciousness’ and hence is always ‘also a subject’,96 any attempt to derive the given entirely from itself will fail. Adorno, who highlights this limitation of Hegelian dialectics at various points in his reflections on the ‘primacy’ or ‘preponderance’ of the object, remarks that in idealism the subjective side of reflective thought is hypostasiszed, the side which is incomprehensible except in relation to the other. But the datum, the irremovable skandalon of idealism, will demonstrate time and again the failure of the hypostasis. […] The object, too, is mediated; but according to its own concept, it is not so thoroughly dependent on the subject as the subject is on objectivity. Idealism has ignored such differences and has thus coarsened a spiritualization that serves abstraction as a disguise.97

He thereby rejects the possibility that reflection on a given subject matter will ever come to an end or, as Hegel puts it, that ‘pure self-equality’ will be subsumed ‘in otherness’.98 The ‘primacy of the object’ remains a problem for dialectics, just like the purported ‘right of the first born’.99 For this reason, it would perhaps make sense to expand Hegel’s objection to Zeno that ‘motion is […] contradiction as existent’100 by specifying that

 Hegel 1955a, p. 243.a  Hegel 2018, p. 13. 93  Hegel 1955a, p. 245. 94  Ibid., p. 265. 95  Ibid., p. 245. 96  Adorno 2000a, p. 142. 97  Ibid., pp. 142–143. 98  Hegel 2018, p. 34. For a critique of Hegel’s systematic philosophy, see footnotes 131 in Chap. 4 and 150 in Chap. 6. 99  See footnote 72. 100  See footnote 90. 91 92

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motion has its ground in the contradictions of existence, and that thought cannot be excluded from this ground. I continue my investigation into the ground of motion in the next chapter. Having considered how validity and genesis are related in Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, I now focus more on the practical foundations of the objective and subjective. On this point, Ernst Cassirer, who regards form-­ giving activity as the driving force of spiritual and cultural development, observes that It is not mere meditation but action which constitutes the center from which man undertakes the spiritual organization of reality. It is here that a separation begins to take place between the spheres of the objective and subjective, between the world of the I and the world of things.101

Although references to practical activity can already be found in Hegel, who expressly understands the passage from natural consciousness to the identity of absolute knowledge as a process of labour,102 his speculative reconstruction of this process has a serious flaw: in the ‘reconciliation of consciousness with self-consciousness’,103 the totality of labour is conceived as sublimated spirit, and this rarefied conception gives us a distorted picture of it.104 Although Cassirer does not interpret practical activity as social labour based on a universal model of exchange, his ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ does have the advantage that it considers not just conceptual knowledge and truth claims, but also other modes of  Cassirer 1955b, p. 157.  See footnote 70. Also instructive is Adorno’s interpretation of the Hegelian labour of the spirit as social labour: ‘But when Hegel no longer opposes production and deed to matter as subjective accomplishments but rather looks for them in specific objects, in concrete material reality, he comes close to the mystery behind synthetic apperception and takes it out of the mere arbitrary hypostasis of the abstract concept.’ Adorno 1993, pp. 17–18. 103  Hegel 2018, p. 457. For present purposes, it is notable that, according to Hegel, the self-grasping, ‘intuited concept […] sublates its temporal form’: it ‘conceptually comprehends the intuiting, and is conceptually comprehended and conceptually comprehending intuiting’. Ibid., p. 462. 104  We could take this idea even further by saying that in absolute knowledge labour and history become obsolete. However, in expanding to a totality, spirit is only seemingly reunited with itself—similar to the Grimm brothers’ tale of the ‘Boy Who Set Out to Learn Fear’, whose protagonist is supposed to learn what fear is from things that are harmless, rather than ones that should actually be feared. The claim that spirit has been purified of labour and fear is part of the metaphysical obscuration of its history. 101 102

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access to the world with their own meanings and form-specific object domains. While Hegelian thought begins, as it were, from the end, asserting ‘full reconciliation through spirit in a world which is in reality antagonistic’,105 Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms starts by understanding the various ways in which meaning is produced as distinctive tendencies or objectivations of spirit that cannot be reduced to one another. The extensive holdings of Warburg Library proved extremely helpful to him in this endeavour.106 Since the library’s collection consisted mainly of cultural-­ historical works that emphasised the primacy of images and symbols, it is unsurprising that the bodily, emotional forms of expression found in ‘mythical thought’107represent a focal point of Cassirer’s philosophy of culture. While Hegel declares sensuous consciousness to be the starting point of the ‘long path’ to ‘genuine knowing’,108 Cassirer begins ‘a step lower’:109 What is commonly called the sensory consciousness, the content of the ‘world of perception’—which is further subdivided into distinct spheres of perception, into the sensory elements of color, tone, etc.—this is itself a product of abstraction, a theoretical elaboration of the ‘given’. Before self-­ consciousness rises to this abstraction, it lives in the world of the mythical consciousness, a world not of ‘things’ and their ‘attributes’ but of mythical potencies and powers, of demons and gods.110

In his attempt to decipher the origins of symbolic meaning production, Cassirer does, admittedly, likewise get caught up in speculations111 and antinomies.112 But unlike Hegel, who connects the all-encompassing spirit to the totality of its manifestations, Cassirer manages to identify ‘typical  Adorno 1993, p. 27.  See Cassirer 1955b, p. xviii. In addition to these holdings, the library also offered a stimulating working environment and forum for interdisciplinary research. 107   This is the subtitle of the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Ibid. 1955b). 108  Hegel 2018, p. 17. 109  Cassirer 1955b, p. xvi. 110  Ibid. 111  For instance in his talk of a ‘fundamental symbolic relationship’ and the ‘original phenomenon of expression and expressive understanding’. Cassirer 1957, pp. 124 and 73. For a more detailed account, see footnotes 33 and 37 in Chap. 5. 112  On the futile ‘quest for the absolutely first’ see footnote 73 in Chap. 5 and footnote 72 above. 105 106

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principles of formation’,113 which in his theory of symbols are condensed into form-specific object domains (in particular: myth, language, art and knowledge), which according to Cassirer cannot be collapsed together despite the interrelationships between them. The advantage of this approach is that what Hegel called the ‘culturally formative stages of the universal spirit’114 are not ascribed a ‘true and authentic autonomy’115 only in the ‘self-movement of the concept’;116 rather, even non- or preconceptual configurations can produce their own forms of objectivation: This is as true of art as it is of cognition; it is as true of myth as of religion. All live in particular image-worlds, which do not merely reflect the empirically given, but which rather produce it in accordance with an independent principle. Each of these functions creates its own symbolic forms which, if not similar to the intellectual symbols, enjoy equal rank as products of the human spirit.117

Cassirer describes the transition from the ‘feeling of time’ to the ‘concept of time’118 as a shift from an indeterminate, substantial intuition of time that is still wholly caught up in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ to a purely functional understanding that ‘embrac[es] all events, as a totality of moments each of which stands to the others in a specific and unambiguous relation’.119 One of Cassirer’s undeniable accomplishments was to show that the concepts and forms of intuition that Kant regarded as universal conditions of knowledge—space, time, substance, causality and so forth— have different meanings in different symbolic form worlds. Consequently, he understands the task of a critique of reason as being a ‘critique of culture’.120 However, Cassirer also succumbs to the epistemological temptation to combine ‘all the possible forms of connection into a systematic 113  Cassirer 1955a, p. 114. According to Cassirer, the ‘principles of formation’ can only be discerned in the forms themselves; in other words, they do not develop ‘out of the absolute that […] is spirit’. Adorno 1993, p. 19. 114  Hegel 2018, p. 18. See also footnote 88. 115  Cassirer 1955a, p. 83. 116  Hegel 2018, p. 44. 117  Ibid., p. 78. 118  Ibid., p. 218. See also footnote 162 in Chap. 5. 119  Ibid., p. 224. See also Cassirer’s classification of the ‘order of time’ into the categories of ‘“lived time” [Erlebniszeit], mathematical time, physical time, biological-organic time and historical (“ethical”) time’. Cassirer 1995, p. 226. See also footnote 166 in Chap. 5. 120  Cassirer 1955a, p. 80.

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concept’;121 that is to say, to take the transition from a ‘substantial’ to a ‘functional’ mode of thought122 that he identified in scientific models to be binding for his own thought too. I say temptation, because on Cassirer’s view the theory of knowledge—by contrast with reflection on experience—is intended to relate changing symbolic forms and relations of form to a spiritual principle of formation, a ‘closed and unified fundamental process’, so as to determine ‘the general character of symbolic formation’.123 Even if the spiritual principle itself eludes theoretical systematisation and can only be discerned in the manifestations of spirit, Cassirer believes it must be taken as necessary: ‘For if we renounce this unity, a strict systematic understanding of these forms would seem to be unattainable.’124 As in Hegel, the given appears here as the ‘skandalon of idealism’,125 but with the difference that Cassirer places the unity of spiritual expressions at the start, whereas Hegel works backwards from the end point of a ‘full reconciliation through spirit’.126 Although Cassirer does specifically highlight the contribution of the subject to the symbolic formations, he is unable to grasp the dynamic principle of formation itself, which as a spiritual faculty cannot be subsumed into its symbolic forms and objectivations. By the time we reach the stage of the signifying function of scientific knowledge, if not before, it is clear that the mediation of the ‘sensuous’

 Ibid., p. 95.  Cf. Cassirer’s early essay Substance and Function (Cassirer 1953b). Just as Cassirer says that the ‘essential aim’ of cognition is to articulate ‘the particular into a universal law and order’—Cassirer 1955a, p. 77—the ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ is based on an ‘ultimate reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic’. Ibid., p. 84. Oswald Schwemmer speaks in this connection of ‘the symbolic and thus the general spiritual and cultural development […] towards theoretical or scientific knowledge’. However, he does not believe this is the main aim of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and therefore ascribes a ‘residual neo-­ Kantianism’ to Cassirer. Schwemmer 1997a, p. 85. This alleged ‘residual neo-Kantianism’ does, in any case, lead Cassirer to conclude that the ideal relation between symbolic forms is most clearly evident in the pure signifying function of scientific knowledge, particularly in mathematical formalism. See in particular part III of the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ‘The Function of Signification and the Building Up of Scientific Knowledge’ (Cassirer 1957, p. 279ff.), and footnotes 118 and 267 in Chap. 5. 123  Cassirer 2013a, p. 75. 124  Cassirer 1955a, p. 84. On the ‘postulate of a purely functional unity’ of symbolic forms, by contrast with purportedly unmediated historical or empirical understandings of them, see footnotes 238 and 241 in Chap. 5. 125  See footnote 97. 126  See footnote 105. 121 122

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and the ‘spiritual’127 in the symbolic process remains external. Although, according to Cassirer, the advance in scientific knowledge towards ‘ever more universal symbols’ with which ‘no definite individual experience can accord’ fulfils the requirements of ‘a universal structural law of the human spirit’,128 it is equally clear that a mathematical number or formula, as the highest possible form of objectivity, can only give a pale, insubstantial indication of what it is for the ‘the sensuous’ to be ‘filled with meaning’.129 Thus, the same claim that Adorno makes with regard to philosophical thought that subjects itself to ‘scientific control and self-control’ can also be applied more generally to thought that embraces its scientific form: ‘By becoming truer, it renounces truth’.130 Instead of being ‘a manifestation and incarnation of a meaning’131 the ‘strict law of form’ ultimately empties itself of content in its ‘objective nature’.132 As ‘logical form’133 that is supposed to be the form of something, thought refers solely to itself. Consequently, the ‘synthetic force of the concept of time’134 is not only ‘farthest removed from the primary level of temporal intuition’,135 but also ossified in the abstract schema of the functional ‘unified representation of time’.136 Pure activity, which on Cassirer’s view is grounded in the spiritual principle of symbolic formation that reaches its limit in the logical self-­ postulations that are supposed to constitute the greatest possible degree of objectivity, never attains the status of substantial, fleshed-out experience. Where the spiritual forms are concretely mediated with the sensuously given, they have the ‘character of natural necessity’.137 According to Cassirer, ‘the characteristic force of the logos’138 only reveals itself when ‘the two factors, thing and signification’,139 come apart, in other words 127  Cassirer speaks of a ‘reciprocal determination of the sensuous by the spiritual and the spiritual by the sensuous’. Cassirer 1955a, p. 318. 128  Cassirer 1957, pp. 478–479. 129  Ibid., p. 93. 130  Adorno 2013a, p. 42. 131  Cassirer 1957, p. 93. 132  Ibid., p. 456. 133  Ibid. 134  Cassirer 1955a, p. 222. 135  Ibid., p. 226. 136  Ibid., p. 222. 137  Cassirer 1955b, p. 23. 138  Ibid., p. 25. 139  Ibid., p. 24.

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when (as illustrated by the example of the development of the forms of mythical and religious thought) ‘the spiritual is revealed […] in the totality of the sensuous world’.140 If, however, we modify the idealist assumption that symbolic forms arise solely from spiritual productivity and pure activity, and instead regard the symbolic products as something practically mediated—by ‘sensuous human activity’141—then ‘the ultimate stratum of objectivity’ of logical, ordering thought will no longer appear as a ‘conclusion’142 but rather as knowledge unaware of its own conditions. Unaware because pure thought does not recognise that its activity adds nothing to the object other than what was supplied by the subject, whereas the subject themselves must necessarily refer to something—‘and “something” indicates an irreducible objective moment’143—in order to be able to act: ‘No matter how we define the subject, some entity cannot be juggled out of it.’144 We could object that it is precisely the ‘“polydimensionality” of the cultural world’145 and the corresponding diversity of symbolic forms and form worlds that prompt Cassirer to investigate the ‘different trends of spiritual formation’,146 which ‘represent qualitatively different modes of signification’.147 However, this investigation is dominated by the idea of constitution, which ‘aspires to find its way back to the primary subjective sources, the original attitudes and formative modes of consciousness’,148 so as to grasp the content of the

140  Ibid., p. 259. On the general significance of the ‘“idea” of the spiritual […]in the transition from mythical concepts to linguistic concepts and from these in turn to the concepts of physical law’, see Cassirer 1957, p. 448. 141  This remark comes from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (Marx and Engels 1960, p. 197). See also footnote 137 in Chap. 6 (which cites a different translation that renders the phrase as ‘concrete human activity’). 142  Cassirer 1957, p. 473. 143  Adorno 2000a, p. 143. 144  Ibid. 145  Cassirer 1957, p. 13. 146  Ibid., p. 56. He continues: ‘These trends must be kept sharply separate, each in its own peculiar determinacy, if the task of reconstruction is to succeed.’ Ibid., p. 57. 147  Ibid. 148  Ibid.

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23

spiritual in its own distinctive expressions rather than in the given itself.149 Accordingly, it seems only logical for Cassirer to conclude, with respect to the pure determinations of meaning and ideas of objectivity in theoretical physics, that What we call the object is no longer a schematizable, intuitively realizable ‘something’ with definite spatial and temporal predicates; it is a point of unity to be apprehended in a purely intellectual way.150

Far more than a mere ‘residual neo-Kantianism’151 reveals itself here. The animal symbolicum creates the objective world entirely out of its own spirit, and of the object as such there remains only ‘a mere X “in relation to which representations have synthetic unity”.’152 For Cassirer, consciousness and object coincide in an abstract unity. It cannot simply be objected that they instead coincide in concrete reality, and so we must insist all the more forcefully that the symbolic forms are mediated at the level of content, rather than having their beginning or end in spiritual activity. We can only speak of a ‘reciprocal determination of the sensuous by the spiritual and the spiritual by the sensuous’153 if ‘the subjective moment in the object’154 also attends to what cannot be subsumed into the conceptual totality of scientific knowledge, for

149  While the sensuous is manifested to varying degrees in the diversity of symbolic forms, Cassirer is primarily concerned with their spiritual aspect rather than their materiality: ‘We start rather from the problems of the objective spirit, from the formations in which it consists and exists; however, we shall not stop with them as a mere fact; we shall attempt by means of reconstructive analysis to find our way back to their elementary presuppositions, the conditions of their possibility.’ Ibid. Hegel, by contrast, says: ‘However, scientific cognition requires instead that it give itself over to the life of the object, or, what is the same thing, that it have the inner necessity of the object before it and that it express this inner necessity. Absorbing itself in its object, it forgets the former overview, which is only a reflection of knowing out of the content and back into itself.’ Hegel 2018, pp. 33–34. This final line also, at least implicitly, rejects the foundations of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. On the understanding of concept and object in terms of a mediation of critical reflection and experience, see footnotes 58 in Chap. 4 and 128 in Chap. 6. 150  Cassirer 1957, p. 473. 151  See footnote 122. 152  Cassirer 1957, p. 473. 153  See footnote 127. 154  Adorno 2004, p. 170.

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What transmits the facts is not so much the subjective mechanism of their pre-formation and comprehension as it is the objectivity heteronomous to the subject, the objectivity behind that which the subject can experience.155

It is this perspective that Bourdieu’s ‘sociology of symbolic forms’156 opens up. Instead of viewing symbolic forms through the lens of a constitutive critique of validity, Bourdieu focuses on the collective and individual ‘history that has produced our categories of thought’.157 This articulates a ‘materialist motif’ that although it is present in Cassirer’s account of the reciprocal relation of sensuous and spiritual, is there only interpreted one-­ sidedly in the form of the spiritual mediatedness of the symbolic. In Bourdieu, by contrast, the forms of mediation are understood as themselves already mediated, insofar as symbolic practices and meanings remain bound up with the social conditions out of which they emerge and to which they refer. Both Cassirer and Bourdieu treat a reference to practice as a fundamental aspect of mediation. But only on Bourdieu’s conception do subject and object reciprocally—not homogeneously—produce the other, as he illustrates using the example of habitus: Only a mechanistic view of the relation that exists between the relations and the agents defined by these relations could let us forget that the habitus, despite being the product of conditioned conditions, the condition of the production of thoughts, perceptions and actions, which are themselves not the immediate product of these conditions, even though, once they have acquired reality, they are knowable only by virtue of knowledge of these conditioned conditions, or to be more precise, of the productive principle that they produced.158

Since the ‘system of objective regularities’ and the ‘system of directly perceptible forms of behaviour’159 are incongruent, their mediation is contradictory and conflict-ridden. While ‘the objectivity heteronomous to the subject’160 remains largely unaffected by the differing forms of its  Ibid.  This expression appears in the title of a German-language edition of Bourdieu’s essays (Bourdieu 1994b). See also Magerski 2004. 157  Bourdieu 2000, p. 9. 158  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 40 (emphases mine). Elsewhere, Bourdieu speaks explicitly of ‘habitus as a mediation between structure and practice’. Ibid., p. 125. 159  Ibid., p. 40. 160  See footnote 155. 155 156

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mediation, from a subjective perspective it only becomes an objective element of social reality through the forms of its mediation.161 Nonetheless, the objective and the incorporated social structures are dependent on each other, i.e. the social conditions from which subjective forms of behaviour emerge are reflected in those behaviours themselves; these conditions are in turn subject to influence by the agents and so remain mutable despite their relative stability. Bourdieu thereby recognises the active, creative dimension of human practices, but without forgetting that they are ‘socially constituted dispositions’.162 And in order to give expression to the imbalance or difference in kind between social heteronomy and practical mediation, Bourdieu sees himself as a practitioner of ‘genetic structuralism’,163 whose work aims to ‘escape the obligatory alternative between subjectivism and objectivism’.164 The ‘work of objectivation’165 that this necessitates involves two aspects. On the one hand, it attends to the twofold nature of social reality by connecting the ‘structures of the various social worlds’ to the ‘“mechanisms” which tend to ensure their reproduction or their transformation’.166 Importantly, the analysis of objective structures in different social fields is inseparable from the analysis of how subjective structures and agential dispositions develop. For even if the objective structures of the social worlds can (as Adorno puts it, speaking in general terms) ‘potentially, even if not actually, […] be conceived without a subject’,167 the social aspects of the subject can only be disregarded or disguised at the price of detaching that subject from reality. Similarly to the Kantian transcendental subject, who is supposed to cognise the particular in the universal, the pure, self-­ sufficient subject would be an indeterminate abstraction, ‘the supposed

161  A modified version of this idea can be found in Hegel’s characterisation of the relation between form and matter. See footnote 198 in Chap. 5. 162  Bourdieu 1994a, p. 13. 163  Ibid., p. 14. See footnotes 95 and 123 in Chap. 6. 164  Bourdieu 1989c, p. 72. 165  On ‘participant objectivation’, see Bourdieu 1992b, p.  253, and footnote 250  in Chap. 6. 166  Wacquant 1992b, p. 7. In the same passage, Wacquant speaks of ‘objectivity of the first order’ (‘species of capital, in Bourdieu’s technical language’) and ‘objectivity of the second order’ (‘the mental and bodily schemata that function as symbolic templates for the practical activities—conduct, thoughts, feelings, and judgments—of social agents’). 167  Adorno 2000a, pp. 142–143.

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“first” of philosophy as against entity’.168 Bourdieu sets against this ‘scholastic point of view’ the ‘question of the social conditions of this very particular standpoint on the world’,169 which can only be answered if social phenomena are understood relationally, that is, in terms of the mediation between ‘the practically experienced reasons and the “objective” reasons of practice’.170 For the subjective and objective aspects of practice can neither be simply subsumed into each other nor derived from a tertia that transcends them. Bourdieu’s twofold ‘work of objectivation’ instead addresses both aspects of experience at once, enabling a mediating ‘praxeology’ of their contradictory relation. The other side of the ‘work of objectivation’ consists in the ‘praxeological perspective’ understanding itself as necessarily mediated, rather than adopting or continuing the ‘presuppositions of lay and scholarly common sense’.171 The incongruence of the sociological gaze is shown in the simple yet demanding ‘will to understand why and how one understands’.172 Simple because the ‘work of objectivation’ can take as its starting point the seemingly simple truisms of everyday life; but demanding because these truisms turn out to be more complex when they are radically called into question and so cease to seem self-evident: The preconstructed is everywhere. The sociologist is literally beleaguered by it, as everybody else is. The sociologist is thus saddled with the task of knowing an object—the social world—of which he is the product, in a way such that the problems that he raises about it and the concepts he uses have every chance of being the product of this object itself. (This is particularly true of the classificatory notions he employs in order to know it, common notions such as names of occupations or scholarly notions such as those handed down by the tradition of the discipline.)173

In light of this, Bourdieu considers it important ‘to reflect not only on the limits of thought and of the powers of thought, but also on the 168  This remark comes from Adorno’s critique of the ‘transcendental principle’. Adorno 2004, p. 177. 169  Bourdieu 2000, p. 13. 170  Bourdieu 1990a, p.  36. On the break with the ‘substantialist mode of thought’ see footnote 95 in Chap. 6. 171  Bourdieu 1992b, p. 247. 172  Ibid., p. 238. 173  Ibid., p. 235.

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conditions in which it is exercised’.174 It is only by breaking with one’s own epistemological traditions, concepts and methods that it becomes possible to ‘bur[y] oneself in the fullest detail of the object’175—a formulation that bears a striking resemblance to the Hegelian idea of knowledge and its object being changed by the subject’s ‘purely looking on’.176 But while Hegel explores and seeks to transcend the limits of thought in thought itself, Bourdieu’s aim is to acquire a view (that must be tailored to the given object) ‘of a game that can be grasped as such because one has retired from it’.177 For Bourdieu, awareness of the possibilities and limits of the ‘work of objectivation’ leads not to spirit being absolutised ‘in a world which is in reality antagonistic’,178 but rather to a restriction of its claims and pretensions by relating practice ‘to the real conditions of its genesis’.179 Only breaking with our own cognitive habits allows us to understand that ‘practice has a logic which is not that of the logician’.180 ‘Practical logic’, which must to a certain extent be blind ‘to its own truth’181 precisely in order to be practical, cannot simply be translated into theoretical concepts or, as Cassirer puts it, transposed into a ‘structure of pure order’.182 Since practical logics ‘can only be grasped in action, in […] temporal movement’,183 the main aim of the ‘work of objectivation’ is to reflect on the theoretical relation to practice in a way that also takes account of its own logic, so as to prevent rational explanations from simply being equated with social practices and phenomena. This not only gives us a better theoretical understanding of them, but also—as a practical effect of ‘praxeology’, as it were—allows us to grant to social practices and

174  Bourdieu 2000, p. 2. Elsewhere, Bourdieu speaks of an ‘obsessive reflexivity’ and notes that ‘among all the obstacles that stand in the way of the development of a scientific sociology, one of the most formidable is the fact that genuine scientific discoveries come at the highest costs and with the lowest profits, not only in the ordinary markets of social existence but also, too often, in the academic market, from which greater autonomy could be expected.’ Bourdieu 1992b, p. 246. 175  Ibid., p. 252. 176  Hegel 2018, p. 56; for a more detailed account see footnote 58 in Chap. 4. 177  Bourdieu 1992b, p. 259. 178  Adorno 1993, p. 27. 179  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 97. 180  Ibid., p. 86. 181  Ibid., p. 91. 182  Cassirer 1957, p. 477. 183  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 92.

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customs their own certainties or, in other words, to ‘give them back’ their ‘raison d’être’.184 This does not mean that the question of time and motion is confined simply to the question of their social conditions. Although the epistemological view that Bourdieu describes as ‘scholastic’, according to which the intuitively given is simultaneously supposed to be a product of spirit, proves to be an illusion, Bourdieu by no means wishes to treat the socially determined products of practice as if they were innocuous and unproblematic. Rather, he believes the task of the sociologist consists ‘in grasping a hidden reality which veils itself by unveiling itself’.185 On this view, social reality remains contradictory, and, in the face of the universal competition for scarce goods and resources, the sociologist must use praxeological means to analyse the ‘objective relations of force between the agents involved or, to be more precise, between the different fields in which they are implicated’.186 Given this conclusion, it is no surprise that Bourdieu believes that the main purpose of the various social practices and strategies of time is to acquire ‘power over […] time’.187 But just as the state does not have the power, as the putative highest authority or ‘realization of God on earth’, to ‘rescue’ the social order ‘from arbitrariness’, nor does Bourdieu regard sociology as ‘a kind of theology of the last instance’.188 Since time as a moving element within social power relations is subordinated to strategic interests in the ‘struggle of all against all’,189 Bourdieu is wary of simply setting its practical efficacy against its conceptual meaning. Just as for Kant time is dependent on particular temporal phenomena in order to be represented, Bourdieu relates socially valid norms and concepts to the products generated by practice, so as to include in the (inevitably scholastic) theoretical reconstruction the truth of those who have neither the interest, nor the leisure, nor the necessary  Ibid., p. 97.  Bourdieu 1992b, p. 256. 186  Ibid., pp. 256–257. 187  Bourdieu 2000, p. 228; see also footnote 343 in Chap. 6. 188  Ibid., p. 245. From the perspective of its citizens, a state may still be regarded as sovereign, but in the context of an emerging ‘global society’, the balance of power is shifting. See on this topic Bourdieu 2014. 189  Bourdieu 2000, p. 238. Bourdieu refers in the same passage to the symbolic ‘power of naming’. 184 185

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instruments to reappropriate the objective and subjective truth of what they are and what they do.190

However, the paradox of the sociological ‘work of objectivation’ is that the agents implicated in a social game have little interest in having the social mechanisms and illusions explained, as this threatens to undermine their effectiveness, whereas ‘the “half-learned”, eager to demystify and denounce’,191 misunderstand the illusionary power of social practices when they reject them as merely deceptive and false.192 The proverbial ruse paysanne thus lives up to its reputation by turning its seeming limitations to its own advantage. This requires an awareness of the ‘twofold truth’193 of social illusions, which can only achieve their effect if they are practically mastered. But since those that the ‘half-learned’ ‘seek to disabuse, or unmask, both know and resist the truth they claim to reveal’,194 Bourdieu does not wish, in a continuation of classical critiques of ideology, ‘to treat the necessarily partial (in both senses) points of the view of the agents as simple illusions’.195 Rather, their perspectives should be incorporated into the sociologist’s own ‘work of objectivation’ by ‘relating position-takings to the positions from which they are taken’196 so as to capture the ‘double reality of the social world’.197 Only by simultaneously considering both the ‘objective divisions of the social world’ and the ‘principles of vision and division that agents apply to it’198 is the abstract concept of the ‘social world’ turned into ‘an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of play that cannot be collapsed under an overall societal logic, be it that of capitalism, modernity, or postmodernity’.199 Just as, on Hegel’s theory, the philosophical concept becomes aware (albeit reluctantly) of its own limitations in confrontation with itself, without this requiring ‘something transcendent, however positive its nature’,200  Ibid., p. 191.  Ibid., p. 189. 192  The now largely obsolete verb ‘illude’ (Lat. illudere) hints at the idea that ‘games’ or ‘play’ (Lat. ludus) are a constitutive aspect of social practices. 193  Bourdieu 2000, p. 188. 194  Ibid., 189–190. 195  Ibid., p. 188. 196  Ibid., p. 189. 197  Wacquant 1992b, p. 11. 198  Ibid., p. 12. 199  Ibid., p. 17. 200  Adorno 1993, p. 27. 190 191

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praxeology is well aware of its division from its object. And the attempt to unite ‘the point of view of the agents who are caught up in the object’ and ‘the point of view on this point of view’201 is, accordingly, similar to Hegel’s speculative requirement that the understanding ‘give itself over to the life of the object, or, what is the same thing, that it have the inner necessity of the object before it and that it express this inner necessity’.202 However, since neither spirit nor practice can grasp the ‘living movement of the subject matter’203 solely by reference to itself, given that as parts of that movement they are related to each other without being subsumable into one another, the philosophical ‘exertion of the concept’204 does at least have in common with the sociological ‘work of objectivation’ that instead of positive certainties and deductive inferences it keeps alive the thought of its own non-identity. In the following chapters, I shall show that this awareness is not a weakness of these theories; rather, it is only this awareness that gives expression to thought and action, which set themselves in motion by comprehending their own contradictory nature.

 Bourdieu 2000, p. 189.  Hegel 2018, pp. 33–34. 203  Ibid., p. 33. 204  Ibid., p. 36. 201 202

PART I

Motion as a Problem of ‘Pure Thought’ and ‘Pure Perception’

Two things threaten human life: order and chaos. M. de Montaigne One must concede to the dialecticians of old the contradictions which they pointed to in motion; but what follows from them is not that motion is not but that it is rather contradiction as existent. G. W. F. Hegel

The concept of motion is an obvious place to begin a study of temporal relations, for changes in bodily states and positions are a typical feature of practical processes and transitions. However, in the following chapters we shall focus not so much on the practical implications resulting from various conceptions of motion as on the theoretical approaches underlying them. In other words, we shall begin by considering their conditions of possibility before we turn to their consequences in practice. For if we take an overall view, it will become clear that the question of the theoretical grounding or groundability of motion cannot be separated from the forms of its practical manifestation. The first part of this study will be an epistemological inquiry into motion, which is taken as an illustrative example of how the choice of theoretical approach can determine the constitution of the subject matter itself. The arguments I examine are structured around two main principles, ‘pure thought’ (Zeno) and ‘pure perception’ (Bergson), which lead to objectivist and subjectivist conclusions respectively. I shall begin by

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assessing their validity claims, before considering their actual consequences. The first epigraph above describes the threat posed to human life by order and chaos, which can be thought of as a leitmotif running through the various proposed solutions discussed in this work. This is something to keep in the back of your mind while reading, for it is not insignificant which alternative one chooses. Moreover, it cannot be ruled out in advance that the postulated dialectic might also hold out other possible solutions.

CHAPTER 2

The Immobility of Being (Zeno)

Zeno’s paradoxes of motion have been occupying philosophers and mathematicians for almost two-and-a-half millennia, without them yet having reached a satisfactory solution.1 The paradoxes were originally intended as a defence of Parmenidean ontology, which conceives of being as unchanging and perfect once all human experience and perception are stripped away. Only pure, logical thought that eschews deceptive sensory reality can guarantee certain, immutable knowledge. Importantly, the being that is graspable only through thought is also understood as material and extended in physical space. Parmenides differs on this point from later ‘idealist’ theories (which likewise favour pure thought), provided we understand ‘idealism’ to mean reducing the world of experience to mental processes. He holds that thought is necessarily related to being inasmuch as the latter comprises the former’s content.2 This would entail that the Pythagorean thesis of ‘empty space’, for instance, is a contradiction in terms, as it cannot be conceived without contradiction and thus lacks any content. Despite the rigorous distinction Parmenides seeks to draw between pure thought and sensory perception, this example shows how 1  On the history of the paradoxes’ influence, see in particular Grünbaum 1967, Vlastos 1975 and Barnes 1979. Salmon 1970 also offers a good overview. 2  See fragments 5 and 8 of Parmenides’ poem in Diels 1952, pp. 232, and 235–240. One interesting point in relation to our discussion of Zeno’s arguments is that Parmenides derives his proof of being indirectly, on the basis that it is impossible to conceive of non-being.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Bockrath, Time, Duration and Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7_2

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strongly his abstract ontology (very much in the spirit of the time) was still influenced by materialist conceptions. Although being as the foundation of conceptual thought serves as an absolute standard, it has not yet been fully freed from its material basis. A strong ‘earthy odour’3 still clings to it, at the very least reminding us of concrete perceptions and phenomena. And so it comes as no surprise when Parmenides uses the vivid image of a ‘sphere in space / perfectly round and balanced’ to express the perfection of being and demarcate it from non-being.4 I shall argue that the obvious difficulties Zeno’s paradoxes present us with are attributable above all to the consistency of thought that they exemplify, with the ‘earthy odour’ that was still discernible in Parmenides now almost entirely expunged. ‘Pure thought’ at least appears to be wholly self-sufficient, in contrast to the perceptions that Zeno reveals by ingenious means to be deceptive. What is especially interesting about his arguments for present purposes is that he refers to motion as a concrete phenomenon while at the same time seeking to prove its impossibility when measured against the standard of pure thought. It remains to be seen what theoretical consequences this kind of approach to the problem of motion will have. But let us first consider what Zeno himself has to say.

2.1   Continuity of Space and Time (the Dichotomy and Achilles Paradoxes) Aristotle, who documented and commented on Zeno’s ideas, distinguishes four different proofs for the non-reality of motion.5 The first two proceed from the premise that space and time are continuously ordered and infinitely divisible. Aristotle describes the ‘dichotomy paradox’ as being ‘about a moving object not moving because of its having to reach the half-way point before it reaches the end’.6 To expand on this very general outline of the problem: to traverse a given distance, one must first traverse half that distance, and before doing that one has to get halfway to  Gomperz 1922, p. 141.  Fragment 8 in Diels 1952, p. 238. 5  Aristotle 1996, Physics, book VI, chap. 9, 239b9ff. It is said that Zeno originally had forty proofs of Parmenides’ claims regarding the indivisibility and immobility of being. See Röd 1988, p. 137. 6  Aristotle, Physics, book VI, chap. 9, 239b14–17. 3 4

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the halfway point, i.e. a quarter of the way, and before that an eighth, a sixteenth, a thirty-second, and so on an ad infinitum. According to Aristotle, Zeno regarded this as an argument for the impossibility of motion. Mathematically, we can easily see that the series produced by halving (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + etc.) does not add up to the value of 1; in this particular example, that means the object does not get to the end of the distance it is traversing. There is always a final, albeit minimal remainder left over that is needed to complete the series.7 Although in reality the distance can be traversed without difficulties, ideally this appears to be impossible, which leads Zeno to the famous conclusion that real motion (ideally conceived) is impossible. The halving process can only be continued ad infinitum given the aforementioned assumptions of continuity and infinite divisibility. If these assumptions are applied to the space to be traversed, we can distinguish between two possible alternatives. Let us suppose that we begin by halving a segment with end points A and B in the middle, at C.  In the above example, it is left open whether the next segment to be halved is AC or CB. On the first alternative, it would not be possible to start moving, as this segment would get smaller and smaller as described above, converging on an infinitesimally small value close to 0, i.e. the starting point A. On the second alternative, the object would not get to the end point, B, since the value of 1 would never be reached. Aristotle appears to prefer the second variant, but the two possible interpretations do not affect the paradox’s basic substance. If the paradox is interpreted in terms of time, we will encounter similar difficulties. In his attempt to solve the paradox, Aristotle distinguishes between infinite divisibility and infinite extension. He argues that it is not possible to traverse an infinitely extended distance in a finite amount of time but that it is possible to traverse an infinitely divisible distance in a finite time, since—analogously to the spatial dimension—it is perfectly possible to traverse infinitely small segments of time.8 However, this distinction still does not solve the fundamental difficulties posed by the paradox. For the mere fact that a finite distance can be traversed in a finite time does not yet answer the question of how exactly this is possible. If we 7  In infinitesimal calculus, the vanishingly small remainders are ultimately ignored, and mathematicians operate with approximate values instead. This makes the theoretical problem of ‘infinity’ mathematically tractable, but does not resolve it. 8  See Aristotle, Physics, Book VI, chap. 2, 233a32–50.

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admit the concept of ‘infinity’ as a possible explanation, it too requires clarification. Aristotle’s important distinction between infinite divisibility and infinite extension does help to clarify certain questions about spatial and temporal distances and relations of magnitude.9 But it does not solve the problem of infinity itself, which necessarily cannot be done in purely quantitative terms.10 Elsewhere, Aristotle makes the seemingly persuasive point that continuous motion is different from motion divided (in thought) into successive segments.11 However, merely pointing out this distinction does not show that it is valid. Since Zeno regards unmediated intuition as deceptive and an inadequate validity basis for reliable propositions, his theoretical objections to motion and change are unaffected. On his view, it makes no difference how movements are performed, since he already disputes their possibility a priori. Thus, Aristotle’s argument that a continuous movement contains infinitely many halves only potentially and not actually12 fails to make contact with the premise from which Zeno’s reflections proceed. Zeno’s scepticism about the possibility of actual motion is concerned with its theoretical groundability, and, by contrast with Aristotle, not directly with its reality. Consequently, Zeno would also flatly reject Aristotle’s view that it is only a coincidental and not an essential property of a continuous movement that it traverses infinity.13 His argument seeks to deny the very possibility of motion, whether continuous or successive. The assumption that space and time are infinitely divisible is likewise crucial to the famous Achilles paradox, which Aristotle sets out as follows: The second [argument] is the so-called Achilles. This claims that the slowest runner will never be caught by the fastest runner, because the one behind has first to reach the point from which the one in front started, and so the slower one is bound always to be in front.14  Ibid., Book VIII, chap. 8, 263b3–12.  This is true even if time is considered in isolation. According to Zeno, there can be no change in time, since infinitesimally small time segments would have to be added up to attain a particular span of time, but it is not possible to do so. To reach the age of forty, for instance, you would first have to have been twenty years old, and before that ten, five, two-and-a-half and so on ad infinitum. If this infinite series is continued, the result we are left with is that it is by definition impossible to reach any finite point in time. 11  Aristotle, Physics, Book VIII, chap. 8, 263a45–48. 12  Ibid., Book VIII, chap. 8, 263a35–44. 13  Ibid., Book VIII, chap. 8, 263b8–12. 14  Ibid., Book VI, chap. 9, 239b15–20. 9

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In this paradox, Achilles (the ‘fastest runner’), arranges a race against the tortoise (the ‘slowest runner’) in which the tortoise is given a head start and Achilles, despite being faster, is unable to catch up. To clarify the example, let us assume that Achilles is ten times faster than the tortoise and that the head start is equal to one hundred units of length. By the time Achilles has traversed these one hundred units of length, the tortoise will be another ten units ahead. When Achilles catches up to this point, the tortoise will have advanced by another unit. At the next interval, the tortoise’s lead will be one-tenth of a unit, then one-hundredth, one-­ thousandth and so on ad infinitum. Achilles, so the argument goes, is unable to catch up with the tortoise because its continuously diminishing lead will converge on the limiting value of zero without ever reaching it. Since, to put it in general terms, the speeds of the two runners are in the ratio 1:n, we can easily see that it is impossible for Achilles to catch up at any point in the series 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 + 1/n4 + etc. Aristotle correctly observes that, like the dichotomy argument, this example involves dividing up the distance to be traversed in a way that means the limit will never be reached; where the two examples differ is that the dichotomy paradox involves a process of halving.15 The Achilles paradox likewise assumes an infinite process of division, but the goal to be reached is not a fixed point but is rather constantly changing and receding. The difficulty posed by this paradox consists in the conflict between two mutually exclusive propositions that both purport to be true. On the one hand, observation clearly shows that Achilles will effortlessly catch the tortoise; on the other, Zeno’s argument appears to prove that this is impossible. Aristotle attempts to refute Zeno by introducing another assumption: if, unlike Zeno, we assume that Achilles and the tortoise only need to traverse a finite stretch of space and time to complete the race, the faster runner will effortlessly overtake the slower. If, however, as Zeno suggests, we judge the race solely in terms of the tortoise’s lead, we will find that this lead gets smaller but never entirely disappears.16 If we follow Aristotle’s line of thinking, we can calculate when and where Achilles will catch up with and overtake the tortoise. The sum of the convergent series 100 + 10 + 1 + 1/10 + 1/100 + etc. will never exceed the value 111 1/9 (more generally expressed: 100 + 100/n + 100/n2 + 100/n3 + etc. = 100 +100/n–1). This means, contra the above supposition that it is impossible  Ibid., Book VI, chap. 9, 239b20–22.  Ibid., Book VI, chap. 9, 239b31–35.

15 16

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for Achilles to catch the tortoise at any point in the series, that the tortoise’s lead will disappear at precisely the 111 1/9 units of length mark, since this functions as the limiting value of the infinite series as a whole. Thus, Achilles will catch up with the tortoise at the moment when it has traversed 10 + 1 + 1/9 units of length. Mathematically speaking, a quantity may be infinitely divisible, but it does not therefore cease to be a finite quantity. We can, at least, easily determine the limiting value that is not exceeded. The problem of infinite divisibility is thereby reduced to finite relations of magnitude, and the paradox appears to have been solved. While this apparent mathematical solution may initially seem persuasive, it leaves some questions unanswered. The paradoxical structure of the Achilles example remains intact, since the problem of infinite divisibility, as in the dichotomy paradox, is not fully cleared up by calculating limiting values. If, as Zeno proposes, we focus our attention solely on the incomplete series 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 + etc., we will find that it remains incomplete despite being limited by the finite value 1/n–1. The calculation of where and when Achilles catches the tortoise is, consequently, valid only on the assumption that he does catch it. But the question of whether he does so cannot be decided mathematically, since, strictly speaking, it is not actually possible to add up all the elements of an infinite series.17 As with the dichotomy paradox, we are presented with the contradictory task of completing the division of a segment that is by definition infinitely divisible. This difficulty leads Zeno to his famous conclusion denying the very possibility of motion. On his view, Achilles cannot catch the tortoise, since the movements of the two racers cannot be conceived without contradiction and, consequently, measured against the standard of pure thought/being, only seemingly occur.

2.2  Discreteness of Space and Time (the Arrow and Stadium Paradoxes) While Zeno’s first two paradoxes are based on a conception of space and time as continuously ordered and constantly related, the next two paradoxes invert this assumption. Firstly, the ‘arrow paradox’:

 This is the argument made by Black 1954, pp. 97–99.

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the third [argument] is the one I mentioned a short while ago, which claims that a moving arrow is still.18

In the earlier remark that Aristotle refers back to, he writes that Zeno claims that if it is always true that a thing is at rest when it is opposite to something equal to itself, and if a moving object is always in the now, then a moving arrow is motionless.19

According to Zeno, difficulties also arise if we conceive of the path of an arrow in flight not as continuous but as composed of discrete points in space and time. He argues that even on the assumption that the discrete points are intervals, i.e. that they occupy a particular segment of space and time, it is not possible to conceive of motion without contradiction. This is because in an ‘atomistically’ conceived structure of space and time, a flying arrow would be unable to move either in the point or interval in which it is currently located or (as seems obvious) in a point or interval where it is not located. Again, this can be illustrated by a simple example. Assuming that an arrow measures one unit in length and flies ten units of length per second, then we can take it that during this time it will in total have occupied space equal to ten times its length. However, if an object occupies space equal to its own size, this entails that it is at rest while doing so.20 Consequently, it is unclear how ten states of rest could yield a state of motion, since merely adding up separate subsegments does not provide an adequate explanation for the process of motion itself. The result of the addition may show a change given that the arrow’s unit of length must be added up a total of ten times to determine the distance it has travelled. But this does not yet show that it is actually possible for it to traverse the distance. Like in the Achilles paradox, we can at best specify the distance the arrow would have to travel to reach its target and how  Aristotle, Physics, Book VI, chap. 9, 239b36–37.  Ibid., Book VI, chap. 9, 239b5–8. 20  ‘While a moving body (if there were one) would (in virtue of being in motion) have to be assigned a spatial value during the time it is in motion that is larger than its own volume (in order to be able to move in this space), a resting body must be assigned a spatial value equal to its own volume. Indeed, this is the very definition of a state of rest (by contrast to a state of motion). However, in each moment the “moving” body occupies precisely this spatial value and not a greater one. Thus, in every moment that it is supposedly “in motion” it is in fact in a state of rest.’ Wagner 1972, p. 638. 18 19

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long it would take. But the assumption that the arrow is moving at all or that it will reach its target cannot be proven mathematically. This difficulty forms the basis for Zeno’s denial of the very possibility of motion. This example draws attention to a further problem. Motion necessarily presupposes transitions between the points or intervals. But we cannot form a definite conception of these transitions, for any attempt to pin them down in thought would make them static, the precise opposite of change. A moving arrow would need to be both in a particular place at a particular time and also already somewhere else. Since this cannot be conceived without contradiction, Zeno concludes that motion and becoming are simply incomprehensible. Taken in conjunction with the paradoxes discussed in the previous section, this conclusion would apply even on the assumption that space and time can be conceived of both as continuous and as discrete. Although the assumption that space and time are continuous may appear to offer an argument for motion, the dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes show that this idea can be taken ad absurdum by emphasising the discrete character of motion; the infinite divisibility of space and time asserted by Zeno clearly shows that it is at least conceptually possible to divide up continuous movements. Conversely, the arrow paradox shows that attempting to understand a motion that has been presegmented into particular parts as continuous gives rise to a contradiction, given our a priori analysis of space and time. However, the arrow paradox is less challenging overall because the assumed discreteness of space and time means there is already a theoretical tension with empirically perceivable experiences of continuity right from the outset; the concept of discrete units is sharply opposed to a conception of continuity and constancy. By contrast, in the first two paradoxes the tension both with everything that seems certain from empirical experience and with Zeno’s own theoretical presupposition of continuous temporal and spatial relations was not immediately obvious.21 In the stadium paradox, a variant of the arrow paradox, Zeno makes another attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of motion, with space and time again understood as discretely ordered. Aristotle describes the paradox as follows: 21  Thus, as we have seen, in the dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes the idea of infinite divisibility is explicitly based on the supposed continuity of space and time. But in these cases too the paradoxical task of performing divisions ad infinitum is only intelligible because, according to Zeno, everything continuous must simultaneously be conceived of as divided.

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His fourth argument is the one about equal bodies in a stadium moving from opposite directions past one another; one set starts from the end of the stadium, another (moving at the same speed) from the middle. The result, according to Zeno, is that half a given time is equal to double that time.22

This paradox again requires further explanation, as it is barely comprehensible in the form reproduced above. However, we will not consider Aristotle’s own critical commentary23 here, since more recent work has shown that his exposition of Zeno’s ideas is misleading and probably false.24 Although Aristotle speaks of three ‘bodies’ on the racetrack, we can just as well suppose there to be two equally sized groups moving at the same speed from opposite directions. One group [A] starts from the middle of the stadium, the other [B] from the end. The difficulty is that, according to Zeno, A and B both need the same amount of time to reach their goal, even though A only has to cover half the distance while B has to travel the whole way to the other end of the stadium. This is what is meant by the surprising assertion that ‘half a given time is equal to double that time’. This account does not yet give any reasons for why Zeno held this view, which flagrantly contradicts our experiences of everyday spatial and temporal relations. Based on these experiences, we would expect that A would only need half as much time as B; in formal terms, tA = tB/2 or tB = 2tA. Zeno, however, expressly asserts that tA = tB.25 We can reinterpret this example analogously to Zeno’s previous arguments if, as in the arrow paradox, we take both of the stretches to be traversed to consist of infinitely many discrete points in space and time. If there are two infinite sets of points, we can no longer say that one is twice as large or only half as large as the other. Measured against the standard of infinity, both must be taken to be equally large. For Zeno, tA = tB would only come out as c­ ontradictory  Aristotle, Physics, Book VI, chap. 9, 239b41–240a2.  See ibid., Book VI, chap. 9, 240a2–24. 24  See in particular Ferber 1995, pp. 14–31. Ferber shows persuasively and in great detail that Aristotle’s rehearsal of the paradox, with the exception of the passage cited above, should be understood as an interpretation that likely has little in common with Zeno’s original intentions. He suggests an alternative reading that fits very well with the substance of the other paradoxes. This reading therefore forms the basis for the remainder of my discussion, allowing me to avoid the unclarities in Aristotle’s account that have occupied a great many commentators without them coming to any satisfactory solution. 25  See Ferber 1995, p. 25. 22 23

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on the assumption of finite spatial and temporal relations. We can avoid a paralogism of this kind if, instead of taking our cue from customary experience, we acknowledge that it is at least conceivable that the spatial and temporal distances to be traversed could be infinitely divided. Only by calculating in this way could we come to the view that half a given time and half a given space are equal to double that time and space, on the reasoning that all these specifications are as general as the standard against which they are measured, and not tied to any particular object. Consequently, if a distance is already conceived as infinite, it makes no difference whether we consider it as a whole or only in part; the property of infiniteness will apply equally to both options.26 If we accept that half is equal to double (tA = tB) or that the parts are equal to the whole, this would give rise, as in the other examples, to the paradox that Zeno’s arguments seem correct when taken ‘by themselves’, but are utterly incompatible with actual experience. Zeno himself sees this example as another compelling argument for the immobility of being. Since moving bodies, just like flying arrows and runners traversing distances, cannot be conceived without contradiction, he is sceptical of the very possibility of motion. Here too, he is guided by the idea that experiences are deceptive, and that certain knowledge can only be secured by pure a priori thought—a conclusion in keeping with Parmenides’ ontology of perfect being, as discussed in the introduction.

2.3  Objectivist Conclusions and Further Discussion This section will begin by describing the basic structure common to the four paradoxes, before outlining other proposed solutions and commentaries on Zeno’s paradoxes. I will then discuss some possible implications for the problem of motion. Zeno’s assertion that there are truths to which we have subject-­ independent access (as discussed above) is based on the dialectic of ‘pure 26  ‘Zeno’s stadium paradox denies that the principle (later formulated in Euclid’s ninth axiom) that the whole is greater than the part holds for infinite sets. For however small an element of a countably infinite or dense set of points you take, it will likewise contain an infinite set of points, and so according to Zeno’s argument is equal to the whole.’ Ferber 1995, p. 26. Elsewhere, Ferber notes that Zeno’s view is entirely compatible with the principles of modern mathematics, on the set theoretic assumption that actually infinite sets ‘have the same cardinality’. Ibid., p. 27.

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thought’ described and critiqued by Hegel, which is a product of ‘immersion in the abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’.27 But what underpins the ‘rigid isolation and self identity’28 of this mode of thought, which seems to be shielded against all objections? To answer this question, we need to look more closely at the commonalities between the paradoxes in terms of method and content. Notably, Zeno uses the same method of proof in all four paradoxes. He begins with the assumption (in accord with ordinary experience) that motion exists, before ultimately arriving at the precise opposite of this assumption. In each case, this conclusion is derived from the contradictions purportedly shown by his arguments. Generally speaking, his arguments have the form of proofs by contradiction, which are very common in mathematics. In such proofs, we assume that the negation of the thesis we wish to prove is true, and then show that this would contradict propositions that are already accepted as theorems. For instance, if we wish to prove that the square root of 2 is an irrational number, we begin by assuming the opposite, i.e. that the square root of 2 is rational. We then show that this assumption is contradictory and thus false, which entails that its negation must be true. Zeno takes a similar approach in his attempts to prove the impossibility of motion. He begins by taking the negation of the thesis he wishes to prove (e.g. ‘The arrow moves’ as the negation of ‘The arrow does not move’) and then shows, based on the contradictory conclusions that follow from this assumption, that the negation must be false and hence the thesis true. We can, however, ask whether things that are methodologically possible in mathematics can also claim validity for non-­ axiomatically based propositions, where considerations of content clearly play an important role. In the introduction to this chapter, I remarked that in Zeno the ‘earthy odour’ still discernible in Parmenides has been almost completely expunged, with ‘pure thought’ presented as sufficient unto itself. Let’s now look at this premise more closely. If we compare the four paradoxes, we will observe that Zeno does indeed begin with an a priori analysis of conditions pertaining to motion; this is true in both the continuity-based and the discreteness-based arguments. The concept of ‘infinity’, which is relevant to all four paradoxes, is not established empirically (which would in any case be impossible) but derived theoretically and posited as valid.  Hegel 1955a, pp. 240 and 243.  Ibid., p. 240.

27 28

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However, the examples have been chosen so that in each case the given task must be performed in real-world empirical conditions. It is this that gives his arguments their paradoxical character. The paradoxes describe agents and objects traversing actual stretches of space and time, rather than merely moving within imaginary, mathematically ideal worlds. The Achilles paradox, for instance, begins with Achilles attempting to catch the tortoise in reality, before proceeding to show that this is ideally impossible. Zeno’s argument uses theoretical conceptions of space and time that transcend the realm of empirical experience but are then applied back to this realm. The other paradoxes take similar conceptual constructions not tied to determinate conditions and apply them in an apparently determinable manner, leading to the familiar result of a mismatch between facts and ideas. We shall not consider Zeno’s solution to this dichotomy (which one-­ sidedly favours the abstract and conceptual) in further depth here. What interests us is, rather, the structure of his argument, which involves a shift in levels that brings about the above-described difficulties. To speak in general terms, this switch consists in the theoretically obtained, empirically unverifiable conceptions of space and time being tacitly transposed and applied to the world of experience. It is this switch which presents us with the absurd requirement to complete an infinite series of tasks in finite segments of space and time. This is an ad modum contradiction inasmuch as different levels of abstraction and modes of application are being treated the same. The characters in Zeno’s examples fail to complete the tasks they are given because experience-transcendent claims cannot be redeemed without contradiction under empirical conditions. It is only at the level of conceptual possibility that a potentially unlimited number of points or intervals can be traversed; in the world of experience, there is an intrinsic limit on this number. The difficulty in Zeno’s argument is that he appears to dispute the possibility of motions by way of reference to their reality. All that the individual paradoxes show is how presuppositions of pure thought necessarily lead to paradoxical conclusions under real-world conditions, because an abstract standard is being applied rather than the one against which the empirical world is normally measured. The empirically based tasks themselves are irrelevant to the argument.29

29  Aristotle’s distinction between the potentiality and actuality of motion is thus crucial to his understanding of the paradoxes. However, as we have seen, his critique of Zeno pays little attention to the crucial question of a theoretical grounding for the possibility of motion. See Aristotle, Physics, Book VIII, chap. 8, 263a35–44 and 263b8–12.

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Consequently, Zeno only attends to the ‘earthy odour’ so as to demarcate it from pure thought, which he holds to be absolutely valid. His view is underpinned not by the assumption of concrete motion, but by the Parmenidean ideal of an abstract, motionless, perfect being. The examples he gives serve simply to reaffirm and substantiate this ideal. Just as, to take an example from Aristotle, one cannot traverse a mathematically ideal circle by traversing an empirical circle, neither can actual movements satisfy the ideal claims of our mental conceptions of them.30 It is simultaneously Zeno’s strength and weakness that he gives paradoxical expression to this point through examples couched in the terms of ordinary experience, for his objectivist assumptions and conclusions can, in virtue of their sheer contradictoriness, at least prompt us to critically question the apparent certainties of everyday experience. This task will remain current for as long as Zeno’s philosophically significant problems can only be understood as contradictory. By contrast, the apodictic assumption that objective knowledge is only made possible by the ‘pure movement of thought in Notions’31 remains just as paradoxical as the examples given to illustrate this claim. So it should not surprise us that there are also other approaches to solving the paradoxes, which we should discuss here at least briefly. Zeno’s purported solution to the problem of motion is not only in tension with our everyday experience; his argument is directed against the very possibility of experience. Although this solution is based in the realm of ‘pure thought’, each argument is initially framed with reference to the world of experience. In the critique presented above, this reference to empirical reality can be understood simply as a modus probandi to more clearly delineate the unquestioned ‘abstract identity of the understanding’. Other proposed solutions, however, regard this as the central aspect of the problem.32 As we saw with the dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes, Aristotle’s critical objections to Zeno proceed from the assumption that infinity is not just confined to the realm of ‘pure thought’ (the assumption that a stretch of space or time can be divided into an infinite number of segments, even if it is not yet so divided, does at least maintain a connection to empirical reality). Although Aristotle’s distinction between  Aristotle 2018, Metaphysics, Book III, chap. 2, 998a1–9.  Hegel 1995, p. 240. 32  See also the linguistic theories of Ryle 1954 and Owen 1975, who attempt to distinguish mathematical and empirical/everyday meanings by means of conceptual elucidation. Although these theories show the dependency of Zeno’s paradoxes on certain language-­ games, they do not solve them. 30 31

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potential and actual infinity does recognise the different levels that Zeno’s paradoxes involve, his proposed solutions remained focused on reality, whereas Zeno is concerned with the theoretical possibility of motion.33 By focusing on the practical tasks posed in the paradoxes, Aristotle fails to get outside the paradoxical structure of Zeno’s method of proof and misses the point of his argument, namely to establish the validity claims of a priori thought. Other proposed solutions, meanwhile, fail to arrive at a clear or satisfactory result for entirely different reasons. In mathematically based approaches, which most closely approach a priori thought, the argument proceeds in precisely the opposite direction, with the emphasis shifting from empirical reality to the validity claims of pure thought. Russell, for instance, notes in his commentary on Zeno that although an infinite series like ‘1/2, 3/4, 7/8, 15/16, […]’ does not reach the value of 1, this value nonetheless clearly marks the series’ limit, the end point on which it converges.34 We have already touched on this argument in a slightly different form in our discussion of the dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes, where we concluded that although the mathematical solution determines the limiting value of a series, it does not answer the question of whether this value is ever actually reached. By contrast with Aristotle’s ambivalent notion of things existing ‘potentially’, the problem of infinite divisibility can now be dealt with mathematically by calculating a limiting value. But from an empirical standpoint, we are still faced with the question of whether it is possible to complete an infinite number of tasks in concreto.35 Thus, although we can give an a priori solution that reduces the concept of infinity to approximate values that mathematicians can operate with,36 the argument remains incomplete, as mathematical approaches cannot answer the substantive questions posed by the paradoxes. 33  Aristotle, Physics, Book VIII, chap. 8, 263a35–44. On the difficulties of this position, see the discussion above on the continuity of space and time in the dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes. 34  Russell 1926, pp. 177–178. 35  On this point, see in particular Grünbaum 1973, pp. 634–636. 36  Vlastos attempts to solve the problem of infinity in another way, based on the idea that in a convergent mathematical series the constantly diminishing remainders will ultimately become so small as to become arithmetically insignificant. See Vlastos 1975, p.  211. However, it can be objected that this argument only addresses the mathematical significance of the infinitesimally small remainders, not their actual significance. We cannot rule out the possibility that extremely minute quantities exist, even if they are mathematically negligible.

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These solutions, which have been presented and compared here only in broad, schematic terms, demonstrate the difficulty, if not impossibility, of solving Zeno’s paradoxes of motion; in any case, previous work has not led to any consensus. Both empirically based approaches concerned directly with the practical tasks posed by the paradoxes and mathematical approaches that seek abstract solutions fail.37 In both cases, it remains unclear how the gap can be bridged between a purely abstract, conceptual understanding of space and time on the one hand, and specific, concrete spatial and temporal conditions on the other. Above, it was suggested that the arguments’ paradoxicality is due to the fact that the two ‘levels’ cannot be combined without contradiction, if they are indiscriminately measured against a single standard of validity. This applies both to Zeno’s categorical assumption of an immobile primordial being and to Aristotle’s distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘potential’ existence, which tries and fails to conceptually smooth over the contradictions. The difficulties appear in a different light, however, if they are understood as necessary due to being grounded in the paradoxes’ ‘substance’ or ‘subject matter’ (what Hegel would call the Sache selbst). Zeno attempts to stabilise the concept of self-contained, self-sufficient being as the start and end point of his argument by pointing out contradictions, but he does not consider whether these same contradictions exist within his own theory. We, by contrast, can extend his critique of motion to the presuppositions of ‘pure thought’. Even if, as we have seen in the paradoxes, motion can come to be thought of as contradictory if apparent experiential certainties are viewed through the lens of a priori concepts, Zeno’s arguments do not demonstrate the impossibility of motion as such or the existence of the perfect, immobile being posited by Parmenides’ abstract ontology. As discussed, we will come to this conclusion only if we already suppose it to be valid and consistent in advance of our attempt to prove it.38 While abstract tasks such as ‘infinitely dividing’ a particular segment do mark a limit to what is possible in concrete experience, this is not to say that the universal concept of infinity possesses (as Zeno would claim) a ‘higher reality’ than particular, finite experiences.

37  For a discussion of other proposed solutions, see in particular Grünbaum 1967, Salmon 1970, Vlastos 1975, Barnes 1979 and Ferber 1995. 38  It is here that the ‘abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’ that Hegel diagnoses in Zeno reveals itself. Cf. the start of this section.

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Due to this unresolved question, some commentators on Zeno have suggested it would make more sense to take a different approach. Ferber, for instance, asks not, ‘How can we solve these paradoxes?’ but instead, ‘What conditions must be fulfilled so that these paradoxes no longer arise?’39 In other words, having found the contradictions to be unsolvable, he seeks to avoid them altogether. Underpinning this approach is the belief that the paradoxes are a product of ‘mathematically ideal thought overstepping its bounds’,40 by contrast with Zeno’s claim that they are due to the deceptive nature of sensory reality. Ferber also describes the level-­ switching that we discussed above, whereby theoretically obtained, empirically unverifiable conceptions of space and time are applied to the world of experience based on the tacit assumption that empirical reality should be conceived in logico-mathematical terms. He explicitly shows that the objects of ‘pure thought’, such as the concept of infinity, are the product of a conceptual method that excludes experience, for it is only once they are understood as purely conceptual constructs and their axiomatic conditions have been revealed that we can comprehend the ideal and empirical worlds as such, instead of measuring one by the standard of the other or, as with Zeno, negating it altogether. Accordingly, we can observe that the pure concept of infinity does not correspond to any intuitive object, even though there are real-world phenomena that seem infinite, such as the distance to the stars or the number of possible chess games. However, it is only as conceptual abstractions that they are ‘infinite’, and these abstractions are not subsumed into experience.41 Thus, Zeno’s attempts to reduce the world of experience to mental processes can be turned against ‘pure thought’ itself. Since contradictions only arise when concrete experiences are viewed through the lens of abstract concepts, we could even make the extreme claim that they exist

 Ferber 1995, p. 50.  Ibid., p. 65. 41  Ferber cites the mathematician Hilbert on this point: ‘As regards the concept “infinite”, we must be clear that “infinite” does not have an intuitive [anschauliche] meaning and without closer examination no sense whatsoever. For there exists everywhere only finite things.’ Elsewhere, Hilbert remarks, ‘The infinite divisibility of a continuum is an operation only present in thought, only an idea, which is refuted by our observations of nature and the discoveries of physics and chemistry.’ Cited in Ferber 1995, pp. 59–60. 39 40

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only in our thoughts or imagination, and have no meaning in reality.42 This displacement of the paradoxes does not solve the question of how to mediate between pure thought and empirically based approaches; the two kinds of knowledge remain opposed. And so to begin with we are left only with the critique that their dialectic cannot be resolved one-sidedly in terms of the presupposed identity of ‘self-thinking thought’. Now that Zeno’s conception of the unrestricted validity of pure thought, by contrast with the relativity of all human experience, has been turned against its creator, it remains to be seen what status motion, until now relegated to non-being, will assume if it is accepted as a knowledge-­determining principle. Another ancient thinker, Heraclitus, formulated a philosophy of becoming and change that appears to reject any rigid being and thus to be directed against Zeno and Parmenides. However, in the next chapter I shall instead focus on a more recent thinker, Bergson, and his conception of the ‘being of motion’. For while Heraclitus opposed being not to becoming but to nothingness, and understood becoming and being as dialectically related, Bergson and his methods, as I interpret them, represent a more direct contrast to the objectivist claims of pure thought.43

42  ‘Where the paradoxes actually play out, they do not exist. They only exist where they do not actually play out. But the paradoxes have to be solved where they actually play out, at the physical-empirical level. However, since they do not exist there, they do not need to be solved there either. Someone who still attempts to do so is not only misunderstanding fictional problems as real ones, but projecting assumptions onto the physical-empirical world of space and time that are clearly refuted by that world.’ Ferber 1995, p. 63. 43  On Heraclitus, see also the following assessment by Bloch: ‘Heraclitus’ becoming is coming-to-be [Werde-Sein], and even this view he does not hold absolutely: he describes the appearance of calm as a temporary equilibrium between opposites (as in a drawn bow); he allows that we can step in the same river at least once (it was only his student Kratylos who took the famous saying further and asserted that we cannot step in the same river even once). For Heraclitus, in every moment the world is at once in a state of unrest and in transition [to or from] a state of rest.’ Bloch 1972, pp. 25–26.

CHAPTER 3

Being of Motion (Bergson)

Bergson is one of Zeno’s most trenchant critics. Epistemological critiques of the Eleatic thesis of immobile being can be found at many points in his major works.1 Bergson precisely inverts the one-sided relation between being and temporal change proposed by the Eleatics. Rather than proceeding from a dogmatic conception of immutable being, he holds the content of reality to be determined by pure intuition of duration. This fundamental Bergsonian idea emerged out of his inquiry into the scientific concept of time in mechanistic theoretical models: I noticed, to my great surprise, that scientific time has no duration [ne dure pas], that nothing would be changed in scientific knowledge of things if the totality of the real was deployed all at once, instantaneously, and that positive science consists essentially in the elimination of duration.2

Duration (durée), or the possibility of perceiving it, plays a central role in Bergson’s thought. By contrast with scientific conceptions, he defines 1  See, in the order of their original publication, Time and Free Will, 1910, pp. 112–115, 240; Matter and Memory, 1911, pp.  250–253; An Introduction to Metaphysics, 1912, pp. 53–54; Creative Evolution, 1922, p. 325ff.; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1935, p. 167; The Creative Mind, ‘Introduction (part I)’, 1946a, p. 16ff., and ‘The perception of change’, 1946c, pp. 166–167. 2  Bergson in a letter to William James dated 9 May 1908, cited in Bergson 1972, pp. 765–766 (English translation from Sinclair 2020, p. 11).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Bockrath, Time, Duration and Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7_3

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time in terms of processes of consciousness (Time and Free Will), its relation to matter (Matter and Memory) and the ‘vital impulse’ (Creative Evolution), and cultural-historical phenomena (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion). One important point for the present discussion is that Bergson does not simply develop an abstract metaphysics of duration and change that reaches different conclusions than proponents of ontological immobility only by changing the premises, but otherwise mirrors the circular argumentative structure of Zeno’s paradoxes. Instead, Bergson focuses on the processual character of reality, so as to avoid the inadequacies of attempts to capture it in fixed, rigid concepts. One way he demonstrates these inadequacies is by reference to ‘actual movements’. In the next section we shall consider what these movements consist in and what implications they might have.

3.1   Differences in Spatial and Temporal Perception Bergson follows in the tradition of modern philosophy’s turn towards the self. But unlike Descartes, he denies that the self only attains certain knowledge of its own existence after first radically doubting it. According to Bergson, the apparently unshakeable certainty of the mind that thinks itself, which enables the Cartesian dualism between thinking and extended substance, blinds us to the fact that there is a structural difference between the concrete experience of the self and conceptual representations of it. He argues that every actual instance of movement differs from its symbolic representational form, since the process of change cannot be intellectually comprehended or spatially fixed. By sharp contrast with Descartes’ rationalist definitions of substance, Bergson believes that it is possible to grasp movement directly and prereflectively ‘without any interposed concept: we shall find it simple and all-of-a-piece’.3 On his view, it is movement’s uninterrupted dynamism, that is, ‘change itself’,4 which is substantial. Moreover, it is not bound to any particular bearers or spatial conditions. This conception of change as duration is fundamental to Bergson’s entire philosophical programme, right through to his later work. Rather than a spatially determined order of isolated states, it describes a flux of interpenetrating elements: 3 4

 Bergson 1946a, p. 15.  Ibid., p. 16.

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It is not the ‘states’, simple snapshots we have taken once again along the course of change, that are real; on the contrary, it is flux, the continuity of transition […] let us restore to movement its mobility, to change its fluidity, to time its duration.5

This position is directly opposed to Zeno’s attempts to divide the duration of movements into individual points in time, each of which occupies a definite position in space that makes it precisely predictable and calculable. Although being able to exactly divide up spatial relations has undeniable advantages, Bergson believes the fundamental flaw of this approach is that it fails to capture relations of duration. Although it is possible to delimit individual paths of movement and divide them into segments— that is how we measure time, for instance, with the second hand of a clock making sixty identical movements a minute—according to Bergson, this spatialised time is not the same as its ‘pure duration’, which has no precise outlines and lacks ‘any affiliation with number’.6 On Bergson’s understanding, duration is more like a melody, in which the rhythmic organisation of the individual notes gives the piece as a whole its unique quality. If a single note were removed or added, it would change the overall impression: not in terms of a measurable, homogeneous relation, but rather as an interplay of mutually penetrating moments.7 If Bergson is right that the measurement of time must be distinguished from its duration, this prompts the question of why, on both everyday and scientific conceptions of time, ‘rhythmic arrangements’ and ‘enduring impressions’ can apparently be unproblematically reduced to abstract numerical relations.8 Since the answer to this question also provides a key to solving Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, it needs to be shown how, on Bergson’s view, we have the illusionary impression that fluid, constantly changing time can be measured using universal, purely abstract criteria. An obvious starting point would be to consider the measurement instrument itself. For Bergson, the observable movements of a clock are  Ibid., pp. 16–17.  Bergson 1910, p. 104. 7  Bergson frequently uses examples of music and hearing to illustrate his understanding of duration. See for instance Bergson 1910, pp. 105–106; 1911, pp. 134–135; 1946b, pp. 85 (where he makes reference to Alfred North Whitehead), 102; 1946c, p. 176. 8  ‘The duration lived by our consciousness is a duration with its own determined rhythm, a duration very different from the time of the physicist, which can store up, in a given interval, as great a number of phenomena as we please.’ Bergson 1911, p. 272. 5 6

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prima facie nothing more than changes in the spatial position of the hands and pendulum. Importantly, in each moment only one determinate position can be perceived and identified. When we follow the movements of a clock hand with our eyes, we add up the perceived positions or strokes, that is to say, we count ‘simultaneities’.9 Since the individual movements repeat regularly without any surprises, we can easily set them in relation to each other and measure their number. On closer inspection, however, we are not measuring time or duration, but giving a conventional description of singular states that only appear to be related to other states because the self links different perceptions together: It is because I endure in this way that I picture to myself what I call the past oscillations of the pendulum at the same time as I perceive the present oscillation. Now, let us withdraw for a moment the ego which thinks these so-­ called successive oscillations: there will never be more than a single oscillation, and indeed only a single position, of the pendulum, and hence no duration. Withdraw, on the other hand, the pendulum and its oscillations; there will no longer be anything but the heterogeneous duration of the ego, without moments external to one another, without relation to number.10

On Bergson’s view, duration is dependent on the self’s internal perception. Although he ascribes material things their own duration in his second work, Matter and Memory,11 the spatially separated movements of hand and pendulum can, crucially, only be grasped as continuous by a conscious observer who remembers the past. According to Bergson, the constant rhythm of the measuring instrument gives us a false sense of a homogeneous measurement of time, which on closer inspection turns out to be possible only because I combine the individual moments ‘within myself’.12 The clock does not measure duration when it divides its ­apparent  Bergson 1910, p. 108.  Ibid. 11  Bergson 1911, pp. 274–275. At several points in his later works, Bergson uses the example of sugar dissolving in a glass of water to illustrate the (unconscious) duration of matter, with the melting of the sugar serving as an expression of the subjective time in which I wait for it to melt. See Bergson 1922, p.  10, and 1946a, p.  21. Bergson speaks explicitly of ‘diverse durations’ in his ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, at one extreme of which is the ‘eternity of life’, the ‘concretion of all duration’, and at the other ‘the pure repetition by which we shall define materiality.’ Bergson 1946d, pp. 220–221. 12  Bergson 1910, p. 108. 9

10

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magnitude into constant, identical segments; rather, the divisions on the clockface are prima facie nothing more than spatial visualisations or conventional symbols, which possess a merely static and thus external significance. At first glance, this seems unobjectionable. Treating time as a measurable magnitude is, after all, very useful in social life, allowing actions and processes to be precisely coordinated. But according to Bergson, if we look more closely a host of problems will become apparent. These problems are manifested in the illusory idea that our inner experience of time, which ‘constitutes true duration’,13 can be exactly measured. In subjectively experienced time, by contrast with homogeneous, spatially measured time, the successive moments interpenetrate one another and lose the character of seemingly isolated states. The ‘heterogeneous duration of the ego’ mentioned in the passage above refers to a process of constant change, of which we are able to form an (albeit indistinct) idea only thanks to our conscious perception and memory.14 Unlike the measurement of time, where individual temporal points are arranged spatially (that is to say, simultaneously and side by side) on a clockface, duration is perceived as a continuous process of succession, with the individual phases of inner experience being unique and unrepeatable. Each new moment has a specific quality, but the boundaries of individual moments blur and merge together rather than their being neatly separated. On this view, it is therefore impossible to say where exactly a moment begins and ends, which is why Bergson only very rarely speaks of individual moments and instead uses the metaphor of time’s ‘flow’ or life’s ‘movement’.15 The dichotomy between temporal duration and spatial extension is central and ineliminable for Bergson. The opposing conception of spatially measured time, by contrast, leads to the above-discussed confusions between temporal succession on the one hand and spatial simultaneity on

 Ibid.  Since conscious perception itself is constantly changing, it is both subject and object of this process. Bergson therefore holds that although consciousness has direct access to the flow of change, it cannot pin down precise moments or draw exact distinctions: ‘Our consciousness tells us that when we speak of our present we are thinking of a certain interval of duration. What duration? It is impossible to fix it exactly, as it is something rather elusive.’ Bergson 1946c, p. 178. This is why ‘we find it extraordinarily difficult to think of duration in its original purity’. Bergson 1910, p. 106. 15  See for instance Bergson 1946a, p. 16, and 1946d, p. 208. 13 14

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the other,16 fluid transition and static ordering, heterogeneous uniqueness and homogeneous repetition. Bergson believes that the unique quality and creative power of the ‘heterogeneous duration of the ego, without moments external to one another’,17 can only be comprehended once time as duration has been disentangled from space—that is to say, only once we acknowledge a difference not of degree but of kind between conditions of being and existence. For while the elements of the spatial world are juxtaposed without succession, like the divisions on a clockface, the inner world is characterised, in Bergson’s rather baroque formulation, by ‘succession without mutual externality’.18 He strives to restore the inner subjective experience of living ‘duration within us’19—the experience, familiar but disguised by external processes such as measuring time, that time itself changes. The distinction between inner and outer is to be taken entirely literally, as it is equivalent to the ideal-typical distinction Bergson draws between the durational life of consciousness on the one hand and the rigid order of spatial states on the other, with the latter barring us from attaining our ‘fundamental’20 or ‘genuine’ self.21 Emphasising the fundamental difference between temporal and spatial relations allows Bergson to set out his conception of a living, creative duration, by way of contrast from mechanistic ideas of causally determined

16  Bergson uses the term ‘simultaneity’ (simultanité) to convey the idea that there is ‘some inexpressible reason’ in external things ‘in virtue of which we cannot examine them at successive moments of our own duration without observing that they have changed. […] Thus in consciousness we find states which succeed, without being distinguished from one another; and in space simultaneities which, without succeeding, are distinguished from one another, in the sense that one has ceased to exist when the other appears.’ Bergson 1910, p. 227. 17  See the quotation corresponding to footnote 10. 18  Bergson 1910, p. 108. 19  Ibid., p. 226. Cf. p. 239. 20  Ibid., pp. 129 and 166. 21  Ibid., p. 233. Elsewhere, Bergson speaks of the ‘deep-seated’ or ‘deeper’ self by contrast to the ‘superficial ego’. Ibid., p. 125. This distinction between ‘two different selves’ extends Bergson’s fundamental separation of the inner and outer worlds to the level of subjective experience. While the spatially alienated subject lives ‘for the external world’ and only perceives the ‘shadow which pure duration projects into homogeneous space’, by ‘deep introspection’ we can ‘grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in duration has nothing in -common with juxtaposition in homogeneous space.’ Ibid., p. 231.

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natural necessities.22 Motion and change play an important role in this conception as expressions of duration, and so we need to look at Bergson’s arguments against the thesis of immobility, which purport to show—by reference to specific examples such as motion in space—that the ‘paradoxes of the Eleatics’23 arise due to erroneously conflating temporal and spatial representations. Only by doing so can we better understand the ‘mobility of duration’.24

3.2   Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion as Antinomies of Stasis As we saw in the first chapter, Zeno gives arguments for the immobility of being based on assumptions both of the continuity and the discreteness of time and space, and concludes that in both cases motion cannot be conceived without contradiction, and hence is not just unreal but impossible.25 Since he reaches this conclusion from two very different premises, his critique even seemed prima facie compelling. It was only when we considered the claim that the world of experience could be sublated into ‘pure thought’ that we were ultimately led to turn the paradoxes of motion against their creator and understand them as contradictions in the ‘abstract identity of the understanding’ that Zeno presupposes as valid. In his critique of Zeno, Bergson also touches on the question of which general features or concepts should be used to analyse movement. Drawing on the traditional contrast between the categories of unity and multiplicity (which is similar to Zeno’s conceptual distinction between continuity and discreteness), he points to an apparently irresolvable difficulty: If we take duration under the simple aspect of a movement being accomplished in space and if we try to reduce to concepts movement considered as representative of time, we shall have on the one hand any desired number of 22  It is notable that Bergson distances himself from the vitalist notion of an ‘internal finality’ of nature: ‘the “vital principle” may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally, while mechanism invites us to ignore that ignorance.’ Bergson 1922, pp. 44–45. 23  Bergson 1910, p. 240. 24  Bergson 1946d, p. 217. 25  On the assumption of the continuity of space and time in Zeno, see the section on the dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes in the previous chapter; on the assumption that space and time are discrete, see the section on the arrow and stadium paradoxes.

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points of the trajectory, and on the other hand an abstract unity joining them, like a thread holding together the beads of a necklace. Between this abstract multiplicity and this abstract unity their combination, once assumed to be possible, is some strange thing in which we shall find no more shadings than the addition of given numbers in arithmetic would allow.26

The comparison to arithmetic indicates that the relation between unity and multiplicity requires clear definition, for it is hard to conceive how the two concepts could occur together given their antithetical character.27 But even used in isolation, they are poorly suited to proper analysing the duration of a movement. For if we analyse a movement solely in terms of its unity, ignoring the individual moments out of which it is composed, then we will only obtain an abstract idea or, as Bergson puts it, ‘an immobile substratum of the moving reality’.28 Although this kind of motion is not confined by internal or external limits, since the continuity Bergson ascribes to it excludes right from the outset the possibility of any distinction between individual elements, the form of infinitude involved here is by definition merely conceptual, the ‘eternity of a concept’,29 which is incompatible with the assumption of an autonomously changing duration. If, to avoid this difficulty, we instead turn our attention to the aspect of multiplicity, we will encounter a similar problem. Although the assumption of a number of discrete moments is compatible with that which is ‘really durable in duration’,30 and is supported, for instance, by the fact that movements must pass through multiple points along their path, this spatial conception of motion also, as Zeno shows, allows the number of points or moments that must be traversed to be extended infinitely, so that  Bergson 1946d, p. 218.  Elsewhere, Bergson notes the dual character of unity and multiplicity in our conception of number: ‘Every number is a collection of units, as we have said, and on the other hand every number is itself a unit, in so far as it is a synthesis of the units which compose it.’ Bergson 1910, p. 80. However, it should be borne in mind that he is talking here about two different senses, with the ‘collection of units’ (i.e. multiplicity) pertaining to the process of counting and the ‘synthesis of units’ to the already formed number. Any number, once formed, can be broken back down into individual parts, but this does not change the fact that unity and multiplicity express different properties that have in common only that they require us to think of number as a ‘juxtaposition in space’. Ibid., p. 85. 28  Bergson 1946d, p. 219. 29  Ibid., p. 220. Bergson also speaks here of the ‘the eternity of death, since it is nothing else than movement emptied of the mobility which made up its life.’ Ibid., p. 219. 30  Ibid. 26 27

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once again duration disappears.31 Endlessly combining individual elements thus leads to the same result as infinitely extending them: motion gives rise to stasis. Although the philosophical categories of ‘unity’ and ‘multiplicity’ attempt to capture certain aspects of motion from opposing perspectives, Bergson regards them as strangely abstract and empty, especially once we consider their further conceptual consequences. He therefore takes Zeno’s stance against the finiteness of human experience, and in favour of the ‘eternity’ and ‘infinity’ of conceptual thought, as an occasion to criticise the limitations of concepts themselves, namely, their rigidity and detachment from reality.32 However, we shall not consider this aspect further here. What interests us, rather, is how Bergson inverts Zeno’s paradoxes into their precise opposite and reveals them to be ‘antinomies of stasis’. For if there is indeed a fundamental difference between spatial orderings and durational changes, then the contradictions that become apparent when ‘we place ourselves outside [movements] in order to recompose their becoming’33 can be attributed to this particular mode of approach. Let us begin with the dichotomy and Achilles paradoxes. As we have seen, in both cases Zeno assumes that a body or bodies in a state of rest must have traversed a certain distance that is composed of an infinite number of individual moments and stages. In the dichotomy argument, this leads to the conclusion that the intervals we conceived of could not be traversed, because they get smaller and smaller until they finally become unextended points, thus apparently ruling out the possibility of motion right from the outset. For Bergson, however, this way of looking at things involves a ‘retrospective absurdity’ which merely proves ‘that it is impossible to construct, a priori, movement with immobilities, a thing no man 31  Bergson uses the vivid metaphor of a ‘dust of moments not one of which has duration, each one being instantaneous’. Ibid. 32  See, for instance, the following remark (which encapsulates one of the core tenets of his philosophical programme): ‘It is understood that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thought from the mobile reality; but there is no means whatever of reconstituting with the fixity of concepts the mobility of the real.’ Bergson 1946d, pp.  223–224. Elsewhere he writes, ‘Concepts, in fact, are outside each other, like objects in space; and they have the same stability as such objects, on which they have been modelled […]. They are, therefore, not images, but symbols. Our logic is the complete set of rules that must be followed in using symbols.’ Bergson 1922, p. 169. On the inadequacy of concepts to grasp relations of duration, see also Bergson 1910, pp. 129, 160–161 and 164–165; 1911, p. 159; 1946a, pp. 12 and 31–32; 1946b, pp. 55, 62ff., 83–84 and 93–94; 1946d, pp. 195–199. 33  Bergson 1922, p. 322.

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ever doubted.’34 Reversing the burden of proof allows him to restrict the claims to infinitude made by ‘pure thought’, and define their specific field of application. The insights and knowledge obtained by purely abstract reasoning may apply independently of all experience, but this does not mean they also apply to ‘real movements’.35 Since Bergson believes that the conditions of concrete experiences are wholly subsumed into the experiences themselves, he does not distinguish between the ‘undivided fact’36 of a movement and the general conditions of its possibility. Even if ‘pure thought’ leads us to assume more comprehensive conditions of experience, Bergson claims that the immediately given qualities of ‘living reality’ cannot be reconstituted with ‘concepts that are rigid and ready-made’.37 Modern mathematics, the ‘science of magnitudes’,38 has the advantage of being able to yield exact results (whose production shows them to be something that has become, not simply something ready-made). But Bergson believes mathematics is unsuited as the standard for knowledge in general, since quantity is always quality’s ‘limiting case’, always ‘nascent quality’.39 While Zeno quite logically infers from the spatial extension of a distance to be traversed that it comprises an infinite series of points and divisible segments, Bergson believes it is important to distinguish between the space that is being moved through and the presently unfolding movement itself. He regards the latter as ‘an undivided fact, or a series of undivided facts’,40 while the distance covered during this movement is prima facie merely one possible way of visualising it. On Bergson’s view, this distinction, as overly subtle as it may appear at first glance, already contains the core of the whole problem. For a spatial stretch or line, however precisely it measures the distance between two points, cannot represent the duration that elapses in the performance of a movement. As the symbolic  Bergson 1911, p. 251.  Ibid., p.  254. Elsewhere, he speaks analogously of ‘the mobile reality’. Bergson 1946d, p. 223. 36  Bergson 1911, p. 251. 37  Bergson 1946d, p. 224. 38  Ibid., p. 225. 39  Ibid. Bergson explicitly differs on this point from Kant, who in his inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of experience gives ‘pure mathematics’ and ‘pure natural science’ as examples of pure synthetic cognition a priori. Kant 2004, p. 26. In modern terminology, these two fields roughly correspond to the disciplines of mathematical logic and theoretical physics. 40  Bergson 1911, p. 251. 34 35

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expression of this duration, it remains separate from the process of movement itself, as is clear among other things from the fact that the movement does actually change, while its path remains rigid and immobile: You substitute the path for the journey, and because the journey is subtended by the path you think that the two coincide. But how should a progress coincide with a thing, a movement with an immobility?41

The ‘journey’ has its own, specific duration and is presented to our consciousness as an ‘undivided whole’.42 This experience undoubtedly underlies our initial reflexive rejection of the contradictory conclusions that result from mentally dividing up movements until they are static, for it can easily be shown that a distance can only be traversed if movement actually takes place. Accordingly, Zeno’s assumption will come out as absurd if we do not, as the dichotomy paradox requires us to do, divide a movement into individual segments, but instead perform it ‘with a single indivisible stroke’.43 Although it is possible to interrupt a journey at any chosen point, in that case we would be performing a different, discontinuous movement. But as plausible as this objection may appear at first glance, it does not yet touch on the distinction Bergson draws between the elapsing duration of a movement and its spatial visualisation. What happens if we conceive a process of movement in spatial terms, that is, as a transition from one point to another, and what exactly is misleading about conceiving it this way? Answering this question is made more difficult by the fact that the fallacious reasoning identified by Bergson is generally not recognised as such. Habitually, we project an act of movement onto space and latch onto the points the moving body passed through, that is, we comprehend durational change as juxtaposition in space. We have already seen above how temporal sequences are captured on the face of a clock without any account being taken of the fact that ‘it is quite possible to divide an object, but not an act’.44 This makes it all the more important for Bergson to clearly disentangle the ‘intermingling’45 of intensive sensations of mobility and extensive representations of space. The external element of every  Ibid., p. 248.  Ibid. 43  Bergson 1922, p. 327. 44  Bergson 1910, p. 112. 45  Ibid. In the same passage, Bergson also uses the term ‘endosmosis’. 41 42

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movement requires a certain space to traverse a distance. But the process of movement itself requires a certain duration, which ‘has no reality except for a conscious spectator’.46 It still needs to be shown how Bergson’s theory of pure perception allows us to conceive of movement without reference to space. At this stage, we can already observe that the illusory intermingling of space and duration begins at the point where spatially juxtaposed things meet with the successively occurring perceptions of consciousness. At this ‘intersection of time and space’, durational movements and changes appear to be connected, in a ‘homogeneous medium’,47 to clearly separated external things and states. However, Bergson believes this connecting link leads to a spatialised, and hence contradictory, conception of movement devoid of duration and mobility. If we follow Bergson’s view, the central problem of the dichotomy paradox is that movement is analysed according to the external standard of spatial relations of magnitude. Only on this assumption, i.e. only given a standard rooted in a ‘need [for] immobility’,48 does it appear to be impossible to traverse spatial distances. If, however, we instead turn our attention to the ‘interior organization of movement’,49 we will be able to grasp its temporal duration while avoiding the impossible task of trying to compose merely mental snapshots of a movement into the movement itself. For however many individual points along the path of a movement we piece together in thought, we will not be able to counterfeit or replace ‘the real and undivided movement of the mobile’.50 Accordingly, Bergson argues that the empty space presupposed by Zeno in the dichotomy argument is merely a conceptual model, ‘not parts of the thing’ but ‘elements  Ibid., p. 111.  Ibid., p. 110. On this connection between space and time in the ‘present [which] moves forward unceasingly’, see also Bergson 1911, pp. 183ff., 196–197 and 211. 48  Bergson 1946c, p.  169. Later, Bergson expands further on this need: ‘We have an instinctive fear of those difficulties which the vision of movement as movement would arouse in our thought; and quite rightly, once we have loaded movement down with immobilities.’ Ibid., p. 171. 49  Bergson 1911, p. 251. 50  Bergson 1946d, p.  214. Bergson also gives another example: ‘You have sought the meaning of a poem in the form of the letters which make it up, you have thought that in considering an increasing number of letters you would finally embrace the constantly fleeting meaning, and as a last resource, seeing that it was no use to seek a part of the meaning in each letter, you have assumed that between each letter and the one following was lodged the missing fragment of the mysterious meaning!’ Ibid., p. 215. 46 47

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of the symbol’.51 This would entail that the apparent paradox of motion is nothing more than a paradox of this particular symbolic, spatialised way of representing motion. Bergson fundamentally assumes a difference in kind, not merely degree, between the mobile reality of duration and the rigid forms of its symbolic representation.52 This distinction is also central to his critique of the Achilles paradox. Zeno is only able to disregard the steps actually taken by Achilles and the tortoise because he divides up the path they must traverse on the basis of mathematical laws. If we were instead to ask Achilles how he was able to catch up with the tortoise, he might give the following answer: Zeno insists that I go from the point where I am to the point the tortoise has left, from that point to the next point it has left, etc., etc.; that is his procedure for making me run. But I go about it otherwise. I take a first step, then a second, and so on: finally, after a certain number of steps, I take a last one by which I skip ahead of the tortoise. I thus accomplish a series of indivisible acts. My course is the series of these acts. You can distinguish its parts by the number of steps it involves. But you have not the right to disarticulate it according to another law, or to suppose it articulated in another way.53

However, pointing out ‘that the tortoise has the pace of a tortoise and Achilles the pace of Achilles’54 does not yet explain why any other way of dividing the course can be ruled out from the outset. As realistic and plausible as Achilles’ fictional answer may seem at first glance, it does little to counter Zeno’s possible objection that the ‘law of pure thought’ licenses him to make other distinctions. As we have seen, this law imposes no limits on formal analysis and calculation. Bergson’s objection that ‘Zeno’s device is to reconstruct the movement of Achilles according to a law arbitrarily

 Ibid.  Bergson writes of differences that go to the ‘essence of things’ and so protect us from incorrectly posed problems. Bergson 1922, p. xi. This leads Deleuze to the intriguing view that Bergson’s ‘method of division had a Platonic inspiration’. Deleuze 1991, p. 124. 53  Bergson 1946c, pp. 170–171. 54  Bergson 1911, p. 252. Elsewhere, Bergson speaks, with reference to the different movements of the two racers, of the ‘natural articulations of the two courses’. Bergson 1922, p. 328. 51 52

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chosen’55 is based on the assumption (which underpins all Bergson’s work) that mathematical and scientific laws do not apply to relations of duration.56 In other words, Zeno’s arguments only lead to the above-described difficulties because he applies ‘the mechanism of our intellect’ and ‘use of artificial signs’57 to ‘real movements’ in a manner that is practical and customary, yet nonetheless strictly speaking improper.58 For Bergson, there is nothing prima facie objectionable about dividing a path or course into however many segments of length we like. These operations of division can be carried on infinitely, and mathematically can be shown to converge on a limiting value of zero. However, the relations of length and magnitude calculated in this manner only give information about the momentary positions and states of moving bodies, but not about their movements, ‘which cannot occupy space, being duration rather than extent, quality and not quantity’.59 The movements themselves, he argues, are not tied to any fixed bearers, since every spatial object can at least potentially be divided and

 Ibid.  ‘Thus mathematics confines itself to its own province as long as it is occupied with determining the simultaneous positions of Achilles and the tortoise at a given moment, or when it admits a priori that the two moving bodies meet at a point X—a meeting which is itself a simultaneity. But it goes beyond its province when it claims to reconstruct what takes place in the interval between two simultaneities; or rather it is inevitably led, even then, to consider simultaneities once more, fresh simultaneities, the indefinitely increasing number of which ought to be a warning that we cannot make movement out of immobilities, nor time out of space.’ Bergson 1910, pp.  114–115. As we have seen, attempting to solve the paradoxes mathematically by calculating limiting values leads to similar problems. Although we can precisely determine the point at which Achilles would catch the tortoise, the question of whether this actually happens cannot be answered solely by reference to approximate values that mathematicians can operate with. See the discussion of this point in relation to the Achilles paradox in Sects. 2.1 and 2.3. 57  Bergson 1946b, p. 44. 58  See footnote 35. Elsewhere, Bergson claims, with positivist élan, ‘Those are the ways of thinking we use in practical life; it is particularly essential to our industry that our thought should be able to lag behind reality and remain attached, when need be, to what. Was or to what might be, instead of being absorbed by what is.’ Bergson 1946e, p. 115. 59  Bergson 1910, p. 114. 55 56

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segmented.60 And for Bergson it is only a small step from conceiving of inert ­matter as the material bearer of changes to making the contradictory attempt to quantify relations of duration in general. It is therefore unsurprising that, on his view, all attempts to measure and calculate movement fail to make contact with their ostensible object; because they eliminate duration as the ‘essential and qualitative element’,61 they consider only the traversed space and the simultaneities that occur there. As we saw earlier with regards to measuring time, Bergson believes that the interval of a movement exists only for a conscious observer, who perceives past and present in a process of constant change, while ‘outside ourselves’62 there exist only spatially fixed and delineated states. To clarify the distinction between these two approaches, Bergson gives the following example: That the interval of duration itself cannot be taken into account by science is proved by the fact that, if all the motions of the universe took place twice or thrice as quickly, there would be nothing to alter either in our formulae or in the figures which are to be found in them. Consciousness would have an indefinable and as it were qualitative impression of the change, but the change would not make itself felt outside consciousness, since the same number of simultaneities would go on taking place in space.63

While consciousness must actually live through the measured or calculated intervals of time and movement to obtain an impression of their duration, the scientific measurement of this duration is strangely abstract and disconnected from reality. Although the ‘motions of the universe’ that Bergson speaks of here have their own unique speeds and rhythms, just as 60  ‘Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded.’ Bergson 1946b, p. 39. The ‘uninterrupted thrust of change’, meanwhile, always ‘adher[es] to itself in a duration which extends indefinitely.’ Bergson 1946a, p. 16. Contra the assumption of a strict causality of physical events, as in Newtonian mechanics, Bergson believes there are dynamic transitional forms that, due to their spontaneity and contingency, elude any attempt to pin them down precisely. His opposition to static conceptions of substance is consonant with the profound shifts that were emerging in the natural sciences at the time he was writing his first major work (Time and Free Will); in electrodynamics, for instance, the spatial concept of mass was replaced with ideas of dynamic interrelationships. See also Bergson’s own discussion in 1946b, pp. 301–303. 61  Bergson 1910, p. 115. 62  Ibid., p. 116. 63  Ibid.

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the two racers in the Achilles paradox run at different paces, mathematical analysis strips away these peculiar features in order to synchronise them and combine them in a single moment. Concrete experiences of movement and the effects of time, such as the irreversible direction of temporal progressions, are eliminated and transposed into mathematical equations as positive or negative magnitudes. Although this does not produce false results, the price for focusing on spatial rather than temporal relations is that time is reduced to simultaneity and movement to immobility. Bergson believes that this way of treating ‘moments which are identical or external to one another’64 fails to connect with its intended object, since consciousness lines up objects in space side by side and neatly divided, whereas movements can only be experienced in their own unique articulation by disregarding spatial relations and homogeneous representations of time. This is presumably what Bergson means when he describes Achilles’ running as a “series of indivisible acts” and denies Zeno the right ‘to disarticulate it according to another law’.65 Bergson similarly criticises the presupposition of motion as discontinuous. As Zeno demonstrates in the arrow and stadium arguments, movements cannot be pieced together from individual points of motion. At a given moment, he argues, a flying arrow can only be at a definite point along its path and not already somewhere else. He concludes from the fact that the arrow must necessarily be still at a given point in its path that it must be still throughout the whole duration of its movement, since even if all the points of rest through which the arrow must pass are lined up without gaps, they would remain static. Bergson rebuts this conclusion by arguing that the moving arrow is never situated at a particular point: The arrow never is in any point of its course. The most we can say is that it might be there, in this sense, that it passes there and might stop there. It is true that if it did stop there, it would be at rest there, and at this point it is no longer movement that we should have to do with.66

There is thus nothing contradictory about the act of simple, indivisible mobility that the arrow displays ‘with a single stroke, although over a  Ibid., p. 120.  See the text corresponding to footnote 53. Also of interest in this regard is Bergson’s critique of mechanics’ analysis of uniform and variable motion, in which it is ‘a question only of spaces once traversed and of simultaneous positions once reached’. Ibid., p. 119. 66  Bergson 1922, p. 325. 64 65

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certain extent of duration’.67 Rather, the problems are once again due to Zeno equating the unfolding act of movement with the space through which the arrow moves, which necessarily lacks mobility and duration. Like the earlier distinction between journey and path, Bergson radically separates the event of movement from its external manifestation, making no attempt at mediation between them. This allows him to distinguish the ‘internal organization’68 of a movement, that is to say its specific articulation, continuity and duration, from the properties that an ‘observer’ who keeps ‘outside the movement’69 will perceive only as rigid spaces, points and segments. Although it is not possible to perceive the flight of an arrow other than by observation, we can adopt the duration of the movement ‘by thought’.70 This reference to thought may initially seem surprising; the idea Bergson is attempting to express is that we can directly apply comparable experiences of movement to other instances of motion. For instance, Bergson observes that whenever someone ‘lifts an arm or advances a step’, We feel then indeed that the line passed over between two stops is described with a single indivisible stroke, and that we seek in vain to practise on the movement, which traces the line, divisions corresponding, each to each, with the divisions arbitrarily chosen of the line once it has been traced.71

It is important that Bergson understands this ‘feeling’ as a conscious experience. As we saw above, when he imagined Achilles himself explaining the actual sequence of his steps during the race, Bergson believes it is possible to directly access inner experience or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘immediate consciousness’.72 However, this should not be understood merely in the sense that we possess certain and infallible self-knowledge due to our natural transparency to ourselves (a view made highly questionable by psychoanalysis). Rather, Bergson holds the stronger view that immediate consciousness is connected to ‘all the real change and movement that [the material universe in its entirety] contains’.73 In other words, Bergson believes that not just the movements of the self but also  Ibid., p. 326.  Ibid., p. 327. 69  Ibid. 70  Ibid. 71  Ibid. 72  Bergson 1946b, p. 36. 73  Ibid., p. 37. Bergson also speaks of the ‘intuition of the vital’. Ibid., p. 36. 67 68

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‘duration’, or the ‘becoming’ of reality,74 are accessible to conscious experience. This view, which has far-reaching epistemological implications, merits closer examination in connection with his theory of ‘pure perception’, as it suggests that it is at least possible for there to be ‘a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen’.75 We shall return to this point later; for the present purpose of understanding Bergson’s critique of Zeno’s arrow paradox, it suffices to ask how the movement of an object that can initially only be perceived from the outside is able to become a ‘subjective fact’ or ‘purely internal state’.76 For if the duration of a movement is connected neither to a bearer nor to an external cause, then we need to consider how exactly it enters into, or is absorbed by, consciousness. Based on a strict distinction between durational events and their outward manifestations, Bergson holds sensations of mobility to be purely qualitative and immaterial.77 ‘Sensations, feelings, passions, [and] efforts’78 are of little use if we wish, say, to give a universally valid analysis of how a movement comes about or what course it takes. But since their ‘pure duration’ cannot be found either in spatial states or corresponding quantitative or numerical relations, the obvious place for Bergson to seek it instead is in the ‘depths of consciousness’.79 The ‘multiplicity of our inner states’80 also harbours that ‘which is essential’ to movement: namely, its ‘mobility’.81 So it is unsurprising that Bergson also refers to the ‘pure duration’ of movement as ‘duration within us’.82 What, however, is gained by this ‘turn to the self’? Even if we put aside for the moment the question of the external conditions of ‘self-sufficient’83 states of consciousness, there is still the problem of how to understand the ‘pure quality’ or ‘internal duration’84 of consciousness. For as a purely mental faculty or, as Bergson puts it, a  Bergson 1922, p. 288.  Bergson 1946b, p. 36. 76  Bergson 1910, p. 1. 77  On the concept of ‘pure quality’, see in particular ibid., pp. 46, 90, 137 and 225. 78  On these ‘states of consciousness’, see ibid., p. 1. 79  Ibid., p. 73. 80  Ibid. 81  On this essentialist characterisation of movement, see Bergson 1922, p. 96. 82  Bergson describes ‘duration within us’ as, among other things, ‘a qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number’, whereas the duration that exists outside of us is ‘the present only, or, if we prefer the expression, simultaneity’. Bergson 1910, pp. 226–227. 83  Ibid., p. 72. 84  Bergson 1946b, p. 35. 74 75

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‘direct vision of the mind by the mind’85 the conscious sensation of a movement can only be conceived as the movement of a conscious sensation. And since this change of consciousness is supposed to be neither spatially nor physically determined, what status it does have still needs to be explained. In order for ‘pure duration’ to count as a ‘state of consciousness’86 independent of external causes, a rigorous distinction is needed between the world of the senses and the world of the mind.87 So far, we have considered only what the implications of such a distinction would be; Bergson attempts to draw it based on the ‘intensity’ of mental states.88 A key role is played here by the sensation of mobility, where there seems to be an obvious causal connection between perceptible stimuli and inner experience. It therefore serves as one of the examples Bergson uses to develop his own opposing conception. To this end, he analyses sensations of various sorts under dual quantitative and qualitative aspects, concluding that spatial magnitudes have no effect on the ‘intensity within [us]’.89 Since this ‘bifurcation of the world’ calls both our habitual experiences and mechanistic, physicalist interpretations of these experiences into question, the arguments Bergson gives for it should be considered in a little more depth. On our everyday conceptions of the magnitude and intensity of sensations, there is no doubt that ‘acquired perceptions’90 are affected by external influences: the greater a stimulus acting on a conscious body, the more intense the resulting sensation will feel. A weightlifter who attempts to lift successively heavier weights in a competition will feel the exertion increasing relative to the load. This increase is experienced as a growing expenditure of effort, with the sensation of exertion eventually giving way to feelings of pain and exhaustion. Thus, the quantity of the weight being lifted has a direct effect on the sensations felt by the weightlifter. And since a similar relation can be observed for efforts of will, it makes sense that  Ibid.  Bergson 1910, p. 225. 87  Bergson speaks of the need to ‘clarify’ psychical ideas by removing the ‘intrusion of the sensible world’ and the ‘obsession of the idea of space’. Ibid., p. 224. 88  On this topic, see in particular the first chapter of Time and Free Will: ibid., pp. 1–74. 89  ‘If magnitude, outside you, is never intensive, intensity, within you, is never magnitude.’ Ibid., p. 225. 90  Bergson uses this term (attributed to ‘the Scottish philosophers’, presumably meaning Shaftesbury and Hume) to denote ‘the states of consciousness which represent an external cause’. Ibid., pp. 72–73. 85 86

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physical exercises are also used in educational settings to achieve the desired psychological effects.91 This idea is also supported by a wealth of examples and empirical evidence showing that perceptions and sensations can be linked to external causes, which can sometimes be measured with extreme precision. Bergson himself mentions sensations of temperature, light and sound, where we can easily make sense of the idea that they are caused or modified by external stimuli.92 After all, both everyday and scientific experience tells us that differences in temperature directly affect our sensations of warmth, changes in brightness our sensations of colour and differences in volume our sensations of sound. Bergson does not deny such correlations. But he considers attempts to quantify (changes in) felt qualities to be problematic. For even within the context of causal explanatory hypotheses, it is unclear what is actually being added when an external stimulus elicits an affective response. Only certain states are observable, calculable and predictable, and can be set in relation to each other as magnitudes. Although this makes it possible to express a difference between two temperatures in exact terms, rather than merely by reference to a person’s sensations of warmth or cold, it remains unclear what the ‘interval which separates them’93 consists in. Trying to explain it by reference to new, ever smaller arithmetical or measurement units will lead to similar difficulties to those encountered in the attempt to define movements in terms of infinitesimal magnitudes. Adding together states and magnitudes only allows us to calculate mathematical differences, but fails to capture the actual transitions and changes manifested in

 This applies both to modern forms of bodily discipline and to systematic training processes. See for instance the discussion of ‘docile bodies’ in Foucault 1995, pp. 135–169 and the philanthropic theory of Körperbildung (‘body education’) in König 1989, pp. 68–104. 92  On these examples, see Bergson 1910, pp. 43–60. Sensations of taste and smell are discussed on pp. 39–40. 93  Ibid., p. 66. 91

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movements and sensations. Bergson therefore regards the translation of sensations into magnitudes as a conventional, arbitrary ‘act of thought’.94 On this view, experimental confirmations of the apparent connection between extensive causes and intensive effects are based on the false assumption that both domains are measurable and calculable in the same way. Even if we expend great technical and intellectual effort on studying the smallest of changes, the results will fail to tell us anything about the sensations themselves. Empirical studies based on quantitative measurements simply reaffirm the theoretical explanatory framework already presupposed as valid. According to Bergson, the data and figures obtained by such studies are not measures of, or ‘plain facts’ about, ‘pure experience’, but rather expressions of a circular self-confirmation of quantitative methods. Pointing to measurements of temperature, volume and brightness does not confirm the supposition that the sensations corresponding to them can also be measured. Rather, it is the other way round: when we draw on relevant empirically obtained results, we presuppose their measurability to be valid.95 But Bergson claims there is ‘no point of contact’96 between sensations and magnitudes, and so inner states cannot be 94  Ibid. In support of this point, Bergson cites Jules Tannery, who wrote in an 1875 article for the Revue scientifique that ‘It will be said, for example, that a sensation of 50 degrees is expressed by the number of differential sensations which would succeed one another from the point where sensation is absent up to the sensation of 50 degrees. […] I do not see that this is anything but a definition, which is as legitimate as it is arbitrary.’ Tannery cited in Bergson 1910, p. 67. If we also bear in mind that extreme sensations, such as feelings of pain at high and low temperatures, become increasingly similar, then although this process can be mathematically modelled by introducing negative signs, allowing positive and negative magnitudes to be compared, it remains unclear whether a sensation can be adequately expressed by a negative sign. For although assigning the value of 0 to the ‘absence of a sensation’ as the extreme negative limiting value makes the problem mathematically tractable, in reality such a state, a sensation of non-sensation, cannot be conceived without contradiction. For Bergson, sensation is thus an ineliminable precondition for possible states of consciousness. He regards the abstract idea of ‘the nought’ or ‘the void’ as meaningless, ‘for we cannot imagine a nought without perceiving, at least confusedly, that we are imagining it, consequently that we are acting, that we are thinking, and therefore that something still subsists’. Bergson 1922, pp. 290 and 294. Bergson appears to be expanding the Cartesian ground of existence to also include sensation and action. This subjective method for assuring ourselves of our own existence is, incidentally, very similar to the ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’ in Rousseau’s Émile (1979). 95  On the circular relation between theoretical assumptions and experimental proofs, see Bergson 1910, p. 70. 96  Ibid.

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adequately represented by external stimuli. Where this is done anyway, ‘a symbolical interpretation’97 transforms experienced changes into fixed representations and abstract schemas. For Bergson, this shift in perspective involves a fundamental, though barely noticed, change in our understanding of the object, in which the quality of an event is stripped away in favour of measurable and calculable properties. What is regarded from the perspective of inner experience as an overcome obstacle becomes, when viewed from the outside, a numerical specification of weights lifted, distances traversed or times achieved.98 Bergson regards these quantitative measurements not as ‘parts of the thing’ but ‘elements of the symbol’.99 Accordingly, he believes that intensity should be understood under a dual aspect. As ‘pure quality or qualitative multiplicity’100 it refers to durational, conscious states of sensation, which overlap and intermingle. But it also manifests as a ‘compromise’101 between qualitative and quantitative properties, where the precise measurability of spatial magnitudes appears to replace the lost ‘pregnance’ (to use Cassirer’s terminology) of their subjectively felt effects. Measuring quantities and setting them in relation to one another increasingly drains ‘subjective facts’102 of significance until finally—in mathematics, ‘the realm of pure quantity’103—sensations are fully replaced by symbolic expression. Bergson also notes a fundamental difficulty that arises with the common characterisation of sensations as more or less intense. As already noted in relation to different sensations of temperature, defining intensity as an increasing or decreasing relation of magnitude gives the false impression that a felt qualitative difference corresponds to the numerical difference used to designate the transition between two states. Similarly, the idea that an increase in pain corresponds to the measurable growth of an external stimulus rests on the tacit assumption that a definite number of other sensations can be inserted between two sensations. And as illuminating as the correlation between inner sensation and outer stimulus may appear at first glance, Bergson believes that, in addition to the above-discussed inadequacy of attempts to conceive  Ibid., p. 69.  We might think here of ‘cgs’ sports, in which distances, weights and times are measured and compared. 99  Bergson 1946d, p. 215. 100  Bergson 1910, p. 224. 101  Ibid. He also uses the term ‘hybrid concept’. Ibid., p. 225. 102  Ibid., p. 1. 103  Ibid., p. 204. 97 98

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change in terms of infinitesimal magnitudes, quantitative approaches fail to account for the fact that whereas relations of space and magnitude can only be expressed in terms of elapsed time, sensations endure and constitute a ‘continuity of flow’.104 In the former case, we are dealing with fixed states or isolated snapshots that must already have occurred in order to be understood as connected.105 It is only the reconstructing gaze that allows different events to be viewed together, with the consequence that individual or contextual shifts in meaning are either grasped under universal concepts or discounted as merely contingent and peripheral. This synthesis is thus predicated on concepts geared towards homogeneous, self-contained objects. On this conception, the difference between two sensations of pain would be defined such that under comparable circumstances we can expect outcomes that are at least similar, if not exactly the same. However, according to Bergson this comes at the cost of reducing objects to the properties they share with others, which is only possible if their particular duration is disregarded. Neither the characteristic quality of a sensation of pain (that is, its spatially ungraspable direction, rhythm and resonance, which Bergson metaphorically describes as ‘giv[ing] the tone’),106 nor the time in which it unfolds, can be fixed. All attempts to express and explain its specific constitution in terms of exact numerical relations and abstract concepts will therefore fail,107 since they treat inner and outer events as if they lack their own duration and can be caught ‘as in a net’ from ‘passing reality’.108 And although it is possible to exclude mobility and duration from concepts by ‘plac[ing] ourselves in the immobile’,109 there is no way 104  Bergson 1946d, p. 192. In the same passage, he describes this phenomenon as ‘a succession of states each one of which announces what follows and contains what precedes’. Importantly, on Bergson’s view time itself is also constantly changing: ‘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.’ 105  This also applies to predictions of future events, which are made by reference to relevant past experiences. 106  Bergson 1910, p.  35. ‘We shall not compare a pain of increasing intensity to a note which grows louder and louder, but rather to a symphony, in which an increasing number of instruments make themselves heard.’ 107  For a critique of these symbolic forms of expression, see Bergson 1946d, p. 223ff. 108  Ibid., p. 223. 109  Ibid.

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of ‘reconstituting with the fixity of concepts the mobility of the real’.110 It is only by neglecting enduring time in favour of elapsed time—that is, as Bergson would see it, only by detemporalising time—that it falsely comes to seem as though the intensity of internal states is identical to the external properties of the forms in which they are expressed. But for Bergson, extension, divisibility and quantifiability are merely spatial properties that presuppose the validity of a homogeneous conception of time that does not, in fact, apply to the ‘region of subjective facts’.111 Even though Bergson rigorously rejects ‘pseudo-problems’, which he claims are ‘born of a confusion of duration with extension’,112 and concludes on this basis that the intensity of a sensation is not reducible to extensive causes and relations of magnitude, the question of the interaction of inner and outer states remains. For although Bergson regards enduring sensations and their spatial expressions as fundamentally distinct, he does acknowledge that there can be ‘high degrees’113 of pure, self-­ sufficient states of consciousness. Sensations like anger, joy, love, shame, disgust and desire are felt in the body even when the body is not regarded as their cause. There are also states that are scarcely conceivable without reference to the body, such as pain or the above-mentioned sensations of movement and temperature. If even these sensations ‘do not occupy space’114 and cannot be explained in terms of spatial properties, then it must be shown how the physically palpable effects of sensations can be stripped away so that only their pure quality and duration remain. One difficulty is that there are a ‘larger or smaller number of simple psychic phenomena ‘that we are able only to ‘conjecture’.115 By contrast with acquired perceptions, in which the quality of an effect is conceived in terms of the magnitude of its external causes, the ‘delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness’116 are a spontaneous, disorderly chaos. Bergson clearly distinguishes these ‘confused’117 sensations  Ibid., pp. 223–224.  Bergson 1910, p. 1. 112  Bergson 1946a, p.  29. For a further distinction between different types of pseudo-­ problems (problèmes inexistants) see Bergson 1946e, p. 113. 113  Bergson 1910, p. 30. 114  Ibid., pp. 32–33. 115  Ibid., p. 73. 116  Ibid., p. 132. 117  Ibid., pp. 73 and 126. This is presumably one reason why Bergson comes to the tautological view that ‘the intensity of e.g. a deep-seated feeling is nothing else than the feeling 110 111

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from acquired experiences and representations, comparing them to dreams and instincts where ‘the communicating surface between the ego and external objects’,118 though not entirely inactive, is at least restricted. It is thus unsurprising that the affects and obscure drives of ‘unsophisticated consciousness’119 remain inexpressible, particularly given that durational changes cannot be adequately expressed in fixed concepts. Bergson calls for an analysis of these ‘fluid inner states’,120 but such an analysis hardly seems possible if we take it to mean a method based on criteria of rationality; we shall return to this point later when we look at the method of ‘pure perception’. First, however, we need to show how Bergson understands the relation between space/the body and sensations, especially those sensations that do not emerge out of the ‘depths of consciousness’;121 based on what has been said up to this point, the intensity of these sensations can likewise only be conceived as spaceless and bodiless. An important point here is that Bergson assumes a gradation of inner experience. For instance, he distinguishes ‘deep-seated feelings’ from ‘acute or violent emotions’ that are (very literally) ‘projected outwards’ as ‘peripheral sensations’.122 The more reflective a feeling or the more deep-­ seated an affect, the less it will be connected to physical and spatial phenomena. A feeling of great tension, palpable on the surface of the body by virtue of an increased heart rate, faster breathing and sweaty hands, will only diminish if we are able to sublimate the associated sensations, that is, to divert them from outside to inside. This is, presumably, what Bergson means when he writes that peripheral sensations will give place to inner states; it will be no longer our outward movements but our ideas, our memories, our states of consciousness of every description, which will turn in larger or smaller numbers in a definite direction.123

Although on Bergson’s own view, inner states cannot be adequately expressed by specifying a spatial direction, he uses the distinction between itself.’ Ibid., p. 185. 118  Ibid., p. 126. 119  Ibid., p. 129. 120  Ibid. 121  Ibid., p. 8. 122  Ibid., p. 31. 123  Ibid.

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‘inner’ and ‘deep-seated’ on the one hand and ‘outward’ and ‘peripheral’ on the other to describe not just degrees of intensity of sensations but also differences ‘of state or of nature’.124 Bergson is referring here to the larger or smaller number of intersecting, interpenetrating ‘elementary psychic phenomena’125 that accompany individual sensations. While simple sensations are generally self-contained and do not set other stirrings of inner experience in motion, affects that are richer in ideas transport us into deep-seated states, with the ‘successive intensities’ corresponding to the ‘changes of state occurring in us’.126 On Bergson’s view, the depth of a feeling puts us into a state of inner mobility that does not correspond to any external movement. In other words, the particular quality of an affect corresponds to its depth; the less it is subject to spatial or physical influences, the purer and less adulterated it will be.127 Despite their purity and ‘original complexity’,128 the intensity of mental states retains an indefinable quality, since material forms of expression are unable to precisely capture their lived significance for us. Bergson thus uses the vague image of an all-pervading warmth and brightness in order to at least gesture at the ‘quality or shade’ of a ‘fundamental emotion’ and distinguish it from attempts at exact definition.129 But if only metaphors, symbols and images seem apt for expressing the significance of inner states, this prompts the question of whether states that are more closely aligned to the ‘outside’ can be defined more precisely. Since ‘peripheral sensations’  Ibid., p. 17.  Ibid., p. 18. 126  Ibid. Bergson elucidates the connection between the depth and contentual richness of sensations using the example of aesthetic feelings. Interestingly, in the discussion of moral feelings that follows immediately after, he speaks of the possibility of ‘qualitative progress’ in sensations. See ibid., pp. 18–19. This makes it clear (if it was not already) that the difference between ‘inner’/‘outer’ and ‘deep’/‘peripheral’ should be understood as normative in nature. 127  See for instance the following remark by Bergson: ‘It follows from this analysis that the feeling of the beautiful is no specific feeling, but that every feeling experienced by us will assume an aesthetic character, provided that it has been suggested, and not caused.’ Ibid., pp. 16–17. For Bergson, art’s suggestive power is based on giving us an impression rather than an expression of feelings. This means that the various arts primarily work on us at an internal level and transport us into a state of dreamlike forgetting, so that their precise form of expression becomes less and less relevant. See ibid., p. 13ff. 128  Ibid., p. 18. 129  Ibid., p. 8; for further discussion of this point see pp. 7–11. There are other famous examples of philosophers using light to symbolise the expression and origin of knowledge, such as Plato’s allegory of the cave (Plato 1998, Republic, 514a–517a). 124 125

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are closer to spatial and physical forms of expression, it seems it might be possible to demonstrate clearer connections between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in these cases.130 But Bergson right from the outset rules out the possibility of a transition between qualitative and quantitative aspects, and instead holds the opposing view that even physically palpable sensations are to be understood only as an expression of purely inner states. The separation between durational and spatial relations is perceived as a ‘a series of transitions, and, as it were, differences of degree’, whereas ‘really there is a radical difference of nature’.131 Bergson illustrates this idea by reference to the sensation of movement, which like touch is situated on the surface of the body132: When I lift a light weight with my arm, all the rest of my body remaining motionless, I experience a series of muscular sensations each of which has its ‘local sign’, its peculiar shade: it is this series which my consciousness interprets as a continuous movement in space. If I afterwards lift a heavier weight to the same height with the same speed, I pass through a new series of muscular sensations, each of which differs from the corresponding term of the preceding series. Of this I could easily convince myself by examining them closely. But as I interpret this new series also as a continuous movement, and as this movement has the same direction, the same duration and the same velocity as the preceding, my consciousness feels itself bound to localize the difference between the second series of sensations and the first elsewhere than in the movement itself.133 130  See also the following remark by Bergson: ‘the further we penetrate into the depths of consciousness, the less right we have to treat psychic phenomena as things which are set side by side.’ Bergson 1910, pp. 8–9. This implies, conversely, that the closer we come to the surface of consciousness, the more that psychic phenomena will appear like things, and thus the less vague and confused they will be. 131  Bergson 1935, p. 181. In the passage in question, Bergson explains the relation between myth and religion by reference to differences of nature and degree. One is reminded of Plato’s opposing pair of unbridgeable separation (chôrismos) and potential participation (methexis), which gives expression to the peculiar dialectic of being and becoming. Although Bergson expressly distances himself from Plato at various points, he too uses contradictory and contrary oppositions to illustrate differences of nature and degree. 132  In the traditional ranking of the senses, the sense of touch (tactus) is placed at the lower end of the value scale due to its proximity to the body’s surface; sexual connotations also undeniably play a role. See for instance Aristotle 2000, Nicomachean Ethics, book III, chap. 13, 1118a–1118b. The other senses are (at least traditionally) ranked according to whether they enable perception of objects distant from the body (sight and hearing) or close to it (smell and taste). On this topic, see Jütte 2005, pp. 65–83. 133  Bergson 1910, pp. 49–50.

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While the ‘movement itself’ pertains only to the quality of a single movement, its magnitude can only be determined by comparison with other movements. Since the subjective sensations of lightness and heaviness do not offer up any suitable standard against which they can be precisely measured, other, external features are required to establish commonalities and differences. The mind therefore abstracts away from the particular features of a movement, such as the individual expenditure of effort, with its rising and fading muscular sensations and the rhythmic interplay of the participating organs, and instead attends to spatial properties. This allows the differences between externally similar movements to be reduced to measurable differences in the weights that are being lifted. The assumption of homogeneous movements in homogeneous space tacitly presupposes that the progression of a movement ‘felt from within’134 can also be expressed and represented by precisely determinable relations of magnitude. However, this flatly contradicts Bergson’s previous remarks about the intensity of ‘purely inner states’. He therefore holds that the qualitative impression of a ‘heavy movement’135 is only compatible with the idea of a ‘sensation of increase’, not with an ‘increase of sensation’.136 Although both these phrases make explicit reference to relations of magnitude, switching the word order entails more than just a change of emphasis, for while an ‘increase of sensation’ presupposes the validity of the spatial character of ‘inner states’, such that it can be expressed—apparently unproblematically—in terms of the magnitude of the stimuli causing the sensation, a ‘sensation of increase’ refers precisely to the ‘interface’ between internal impressions and external influences. Since Bergson does not deny that certain sensations are accompanied by physiological phenomena, which in his view are neither the cause nor effect of inner states but at most their spatial expression, this prompts the question, ‘in what does our perception of its intensity exactly consist?’137 For insofar as, on the one hand, inner states of consciousness are, as Bergson repeatedly stresses, pure, ‘self-sufficient’138 sensations, but on the other, as in the case of ‘heavy movements’, extend to the ‘surface

 Bergson 1922, p. 96.  Bergson 1910, p. 50. 136  Ibid., p. 48. 137  Ibid., p. 24. 138  Ibid., p. 72. 134 135

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of the body’,139 this gives rise to the contradictory impression that they are simultaneously immaterial and physical. There would be no objection to a contradictory conception of this sort if it served to overturn apparent certainties and reveal their dialectical significance.140 However, since Bergson, as noted above, regards the ­‘interface’ (as we termed it) between internal duration and external magnitude as an insurmountable barrier that precludes any form of mediation right from the outset, he is forced to understand even physically palpable phenomena, such as an increase in exertion, as an inner event. He gives the example of a paralytic who vainly attempts to lift his immovable leg yet still feels the requisite sensation of effort.141 This phenomenon could be seen as proof that the sensation of exerting force is independent of the muscular exertion associated with it. This supposition could be supported by conceiving the force as the action of an inner faculty or a pure effort of will prior to its physical manifestation,142 which would reinforce Bergson’s assumption of the particularity of mental states that unfold spatially without occupying space. But this kind of distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, which closely resembles the Cartesian dualism between thinking and extended substance, would entail a one-sided dominance of mind over matter. For if, as Descartes writes, the calculating rational will ‘in order to exist, has no need of any place nor depends on any material thing’,143 it is only a small step from there to conceiving of the body as a machine analysable in terms of purely physical laws. Bergson emphatically  Ibid., p. 24.  One might think here, for instance, of the ‘skeptical method’ of Kant’s Critique of Reason, which attempts to learn from contradictions instead of deriving certainties from abstract postulations or ideal-typical definitions. On this productive approach to contradictions, see Kant 1998, A 424/B 452. 141  On this example, see Bergson 1910, p. 21, where he refers to Wilhelm Wundt’s studies of physiological psychology. Interestingly, the approach that came to be known as the ‘phenomenology of the sensing body’ (Leibphänomenologie) often attempts to understand the particular features of bodily perception by considering pathological phenomena. For a more detailed exposition of this method, see Merleau-Ponty 2005, p. 123. 142  See for instance David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ‘It may be said, that we are every moment conscious of internal power; while we feel, that, by the simple command of our will, we can move the organs of our body, or direct the faculties of our mind.’ Hume 2007, p. 60. 143  Descartes 1998, p. 19. This formulation anticipates the Kantian ‘I think’, which combines ‘all the manifold of intuition’ under ‘the original synthetic unity of apperception.’ Kant 1998, B 132 and B 137. 139 140

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rejects this rationalist vision of humans as machines, so he is forced to understand the relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ differently.144 He opts for a surprising approach, attending first not to the depths of the psyche but to the visible surface of the body: When a paralytic strives to raise his useless limb, he certainly does not execute this movement, but, with or without his will, he executes another. Some movement is carried out somewhere: otherwise there is no sensation of effort.145

According to this passage, the paralytic’s sensation of movement is not merely an error or figment of imagination, but an impression of actual muscular movements at very different points on the body; the person might, for instance, involuntarily clench their non-paralysed fist, contract their chest muscles, close their glottis, knit their brows or clench their jaw. As well as these directly observable phenomena, the sensation of effort is also influenced by a complex interplay of ones that are less immediately obvious, such as skin resistance, which can only be demonstrated using special methods of measurement. For Bergson, it is important, firstly, that the feeling of effort only occurs when corresponding changes in bodily states begin and not when the ‘rational will’ becomes conscious of its ‘internal power’. Secondly, it follows from this that ‘the apparent consciousness of a greater intensity of effort […] is reducible, in reality, to the perception of a larger surface of the body being affected.’146 This view, supported by many examples and experiments, is fully in accord with positivist explanations that deliberately exclude ‘inner states’ because we cannot say anything about them with certainty. However, Bergson does not want to limit his gaze to what is empirically observable. Rather, it is only by attending to the ‘surface of the body’ that he is able to distinguish the spatially conceived phenomenon of increase from the ‘deep-seated feelings’ uninfluenced by external things.147 For although Bergson’s talk of a ‘sensation of increase’ supposes a relation between inner states and outer appearances, once again there is no clear mediation between them. The sensations of a ‘heavy movement’, i.e. the fluid 144  For a critique of the ‘metaphysical interpretation of modern science’ by Descartes and other thinkers, see Bergson 1922, pp. 365–375. 145  Bergson 1910, p. 22. 146  Ibid., p. 24. 147  Ibid., p. 27.

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transitions between ease at the start followed by exhaustion and pain, are accompanied by a lesser or greater number of muscular movements, but since, on Bergson’s view, the particular quality of these transitions is not reducible to material states, thereby ruling out the possibility of an ‘increase of sensation’ right from the outset, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between the apparent site of their occurrence on the one hand and their actual significance on the other, which cannot be grasped in spatial terms. Not least for this reason, Bergson understands the consciousness of increasing muscular exertion as a ‘twofold perception’ of, on the one hand, ‘a greater number of peripheral sensations’ and, on the other, ‘a qualitative change occurring in some of them’.148 Strictly speaking, however, Bergson’s talk of the ‘number of peripheral sensations’ is misleading, unless the body itself is understood as a sensory organ with its own perceptions and memories.149 In that case, an ‘intersection of mind and matter’150 would be at least conceivable. Since this point will be dealt with in more depth later, for now it shall suffice to say that for Bergson, sensations have a dual character: as inner states, they refer to the pure quality or intensity of elementary mental phenomena, independently of the material expressions that accompany them. As material expressions, meanwhile, they refer to the external relations and quantitative proportions in which changes manifest spatially, which for Bergson means abstractly and devoid of quality.151  Ibid., p. 26.  While the body as a sensory organ has been the subject of both philosophical and scientific studies, memory in the sense meant here refers to a faculty that is not merely cognitive, but also involves processes that, as in Nietzsche’s dramatic description of mnemo-technique, work directly on the body and are remembered by it: ‘One burns something in so that it remains in one’s memory; only what does not cease to give pain remains in one’s memory.’ Nietzsche 1998, p. 37. 150  Bergson uses these words to describe memory. Bergson 1911, p. xii. 151  Although Bergson does not refer directly to Marx, the similarity with the latter’s definition of the twofold character of commodities is striking: ‘Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value. Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. […] As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value.’ Marx 2011, pp. 42–44. 148 149

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This contrast shows that the interface between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is also ambiguous, depending on whether we focus on the ‘number of peripheral sensations’ or their ‘pure quality’. Although Bergson one-­ sidedly emphasises the difference between inner quality and outer magnitude, and the insurmountable barrier between them, the attention he gives to ‘superficial efforts’152 shows that the question of the mediation between the two sides has not been solved, nor can it be suspended. Since physically palpable phenomena cannot simply be stripped away from sensations to obtain their pure quality, this means that the assumption that the world can be strictly divided in two is questionable even within the logic of Bergson’s own argument. His legitimate criticism of the unquestioned equation of quantitative and qualitative properties, especially in the ‘exact’ sciences, leads him to overemphasise the differences that supposedly exist between them, thus ruling out the possibility of complex, multilayered connections and transitions rather than a merely abstract dualism.153 Linguistically ambivalent constructions such as ‘sensation of increase’ or ‘peripheral sensations’ give expression to this problem, but it is not construed in terms of possible interactions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, even though Bergson goes on to remark that concrete movement ‘capable, by repeating itself, of engendering sensible qualities, already possesses something akin to consciousness, something akin to sensation’.154 Before we discuss this expanded perspective on the ‘relation between body and mind’,155 let us sum up why on Bergson’s view Zeno’s paradoxes of motion should be understood as antinomies of stasis. As we will recall, in the stadium paradox156 Zeno conceives of the time required to traverse distances as a dependent and thus changeable magnitude. If space itself becomes a relative and changeable magnitude that can be divided however we see fit or infinitely extended, then ultimately time too will lose its  Bergson 1910, p. 27.  We might think here, for instance, of touching our own hand, hearing our own voice or seeing our own image. In these cases, we are neither apprehending a merely external object nor is there a pure, wholly self-reflexive process of consciousness. Rather, these sorts of dual sensations make reference both to self and other, with the sensing subject and sensed object mutually conditioning each other but without being identical. On this topic, see Bockrath 2001, pp. 30–42. 154  Bergson 1911, p. 329. 155  Cf. the original French subtitle of Matter and Memory (Bergson 1911), ‘Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit’: ‘an essay on the relation of body and spirit’. 156  Bergson regards the stadium argument as the most instructive ‘because the postulate masked in the three others is here frankly displayed.’ Bergson 1911, p. 252. 152 153

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continuous, durational character. Bergson therefore regards Zeno’s conclusion that ‘half a given time is equal to double that time’157 (something that flies in the face of all experience) as the product of a view which ‘leaves real duration on one side, and considers only its objective track in space’.158 The same applies to movements; if they are analysed in terms of their external properties, they likewise lose their duration and mobility. Although, as we have seen, the progression of a movement can be easily reconstructed from the positions of the unmoving points along its path, doing so subtly transforms or objectifies it, replacing the flow of movement with a static image of flow. Since Zeno’s paradoxes all concern spatialised intuitions of movement, whose claim to validity requires their object to be immobilised, it becomes clear that for Bergson it is not the possibility of movements that is in question, but rather artificial attempts to pin them down in thought.159 In Zeno’s arguments, this artificiality is heightened by extending the spaces in which movement unfolds into infinity, thereby ruling out any idea of the ‘flow of time’ or ‘duration of consciousness’ from the outset. However, since this method involves counting ‘simultaneities’ and ‘units of duration’, which could be ‘spread out all at once in space without [the physicist] having to change anything in his science or to cease talking about time’,160 the paradoxes of motion ultimately turn out to be paradoxes of stasis. For while the duration of a movement can be felt in the ‘flow of time’ as an irreversible relation with its own tempo and rhythm, interrupting this flow and dividing it into segments however the observer sees fit eliminates concrete temporal effects.161 For Bergson, it is immaterial whether these segments are infinitely small or  See the passage corresponding to footnote 22 in Chap. 2.  Bergson 1911, p. 253. 159  Bergson describes movement as ‘an indisputable reality’, and considers the ‘division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines’ to be ‘artificial’. Ibid., pp. 254 and 259. 160  Bergson 1922, pp. 356–358. 161  ‘What is important to the physicist is the number of units of duration the process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves […]. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that matter, for we do not count extremities of intervals, we feel and live the intervals themselves.’ Bergson 1922, pp. 357–358. On the differences between the actual experience of time and the analytical, scientific reconstruction of temporal relations, see also Bourdieu 1990a, p. 81ff. It is striking that in his writings on a ‘logic of practice’, Bourdieu uses examples that can already be found in Bergson. For further similarities, see Bergson 1911, p. 248 and Bourdieu 1976, p. 141 or Bergson 1946d, pp. 200–201 and Bourdieu 1990a, p. 84. In his final major work, Bergson speaks of a ‘logic of the body, an extension of desire, which comes into play long before intelligence has found a conceptual form for it.’ Bergson 1935, p. 140. 157 158

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large; what matters is that immobile spatial magnitudes cannot be composed together into movements. The worlds of ‘motion in space’ and ‘consciousness with sensations’ thus both involve a certain indivisible duration in which, as Bergson puts it, ‘the successive moments of time’ are linked ‘by a thread of variable quality’.162 Insofar as this remark is directed not just against the exclusion of qualitative properties by ‘pure thought’ but also reveals an intention to take up the ‘thread’ that links inner and outer movements, it must be asked how such a link is possible at all. If, like Bergson, we hold that duration is always already consciousness, which is constantly changing, then it becomes clear that the spatial distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ must likewise be radicalised and conceived as a relation of duration. To assess whether ‘internal duration’ does indeed represent a common tertia from which we can adequately apprehend movements both ‘in space’ and ‘in the flow of time’, we can now turn to Bergson’s reflections on ‘pure perception’ and ‘pure memory’163 in his theory of images.

3.3  Movement-Images and Image-Movements In the opening lines to the preface of the seventh edition of Matter and Memory, Bergson describes the aims and fundamental orientation of his work: This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory. It is, then, frankly dualistic.164

This statement offers little support for the prospect of adopting ‘internal duration’ as the ‘connecting thread’ or ‘common tertia’ between outer and inner relations; the dualism between mind and matter seems insurmountable. Even memory, despite being characterised as ‘the point of contact between consciousness and things’,165 appears to affirm rather than revoke this division of reality. Elsewhere, by contrast, Bergson  Bergson 1911, pp. 267–268.  See for instance Bergson 1911, pp.  69–73 and 170–176. See also the more detailed discussion in Sects. 3.4 and 3.5 below. 164  Bergson 1911, p. vii. 165  Ibid., p. 70. 162 163

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famously proposes that, disregarding particular habits of thought and perception, we seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience.166

Although a fuller explanation of what is meant by a ‘source of experience’ shall have to wait until later, this second quotation makes clear that Bergson considers it at least possible to overcome the dualism between body and mind. However, the distinction between the mode of ‘reality’ in the first quotation and that of ‘possibility’ in the second implies that a unification is only conceivable ‘above that decisive turn’, and no true mediation between the two poles is possible in human experience prior to that turn. Thus, right from the outset Bergson explains the antithesis between body and mind in terms of different levels of experience, rather than an inherent contradiction in their relation. We should bear this dual character in mind as we explore the relation between matter and memory, particularly given that it exemplifies a typical feature of Bergson’s thought. Let us begin with the real experiences below or this side of the ‘decisive turn’. This is also Bergson’s point of departure: We will assume for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter and theories of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world.167

By contrast with the earlier-discussed distinction between the quality of internal states and external things, Bergson now turns his attention to the epistemological relation between conscious and unconscious processes.

 Ibid., p. 241.  Ibid., p. 1. This does not, however, alleviate the ‘complexity of some parts of the present work’, as acknowledged by Bergson himself in the introduction to Matter and Memory. Bergson 1911, p. xvi. As shall become clear later, in Bergson’s theory, like in other Ursprungsphilosophien (‘philosophies of origin’), the conditions of knowledge are only apparently immediately given. The ‘complexity’ is attributable in part to the ‘contradiction’ that (as Adorno writes in reference to Husserl) ‘there should be found, openly or disguised, a doctrine of being disposed before all subjectivity and lifted above its critique, but with reference back to that very subjectivity which had denied the doctrine of being as dogmatic.’ Adorno 2013a, pp. 5–6. 166 167

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Following the ‘simple convictions of common sense’,168 he supposes human experiences to originate with sensory perceptions, which immediately raises the question of how the ‘reality of matter’ can act on us with ‘actions of every kind’.169 Bergson does not deny that perceptions are not simply identical with their objects. On his view, it is possible to perceive objects ‘where they are, in themselves and not in me’,170 so that objective properties are construed as properties of the objects themselves. But the same applies to images of objects that are represented without being present. In that case, the ‘physical qualities’ are replaced by a mere faded impression of them, which acquires concrete significance ‘in relation to an eventual vision and an eventual contact’.171 Although perceptual and representational images are oriented, in virtue of their actual or potential relation to experience, towards ‘objective reality’,172 for Bergson they remain incomplete and only show a segment of the whole, for every concrete and abstract image is ‘bound up with all other images’.173 This is not just a matter of a quantitative difference between the complete ‘image of the universe’174 on the one hand and images rooted in experience on the other. On Bergson’s view, present representations and images are also connected to past and future ones, and are thus to be conceived as enduring. Since, moreover, this relation (as shown by the paradoxes of motion) is located not in the things themselves but ‘in ourselves’,175 it is clear that we cannot have ‘a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous’.176 Bergson therefore rejects both the naive  Bergson 1911, p. 38.  Ibid., p. 30. 170  Ibid., p. 59. 171  Ibid., p. 26. Bergson by no means wishes to disparage or deny scientific ideas. Indeed, it is striking how often he engages with biological, physical and psychological theories in his writing. So it is unsurprising that on his view both external perceptions and abstract representations can communicate a realistic picture of reality. His reference to ‘an eventual vision and an eventual contact’ shows, however, that this excludes purely conceptual judgements, and that Bergson’s critique of the scientific concept of experience is directed primarily against a one-sided emphasis on the judging intellect as a purportedly reliable source of knowledge. See Bergson 1922, pp. 347–365. 172  Bergson 1911, p.  28. Elsewhere, Bergson speaks of the ‘existence’ of perceived and represented images of material objects. Ibid., p. 27. 173  Ibid. 174  Ibid., p. 4. 175  Bergson writes that we are compelled ‘de facto, to perceive matter in ourselves, whereas we, de jure, perceive matter within matter’. Ibid., p. 80. 176  Ibid., p. 26. 168 169

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realist theory on which images are produced by things independent of us and the idealist conception on which things are produced by our representations. Instead, he holds that images exist both ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, that is, they represent 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’.177 This interim position still does not give a satisfying answer to the question raised in the previous section about the relation between external perceptions and internal representations. For while the former relate to objects in space, the latter are internal states that, like sensations, belong to the ‘region of subjective facts and unextended objects’.178 But before we consider the epistemological status of inner representations, it first needs to be clarified how the ‘totality of the images of the material world’179 is synthesised into individual perceptual images. I shall do so using the example of ‘movement-images’ and ‘image-movements’—as it were augmenting the ‘objectivist perspective’ of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion and anticipating their ‘subjectivist reinterpretation’ by Bergson. For Bergson, there is an obvious connection between perceptions and movements, particularly in simple organisms whose interactions with their environment are reducible to motor responses: When a foreign body touches one of the prolongations of the amoeba, that prolongation is retracted; every part of the protoplasmic mass is equally able

177  Ibid., pp. vii–viii. Taking images, rather than judgements, as his point of departure allows Bergson to relate external objects and internal representations in the manner described above. However, it would be incorrect to read his theory of images primarily as a theory of perception of impressionist painting, in which impressions of a changing, moving world are captured on the canvas with fine dots of paint. Although Bergson’s theory frequently makes reference to the visual arts, questions of aesthetic perception are not the main focus of his interest. For instance, in his writings on intuition it is clear that he does not understand it as an indistinct feeling or obscure hunch, but rather as a reliable method that follows strict rules and strives for precision. Not least for this reason, he primarily seeks out points of connection in the natural sciences, and only secondarily in the arts. On the complementary relation of scientific knowledge and philosophical intuition, see Bergson 1946f, pp. 144–152. 178  Bergson 1910, p. 1. 179  Bergson 1911, p. 30.

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to receive a stimulation and to react against it; perception and movement being here blended in a single property,—contractility.180

‘Contractility’ describes a twofold relation: on the one hand, the organism’s reaction corresponds to the possible effects that it can exert on the objects around it; on the other, it also shows the possible effects of those objects on the organism itself. Accordingly, an organism’s perception is not a passive process, but an active interplay between external stimuli and responses to those stimuli. Bergson therefore describes external perception as a ‘reflexion’181 that acts both internally and externally. One notable thing about this example is that in amoebae, the response directly follows the stimulus. Since perception is translated immediately into a corresponding movement, the relation between external causes and the organism’s reactions is clearly apparent. This relation becomes less clear as the possible perceptions and responses become more complex and mediated. Generally speaking, the more complex an organism’s nervous system, the larger the scope of its perception. While a simple organism is only capable of involuntary reactions caused by centripetal nerves transmitting stimuli to the nerve centres and the centrifugal nerves then relaying movement impulses directly to the periphery of the body, a greater variety and variability of perceptions and responses can be observed in more developed organisms. Rather than reacting mechanically or reflexively to external stimuli, the development of a complex nervous system makes it possible ‘to receive stimulation, to provide motor apparatus, and to present the largest possible number of these apparatuses to a given stimulus.’182 According to Bergson, these functions, which in the higher vertebrates are carried out by the senses, spinal cord and brain, represent ‘merely a

180  Ibid., p.  55. According to Bergson, the interrelationship between perceptions and movements is not just philosophically but also biologically grounded. See also the contrast he draws between life as ‘movement’ and materiality as ‘inverse movement’ and his speculative hypothesis of a ‘vital impetus’ (élan vital) that brings about increasing differentiation of duration in different organisms in Bergson 1922, p. 263–286. 181  Bergson 1911, p. 57. Over thirty years after Bergson, Plessner formulated this dualistic conception in terms of the ‘positionality’ or ‘positional character’ of organic bodies, by contrast with inorganic matter. ‘In the specific modes of “beyond it” [über ihm hinaus] and “against it” [ihm entgegen], the [living] body is picked out from [its being] and related to it, or, more precisely speaking: the body is both outside and inside [its being].’ Plessner 1981, p. 184. 182  Bergson 1911, pp. 20–21.

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difference of complication, and not a difference in kind.’183 Accordingly, extending a peripheral stimulus from the spinal cord to the sensory regions of the cerebral cortex does not create something fundamentally new, but only increases the selection of different possible movements. Bergson emphatically rejects the idea that material stimuli are turned into autonomous, immaterial representations in the higher nerve centres, as this would require a ‘miraculous power’184 and so offer no explanation for how inner impressions are created; if we were to posit such a power, it would then need to be explained where it comes from and how it works, and so the problem would simply have been displaced to a more abstract level. As already shown in our discussion of Zeno, attempting to reduce experiences to pure thought results in irresolvable contradictions between concepts and intuitions, which is why Bergson instead stresses the relation between the production of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ images. For this reason, he understands the brain not as the site or centre of an independent consciousness in which things are mysteriously transformed into representations, but instead to begin with confines his focus to the functions of the higher nervous system. Like a ‘central telephonic exchange’, its primary function is ‘to allow communication, or to delay it’.185 In other words, the brain is like a tool that serves to analyse perceived movements and decide what movements to execute in response. This allows Bergson to comprehend the increasing complexity of nervous systems in terms not of a teleological orientation towards knowledge and truth but rather of activities fundamental to life and survival.186 And so it is unsurprising that he begins

 Ibid., p. 18.  Ibid., p. 19. 185  Ibid. 186  Bergson frequently emphasised the advantages of ‘action’ over ‘mere thought’. In the early twentieth century, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, he wrote optimistically: ‘Human intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plough and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is being ploughed, such is the function of human intelligence.’ Bergson 1922, pp. 201–202. In these words, we can hear not just the educated middle-class man freed from ‘heavy tasks’, but also the philosopher of life not yet burdened by political ‘reality’. 183 184

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his inquiry into the relation between body and mind not with the judging intellect but with the form of conscious image perception. According to Bergson, the production of individual perceptual images out of the ‘totality of the images of the material world’ results ‘from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally for our functions’.187 While an amoeba has little ability to influence which stimuli it is affected by, consciousness has a degree of choice in the matter, ­depending on the given conditions and possibilities. This is true to a certain extent even for simple organisms, whose perceptual limits are likewise geared towards the necessities of life, but these organisms only possess a very limited, unconscious form of perception. Bergson emphasises consciousness’s unique capacity to make spontaneous choices and deliberate distinctions.188 Regardless of individual variations in perceptual limits, neither conscious nor unconscious perception adds anything new to our understanding of an object. To illustrate this point, Bergson compares an object’s possible actions to rays emanating from it. An organism then (subject to its interests and capacities) reflects these rays back, thereby indicating at least the outlines of the object. In this process, objects ‘merely abandon something of their real action in order to manifest their virtual action that is to say, in the main, the eventual influence of the living being upon them’.189 Importantly, there remains a difference between objects and our representations, which Bergson attributes to the organism’s functions and interests. For images, the relation ‘between being and being consciously perceived’190 is limited from the outset or, rather, weakened relative to the degree to which the organism is able to actualise its own potential influence. Images unconsciously act and react ‘by all their elements’,  Bergson 1911, p. 30.  Within the context of evolutionary development, however, this capacity represents only one aspect of ‘life’. Commenting on Darwinism and Lamarckism, Bergson argues that the development of the organic world, measured by similarities and differences of form, is neither fully predetermined nor entirely free: ‘An organ like the eye, for example, must have been formed by just a continual changing in a definite direction. Indeed, we do not see how otherwise to explain the likeness of structure of the eye in species that have not the same history.’ Bergson 1922, p.  91. Accordingly, although the formation of a central nervous system increases an organism’s choices and freedom, for Bergson this represents only an extended capacity that in order ‘to conquer matter’ has had to adapt to new constraints, in particular the ‘habits of matter’. Ibid., p. 282. 189  Bergson 1911, p. 30. 190  Ibid. 187 188

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presenting ‘each to the others all their sides at once’; but this reciprocal relationship is diminished if any of them ‘perceives or is perceived consciously’.191 Bergson summarises this key idea of an epistemic limit as follows: Suppose, on the contrary, that they [the images] encounter somewhere a certain spontaneity of reaction: their action is so far diminished, and this diminution of their action is just the representation which we have of them. Our representation of things would thus arise from the fact that they are thrown back and reflected by our freedom.192

Bergson’s reputation as an ‘irrationalist’ leading a ‘revolt against reason’193 rests on these kinds of remarks, in which he claims that it is precisely our freedom and conscious perception of objects that decisively limits our reception and knowledge of them. Putting that aside, it still remains to be asked why, according to Bergson, it is on this side of the ‘decisive turn’ that objects ‘abandon something of their real action’. By contrast with the Kantian critique of knowledge, in which the problem of experience is attributed to the contradictory relation between conscious forms and intuitive contents, Bergson attends to the apparent contradiction between the ossified forms of matter and the mobile transitions of life. He understands the claim that ‘life is a movement’194 in a sense precisely opposed to the mathematical natural sciences. Instead of causal and empirical explanations, which are oriented towards the spatial forms of matter and thus situated this side of the ‘decisive turn’, Bergson focuses his attention on enduring, changing life, which cannot be grasped or captured by universal concepts. But given that the ‘principle of life’ can only actualise and unfold in the material forms that it itself generates, with ‘each species behav[ing] as if the general movement of life stopped at it instead of passing through it’,195 it becomes clear that every organism is at once an expression of and an obstacle to this process.  Ibid., p. 29.  Ibid. In another context, Bergson speaks of certain ‘dangers of knowledge’. Bergson 1935, p. 136. 193  One critic to level this charge was Russell 2000, p. 756. 194  Bergson 1922, p. 263. 195  Ibid., p. 259. Elsewhere, Bergson writes rather dramatically, ‘Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of 191 192

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Bergson thus distinguishes between ‘life in general’ and ‘the forms in which it is manifested’.196 Relative to the variety of individual forms, lines of development and generational successions, each individual living being is a mere ‘thoroughfare’,197 But according to Bergson, where everything is in motion, it falsely seems to us as though the ‘thoroughfares’ are faithful representations of the process itself. As already illustrated by the paradoxes of motion, a movement cannot simply be pieced together from individual moments, since relations of duration cannot be adequately expressed by spatial states. Even though every organism participates in life, insofar as it develops and changes, due to its persisting forms it ‘ignores’ and remains separate from ‘almost all the rest of life’.198 In other words, although an organism’s spatial form is what allows it to participate in life in the first place, and can be understood as a more or less successful adaptation to its environmental conditions, it limits the organism’s contact with ‘creative evolution’199 in general due to the need for demarcation and specialisation. This applies both to the forms of sensory organs and neural pathways and to the forms of consciousness, which allow things to be ordered in a way conducive to survival, but at the price of being bound to the material conditions that enable the perception of different durations in the first place.200

them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement.’ Ibid., pp. 134–135. 196  Ibid., p. 135. 197  Ibid. 198  Ibid. 199  Reflecting on his work at a later date, Bergson goes beyond the biologistic assumptions of Creative Evolution, no longer simply taking the ‘current of life which traverses matter’ for granted but instead maintaining that its ‘creative energy is to be defined as love’. However, this definition still remains imprecise, particularly given that it is only supposed to be accessible to ‘mystics’ who are able to show ‘the whence and whither of life.’ On this point and on the increasingly obscure relation between mysticism, religion and science in his later work, see Bergson 1935, pp. 220–221. 200  ‘In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is therefore a certain agreement between subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again in things.’ Bergson 1922, p. 235. A central or peripheral nervous system is needed to perceive differing durations in cases such as the race between Achilles and the tortoise, though this requires them to actually take place or at be least played out mentally. If an organism lacks the necessary material requirements, they will be bound by their nature to their own temporal rhythm. Deleuze, citing Bergson’s 1922 work Durée et Simultanéité (which Bergson refused to have reprinted) describes Bergson’s ‘triplicity’ of different dura-

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As we shall see, on Bergson’s view it is only in free and artistic activity that consciousness can transcend its own limited form, allowing at least a glimpse into the originality of creative evolutionary processes. As an ordering intellect, however, consciousness focuses primarily on the external forms of objects, which remain as separate from each other as it is from them: This order, on which our action leans and in which our intellect recognizes itself, seems to us marvellous. Not only do the same general causes always produce the same general effects, but beneath the visible causes and effects our science discovers an infinity of infinitesimal changes which work more and more exactly into one another, the further we push the analysis: so much so that, at the end of this analysis, matter becomes, it seems to us, geometry itself.201

We generally forget that this is an artificial order, which seems more natural the more precisely that the intellect that produces it recognises itself within it. This leads finally to ‘geometrical mechanism’,202 a complete inversion of all movement, an immobilisation of elements that remain ‘external to one another’, which (as in Zeno) can be set into a purely conceptual relation in which their specific quality and duration cannot be discerned. The resulting order of ‘the inert and the automatic’203 places our experience on an apparently secure, law-governed foundation. However, according to Bergson it also marks an extreme limit, the ‘kind of order that is concerned whenever a relation of necessary determination is found between causes and effects’.204 The other, often overlooked order, meanwhile, is based not on preformed expectations, regularities and laws, but instead gives rise to unforeseeable, unpredictable developments and turns of events. It is notable that Bergson posits ‘two species of order’,205 rather than describing the fundamental openness of creative evolution in terms of disorder or chaos. While repetition is essential as the basis for making tions: ‘that of our interior life; that of voluntary movement; and that of a movement in space.’ Deleuze 1991, p. 130. 201  Bergson 1922, p. 229. 202  Ibid., p. 235. 203  Ibid., p. 236. 204  Ibid. 205  Ibid., p. 234.

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generalisations in the physical order, ‘the vital order is, I will not say voluntary, but analogous to the order “willed”’.206 This conception of an order of ‘the vital or of the willed’207 is closely related to biological explanations of the transmission and change of particular properties and traits, as the process of constant transformation of living things is also based on a repetitive interplay of regularities and divergences, even if the course of development does not appear to be directed towards any overarching goal. Bergson also holds that conceptual negations and states of ‘disorder’ merely express the absence of expected positions and orders, so that it would be absurd to attribute to them their own, independent meaning. As provisional manners of expression for the unfamiliar or unexpected, they are ‘made for practice’ rather than the ‘domain of speculation’, which is why Bergson believes that outside positive orders there lie only ‘pseudoproblems’ and ‘pseudo-ideas’.208 The task of philosophy or metaphysics, as he understands it, is to trace empty and speculative concepts back to their actual conditions, so as to show that there exist merely two contrary orders ‘within one and the same genus’.209 Bergson regards the basic epistemological question of ‘why there is order and not disorder in things’ as valid; but with the apodictic assertion ‘that order exists is a fact’210 he restricts his perspective to an order taken as already given. Insofar as the production of individual perceptual images is supposed to precisely correspond to the possible ways that an organism can act on the things in its environment, it is initially impossible for the constituted images to differ from the perceptions constituting them. In 206  Ibid., p. 244. Elsewhere, Bergson gives an example: ‘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.’ Ibid., pp. 236–237. 207  Ibid., p. 236. 208  Ibid., pp. 233–234. Bergson’s explication of the relation between different ‘species of order’ is in the same positivist vein: ‘At bottom, all there is that is real, perceived and even conceived, in this absence of one of the two kinds of order, is the presence of the other. But the second is indifferent to me, I am interested only in the first, and I express the presence of the second as a function of the first, instead of expressing it, so to speak, as a function of itself.’ Ibid., pp. 245–246. 209  Ibid., p. 234. Elsewhere, Bergson speaks of a ‘reversal of the habitual work of the intelligence’, going from ‘concepts to things, and not from things to concepts’ so that ‘thesis and antithesis are seen to emerge from the reality’, instead of subordinating reality to one of the two opposing poles. Bergson 1946d, p. 208. 210  Bergson 1922, p. 244.

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the process of reflection, these coincide and form a single order. However, due to the variety of interests and functions, there exist as many perceptual images as organisms, which explains why Bergson subsumes all positions and orders ‘within one and the same genus’. The relationship between the eye and light described in the introduction to Goethe’s Theory of Colours is taken to hold for all images: ‘If the eye were not sunny, how could we perceive light?’211—Or, in Bergson’s terms, if there were no relation between individual perceptual images and the ‘totality of the images of the material world’, how would we be able to survive? It is open to question whether this also applies to purely speculative perceptual images, whose abstract representations and static concepts are directed towards immobility and against the duration of life. Elsewhere, Bergson clarifies his position by once again pointing to the fundamental premise underpinning his conception of reality: But it is movement which precedes immobility, and between positions and a displacement there is not the relation of parts to the whole, but that of the diversity of possible viewpoints to the real indivisibility of the object.212

The ‘order of life’ is equated here with the ‘order of motion’, which can also be viewed from the perspective of immobility, but this would be only a conceptual understanding detached from reality. If Bergson were to understand even purely mental representations as merely contingent and arbitrary, then he would indeed need to clarify why mathematical quantities and the laws of physics can be applied to material phenomena at all. But Bergson does not deny that science is possible and, in an abstract sense, ordered. Even on the assumption that nature neither counts nor measures, for Bergson the natural sciences belong ‘within the whole‘,213 because the ‘movement which constitutes materiality’214 takes place mainly in homogeneous space, which is just as immobile as the mathematical concepts and physical laws that are applied to it. ‘Intellectuality and materiality’ are of ‘the same nature’ and ‘produced in the same way’,215 originating  Goethe 1970, p. liii.  Bergson 1946d, p. 216. 213  Bergson 1922, p. 229. 214  Ibid., p. 231. 215  Ibid. Bergson does add the qualification that ‘laws of mathematical form will never apply to [matter] completely. For that, it would have to be pure space and step out of duration.’ Ibid., p. 230. 211 212

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in ‘different species of order’ rather than opposing domains.216 Accordingly, the ‘perspective of immobility’ is likewise an appropriate reflex of consciousness, but only with regards to the rigid, homogeneous structure of matter surrounding it. Although this phenomenon can be understood as an intellectual form of adaptation to the conditions of life, it does not transcend the difference between the orders of the living and unliving. Bergson holds, on the contrary, that only the organic can creatively evolve in the face of resistance from inert, inanimate reality. While ‘matter’ is an obstacle, only life’s ‘vital impetus’217 possesses creative, effective power. In light of this distinction between passive and active orders, the different organic forms that capacities such as sight assume in different organisms are understood as different solutions to materially posed problems, such as that of light.218 We might 216  For an opposing view, see in particular Kant’s conception of the critique of knowledge, according to which the conceptual forms of reason on the one hand and the manifold contents of perceptions and sensations on the other are translated into an abstract order of thought by the synthesis of the understanding. For Kant, the forms and contents of knowledge do not just belong to ‘different species of order’, but rather are precisely antithetical; the material of intuition given to the understanding is disordered, chaotic, multifarious, contingent, impenetrable. On the ‘two stems of human cognition’, see Kant 1998, A 16/B 30. 217  The ‘vital impetus’, as an expression of a ‘need of creation’ (Bergson 1922, p. 265), is one of Bergson’s most controversial ideas. On the one hand, it refers to a process of ‘dissociation and division’ of living forms. Ibid., p. 94. But Bergson also goes beyond merely describing external forms and takes the vital impetus to be the shared origin of different lines of evolution. ‘The harmony between terms that are mutually complementary in certain points is not, in our opinion, produced, in course of progress, by a reciprocal adaptation; on the contrary, it is complete only at the start. It arises from an original identity, from the fact that the evolutionary process, splaying out like a sheaf, sunders, in proportion to their simultaneous growth, terms which at first completed each other so well that they coalesced.’ Ibid., pp. 123–124. In virtue of this common, indivisible origin, Bergson claims that individual life forms are actualisations of a ‘totality of life’ that exists (at least in virtual form) despite divergent lines of evolution. But even given that traces of animate life can be found in plants and vegetative forms in animals, or that intelligent and instinctive capacities can complement one another, there are no rational grounds for the supposition of an ‘original identity’. So it is unsurprising that Bergson refers to a ‘simple’ or ‘original’ intuition (intuition originelle) to support his metaphysical assumptions. Bergson 1946f, p.  128. Adorno’s earlier-quoted remark about a ‘doctrine of being disposed before all subjectivity and lifted above its critique’ (Adorno, see footnote 167) also applies perfectly to Bergson’s approach here: the ‘totality of life’ can likewise only be found by recourse to the very subjectivity rendered almost irrelevant by the universal ‘vital impetus’. 218  Bergson 1922, p. 73ff.

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think that the intellect is also capable of creative solutions and so also partakes of the ‘vital impetus’. But Bergson disagrees, claiming that the intellect is ‘formed to act on matter from without, and […] succeeds by making, in the flux of the real, instantaneous cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity, endlessly decomposable.’219 As we saw with the paradoxes of motion, solutions based in pure thought are ‘unlimited’ in a dual sense: detached from perceptible reality while laying claim to universal validity, their limits can only be circumscribed by juxtaposing them to another ground of validity. Bergson thus believes that it is practical, intuitive solutions, rather than abstract, conceptual ones, that lend themselves to active engagement and confrontation with the obstacles of matter and other organisms, actualising the ‘initial impetus of life, essentially directed toward free actions’.220 Thus, it is down to individual organisms to creatively solve the difficulties they are faced with. It is only by flexibly adapting to external conditions, which are likewise constantly changing, that they can ensure their survival and partake of the ‘general impetus’, though there is always a danger of failure if they choose the wrong solutions. Consciousness, which is ‘pre-eminently intellect’ and one-sidedly focused on the qualities of matter, is at particular risk of losing contact with life; only intuition preserves at least a residue of what has been lost as the price for the elevated place that humanity occupies ‘in the whole of nature’.221 Since humanity’s connection to nature has been almost entirely sacrificed  Ibid., p. 264.  Bergson 1922, p. 268. For Bergson, conflict with other organisms is also part of the ‘evolution of the organized world’, which is nothing but the ‘unrolling of this conflict’. Although Bergson expressly does not (as was common at the time) use this ‘discord, striking and terrible’ as legitimation for imperialist endeavours, the reference to ‘numberless struggles that we behold in nature’ does appear to foreshadow the First World War, which broke out just seven years after the publication of Creative Evolution. Be that as it may, the fateful acknowledgement of destructive natural powers, albeit ones ‘for which the original principle of life must not be held responsible’, reveals a generally pessimistic view of culture, as was becoming increasingly popular at that time (particularly after the experiences of the war). Bergson 1922, p. 268. This is especially true of Bergson’s final major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (primarily published in 1932), where he maintains the idea of parallels in the development of nature and culture. Bergson 1935. 221  Bergson 1922, pp. 281–282. Loss is a recurring motif in Bergson’s work. One example can be seen in the following remark, which underscores the speculative character of his thought: ‘It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way.’ Bergson 1922, p. 281. On humanity’s elevated status ‘in the whole of nature’ and the difference between ‘natural’ intuition and ‘artificial’ intellect, see Bergson 1946d, p. 230 ff. 219 220

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to conceptual thought that seeks one-sidedly to ‘conquer matter’, intuition is at best a lamp almost extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital interest is at stake.222

By this point if not before, it is clear that Bergson does not understand the orders of ‘life’ and the ‘lifeless’ in a merely metaphorical sense. Rather, the ‘vital interests’ relate to the struggle for existence that Darwin and Spencer explained in sociobiological terms, even though Bergson still speaks of creative processes in cases where survival is at stake. Evidence of this can be seen not least in the setbacks and failed attempts in the ‘evolution of life, just as in the evolution of human societies’.223 And so when Bergson claims that evolutionary success, defined in terms of ‘mobility’, ‘suppleness’ and ‘variety of movements’, depends on accepting ‘risks’, this is also to be taken entirely literally.224 For insofar as the ‘vital order’ is affected both by material obstacles and opposing interests, partaking of the ‘free’ and ‘creative’ power does indeed presuppose a drive to adapt and change. Only those who are fast, mobile and creative enough to master the challenges of constantly changing circumstances have a chance of winning the relentless, aimless struggle for survival: [Life] is essentially a current sent through matter, drawing from it what it can. There has not, therefore, properly speaking, been any project or plan. On the other hand, it is abundantly evident that the rest of nature is not for the sake of man: we struggle like the other species, we have struggled against other species.225

Although Bergson attempts to alleviate the conflict between rising life and falling matter226 by assuming a reconciliation of opposites ‘within the whole’, it still appears that the ‘original impetus’ condemns us to keep  Bergson 1922, p. 282.  Ibid., p. 139. From the category of fauna, Bergson mentions molluscs and crustaceans, whose shells restrict their potential for further development, and applies this perspective directly to the advantages and disadvantages of advances in military technology: ‘So the heavy hoplite was supplanted by the legionary; the knight, clad in armour, had to give place to the light free-moving infantryman.’ Ibid., pp. 138–139. 224  Ibid., p. 139. 225  Ibid., p. 280. 226  On the rising and falling movements of life and matter, see ibid., pp. 275 and 284. 222 223

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striving aimlessly, restlessly forwards. And since on Bergson’s own view man ‘continues the vital movement indefinitely, although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in itself’,227 it must be asked whether the blind striving he describes does not have far more in common with the way of thinking he is criticising than he would like to admit. For, as Bergson himself demonstrates, the proponents of ‘pure thought’ likewise keep pressing their claims ‘indefinitely’ so as to extract whatever they possibly can from matter—to the point where matter itself becomes an obstacle, insofar as it is unable to satisfy the limitless demands of ‘pure thought’. Given, moreover, that this way of thinking (which was taken to an extreme by Zeno) only pursues goals that have been cleansed of anything concrete, we should recall that Bergson likewise holds that we can only view ‘the self in its original purity’ once ‘certain forms’ that ‘bear the obvious mark of the external world’228 are eliminated or corrected. Thus, Bergson’s ‘pure duration’ and Zeno’s ‘pure thought’ do at least have in common, despite all their differences and oppositions, that they both shield themselves against the ‘intrusion of the sensible world’229 in order to secure, respectively, their purely qualitative and purely logical claims. Although in Zeno these claims are expressly directed against the ‘sensible world’, and so appear to go outside their domain of validity, this only happens, as we have seen, in order to assert the unity and purity of forms against the bewildering diversity of our perceptions and sensations.230 Zeno does not contemplate the possibility of an actual mediation between forms and contents, as that would entail that the logical unity of thought would only be one possible form of knowledge. Meanwhile, it is unclear how Bergson proposes to protect the pure duration of perception from the ‘obsession of the idea of space’.231 For while ‘pure thought’ attempts to demonstrate the immobility of being analytically, and thus prior to all

 Ibid., p. 280.  Bergson 1910, p. 224. See also footnote 87. 229  Ibid. 230  Zeno’s paradoxes, for instance, are based on the logical law of non-contradiction, according to which a proposition cannot be both affirmed and negated. Famously, this law only has positive significance in analytic judgements, i.e. propositions where the predicate is already contained in the subject. In synthetic judgements and propositions about reality, meanwhile, it serves only as a negative truth condition. 231  Ibid. 227 228

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experience,232 a similar construction would be needed in order to derive spatial movements and changes from the ‘purity of the self’. In other words, in order to justify his thesis of pure quality and duration, Bergson would need to show how the movements of the ‘sensible world’ relate to the inner movements of an identical self-consciousness. The very distinction between the external world of the senses and a ‘duration of the ego’ uninfluenced by it presupposes their duality. And since, on Bergson’s view, the analytic judgements of ‘pure thought’ are unsuited to this purpose, another form of conscious perception or apperception is needed in order to relate changing outer impressions to inner experiences. The term ‘apperception’ (not used by Bergson himself) is meant here in its original sense of ‘perceiving towards’, so as to indicate that the self must have a unitary point of reference in order to be able to integrate changing perceptions.233 If such a point were to be constituted solely in the self’s orientation towards the ‘external world’, this would call into question not just the ‘purity of the ego’ but also Bergson’s associated aim of determining identity based on inner experience. For if the integration of perceptions were determined just by the more or less contingently manifesting impressions of the ‘sensible world’ or by context-specific social norms, the required unity of the self or perception would be equally contingent and fragmentary.234 This prompts the question of what must be added in the process of perception and what must stay the same in order for movements and transitions to be grasped as such. What is at stake in the answer to this question is not whether (as Heraclitus claims) we can only step in the same river once—for Bergson, both the river and the 232  Analytic judgements are valid prior to all experience, as their truth conditions are purely conceptual and logical. Hence, Kant writes, ‘analytic propositions are tautological.’ Kant 1988, p. 118. The analytic sentence ‘If tulips bloom in winter, then there are flowers that bloom even in winter’, however, has not just formal-logical but also epistemological significance, as shown in the fact that it simultaneously expresses a proposition about reality whose validity ground is experience. 233  The Latin adpercipere also refers to a unifying point that integrates different perceptions, while the French aperception refers only to the perception itself. 234  One might think here, for instance, of Kant’s theory of empirical apperception: ‘The consciousness of oneself in accordance with the determinations of our state in internal perception is merely empirical, forever variable; it can provide no standing or abiding self in this stream of inner appearances.’ Kant 1998, A 107. This idea has particular implications for the formation of identity in social conditions where we alternate between different roles, which can prevent unified self-perception. Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities is a famous example of this, whose significance is not merely literary. See Musil 1997.

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person who dips their toe in it change235—but rather the conditions for perceiving movements, as this appears to require a halt to the river’s flow or a snapshot of experience so that we can observe external and internal changes from a secure standpoint. Insofar as such a standpoint would require a state of immobility, whereas Bergson holds that ‘there do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in process of change’,236 there would clearly need to be a special kind of perception that is distinct both from the ‘outer’ world of the senses, in order that we can grasp and apprehend that world, and from the ‘inner’ world of rigid thought, in order that we can participate in the process of movement. Thus, what we are looking for is a form of perception that is neither contingent nor immobile, or, to put it in positive terms, that is pure and durational. Bergson couches this dual condition in the ambiguous expression ‘the substantiality of change’.237 We shall now proceed to examine this concept’s implications for the perception of images and the formation of perceptions in detail.

3.4  External and Pure Perceptions As discussed above, the images produced by ‘external perception’ only ever reproduce a subset of things’ possible effects. Insofar as these effects simultaneously depend on the possibilities of acting on things, which is what gives perceptions their reflexive status, according to Bergson there is a necessary relation for images ‘between being and being consciously perceived’.238 As we have seen, this further entails that there exists only ‘a difference of degree, and not of kind’239 between the vast totality of images and the actual perceptual images of a single organism. Applying this perspective to a single perception shows how the insoluble interrelationship between external image perceptions and internal perceptual images is to be conceived: 235  Bergson’s ontological conception of motion is especially evident in his inquiries into duration as a creative principle of life and history. On these two fundamental themes, see Bergson 1922 and 1935. Although Bergson himself does not speak of the ‘being of motion’ (the title of the present chapter), he does explicitly equate ‘reality’ with ‘pure movement’ at a number of points. See for instance 1946d, p. 222 (where he makes reference to Heraclites). 236  Ibid. 237  Bergson 1946c, p. 175. 238  Bergson 1911, p. 30. 239  Ibid.

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The truth is that the point P, the rays which it emits, the retina and the nervous elements affected, form a single whole; that the luminous point P is a part of this whole; and that it is really in P, and not elsewhere, that the image of P is formed and perceived.240

Consequently, although an object’s colours, smells, forms, tastes and sounds belong to that object, the way in which they are actualised depends on the differing conditions of individual sensory organs. This allows for organisms as different as amoebae and human beings to inhabit the same world yet perceive different worlds. And just as from the perspective of a single organism these worlds form a single, self-contained and self-­ sufficient whole, according to Bergson the different worlds and perspectives also form a ‘whole’, albeit one that only exists virtually so long as there is a difference between the images’ ‘being’ and their ‘being consciously perceived’. The ‘totality of images’ would only be wholly perceptible if it could occur without consciousness, i.e. if it could simultaneously absorb and reflect all actions without being clouded by a conscious agent’s own representations and interests. Bergson briefly elaborates on this (hypothetical) idea: Indifferent to each other because of the radical mechanism which binds them together, they [the images which surround us] present each to the others all their sides at once: which means that they act and react mutually by all their elements, and that none of them perceives or is perceived consciously.241

This remark remains speculative because it presupposes the validity of that which is supposed to be proved. The condition of a virtual relation between images cannot be justified by the assumption of an unconscious perception, since ‘external perceptions’ only ever reproduce a selection of possible actions, precisely because they are ‘full of memories’242 and hence conscious. Even if we concede that the perceived and generated images  Ibid., pp. 37–38.  Ibid., p. 29. Elsewhere Bergson remarks that ‘the perception of any unconscious material point whatever, in its instantaneousness, is infinitely greater and more complete than ours, since this point gathers and transmits the influences of all the points of the material universe, whereas our consciousness only attains to certain parts and to certain aspects of those parts.’ Ibid., pp. 30–31. 242  Ibid., p.  24. He continues: ‘With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.’ 240 241

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form a ‘single whole’ from the perspective of a single organism, there is not yet any reason to assume the same holds for the images in relation to each other. This would require another form of perception or consciousness that remains wholly in the present and ‘mould[s] itself upon the external object’.243 In the absence of this kind of ‘vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous’,244 however, any speculations about ­relations between images will remain an ‘arbitrary hypothesis’.245 Bergson is well aware of this difficulty. But he nonetheless holds onto his notion of an ‘ideal’ form of perception, ‘obtained by the elimination of individual accidents’, which he claims is ‘at the very root of our knowledge of things’.246 Thus, a possible proof of this notion would simultaneously also support the notion of a ‘totality of the whole’ that has so far only been postulated. In his discussion of ‘pure perception’ and ‘pure memory’, Bergson therefore seeks to resolve the above-described tensions, especially that between ‘life in general’ and ‘the forms in which it is manifested’.247 Because although, on Bergson’s view, contradictions are part of reality, it needs to be asked what arguments can be made for the ideas of originality and wholeness (such as the ‘genuine self’, ‘original intuition’ and ‘vital impetus’) that he developed in opposition to analytic concepts of pure thought. Using these ideas, Bergson constructs a positive alternative conception that allows for various different types of perceptual images and perceptions of images. This conception is the key to addressing the still unsolved problem of a pure, durational, self-identical yet changing perception. In external perceptions, durational and spatial aspects exist side by side, and are infused with qualitative significance only by our rapt ‘attention to life’.248 By contrast, pure perceptions appear to be unadulterated by spatial aspects. While visual, auditory and tactile images necessarily make reference to space due to their connection to physical sensory organs, pure perceptions would allow us direct access to the immediately given data of consciousness, at least at the abstract, conceptual level. But in order to actually provide the ‘connecting thread’ Bergson seeks between consciousness and things, or between inner and outer movements, we would need  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 26. 245  Ibid., p. 24. 246  Ibid., pp. 24–25. 247  Bergson 1922, p. 135. 248  Bergson 1911, p. xiv. 243 244

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to demonstrate pure perceptions’ applicability to concrete, empirical reality too.249 However, Bergson makes clear early on that, in his view, pure, impersonal perception ‘exists in theory rather than in fact’.250 Since any perception, no matter how brief, always ‘occupies a certain duration’ and thus involves ‘an effort of memory which prolongs one into another a plurality of moments’,251 sense-data that appears immediately present is necessarily mingled with ‘a thousand details out of our past experience’.252 If perceptions are always already enriched with personal memories and chance individual factors, this would seem to preclude the possibility of a ‘vision both immediate and instantaneous’. But Bergson holds to the idea of pure perception as ‘a free cause’,253 asking hypothetically how a ‘vision’ or intuition absorbed wholly by the present could be conceived. For only by freeing the perceptual core from the shell of subjective memories surrounding it could it be shown that the perceptions first occur outside our consciousness, i.e. in things themselves, even though it seems to us as if they were ‘born of the internal movements of the cerebral substance’.254 Based on what has been said up to this point, the ostensible reality of pure perceptions should instead be taken as a possible limiting case. Despite this, Bergson remains interested in these perceptions’ conditions of possibility, for in order for the ‘image of P’ to be not just a conglomerate of subjective memories, contingent impressions and artificial properties, and instead to be formed ‘in P, and not elsewhere’, a perception is required whose sole task is to ‘moul[d] itself upon the external object’.255 This hypothetically assumed claim to objectivity can only be partially realised by an individual organism, but is essential for the ‘action of the whole’.256 For if we rule out the possibility of intuitively mediated objectivity, ‘pure duration’ would also be a merely imagined ideal with no

 See on this point the opening lines to Sect. 3.3.  Bergson 1911, p. 26. 251  Ibid., p. 25. 252  Ibid., p. 24. 253  Bergson uses this expression to describe the basis for wholly transparent self-perception. Bergson 1910, p. 235. 254  Bergson 1911, p. 24. 255  Ibid. 256  Bergson 1922, p. 219. 249 250

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wider-reaching validity claims.257 The assumed existence of ‘pure perception’ is thus central to Bergson’s concept of self and world disclosure. Since the purity of vision or intuition is not simply given, Bergson chooses another way to demonstrate its significance, deploying a method of indirect proof that proceeds by criticising ‘the analyses of current psychology’258 and showing the limits of their conclusions. By reference to the sense of sight, he shows that perceptual processes necessarily involve an interplay of material and mental properties. For, Bergson argues, if we assume only external or internal influences to have sole validity, we would have to explain how the impressions received on our two retinas could possibly be synthesised into a perception that corresponds to ‘what we call a point in space’.259 It would also be unclear how it would be possible for visual impressions to correspond to tactile ones. The order of individual visual perceptions among themselves would, on this view, need to be supplemented with a parallel order of corresponding tactile perceptions; only by combining these two orders into a single common order would the perceptual object be constituted. And if this single common order actually exists independently of our individual perceptions, such that ‘it is the same for all men, and constitutes a material world in which effects are linked with causes, in which phenomena obey laws’,260 then unity, if not yet purity, would be a necessary condition of knowledge. But even in that case, Bergson suggests that the specific properties and particularities of matter would remain elusive: Though the matter which we have been led to posit is indispensable in order to account for the marvellous accord of sensations among themselves, we 257  See also Bergson’s account of pure affects, which are not triggered by individual representations but are instead prior to intellectual states and so are able to engender ideas. As with the thesis of ‘pure duration’, we cannot rule out the possibility that emotions are not self-contained ‘affective stirring[s] of the soul’ but rather reactions determined by external influences. This would, at least, preclude any sweeping claims about the ‘purity’ of emotions or the (in Bergson’s view fundamentally deficient) emotional lives of women. See Bergson 1935, pp. 31–32. While some of Bergson’s conclusions are undeniably problematic, however, what primarily interests us here is how exactly the proclaimed purity of duration or deep-seated affects is supposed to be perceivable, in order that we can assess their claim to objectivity. 258  Bergson 1911, p. 64. As we will recall, Zeno also uses indirect methods of proof in his arguments. See Sect. 2.3. 259  Ibid., p. 65. 260  Ibid., p. 66.

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still know nothing of it, since we must refuse to it all the qualities perceived, all the sensations of which it has only to explain the correspondence. It is not, then, it cannot be, anything of what we know, anything of what we imagine. It remains a mysterious entity.261

He distinguishes clearly between, on the one hand, the necessary interrelation of perceptions and sensations among themselves and, on the other, the ‘totality of the images of the material world’ that exists independently of the former. This totality cannot be formed by uniformly combining individual perceptual images, since (as we have seen) the actions of objects also depend on an organism’s possible modes of perceiving and reacting. Given the diverse forms these can take, such that for instance unconsciously felt or consciously represented moments either succeed or interpenetrate one another, it is clear that even their necessary interrelation can only ever express one possible perspective. Consequently, unity of perceptions is no guarantee of their validity. Rather, on Bergson’s view, the positive effect of this unity is that the various perspectives from which an object is apprehended and the apprehended object’s actions can only be conceived as connected. For even though the ‘totality of images’ is not wholly subsumed into the constant interplay of actions and apprehensions, since the whole is represented from a ‘certain point of view’,262 the experiential realities of different organisms taken by themselves do form a ‘single whole’.263 The differences between subject and object are not simply eliminated in this restricted conception of the ‘single whole’. By clear contrast to Kant, Bergson holds that experiences are formed only in the concrete interplay of action and apprehension, rather than being based on concepts of the understanding and forms of intuition that possess a priori validity.264 Bergson discerns in Kant’s mistrust of changing perceptions and  Ibid.  Bergson 1946d, p. 201. 263  Bergson 1911, p. 38. See also footnote 240. 264  For a more detailed account of the alleged errors of Kant’s critique of reason and the ‘cinematographical method’ underlying it, see Bergson 1922, p.  347ff. Importantly, the Kantian inquiry into the conditions of possibility of experience relates to the problem of how scientific knowledge is acquired, whereas Bergson’s metaphysical, experiential approach, which proceeds from perceptions and appearances, ‘bear[s] on duration itself’. Bergson 1922, p. 364. This difference should be borne in mind when considering Bergson’s critique of Kant. 261 262

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experiences, and the attempts motivated by this mistrust to transcend concrete change and contingency, a desire to ‘break away from practical life’.265 He agrees with Kant that ‘our senses and consciousness, as they function in everyday life’,266 are subject to myriad illusions and deceptions, but unlike the critic of ‘pure reason’ he believes that a direct perception of metaphysical reality (which Bergson terms ‘superior intuition’ and Kant ‘intellectual intuition’) is perfectly possible.267 However, insofar as Bergson can no longer rely here on the logical unity of reason, since on his view the ‘single whole’ can only be conceived as a plurality of intuitions, the question still remains as to the point at which the myriad processes of action and apprehension begin or converge. For Bergson supposes that a ‘direct vision of reality’ is possible, especially in the arts, but it is unclear how a ‘revivification of our faculty of perceiving’ and ‘prolongation which privileged souls will give to intuition’ can ‘re-establish continuity in our knowledge as a whole’.268 To borrow a metaphor from Kant, we are looking for the ‘highest unifying point’269 of our faculty of perception, given that perception itself has been resolved into a heterogeneous interplay of perspectival relations of action and apprehension. Bergson’s answer to this question is as simple as it is consistent. By contrast with theoretical knowledge, he regards the faculty of perception as a practical capacity that is characterised not by universal principles of reason but by the constantly changing interplay of received sensations and the creative processing of those sensations. Just as the process of evolution  Bergson 1946c, p. 165.  Ibid. 267  For Kant, non-sensible or intellectual intuition is problematic, since ‘the intelligible would require an entirely special intuition, which we do not have’. Kant 1998, A 280–281/B 336–337. In his transcendental account of time and space, he nonetheless elaborates the idea of a pure intuition or experience-less experience, without resolving the contradictory relation between the givenness of sense-data on the one hand and formal purity on the other. Adorno disparagingly describes Kant’s concept of a ‘pure intuition’ of space and time as ‘a square circle’, and is unequivocal in his criticism: ‘A form of sensibility which merits the predicate “immediate” without, however, also being “given”, is absurd.’ Adorno 2013b, p. 146. On the terms ‘direct perception’ and ‘superior intuition’, see Bergson 1946c, pp. 167, 164. 268  Bergson 1946c, pp. 163, 167. 269  For Kant, ‘I think’ famously represents the highest, non-circumventable unifying point of transcendental self-consciousness. Kant 1998, B 132–136. If we now ask about the highest unifying point of the faculty of perception, this is intended to express that, for Bergson, it is not just representations but also perceptions that must be connected to something, otherwise they could not be ‘my’ representations or perceptions. 265 266

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constantly gives rise to new forms, which Bergson describes as ‘thoroughfares’ of life, the process of perception forms and links together snapshots until finally the ‘fluid continuity of the real’ solidifies into ‘discontinuous images’.270 As this formulation indicates, the snapshots resulting from the act of perception can only inadequately represent the continuously changing forms. For according to Bergson, even the (only seemingly) isolated forms and states are recreated in every moment, i.e. they are subject to constant change and development. It is only due to the inertia of our sensory organs and our minds’ need for order that colour follows colour, sound follows sound, impact follows impact, with one impression appearing to be succeeded by another. However, for Bergson this is an artificial cross section of reality that satisfies our ‘need [for] immobility’271 at the price of concealing the actual qualities of matter and the relations between our perceptions: Each of these qualities, taken separately, is a state that seems to persist as such, immovable until another replaces it. Yet each of these qualities resolves itself, on analysis, into an enormous number of elementary movements. Whether we see in it vibrations or whether we represent it in any other way, one fact is certain, it is that every quality is change.272

Putting aside for the moment that it is no more possible to apprehend ‘each of these qualities’ than it is to apprehend ‘life as a whole’ or the ‘totality of images’, it is striking that whereas in Kant’s transcendental philosophy the relation between the two ‘stems’ of cognition, namely intuitive receptivity and intellectual spontaneity, is contradictory, Bergson defuses this contradiction by recourse to the practical faculty of perception. While Kant, contrary to his own thesis that knowledge is determined by the subject, digs deeper and asks how intuitions and concepts can be

 Bergson 1922, p. 319. On the idea that forms are ‘thoroughfares’ of the evolutionary process, see the passages corresponding to footnotes 196 and 197. 271  Bergson 1946c, p. 169. 272  Bergson 1922, p. 317. 270

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recombined, having first separated them,273 Bergson initially speaks only of an ‘an enormous number of elementary movements’, whose ‘inner essence’ can be grasped only through submission and immersion: Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once both change itself and the successive states in which it might at any instant be immobilized. But with these successive states, perceived from without as real and no longer as potential immobilities, you will never reconstitute movement.274

It is striking that Bergson, in keeping with the distinction between inner events and outer appearances that we have already seen in relation to a variety of different questions, once again espouses essentialist notions of a ‘source’ or ‘origin’. The fragmentary, incomplete external perceptions of the ‘empirical’ self are contrasted with the ‘fundamental’ self’s capacity for pure perception. According to Bergson, the special feature of this capacity (located at the ‘source of experience’) is that it is freed of all individual contingencies and as ‘impersonal perception […] is at the very root of our knowledge of things’.275 But how can perceptions be ‘impersonal’ and thus universal, given that Bergson previously—and with good reason— emphasised their merely perspectival validity? And if it is true that this special type of perception affords a ‘vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous’,276 and thus is not just universal but also objective, this raises the further question of how the manifold of a given intuition can be subsumed into the intuition itself. For if, following Bergson, we hold that 273  See the chapter ‘On the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding’ in Kant 1998, A 137–148/B 176–188, where Kant concludes that pure concepts must be at least similar to intuited objects. This not only calls into question the strict separation of the two ‘stems of cognition’, but also asserts a non-identical or impersonal aspect at the heart of subjectivity. One of the strengths of Kantian philosophy is that it takes these sorts of questions seriously and turns them against its own assumptions, rather than overhastily attempting to defend or reconcile those assumptions. Another interesting point is that Kant’s use of schemas and images as intermediaries between intuitions and concepts reveals similarities to Bergson, particularly when he describes this ‘schematism of our understanding’ in almost metaphysical terms as ‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul’. Kant 1998, A 141/B 180. If we also consider that Kant regards time as the aspect common to the spontaneity of thought and the receptivity of intuition, there may be even more parallels to Bergson than the latter would like to admit. 274  Bergson 1922, pp. 324–325. On the attachment to the ‘inner becoming of things’ see ibid., p. 322. 275  See footnote 246. 276  Bergson 1911, p. 26.

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an intuition can only be described as immediate if it is itself created, the problem will remain of how that which is sensuously given can be conceived as pure. Despite his categorical definition of the forms of intuition, Kant held firm to the idea of the bare givenness of sensuous material, and so maintained the difference between subjective conditions of knowledge and objects as the ‘intelligible cause of appearances’;277 by contrast, Bergson’s concept of pure perception is based on the fundamental capacity to see things how they really are.278 In other words, while the Kantian critique of reason explores and delineates the limits of understanding in an attempt to ground being in the subject’s faculty of cognition, Bergson allows that even the sensuously given, the last bastion of the non-­subjective, could be accessible to pure experience. However, it remains unclear whether and how this claim can be redeemed—a key question for Bergson and speculative Identitätsphilosophie in general, in particular given Kant’s denial that it is possible to do so. To attain an adequate understanding of this position, we shall therefore focus to begin with on the role of pure perception in Bergson’s theory of images. For despite the open, speculative character of his philosophical approach in general,279 particularly with regards to the basic concepts that he uses, Bergson does still make reference to concrete reality. Unlike judgements of the understanding, in which concepts are combined, separated or interrelated by other criteria, images offer up their elements not successively but simultaneously, and thus are grasped ‘with a single stroke’. Strictly speaking, it is actually incorrect to speak of individual elements, 277  Kant 1998, A 494/B 522. Kant’s conception of objects remains contradictory, because the critique of theoretical reason, in making reference to its own power of cognition, points beyond itself without getting to the unknown and indeterminable cause of the phenomena: ‘The sensible faculty of intuition is really only a receptivity for being affected in a certain way with representations, whose relation to one another is a pure intuition of space and time (pure forms of our sensibility), which, insofar as they are connected and determinable in these relations (in space and time) according to laws of the unity of experience, are called objects. The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot intuit it as an object; for such an object would have to be represented neither in space nor in time (as mere conditions of our sensible representation), without which conditions we cannot think any intuition.’ Ibid. 278  Bergson, for instance, speaks of an ‘act, constituting pure perception, whereby we place ourselves in the very heart of things.’ Bergson 1911, p. 73. 279  This openness only becomes fully apparent as Bergson’s thought unfolds, with the ‘self-­ movement and self-transformation’ of his ideas finding expression in his ‘dramatic style’. On the coincidence of style and content in Bergson, see Vrhunc 2002, p. 21.

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since they cannot be perceived in isolation without distorting the overall impression made by an image. For this reason, Kant claims that conceptual understanding is ‘discursive’ rather than ‘intuitive’, and so denies that we could have an intuitive understanding that ‘proceeds from the synthetically universal (the intuition of a whole as a whole) to the particular’.280 But for Bergson, the division between the substance of cognition and its form is already the product of a mental abstraction. Unlike Kant, who accepts the results of pure mathematics and the natural sciences as universally valid, Bergson believes that as well as scientific discoveries there is also an objective ‘intuition of the psychical, and more generally of the vital’281 that cannot be wholly translated into either synthetic or analytic judgements. As a ‘supra-intellectual intuition’282 it is situated between conceptual forms purified of anything material and sensory perceptions anchored in matter: If this intuition exist, a taking possession of the spirit by itself is possible, and no longer only a knowledge that is external and phenomenal. What is more, if we have an intuition of this kind (I mean an ultra-intellectual intuition), then sensuous intuition is likely to be in continuity with it through certain intermediaries, as the infra-red is continuous with the ultra-violet.283

On this view, ‘supra-’ or ‘ultra-intellectual’ intuition is distinct from the pure forms of the spirit and from sensory perceptions, yet also has a certain connection to them. It possesses, as it were, a dual boundary that the spirit qua self-activity can spontaneously transcend, whereas a connection to sensory perceptions only exists via ‘certain intermediaries’ between the visible and the invisible. The ‘taking possession of the spirit’ clearly refers to the spontaneous capacity to generate pure intuitions, which is what 280  Kant 1987, p. 291 [407]. In light of this, the idea of a ‘Newton of the blade of grass’ would be nonsensical, as they would need an ‘intuitive’ or ‘intuiting’ understanding to bring forth their objects in pure form. Elsewhere Kant claims that the intuitive form of presentation must be either ‘schematic’ or ‘symbolic’. Ibid., p. 226 [351]. Building on the work of Ernst Cassirer and A. N. Whitehead, Susanne K. Langer later took up this idea and expanded it into a theory of ‘discursive’ and ‘presentational’ symbolic forms. Langer 1948, pp. 63–115. 281  Bergson 1922, p.  380. It should be noted here that in his distinction between the empirical and transcendental self, Kant sharply criticises the ‘intuition of the psychical’ by ‘rational psychology’, which claims to be able to derive substantive propositions from pure concepts about matters such as the existence of the soul. See Kant’s discussion of the ‘paralogisms of pure reason’ in Kant 1998, B 399–B 414. 282  Bergson 1922, p. 380. 283  Ibid.

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distinguishes it from simply given external phenomena. The ‘ultra-­ intellectual intuition’ likewise does not remain confined to itself, but is directed towards some other object that it appropriates. Since this other object is connected to the ‘sensuous intuitions’ without being identical to them, the ‘ultra-intellectual intuition’ seems at first glance to be indeterminate or ambiguous in a manner similar to the Kantian ‘forms of intuition’. For its purity and identity appears to come at the price of a continuous disappearance of the visible, so that the empirical ‘red’ ultimately seems to have as little in common with ‘ultraviolet’ as ‘the empirical concept of a plate has homogeneity with the pure geometrical concept of a circle’.284 And Bergson does indeed hold that sensuous intuitions can only yield subjectively valid knowledge, similar to Kantian perceptual judgements. However, by contrast with Kant, who says that ‘beyond the empirical and in general beyond what is given in sensory intuition, special concepts must yet be added, which have their origin completely a priori in the pure understanding’,285 Bergson does not distinguish between judgements of perception and experience, but instead holds there to be ‘two intuitions of different order’.286 Since only the ‘intuition of the psychical or the vital’ enables ‘knowledge from within’,287 the ‘intuition of the physical’, all supposed spontaneity and purity of the understanding notwithstanding, remains connected to the material or spatial world. If, by contrast, the supra-intellectual intuition is able to ‘dig beneath space and spatialized time’ and grasp that the facts that seem external to the mind in fact ‘spring forth’ from it, this allows us to attain ‘the absolute’, rather than ‘only the phantom of an unattainable thing-in-itself’.288 According to Bergson, below the level of abstract consciousness, where ‘body and mind’ are grasped ‘from within’,289 the form and substance of knowledge are combined, so that there is no longer any essential difference between intellect and intuition: The barriers between the matter of sensible knowledge and its form are lowered, as also between the ‘pure forms’ of sensibility and the categories of  On this distinction, see Kant 1998, A 137/B 176.  Kant 2004, p. 50. 286  Bergson 1922, p. 381. 287  Ibid., p. 382. 288  Ibid., pp. 380 and 382. 289  Ibid., p. 378. 284 285

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the understanding. The matter and form of intellectual knowledge (restricted to its own object) are seen to be engendering each other by a reciprocal adaptation, intellect modelling itself on corporeity, and corporeity on intellect.290

While Kant encapsulates the antagonism between the receptivity and spontaneity of our faculty of cognition within the pure forms of intuition, Bergson solves the problem of their mediation by distinguishing between ‘two intuitions of different order’. However, this separation comes at a high price, since it raises more questions than it answers and the solutions it does offer become increasingly problematic. For instance, it remains unclear how the supra-intellectual intuition is supposed to enable knowledge ‘from within’ that transcends spatial representations. Bergson’s notion that ‘the substantial duration of things’291 can be introspectively grasped in the ‘intuition of the psychical and the vital’ presupposes that there exists a second reality beyond the ‘physical’ that is at least similar to the purity of the self. Otherwise, it would be hard to see how ‘moments of real duration, perceived by an attentive consciousness,’ could ‘permeat[e] one another’,292 i.e. how inner and outer moments could come together. Bergson goes a step further in the above-quoted passage when he claims that the mind’s intuition of itself causes the ‘barriers between the matter of sensible knowledge and its form’ to be lowered. Whereas before the mind was restricted solely to ‘its own object’, i.e. ‘true’ reality, a connection now appears possible between the previously separate domains of the ‘purely mental’ and ‘purely physical’ where both can influence and ‘model’ themselves on the other.—But this interpermeation will remain one-sided and superficial if the relation between sensuous and supra-intellectual intuition is conceived as ‘a taking possession of the spirit by itself’. For even if, following Bergson, we suppose that intellectual intuition can influence sensuous intuition, it is hard to see how a ‘reversal of the direction’293 is supposed to enable a transition from visible to invisible things. The reference to ‘certain intermediaries” is not enough, especially as the ‘duality of intuition’294 assumes that ‘knowledge from within’ need make no reference to the external world. And given this duality, the ‘interface’ between  Ibid., p. 381.  Ibid. 292  Bergson 1910, p. 235. 293  Bergson 1922, p. 381. 294  Ibid. 290 291

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inner and outer remains an insurmountable barrier that cannot be ‘remodelled’ into a surmountable one from the seemingly secure standpoint of pure perceptions and sensations.295 This would require concrete forms of mediation for which, however, there is no place in the idea of duration as an original, immediately acting substance. Since, for Bergson, purity of duration can only be experienced where the mind coincides wholly with itself, any object relation would appear to presuppose the immediacy of consciousness. This entails that there either needs to be a pre-established harmony between mental and physical objects, or that the other must be produced entirely by the self. There is strong textual support for either reading, but with the important qualification that Bergson is always talking of pure relations, not empirical ones.296 He relies on metaphysical reality, in which subjective and non-subjective mutually engender and reconcile themselves with each other ‘by a reciprocal adaptation’, in order to circumvent the difficulties posed by their lack of physical agreement. Whereas for Kant this difference is manifested in the subject’s inability to fully create the objects with which it is confronted, Bergson proclaims a departure from matter, invoking ‘original intuition’ and an inward-turning of the mind. The ‘duality of intuition’ thus leads right back to where it started: a strict distinction between the original ‘reality of spirit’ above and the derived ‘reality of matter’ below ‘that decisive turn’ where experience ‘becomes properly human experience’.297 Only now does it become clear why Bergson contrasts the upward movement of the spirit and life with the (in his eyes) downward movement of matter.298 He regards the latter simply as an obstacle or waste product of a spiritual power unbound by any substratum, which strives constantly and urgently upwards with no fixed goal:

295  See also Sect. 3.2, which discusses the question of the intensity of mental states by reference to ‘pure sensations’ and ‘spatial magnitudes’. 296  See on this point the following example: ‘But between physical existence, which is spread out in space, and nontemporal existence, which can only be a conceptual and logical existence like that of which metaphysical dogmatism speaks, is there not room for consciousness and for life? There is, unquestionably. We perceive it when we place ourselves in duration in order to go from that duration to moments, instead of starting from moments in order to bind them again and to construct duration.’ Bergson 1922, p. 382. 297  See the passages corresponding to footnotes 164–166. 298  See footnote 226.

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Consciousness, or supra-consciousness, is the name for the rocket whose extinguished fragments fall back as matter; consciousness, again, is the name for that which subsists of the rocket itself, passing through the fragments and lighting them up into organisms.299

The unavoidable contact between ‘supra-consciousness’ and matter divides the originally unified impetus, a process that is ‘in part the work of matter, in part the result of life’s own inclination’.300 Although the diversity of the new and creative are revealed in the unfolding of external reality, for Bergson this only ever represents a limited actualisation of unlimited possibilities, whose full richness is not even close to adequately expressed in material and spatialised forms. Another reason why pure perception, which is directed immediately towards the virtual diversity of the creative, proves to be a purely mental endeavour is that any contact with matter brings us only to the ‘fragments’ of life. According to Bergson, if we wish to grasp the original principle of life and motion, we must attend not to that which is dead but rather to the constantly changing self. But since this ‘self’ needs to be completely disconnected from matter in order to be wholly pure and original, the argument runs in a circle. Subject and predicate collapse together, leading to tautological conclusions: purity consists in that which is pure, vitality in that which is vital, novelty in that which is new, movement in that which is mobile.301 If the distorted image of matter did not exist as an opposing pole to life, there would be no differentiating features whatsoever. And so, contra Bergson’s own intention, it is due precisely to the physical and the spatial that Zeno’s arrow goes anywhere, that Achilles and the tortoise are able to race. The very claim Bergson reserves for matter holds true for life: it transforms into a static self-­relation disconnected from anything outside itself, ‘a conceptual-mechanical fixum par excellence’,302 devoid of substance and mobility. The same applies to other categories to which the attribute ‘original’ and ‘pure’ is applied. Pure impetus, duration or intuition, which likewise make no reference to the spatial and material world, represent not the  Bergson 1922, p. 275.  Ibid., p. 272. 301  This is a typical figure of thought in metaphysical speculations, which begin or end with self-referential propositions. Attempting to reduce everything to an abstract formula leads to an abandonment not just of the empirical, but also of the capacity to draw conceptual distinctions. On this point, see Adorno 2013a, p. 85ff. 302  Bloch 1972, p. 282. 299 300

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‘most intimate secrets of life’303 but rather a futile attempt to protect the self, as the subject of self-affirmation, from the threat of being objectified by the non-subjective. This attempt is futile because ‘the pure’ is merely rigidly opposed to ‘the impure’, rather than it being shown how they are interrelated. Even the creative aspect of novelty, which Bergson highlights as a typical feature of movement and change, is ultimately also just an effect of an obscure, indivisible ‘impulsion’304 over which the self has no influence. Although, on Bergson’s view, this impulsion is only accessible to the self, insofar as it requires an immersion in the inner world, it remains unfathomable and strange, akin to ‘a beneficent fluid [that] bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labour and to live’.305 Since we do not produce creative energy ourselves but merely draw it from another source, there is little prospect of our being able to change the flow of life. Accordingly, the influences of matter are conceivable only as ‘creations of form’,306 whose substances and elements, like the colours of a picture or the letters of a poem, already exist prior to their being arranged in a particular way. Becoming one with the flow of life would require the capacity for a ‘creation of matter’ by an ‘arrest of the action that generates form’.307 Even if, on Bergson’s view, great art comes very close to this ideal—in a chord or brushstroke, for instance, form and substance appear to merge together—the gulf between artistic impression and expression remains unbridgeable. For it is beyond the artist’s power to either voluntarily produce the ‘creative impulse’ or refer to it in a pure form. If they could do so, their articulations would lack tangible content, that is, their art would be devoid of work. But as a work, all art bears a necessary relation to the space and matter in which it is expressed. The creative aspect of novelty is, thus, like pure perception, only conceivable as a limiting case; at the base

 Bergson 1922, p. 174.  This ‘same tremendous push’ to which all living beings are subject sometimes appears threatening, but at the same time is what empowers us to ‘clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.’ Bergson 1922, p. 286. 305  Bergson 1922, p. 202. 306  ‘Every human work in which there is invention, every voluntary act in which there is freedom, every movement of an organism that manifests spontaneity, brings something new into the world. True, these are only creations of form. How could they be anything else? We are not the vital current itself; we are this current already loaded with matter, that is, with congealed parts of its own substance which it carries along its course.’ Bergson 1922, p. 252. 307  Ibid., pp. 252–253. 303 304

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of reality, however, there are only the ‘congealed parts of its own substance’.308 Bergson invokes notions of purity in an attempt to avoid the problem of objectification; the main function served in his argument by the indivisible ‘impulsion’ of life is to allow the self to unfold as purely as possible without being objectified. By contrast with Kant, who emphasises the spontaneity of thought, and hence the effort and work that goes into constituting the phenomenal world, the immersion in the ‘beneficent fluid’ of life allows the subject to remain passive even in the creative act. In absolute purity and freedom—that is, in the absence of any opposition between subject and material objects—we are ‘immersed’ in the ‘ocean of life’,309 with this immersion being something that happens to us rather than actively brought about by us. Any last residual tension between subject and object disappears, nothing now opposes or conditions anything else, because everything dissolves into ‘the Whole’.310 But the attempt to dissolve everything phenomenal ‘within the whole’ or trace everything disparate back to a single origin already has an objectifying character. For although Bergson regards the ‘ocean of life’ as a ‘beneficent fluid’ that is supposed to have nothing in common with the cool rationality of Kantian reason, all living things, whether they can swim or not, are indiscriminately immersed and pulled along by its current. While for Kant the objectification of the world is dependent precisely on the rise of subjectivity, insofar as it is only in the attempt to ground the possibility of subjective knowledge that the world comes to appear as something with which we are confronted, the dissolution of the particular in the ocean of universality results in a unique kind of objectification: subject and object are both nullified, as their identity in the realm of the pure and original depends on a negation of the material and concrete. Although Bergson constantly points to differences and oppositions, and attempts to resolve them by his characteristic inversion of the way we think about them, he does not attend to the contradictions in the things themselves, but instead reconciles them in a metaphysical whole. Instead of seeking negativity, which on

 See footnote 306.  Bergson 1922, p. 202. 310  Ibid. 308 309

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a dialectical construal is ‘the inner pulse of self-movement and life’,311 he regards philosophy as ‘an effort to dissolve again into the Whole’.312 Needless to say, there are (albeit contra Bergson’s own intentions) certain risks of totalitarianism inherent in the idea of a ‘Whole’ accessible only via intuition.313 Aside from the politically dubious nature of philosophical notions of originality, purity and wholeness, which were later turned to other ends by authors inspired by Bergson,314 another point of criticism is that using such terms prevents the necessary clarification of concrete relations. For instance, it is probably no coincidence that the focus on ‘that real and effective duration which is the essential attribute of life’ can be combined seemingly unproblematically with a reference to the ‘instinctive or somnambulistic self’, whose spontaneous activity is supposed to have advantages over reflective behaviours in terms of promoting survival, even in an environment increasingly dominated by technology.315 This reveals the naivete of Bergson’s blind trust in the ‘residue of instinct’,316 given the complete devaluation of instinct under the unfettered conditions of mass production in which nothing is left to chance and everything is given the stamp of sameness.317 Not only does the ‘pure’ inward gaze prevent us from seeing the relations between inner and outer, but the impression of perfection and profundity it conveys can be used to serve less noble ends— for as is well known (and this insight would not have been unfamiliar to

311  Hegel 2010a, p. 384. At another point in his discussion of the law of non-contradiction, he remarks that ‘it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, is possessed of instinct and activity’, whereas identity ‘is only the determination of … inert being’. Ibid., p. 381–382. 312  Bergson 1922, p. 202. See also Bergson’s characterisation of conceptual negations as ‘pseudo-problems’ and pseudo-ideas’ in footnote 208. 313  This applies, for instance, to the view expressed as late as 1932 that only exceptional individuals (Bergson is thinking here mainly of mystics and artists) can show a path ‘that others can potentially, if not actually, undertake’. Bergson 1935, p. 210. 314  This applies especially to the discussion of ‘authenticity’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Heidegger 1962, first published in German in 1927). 315  Bergson 1935, pp.  95 and 99. In this passage, Bergson illustrates the phylogenetic advantages of instinctive behaviour using the example of a woman whose quick reactions save her from falling into an empty lift shaft. 316  Ibid., p. 99. 317  Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of the ‘culture industry’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where they make reference to one of their fundamental theses: ‘Culture has always contributed to the subduing of revolutionary as well as of barbaric instincts. Industrial culture does something more.’ Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 123.

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Bergson either), the more dubious our aims and intentions, the purer our professed motives will be.318 It is not just Bergson’s detachment from reality that can be criticised, however. A more important problem is that measuring things against the higher ideal of ‘the Absolute’319 distorts our perspective, causing us to disdain everything that is imperfect and material. Because metaphysical reality is supposed to be resplendent all by itself, unconditional and pure, the physical world is devalued by comparison. Due to the lack of any intermediaries between the two extremes, any questioning of their arrangement presupposes a rejection of the ‘Absolute’, whose claim to categoriality is incompatible with provisional or qualified solutions. A more critical approach, by contrast, will call the imperfect by its name without invoking a pure ideal. Consequently, it can act on two fronts at once, rejecting both questionable states of affairs and ‘ultimate’ grounds, and thus stands in direct opposition to conceptions that divide the world into simple dichotomies. In the mirror of dualistic thought, this opposition is viewed as picking one side over the other rather than as fighting a battle on two fronts. This leads Bergson, commenting on the question of how to determine the content of negative concepts as a way of articulating real oppositions, to laconically remark that this amounts to ‘the idea pure and simple of the empty word that we have created by joining a negative prefix to a word which itself signifies something’.320 In other words, for Bergson critique is only legitimate if it is based on the ‘actually perfect’; as a determinate or concrete negation, however, he considers it mechanical and devoid of content. We can see here the totalitarian foundation of this way of thinking, which is not merely a superficial feature of Bergson’s rather old-fashioned speculations about history, morality, religion and society.321 In addition to 318  It should be mentioned here in passing that during the First World War Bergson worked in the official diplomatic mission for two different French administrations, and in 1922 was appointed president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. These biographical details make clear that Bergson was not simply an ivory-tower metaphysician absorbed entirely in his own inner world. 319  See for instance Bergson 1922, p. 315. 320  Ibid., p. 248. 321  See esp. Bergson 1935, which investigates duration as a historical phenomenon. The last of Bergson’s major works, it was met with a lot of resistance and was probably what definitively cemented his reputation as a ‘dead classic thinker’ (Kolakowski 1985). For a critique of Bergson’s metaphysical conception of time and history, see esp. Horkheimer 2005.

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the legitimate doubts we may have about the existence of the historical duration posited by Bergson, which he presents as temporally unmediated or timeless, the very attempt to relate all being to an ‘Absolute’ or ‘source’ involves a boundless hubris on the part of the mind, which claims that only that which it purports to immediately know to be valid. Thus, pure perception in Bergson and pure thought in Zeno share at least the common factor that in both cases the question of the possibility of knowledge is based on first or last principles that are supposed to give adequate expression to the identity that is assumed to hold between the object and the faculty of knowledge. Given this, the condition that everything that is knowable is disclosed in these ultimate or original principles appears plausible at first glance. At most, there is disagreement about which principle of thought—logical calculus or living duration—should be preferred and what conclusions should be drawn. But the mutually attested incompatibility of the principles, which culminate respectively in the absolute immobility of logos and the unending dynamism of duration, shows that neither pure thought nor pure perception can deliver on the promised self-­ agreement. In both cases, the immediate and absolute are incompletely determined: not just because the mediated and manifold need to be accounted for, but above all because they cannot be produced in pure form.322 The opposition between thought and perception elaborated in detail by Zeno and Bergson leads in both cases to a polarisation of objective and subjective aspects, which is undermined by the resolution into the pure and original being presupposed as valid. This defuses the contradiction between the poles of cognition that both thinkers insist on so vehemently. Moreover, the critique misses its mark because it amounts merely to a restatement of its own premises, in which anything that contradicts the ideal of pure duration or logic is discounted as lifeless or non-being, so that a life in which movement and immobility succeed and augment one another appears wholly impossible. A result whose radicalism fizzles out in the domain of the pure, but whose rigorism raises more questions than it answers in the domain of the real. 322  Cf. the following remark by Adorno, with reference to Husserl: ‘The qualification of the absolutely first in subjective immanence founders because immanence can never completely disentangle the moment of non-identity within itself, and because subjectivity, the organ of reflection, clashes with the idea of an absolutely first as pure immediacy. Though the idea of philosophy of origins aims monistically at pure identity, subjective immanence, in which the absolutely first wishes to remain with itself undisturbed, will not let itself be reduced to that pure identity with itself.’ Adorno 2013a, p. 23.

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It is particularly unclear whether this critique of the pure forms of knowledge also applies to the distinctions between spatial and temporal perception that Bergson draws in his analysis of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion.323 Because if pure perception cannot provide ultimate grounds for motion nor pure thought for immobility, we must consider whether the oppositions should perhaps be conceived differently, i.e. as reciprocally conditioned and mediated. In that case, still unsolved problems. Such as the characterisation of sensations as ‘twofold perception’324 of inner and outer changes, could be reinterpreted so that the contradictions are seen not as a deficiency, but rather as grounded in the crux of the matter (the Hegelian Sache selbst). Bergson does not rule out such an interpretation, remarking that ‘push[ing] dualism to an extreme’ in the theories of pure perception and pure memory may have paved the way for ‘a reconciliation between the unextended and the extended, between quality and quantity’, at least in the realm of memory.325 And although Bergson essentially maintains his dualistic perspective, it is worth looking at his theory of memory and past time, where he rearticulates his understanding of duration in relation to spatial and pure perception in a way that also allows for differences of degree. In the next section, we shall therefore expand our perspective and also consider what Bergson has to say about memories, so as to establish whether we should perhaps understand him as holding a less pure, and hence less metaphysical, conception of duration and motion at the ‘intersection of mind and matter’.326

3.5   Bodily and Pure Memories In Matter and Memory, Bergson adds another aspect to the elusive concept of duration, by focusing even more strongly on the idea of temporality and change. On Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assessment of the work, ‘time is not put in place of being’ but rather ‘now it is the whole of being

 See Sects. 3.1 and 3.2.  See the discussion of ‘increase of sensation’ and ‘sensation of increase’ in Sect. 3.2. 325  Bergson 1911, p. 236–237. 326  See footnote 150 on this characterisation of memory. Elsewhere, Bergson elucidates this ‘intersection’ by distinguishing between two different ‘forms of memory’, mémoire-­ souvenir and mémoire-habitude, of which ‘the one imagines and the other repeats’. Bergson 1911, p.  93. This idea will be explored in the next section in terms of ‘bodily’ and ‘pure’ memory. 323 324

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which must be approached from the side of time’.327 And over half a century after the high point of Bergson’s writing career, when he received the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature for Creative Evolution, Gilles Deleuze wrote that the Bergsonian discovery of a movement-image and a time-­ image ‘still retains such richness today that it is not certain that all its consequences have been drawn’.328 Bergson’s fundamental distinction between the unfolding and the representation of the life of consciousness became a key topic in the philosophy of the early twentieth century, particularly in the work of William James, Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. But although these authors took up the idea of the changeability and duration of our inner perceptions,329 it is notable that they rejected any sharp contrast between duration and space, which Bergson extended into an irreconcilable dichotomy between life and matter, but rather saw their relation as one of mutual complementarity. For instance, Cassirer (whose position on the apprehension and significance of motion will be considered in more depth in Part II) writes, by contrast with Bergson, of the productive tension between the activity of the life of consciousness and the forms of cultural expression produced by it: But the demand for pure ‘intuitionism“ (Bergson) cannot be fulfilled: paradise is bolted fast, and we must make the trip around the world (Kleist, ‘Marionettentheatre’ …). All culture takes place in and proves itself in the creative process, in the activity of the symbolic forms, and through these forms life awakens to self-conscious life, and becomes mind.330

Thus, instead of trusting in our ‘original interiority’ and immersing ourselves in the ‘purity of the self’, Cassirer calls for a reflective engagement with cultural forms and symbols, so that the ‘chaos of sensory impressions’ is articulated in a ‘fixed form’331 and acquires ‘form and duration’ for us. Although Cassirer, like Bergson, takes practical activity to be  Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 184.  Deleuze 1986, p. xiv. 329  On the processual character of consciousness and different ways of representing it, see for instance James 1976; Husserl 1964; Cassirer 1955a, 1955b and 1957; and Whitehead 1929. 330  Cassirer 1996, pp.  230–231. For a more detailed discussion of Kleist’s ‘Marionette Theatre’ (Kleist 1972), mentioned here only in passing, see Cassirer 1949. 331  Cassirer 1955b, pp. 29, 67. See also ibid., pp. xv and 178. On ‘form and duration’, he writes, ‘The fluid impression assumes form and duration for us only when we mould it by symbolic action in one direction or another.’ Cassirer 1955a, p. 107. 327 328

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the point of departure for the ‘organization of reality’, in which ‘the world of the I and the world of things’332 are separated, he does not simply reject this process of objectification, which is marked by conflicts and contradictions, or purify it using paradisiacal conceptions of unity. Cassirer instead points to the ambiguity of any practical foundation of our spiritual and cultural existence, for ‘the farther the consciousness of action progresses, the more sharply this division is expressed, the more clearly the limits between I and not-I are drawn’.333 The emancipation of the self from the mythical conception of a unified, indivisible soul presupposes that the originally undivided feelings, perceptions and ideas are understood neither as simple representations of external impressions nor as ready-made projections of inner processes; rather, ‘the two factors of “inside” and “outside”, of “I” and “reality” are determined and delimited from one another only in these symbolic forms and through their mediation’.334 On Cassirer’s view, it is only when the self performs an act of symbolisation which mediates between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ that the life of consciousness steps outside itself and becomes a historico-cultural reality. Conversely, cultural products have a reciprocal influence on the inner life of consciousness, and so are not merely external instruments of the mind’s creative power. The peculiar dialectic of this process consists in the mediation of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ being conceived as a dichotomy between mind and matter, an incarnation of the mental in the sensible, whose significance only becomes clear in the process by which different symbolic forms are constituted. For in the myriad forms of objectification that distance the self from its products, the self simultaneously comes to know and is alienated from itself. For Cassirer, it thereby achieves not some form of direct certainty or fulfilment in immediacy, but rather attains ‘the “external” world, the world of objects, with which we are spatially and materially [sachlich] confronted’.335  Cassirer 1955b, p. 157.  Ibid. 334  Ibid., p. 156. 335  Cassirer 1993, pp.  206–207. One notion of direct or immediate certainty is that of Evidenz im Augenblick (literally, ‘(self-)evidence in the moment’) as set out in Sommer 1987. However, the ‘phenomenology of pure sensation’ promised by Sommer is significantly more cryptic and obscure than Bergson’s intuitionism. A far more illuminating treatment of this idea can be found in Ingarden’s 1921 work Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson, where the influence of his teacher Husserl is still clearly evident. See especially ‘Versuch einer Kritik der Bergsonschen Erkenntnistheorie’ in Ingarden 1994, part 2, pp. 123–195. Sommer, incidentally, only mentions Bergson and Ingarden in passing. See Sommer 1987, pp.  56, 96 and 390. 332 333

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For this ‘external world’ to become our world and cease being strange to us presupposes a historical becoming of the self through creative engagement with the world. This involves not just opening up new possibilities of action and thus an increase in human freedom, but also a compulsion to impose form, since—as it was put above—‘paradise is bolted fast’ and we must instead ‘make the trip around the world’. So although Cassirer believed, even in the midst of war in 1944, that ‘culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man’s progressive self-liberation’336— and this idea is a common motif throughout his works—it should not be overlooked that his works also describe a need for externalisation, distancing and abstraction, because, epistemologically speaking, the ‘world of objects’, all symbolic mediation notwithstanding, is not wholly subsumed into the ‘world of the life of consciousness’. But even if we critically emphasise the aspect of civilisational constraints rather than that of cultural freedoms, we can agree with Cassirer that ‘the spirit arrives at its true and complete inwardness only by expressing itself’.337 For unlike in conservative theories of culture, in which the spiritual and material worlds are pitted against each other, and universal values are contrasted with the mundane demands of society,338 for Cassirer the ‘authentic function of the human spirit’339 is necessarily linked to material conditions. On his view, it is not individual bearers of meaning—such as crosses, hearts or roses— that possess cultural-philosophical significance, but the particular way a

 Cassirer 1944, p.  186. It is striking that the contradictions Cassirer describes in the process of symbol formation, which threaten or prevent the ‘process of man’s progressive self-liberation’, concern both the combination and the differentiation of symbolic forms: for instance, the destructive combination of mythical thought and modern technology, or the disputed boundary between mythical and religious forms. Cf. Cassirer 1946 and 1955a. The idea that every form of symbol formation and objectification involves ‘distancing … from the “I”, even alienation from it’, by contrast, is only minimally developed, probably in part because Cassirer considered it to have not only a “negative sense’ but rather to be the ‘beginning of a completely new position’. Cassirer 1996, p. 141. 337  Cassirer 1955b, p. 196. 338  See for instance the extreme position of Oswald Spengler, influenced in part by Bergson’s Creative Evolution, according to which the West’s once high culture is now in a state of decline. See especially the first volume of Spengler 1991. 339  Cassirer 1955a, p. 78. 336

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symbol is formed, through which ‘the simple presence of the phenomenon assumes a definite “meaning”, a particular ideational content.’340 Unlike Bergson, Cassirer presupposes and draws attention to the constitutive importance of symbols and cultural forms in the development of different modes of relating to self and world. Not only is a person wholly ‘without culture’—that is, without language, law, architecture, tools, transport, customs, attitudes and other forms of expression—inconceivable, but, on Cassirer’s view, material and social relations only become comprehensible when ‘the self extends itself to the world’ and finds itself ‘in this act of extension’.341 By clear contrast with philosophical notions of substance, Cassirer remarks at various points that this process of opening and extension can only be understood as a continuous interplay between the form-giving self and the created forms: The I does not simply impress its own form, a form given to it from the very outset, upon objects; on the contrary, it acquires this form only in the totality of the actions which it exerts upon objects and which it receives back from them.342

In a similar vein to Bergson, Cassirer writes that ‘the pure energy of action as such’ produces and heightens the ‘feeling of the determinacy of the personality’.343 But unlike Bergson, he does not see this as an independently acting, formative power that overcomes all material obstacles. Rather, the ‘unity of the personality can be intuited only through its 340  Ibid. In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer focuses not on the symbols themselves but on the various ways in which they are formed, which he rigorously distinguishes. This allows him to examine functions and relations rather than the specific content of individual symbols. This choice of approach is in line with the Kantian tradition, according to which ‘objects must conform to our cognition’. Kant 1998, B XVI. Cassirer, however, goes a step further, holding that the ‘act of logical completion’ begins with simple judgements of perception, and not only with universal judgements of experience: ‘When we characterize a sensuous impression, that is given us here and now in a definite nuance, as “red” or “green”, even this primitive act of judgment is directed from variables to constants, as is essential to all knowledge. Even here the content of the sensation is separated from its momentary experiencing (Erlebnis) and is opposed as independent; the content appears, over against the particular temporal act, as a permanent moment, that can be retained as an identical determination.’ Cassirer 1953b, p. 276. 341  Cassirer 1993, p. 206. Elsewhere, Cassirer vividly describes this act as being completed ‘from the inside outward’. Cassirer 1955b, p. 199. 342  Cassirer 1955b, p. 200. 343  Ibid., p. 206.

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opposite’.344 On this view, Bergson’s one-sided ‘inward path’ to the ‘source of experience’ is blocked, so that the idea of a ‘fundamental self’ detached from its physical and cultural environment cannot be sustained. While Bergson still trusts in the ‘direct vision of reality that we find in the different arts’,345 Cassirer focuses on the work in which the artist’s form-­ giving power takes effect. While, like Bergson, he distinguishes between artistic and ordinary perception, Cassirer believes this distinction is discernible only in the material forms in which the meaning created by an artist is expressed. This requires not, as Bergson puts it, a ‘break with utilitarian convention’, a ‘certain immateriality of life’,346 but rather a receptivity to symbolic forms manifested in artistic, technical and scientific works.347 We shall return to this idea in the next section. On this view, the negation of cultural forms or ‘deconstruction of symbolisations’348 is the price that Bergson believes we must pay in order to be released from space and returned to immediacy. But how complete can this release possibly be? Bergson’s answer can be interpreted in multiple ways, depending whether the ‘return to the immediate’ is intuitively mediated or conceived as pure. In the former case, Bergson’s account rests on experiences such as that of bodily movement in space, which give rise to a ‘feeling of absolute indivisibility’ that is induced ‘from within, through the muscular sense’ and ‘from without through sight’: ‘If I leave my movement from A to B as it is, I feel it undivided and must declare it to be indivisible.’349 But it is questionable whether this example actually counts  Ibid.  Bergson 1946c, p. 163. 346  Bergson 1914, p. 157. 347  Cassirer draws a distinction between the poetic and the practical: ‘The practical is directed toward an effect in the present, as something momentary, toward an “influence” on physical nature or on the human will. The poetic is different because its being is not limited only to such works. The poetic “arises” and “endures” outside every “intention” … It dwells within itself and is “blessed in itself.”’ Cassirer 1996, p.  183. Here, there is at most an implicit suggestion that the poetic work is separated from its producer and develops its own, often unpredictable dynamic. This idea is made explicit by Oswald Schwemmer: ‘With our work [Wirken], we might also say, we deliver ourselves to a world that has its own laws: in the work [Werk], it thus seems, we are always also alienated from ourselves, instead of realising ourselves.’ Schwemmer 1997a, p. 207. Even though the term ‘alienation’ (Entfremdung) points semantically to its opposite and so raises new questions, it is nonetheless clear that self and work do not form a self-contained or necessary unity. On this point, see also footnote 336. 348  Vrhunc 2002, p. 203. 349  Bergson 1946c, pp. 168 and 173. 344 345

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as a ‘direct vision of a change, of a movement’350 by Bergson’s own standards, given, as we have seen, the clear separation he draws between durational and spatial perceptions. His suggestion that contradictions and problems of symbolic representations and mediations can be avoided by seeking the images of perception at the site where they are formed, such that ‘one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it’,351 also remains unclear. For on Bergson’s own view, ‘internal duration’ that is spatially conceived and intuitively mediated will be impure, whereas the few moments in which self and duration appear to be united have a hyperreal character, since they are perceivable only beyond consciousness, language and symbols: Rare indeed are the moments when we are self-possessed to this extent: it is then that our actions are truly free. And even at these moments we do not completely possess ourselves. Our feeling of duration, I should say the actual coinciding of ourself with itself, admits of degrees. But the more the feeling is deep and the coincidence complete, the more the life in which it replaces us absorbs intellectuality by transcending it.352

Taking this idea further, we might say that only ‘pure duration’ acts as a vital power, which is why all efforts of the self to partake of this ideal ultimately remain incomplete. But even this glimpse beyond the ‘limit’ where we see ‘nothing but the instantaneous’ and fall into ‘absolute passivity’,353 since all differences are eliminated, is purely speculative. Just as perception was earlier separated into ideal and external forms, it appears that a distinction must also be drawn between what we might call ‘duration in itself’ and ‘duration for us’.354 This distinction should not, however, be confused with the determination of an objectively measurable temporal sequence that is lived with varying degrees of intensity. Rather, ‘pure duration’ supposedly subsumes all the temporal sequences into itself, instead of simply quantifying them. Thus, for instance, Achilles and the

 Ibid., p. 173.  Bergson 1946d, p. 190. 352  Bergson 1922, p. 211. 353  Ibid., pp. 211–212. 354  Based on Kant’s famous distinction between the ‘thing in itself’ and ‘appearances for us’, on which see Kant 1998, A 386. 350 351

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tortoise do not merely perceive their race differently355; Bergson further believes that these perceptions are only possible because there is a common duration underlying all the movements, rhythms and changes: A single duration will gather up the events of the whole physical world along its way; and we shall then be able to eliminate the human consciousnesses that we had at first laid out at wide intervals like so many relays for the motion of our thought; there will be nothing more than an impersonal time in which all things will pass.356

With this decoupling of a single, pure duration from the forms of its individual apprehension, the ‘source of human experience’ is conclusively ontologised.357 It exists, or rather it endures, even without human experience. Bergson posits this self-identity of pure duration in an attempt to explain how different currents of time can be perceived simultaneously. If the possibility of external standards as a shared point of reference is ruled out from the outset, another common tertia is needed that links together all qualities, rhythms and motions. Otherwise, there would only be an endless array of heterogeneous temporal sequences existing side by side without our being aware and without any discernible connecting thread. For this reason, Bergson speaks of a ‘third’ duration358 in which the different currents are combined. Taken by themselves, Achilles’ running and the tortoise’s walking would prima facie merely be two independent events. If, however, these events are related to one another by being perceived as different yet concurrent, this would require an approach that aligns ‘duration for us’ with ‘duration in itself’. For even if both forms of duration, on Bergson’s view, share a common ‘source’ prior to all individual experience, they only rarely coincide in our actual experience of time, since this experience is overlaid with references to external things, spatial symbols and quantitative properties of all kinds. Zeno’s paradoxes represent merely an extreme example of this, with the consequence (as we have seen) that at the extreme of pure thought the very possibility of movement and change over time is ultimately ruled out. However, it remains an open question how supra-individual access to ‘duration in itself’ could be possible. For even if the ‘simultaneity of flows  See footnote 53.  Bergson 1965, p. 47. 357  See footnote 166. 358  Bergson 1965, p. 52. 355 356

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[…] leads us back to inner, real duration’,359 such that by experiencing our own duration we ‘doubl[e] and multipl[y] our consciousness’,360 ‘impersonal time’ is not subsumed into this experience. On Bergson’s own view, it can only be found ‘above that decisive turn’ before it ‘becomes properly human experience’, meaning that any other access to it appears to be ruled out from the outset.361 It would be faulty reasoning to attempt to infer the existence of pure duration from concrete experience: this would amount to an instance of the classical hysteron proteron (‘later–earlier’) fallacy. Bergson, who makes no attempt to avoid this difficulty despite his metaphysical commitments, therefore chooses another route. Instead of looking outwards, towards the world of things, he turns his gaze even more emphatically inwards, to the world of representations and ideas. While Bergson’s ideal of pure perception, based on eliminating all individual accidents from duration, was supposed to be the ‘very root of our knowledge of things’,362 but was unable to wholly expunge its subjective component, his theory of memory attempts to demonstrate that the ‘earlier’ is fully subsumed into, or continued in, the ‘later’. This not only appears to avoid the hysteron proteron fallacy, since instead of the endpoints of temporal progressions we now consider their whole duration, but also allows that, with regards to ‘an individual consciousness’, that ‘contin[ues] and retain[s] the past in a present enriched by it’,363 experiences and memories could possess a significance that goes beyond the merely personal. For if ‘duration in itself’ coincides with the process of the constantly advancing past, which cannot be stopped by any temporal or spatial states, since the present and its objects are likewise changing, then memories are not just significant at the level of the individual psyche, but also expressions of the ‘complete and independent survival of the past’.364 On this view, ‘duration for us’ would simply be a particular mode of accessing ‘impersonal time’, which for Bergson exists even without consciousness. The test for the correctness of this theory will be whether images of the past can be so completely stripped of personal memories that we can reach ‘pure duration’ itself, independently of individual experience. Only then, it seems, would duration and memory be one, since they would both  Ibid., p. 61.  Ibid., p. 47. 361  See footnote 166. 362  Bergson 1911, p. 25. 363  Ibid., p. 313. 364  Ibid., p. 193. In the same passage, Bergson speaks of the ‘survival of the past per se’. 359 360

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consist not in a ‘regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progress from the past to the present.’365 Let us now consider this initially surprising change of direction in a little more detail. While personal memories relate primarily to individual past events and segments of past time, which are actualised in more or less accurate representations and images, Bergson initially considers duration, understood as a ‘progress from the past to the present’, separately from the question of its individual apprehension. On the basis that singling out particular events interrupts the current of individual experience, Bergson holds that the continuity of ‘duration in itself’ requires it to be as free as possible of personal references and distinctions.366 On this conception, the very attempt to demarcate different temporal forms from one another already entails an interruption of their duration. Bergson does speak of past, present or future events that are represented in memory and perceptual images,367 but he takes there to be continuous transitions between them rather than  Ibid., p. 319.  This is probably the most crucial difference between Bergson’s and Proust’s conceptions of time. While Proust believes a moment from the past can be relived in the present, allowing us to access ‘lost time’ through a chance intersection of two moments, for Bergson personal memory-images are a more of a hindrance to apprehending ‘pure duration’. A single sensuous impression, like when the narrator of Proust’s novel touches an uneven paving stone, may evoke a memory of a long-ago event, but according to Bergson such incidents do not give us access to ‘duration in itself’, in which all experiences of time are subsumed, but rather is connected to ‘the subjective side of the knowledge of things’. Ibid., p.  25. One important point here for the systematic relation between philosophy and literature is that although Proust’s novel supplements the critique of conventional ideas of time with a solution in the form of ‘regained time’—see especially Proust 2003—due to its singularity and chance nature this solution does not represent a generally valid model like that offered by Bergson. For Bergson, the ‘pure past’ lies outside the domain of experience. On the role of literary forms in the acquisition of knowledge, see Bergson 1910, pp. 133–134. On the similarities and differences between Proust and Bergson, see especially Megay 1976 and Gebauer 1981, pp. 252–266. 367  On this point, see for instance Bergson’s diagrammatic representation of the ‘survival of images’, based on a ‘straight line AD’ divided into ‘consecutive segments AB, BC, CD’. Bergson writes that ‘our thought describes this line in a single movement which goes from A to D, and that it is impossible to say precisely where one of the terms ends and another begins’. Bergson 1911, pp. 170–171. This remark makes clear that the spatialised representation, with its precise distinctions, should be understood merely as an aid to understanding. However, as we shall see, Bergson nonetheless uses similar visualisations at a number of other points, which—contrary to his intention—gives at least the impression that relations of duration can be grasped spatially. Elsewhere, Bergson criticises ‘geometrical symbolism’, which he claims cannot express ‘living activity’. This criticism should be borne in mind when we consider his use of diagrams. On the inadequacy of symbolic representations, see Bergson 1910, pp. 177–178. 365 366

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sharp divides. That which appears present, insofar as it separates past and future, is itself in a state of permanent change and so an expression of relations of duration. If we consider, for instance, that ‘in the shortest perceptible interval of our time are contained trillions of oscillations’ that ‘would take us hundreds of centuries to unfold’,368 but which we synthesise in a single instant into a form with definite outlines, then it becomes clear that snapshots of things must be distinguished from their true duration. On Bergson’s view, there is a relevant difference here too between snapshots ‘for us’ and changeability ‘in itself’. It is not just duration’s changeability that frustrates attempts to grasp and comprehend it. Another key problem concerns the ‘distinction between temporal and spatial series’.369 As already made clear by the example of ‘trillions of oscillations’, our perceptions extend in at least two directions: towards simultaneous objects in space on the one hand, and memories accumulated over time on the other. Bergson illustrates these two ‘series’ (nowadays we would probably tend to speak of dimensions) using a diagram. The spatial dimension is represented by a horizontal line with end points A and B. Perpendicular to this line is the time axis with end points I and C, with I intersecting the midpoint of AB.370 Since the two lines only meet at I, at least initially this is the only point ‘which appears to us really to exist’.371 Thus, in addition to our actual perceptions we must ‘posit the reality of the whole line AB’,372 i.e. we must assume the existence of a reality independent of consciousness. As we have seen, ‘pure perception’ is supposed to allow us to grasp this ‘objective reality’.373 However, it is the vertical time axis that appears to be of particular importance for Bergson’s ‘inward path’ to the ‘source of experience’, insofar as it relates not to objects juxtaposed in space but to successively progressing events. Thus, while line AB is supposed to represent ‘what we are going to perceive’, the line CI ‘contains only that which has already been perceived’.374 Even if the past has ‘exhausted its possible action’, for instance because of how far back it lies, Bergson believes we cannot rule 368  Bergson 1946b, p.  82. See also his remarks on perceiving colour in Bergson 1946c, p. 172 and Bergson 1946d, pp. 193–194. 369  Bergson 1911, p. 184. Translation modified. 370  See ibid. for an illustration. 371  Ibid. 372  Ibid. 373  Ibid. On the concept of ‘pure perception’, see Sect. 3.4. 374  Ibid., p. 185.

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out the possibility that it could be revived and ‘recover an influence’ by borrowing, as he vividly puts it, ‘the vitality of the present perception’.375 We shall return to this idea later, which has important implications for Bergson’s theory of memory. But to complete the picture, we must first note that this model can also explain events and actions that have not yet occurred. If we assume that future events and actions are also characterised by a ‘double movement’,376 bringing about changes in both space and time, then the two ‘series’ will be extended towards their end points: respectively, A and B for the spatial series and I for the temporal series. As regards space, this means that ‘the unperceived part of the material universe, big with promises and threats’,377 will come increasingly into view on the horizontal axis, while along the axis of temporal change I will advance vertically. In order for I to still meet/intersect with the ‘spatial series’, then—on this dynamic reading—line AB would likewise need to be shifted vertically. This interpretation, which presupposes the dominance of the ‘temporal series’—inasmuch as it exerts an influence on the ‘spatial series’, as it were ‘pushing’ it along, while spatial states do not have any comparable effect on durational processes—is supported by the fact that from Matter and Memory onwards Bergson allows that things themselves have their own duration.378 The different temporal sequences and rhythms expressed in material movements and changes are, on this view, particular expressions of ‘duration in itself’: in terms of Bergson’s geometric metaphor, further points of intersection between the temporal and spatial ‘series’. Since these additional points would likewise need to be arranged, according to their respective duration, between A and B, but cannot lie on the time axis CI if they are supposed to be distinct from it, it makes sense that movements of things in space can be perceived at point I but without being subsumed into it. Otherwise, it would be unclear how the ‘trillions of oscillations’ could exist in a moment even if they are not currently being perceived. Consequently, every single thing in space would need to be  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 184. 377  Ibid. 378  See for instance ibid., pp. 257ff. and 270–271, where he explains the duration of things in terms of their movements. As already discussed above (see footnote 11 on the example of sugar dissolving in a glass of water), Bergson only speaks explicitly of ‘diverse durations’ and the ‘duration of matter’ in his ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ and Creative Evolution. But there are already indications in Matter and Memory that things too can participate in duration, and not just (as in Time and Free Will) the self. 375 376

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assigned its own time axis, which as an expression of its specific duration extends far beyond its spatially visible part. However, Bergson initially focuses on the arrangement of ‘our successive recollections set out in time’;379 that is, he restricts himself to the single ‘temporal series’ CI so as to be able to trace the ‘inward path’ as directly as possible. For even if the snapshots ‘for us’ are not the same as changeability ‘in itself’, since the multiplicity of temporal currents is not reducible to the individual experience of time, for Bergson the ‘substantiality of change’ is nowhere ‘so visible, so palpable, as in the domain of the inner life’.380 Having acknowledged, with respect to the ‘spatial series’, the existence of ‘objective realities’ beyond the intersection I and thus outside our perceptions, with respect to the ‘temporal series’ Bergson maintains that ‘states of consciousness without objective reality’381 are equally real. Just as the recognition of the reality of mind and matter afforded images ‘a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing’,382 here too it appears that Bergson’s dual perspective could allow even contrary views to be separated or combined almost however we like. For instance, Bergson concedes to idealism ‘that every reality has a kinship, an analogy, in short a relation with consciousness’,383 but at the same time he denies that the ‘aggregate of things’384 can be derived from our consciousness. Meanwhile, while he concedes that realism is able to grasp at least ‘some part of these objects themselves’,385 it ‘fails to draw from reality the immediate consciousness which we have of it’.386 So while idealism is detached from the  Bergson 1911, p. 184.  Bergson 1946c, p. 175. 381  Bergson 1911, p. 184. 382  See footnote 177. 383  Bergson 1911, pp. 304–305. 384  Ibid., p. 306. 385  Ibid., p. 304. 386  Ibid., p. 306. Although Bergson occasionally mentions the names of specific authors, such as George Berkeley and John Stewart Mill, when talking about ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’, these scattered references tend to substitute for a detailed analysis of their individual positions, which are at best sketched in broad-brush terms. See ibid., pp. 12–16 and 300–309. When Bergson does attend to individual authors in more depth, he does so not under the general heading of the idealism–realism dispute, but in relation to specific questions. See for instance his discussion of the relation between freedom and determinism with reference to the ideas of Mill and others in Bergson 1910, pp. 140–221, or his critique of modern science’s mechanistic way of thinking with reference to Descartes and related thinkers in Bergson 1922, p. 365ff. 379 380

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world of objects, realism is unable to transcend the spatially divided arrangement of objects so as to ‘place ourselves in the very heart of things’.387 If it is correct that both ‘objective realities’ beyond our perceptions and ‘states of consciousness’ exist independently of all external things, i.e. if both the spatial and temporal series could exist in isolation from each other, then there would only be a fleeting connection between the two dimensions at the constantly advancing intersection point I. Relative to the sum of external things and internal representations, this point appears infinitesimally small and arbitrary. However, given that the two series, aside from coinciding more or less by chance at I, are already supposed to be connected by a common duration before being condensed into discrete perceptual images, it becomes clear that individual points and lines will be inadequate to represent them. In order to also capture the ‘objective realities’ beyond our perceptions, at least as many temporal series as there are existent objects would need to be arranged side by side perpendicular to the line AB. And since each of these vertical lines would need to be extended downwards, parallel to the movement towards I on the time axis CI, so as to finally intersect with the line AB, then as well as the actual intersection point I there must clearly also exist an infinite number of other, virtual points and lines. In terms of Bergson’s metaphor, these would fill the entire area above the end points A and B and to the left and right of C and I, something that Bergson does not consider because his attention is focused on one particular temporal and spatial series. If we did attempt to represent duration ‘in itself’, we would no longer even be able to distinguish between lines and points, since all spaces and objects would always already be permeated by more or less consciously perceived temporal relations. The image of a solidly filled, unbounded area would perhaps come closest to this conception, but with the crucial qualification that due to the lack of distinctions and boundaries it would no longer represent anything truly visible. Not even the metaphor of the ‘sphere in space / perfectly round and balanced’ used long before Bergson’s time by Parmenides to illustrate the perfection of being can adequately express the tautological idea of a pure, self-identical duration.388 And so it makes sense that Bergson initially proceeds to focus on the simplified representation of duration ‘for us’.  Bergson 1911, p. 73.  On Parmenides, see footnote 4 in Chap. 2. On the tautological character of ‘pure duration’, see footnote 301. 387 388

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How, then, is the relation between space and time, or between matter and memory, constituted, if we attend to the individual experience of time? To clarify this question, we can draw on another of Bergson’s schematic representations, which shows that very different forms of memory and the past must be distinguished on the ‘temporal series’. To more clearly illustrate the multiple spatial and temporal levels of his theory, Bergson makes use of a three-dimensional model. Since, despite his scepticism about spatialised representations and symbolic forms in general, he is only able to achieve a general understanding of duration by making reference to individual bearers of meaning, we should at least briefly examine the diagram he produced to illustrate ‘the recollections accumulated in […] memory’.389 Instead of two intersecting perpendicular lines, he chose the three-dimensional figure of a cone whose base AB is situated in the past and remains motionless, while the summit S, representing present perception and change, touches spatial plane E (Fig. 3.1).390 Like the two-dimensional line model, Bergson’s cone schema assumes that the point of intersection S, which ‘indicates at all times my present’, is mobile, i.e. ‘moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches

Fig. 3.1  Cone schema  Bergson 1911, p. 196.  Figure 3.1 appears as Figure 4 in ibid., p. 197.

389 390

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the moving plane E of my actual representation of the universe’.391 Since the summit of the cone marks the outermost moment of the individual experience of time, i.e. its ‘actual present’, and also belongs to the spatial plane of the universe, it is equivalent to ‘pure perception’ as ‘the very root of our knowledge of things’.392 We should recall here that Bergson himself describes the idea of ‘a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous’ as a mere limiting case or ‘arbitrary hypothesis’.393 Nonetheless, as we have seen, it is of central importance for the metaphysical assumption of a ‘duration in itself’, which functions, as it were, as a genus proximum under which the differentia specifica of ‘duration for us’ are collected. Although on Bergson’s theory it is questionable whether a distinction can be drawn between general and specific duration, since they are understood as standing in a relation of identity to each other, unless we draw this distinction it cannot be explained why exactly we should assume a point of intersection between the inner world of temporal consciousness and the outer world represented by the spatial plane. But insofar as S at every moment explicitly designates ‘my’ present and not ‘the’ present, the apprehension of its duration is limited from the outset to the domain of ‘my actual representation of the universe’, specifically: it is bound to the segment of my individual experience of space and time. As Bergson writes, At S the image of the body is concentrated; and, since it belongs to the plane E, this image does but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed.394

Since the actual ‘representation of the universe’ is connected to the body and oriented towards pure duration without being able to grasp it as a whole, the further question now arises of how it is possible for the intersection point S to belong both to conscious perception and to plane E. For based on the preceding and Bergson’s own account, pure perceptions differ from external ones precisely in that all spatial elements are supposed to have been eliminated from the former.395 Despite all the tensions in his account that have been described, Bergson holds to the overarching goal  Ibid., p. 196.  See footnote 246. 393  See footnote 245. 394  Bergson 1911, p. 196. 395  See Sect. 3.4. 391 392

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of ‘put[ting] an end to the old conflict between realism and idealism’.396 He believes one way to do this is to begin by analysing space in terms of its opposite—that is, with respect to its mobility. Plane E is of interest to him only inasmuch as it shifts vertically, changing and moving as it does so. Taken by itself, the horizontal dimension, i.e. the material extension and spatial arrangement of objects, represents only the immovable points and segments of the whole, which as such at the same time constitute the negative limit of their duration. And as we have seen, Bergson’s critique of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion is directed precisely against the attempt to understand this negative limit as the only possible argument for the existence of reality.397—Based on the three-dimensional diagram, however, it is now equally clear that the temporal series, illustrated by the cone’s vertical dimension, also only comprises a small segment of the external world or totality of ‘images of the universe’. For in relation to the full extension of E, both the surface and the volume of the geometric figure appear intrinsically limited.398 This applies regardless of the assumption that there is a constant expansion at the point of intersection S, since for Bergson each individually produced perceptual image is included in the ‘totality of the images of the material world’399 without ever capturing this totality. The relation between base and geometric figure, which is concentrated in the shared intersection point S where matter and mind connect, is reminiscent of Kant’s critique of the ‘dreams of the spirit-seer’, Emanuel Swedenborg, who in Kant’s words produced ‘eight quarto volumes stuffed full of nonsense’, ‘wild figments of the imagination’ and ‘personal visions’.400 Kant’s essay is likewise concerned with the relation between body and mind or, in the essay’s terminology, soul, a topic which Swedenborg idiosyncratically extends into claims about the existence of physical spirits. We could simply dismiss these wild exaggerations and sophistries out of hand, given the lack of empirical or argumentative support for them. However, it is instructive to see how far the metaphysical speculations go before they are clearly revealed to be mere ‘illusory arguments of reason’ or ‘illusory experiences’.401 My aim here is not a polemic  Bergson 1946b, p. 88.  See Sect. 3.2. 398  There is presumably also a domain of possible, unrealised experiences outside the cone, i.e. beyond individual images and representations, at the temporal level too. 399  On this expression, see footnote 179. On Bergson’s theory of images, see Sect. 3.3. 400  Kant 1992, pp. 347, 352 and 353 (2:360, 2:366 and 2:367). 401  Ibid., p. 347 (2:361). 396 397

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against Swedenborg’s blatant fallacies—Kant already undertook that task with his essay, written in a forceful and uncharacteristically simple style— but rather to ask whether Bergson’s metaphysics finds another way to address the mind–body problem, or whether his theory likewise represents what Kant disparagingly calls a ‘sensible’ way of thinking,402 based on mere delusions. On Kant’s account, Swedenborg distinguishes his extrasensory experiences according to their relation to reality and degree of consciousness, that is, his ‘fantasies’ assume a variety of possible relations between mind and body.403 Despite positing these different points of connection, however, Swedenborg is unable to say how many spirits would fit in a ‘cubic foot of space’ or what causal laws govern their ‘pneumatic’ (i.e. spiritual) existence, and so Kant regards such speculations as ‘a fairy-story from the cloud-cuckoo-land of metaphysics’.404 Bergson does not speak of spirits when he considers the intersection between things and ideas, and we can assume that no mere illusions or fantasies are produced at the apex of the cone, that is to say in the process of forming perceptions/perceiving images, given the dual anchoring in space and time. However, we should also recall that Bergson, contra his aim of transcending the dichotomy of realism and idealism, nonetheless maintains a fundamental opposition between space and time. And as we have seen, he claims that ‘paradise is bolted fast’ if we ‘make the trip around the world’ rather than returning to the ‘source of experience’.405 It has still not been explained whether this ‘inward path’ actually exists or is merely a dream that begins or ends in the ‘cloud-cuckoo-land of metaphysics’. If it should turn out that a direct access to ‘pure duration’ is only to be assumed in the extrasensory realm, such that (as Kant paraphrases Swedenborg) a person’s ‘inmost being [is] opened up’ and they become conscious of ‘obscure representations’, it would need to be shown how ‘inner memory’ functions and whether a ‘connection with the spirit-­ world’ can be ruled out.406 Insofar as Bergson himself connects metaphysics to ‘intuition’, an inward-looking form of ‘attention’ that is not ‘fixed  Ibid., p. 525 (2:367).  For a more detailed characterisation of Swedenborg’s ‘visions’ and ‘fantasies’, see ibid., pp. 348 and 350 (2:361 and 2:364). 404  Ibid., pp. 308–309, 323 and 343 (2:320–2321, 2:336, 2:356). 405  See the opening paragraphs of the present section. 406  Kant 1992, p. 348 (2:361–2:362). In the same passage, Kant discusses Swedenborg’s distinction between ‘outer and inner memory’ and ‘the outer and the inner man’. 402 403

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upon matter’, and thus utilises the notion of ‘another kind of knowledge’, it seems at least possible that obscure ‘faculties of the soul’ might play a role in his theory too.407 If, following Kant, we instead understand metaphysics as a science of the limits of human reason, then our critical examination of notions of a ‘spirit-world’ should have made clear, if it was not already, that Bergson’s claims about ‘pure experience’ and ‘inner knowledge’ require critical examination. The cone figure (in a slightly modified version) will prove helpful here once again, since it can illustrate not just the relation between temporal and spatial dimensions but also that between perceptions and memories (Fig. 3.2).408

Fig. 3.2  Expanded cone schema 407  Bergson 1946b, pp. 92–93. On the charge that Bergson supports metaphysical irrationalism, see footnote 193. Even Ingarden, who despite criticisms of individual points is positively disposed towards Bergson’s theory overall, expresses himself in remarkably vague terms when he talks about intuition as ‘a sort of “immediate cognition”’, speaking for instance of a ‘memory of our derivation from the general impulse of life’, ‘sympathetic contact between ourselves and other organisms’ and a ‘presentiment of givennesses [Gegebenheiten]’. Ingarden 1994, pp.  118–119. As we can see, this is not a million miles away from talk of ‘fleeting spirits’ and ‘metaphysical faculties of the soul’, and we must at least suspect that Kant was right to say that in the search for ‘the more hidden properties of things’, hope is ‘all too often disappointed by the outcome’. Kant 1992, p. 354 (2:367). 408  Figure 3.2 appears as Figure 5 in Bergson 1911, p. 211.

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The cross sections A’B′ and A”B″ that have been added to the original diagram stand for the ‘thousand repetitions of our psychical life’,409 which could be represented by an equal number of further ellipses. The positioning of these sections between the base of the cone, AB, and the constantly advancing summit S adverts to the dual character of ‘spiritual experience’, which according to Bergson is indivisibly grounded in the ‘totality of […] memories’ and the ‘sensori-motor mechanisms’410 of actual perceptions. Unlike in linear conceptions of time, in which past and future events are connected by momentary progressions without being able to transcend their spatially conceived separation, Bergson holds that duration is not confined by any temporal limits. On this view, what happened in the past and what is happening in the present represent simply two sides of a flow of happening that changes while remaining the same. But how are we to concretely understand this identity in change, this ‘indivisible and indestructible continuity of a melody where the past enters into the present and forms with it an undivided whole which remains ­undivided and even indivisible in spite of what is added at every instant, or rather, thanks to what is added’?411

To answer this question, Bergson again turns his attention to the ‘normal self’ that exists between the ‘extreme positions’412 of pure memories and perceptions, i.e. between AB and S. For it is not just at the outer limits of experience—that is, in the deepest dream of the past or the most extreme tension of the present—but also between these poles that duration as ‘continuity of progress’413 is significant and palpable. While the earlier focus on the base and summit of the cone emphasised the geometric figure’s opposing sides, a stronger emphasis is now placed on its form as a whole. To stay within the mathematical metaphor, the geometric figure of the cone assumes its specific form only through the connection between its two opposing ends.414 However, this analogy should not be overstated, since Bergson only uses the spatial figure to illustrate  Ibid.  Ibid. 411  Bergson 1946b, p. 83. 412  Bergson 1911, p. 212. 413  Bergson 1946d, p. 194. 414  Mathematically, a cone is formed by connecting every point on a plane curve to a point outside this plane by a straight line. 409 410

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qualitative transitions in the development of forms.415 The image is completed not just by the sum of individual conic sections, but by their being synthesised in the gaze of the observer. Although the cone shape admits of clear, unambiguous measurements and calculations, by contrast with less definite forms such as the motion illusions famous from the psychology of perception, its outer appearance gives no representation of living duration, which according to Bergson is to be found not in ‘external things’ but rather in the ‘depth of the mind’.416 Thus, the same thing holds true for the geometric figure that Bergson claims of symbolic forms in general: its spatial constitution and fixed form allow at best a ‘clumsy imitation, a counterfeit of real movement’.417 And even attempting to represent the ‘path of intuition’ using a motion illusion, with the mobility of perception intended to convey a sense of the mobility of duration, would entail emphasising individually significant impressions and representations, contra Bergson’s view that duration is not ‘psychological in essence’418 but rather has an ontological status. Since no representation can adequately satisfy this demanding condition, the geometric figure of the cone ultimately appears to be simply the lesser evil. Bergson’s conception of a ‘return to the inner’ also involves access to the past, which in the cone schema is arranged vertically. The cone thus visualises two different directions: downwards from the base to the summit and upwards from S to AB.  In Bergson’s theory of memory, both directions are significant and take effect concurrently. On the one hand, the cone form is constantly growing, as the progression of time automatically turns each moment of the present into the past. We can envision this clearly if we mentally flip the cone so that the summit points upwards, and 415  On the concept of form (Gestalt), see for instance Weizsäcker 1947. The clear influence of a Bergsonian philosophy of life on Weizsäcker is clear right from the preface to his work: ‘To study living things, you must participate in life. Although you can attempt to derive the living from the non-living, all previous attempts to do so have failed.’ Weizsäcker 1947, p. v. The conception of durée as an interplay of preservation and change can also be discerned in the holistic concept of the Gestaltkreis (‘circle of form’): ‘The forms follow one another; but the form of all forms is not their consequence, but their self-movement in an eternal homecoming to the origin.’ Weizsäcker 1947, p. 196. On Bergson’s view that a form expresses more than just the sum of its parts, see the examples on music and poetry in Sects. 3.1 and 3.2, footnotes 7 and 50. 416  On the depths of the inner world and the surface of the outer world, see Bergson 1946b, p. 46. 417  Bergson 1946d, p. 215. 418  Ibid., p. 217. On the ontological status of duration, see footnotes 235 and 356.

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imagine the inverted cone to be the lower half of an hourglass that steadily fills up as time passes so that the form builds up layer by layer from the base to the summit. If we only focus on the small segment of currently perceptible changes at the summit, we will overlook the fact that the layers that have already accumulated below S have already gone through the same kind of changes, and fill up the ‘domain of the inner life’.419 In the hourglass metaphor (which Bergson himself does not use),420 the growth of the cone is thus understood not just from the moving end, but also involves the idea of a continuous connection between past and present changes. Bergson considers this connection so strong that beneath the scene illuminated by consciousness […] 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.421

But what justifies the certainty that all sensations, ideas and passions persist ‘continually’ and ‘indivisibly’?422 Bergson does not consider himself a particular expert in the subconscious, and unlike contemporary psychoanalysts he does not develop a depth semantics of rationality. The metaphysician of ‘pure duration’ is interested in the subconscious only to the extent that it expresses a form of the past that appears to be unrelated to the conscious present: But if consciousness is but the characteristic note of the present, that is to say of the actually lived, in short of the active, then that which does not act may cease to belong to consciousness without therefore ceasing to exist in some manner.423

While psychology attempts to analyse the subconscious in terms of its implications for our mental lives in the present, for instance by getting us to relive repressed memories so that we can consciously process them,  Bergson 1946c, p. 175.  At first glance, this metaphor runs counter to Bergson’s fundamental scepticism about all attempts to measure time. For an example of his critique by reference to a pendulum clock, see footnote 10. The example of an hourglass is given here only to illustrate the ‘increase’ of the past, as distinct from ‘measuring’ it. 421  Bergson 1920, p. 116. 422  Bergson 1946b, pp. 87–88. 423  Bergson 1911, p. 181. 419 420

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Bergson attends to the merely virtual existence424 of the distant past. Real yet hidden, living yet shielded from the ‘activity of the mind’425—Bergson once again brings the idea of pure duration to bear, but without making the interplay of change and preservation that is presupposed as valid any more comprehensible. It appears, rather, as if the difficult relation between change and identity is now being conclusively relocated to the domain of the unconscious and inexplicable. For Bergson, the purity of the past comes at the expense of that past being ‘essentially powerless’,426 whereas psychological and critical cultural studies of the unconscious describe the precise opposite: our own, repressed history not only persists, but, more or less subtly, shapes the process of individual and social development.427 We have already seen that Bergson regards the ‘impulsion’ of life as an obscure and incomprehensible force, in whose ‘beneficent fluid’428 the creative life seeks to unreflectively immerse us. Now the ‘pure past’ is revealed all the more clearly as a site of neutralisation and repression. For while traditional psychology at least attempts to give a rational explanation of the maelstrom of the irrational unconscious and the power of instincts and affects, the metaphysics of the ‘pure self’ rejects and mistrusts these rationalist endeavours.429 In this same vein, Bergson likewise conceives ‘pure memory’, initially only rather hazily, as an unconscious ability to immerse oneself in the ‘pure past’. One example of this can be seen in the notion of a ‘pure’, ‘original’ or ‘superior’ intuition of duration and life, which (in the words of 424  Bergson uses the concept of the virtual to distinguish possible and actual influences and actions. See footnote 189. 425  Bergson 1910, p. 95. 426  Bergson 1911, p. 176. 427  The ‘return of the repressed’, for instance, does not belong to the realm of ‘individual psychology’; rather, on the classical view, the content of the unconscious is collective, ‘a general possession of mankind’. Freud 1955, p. 170. 428  See footnote 305. 429  I am referring here to the ‘science of the unconscious’ that was emerging at around the same time (i.e. the early twentieth century), which developed a self-critical attitude and did not draw anti-rational or irrationalist conclusions despite recognising the impotence of reason. In the works of Freud in particular, which are nowadays generally viewed critically in educational psychology, we can find a comprehensive theory of the subject that is clearly opposed to the dubious postulates of ‘the spirit as the adversary of the soul’ (Ludwig Klages) or the ‘decline of the West’ (Oswald Spengler). In light of this, it would certainly be a worthwhile enterprise to look at Bergsonian and psychoanalytic approaches to the ‘unconscious’ in greater depth in order to show the differences between their rejection and critique of reason more clearly than is possible here.

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Ingarden) promises ‘a return to the original totality of givennesses [Gegebenheiten]’.430 As well as this optimistic prospect of ‘becoming one with becoming’, it should be noted here that Bergson’s theory of freedom is likewise based not on the power of reason but on the indeterminacy of ‘the will’, which intervenes abruptly like ‘a kind of coup d’état’.431 In light of this, it is unsurprising that Bergson characterises his conception of freedom as ‘indefinable’, ‘for we can analyse a thing, but not a process’.432 In short: since pure, virtual memories are supposed to stand in contrast with our actual perceptions, they are unaffected by the limits and constraints of our practical everyday activity. They thus embody purity itself, to which, it seems, the general principles of life, duration and freedom can be effortlessly applied.—But even if, following Bergson, we assume the virtual existence of a ‘universal past’ and a ‘pure memory’ of it, we will still lack the ‘connecting thread’ to present reality and our perceptions of it. The dualism between the distant past and immediate present once again proves too rigid to adequately capture our ‘immediate insight’ into all-encompassing, constantly advancing duration, as there is no ‘connecting thread’ between any of the binary opposites that Bergson describes: pure and physical sensations, living and rigid forms, inner and outer movements, etc.433 His attempted solutions—namely, relocating deep sensations to the ‘region of subjective facts’, sublating material oppositions ‘within the whole’, introducing the notion of ‘pure perception’ of movement—remain one-sided and speculative, especially where they make reference to an ‘Absolute’, ‘source’ or ‘origin’. Bergson nonetheless seeks a common tertia between pure memories and perceptions: not so as to call his metaphysical premises into question, but rather in order to align the ‘totality of things’434 as far as possible with their principles. An important point if we wish to better understand his position is that the extended claims of a ‘metaphysics of life’435 apply only if memories and perceptions can be connected in this manner, for until now ‘pure memories’ have been locked in a ‘virtual past’

430  Ingarden 1994, p. 105. On the properties of intuition mentioned here, see the passages corresponding to footnote 267. 431  Bergson 1910, p. 158. 432  Ibid., p. 219. 433  See Sects. 3.2–3.4. 434  Bergson 1946b, p. 50. In this passage, Bergson also analyses the relation between science and metaphysics. 435  Bergson 1946b, p. 36.

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and ‘pure perceptions’ confined to ‘fictional actuality’436; it is only in concrete perceptions and memories that they also become significant for the ‘totality of things’. In his search for the ‘connecting thread’ between the unconscious past and the actual present, Bergson picks up his earlier reflections on image perception.437 To support the supposition of an indivisible continuity of duration, he initially distinguishes three different forms of the past, which are closely interconnected and so can only be understood if considered jointly: Perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it. The memory-image, in its turn, partakes of the ‘pure memory’, which it begins to materialize, and of the perception in which it tends to embody itself: regarded from the latter point of view, it might be denned as a nascent perception. Lastly, pure memory, though independent in theory, manifests itself as a rule only in the coloured and living image which reveals it.438

Applied to the expanded cone schema, ‘perception’, ‘memory-images’ and ‘pure memory’ can provisionally be identified with the summit, the individual cross sections and the base of the geometric figure respectively. The need to interpret the graphical representation dynamically now becomes abundantly clear, if it was not already. For instead of precise distinctions between the individual segments, which as in spatialised conceptions of time are arranged linearly, Bergson describes the unclear boundaries and fluid transitions between them. Thus, external perception—unlike ‘pure perception’, which remains wholly in the present—is shot through with individual images of the past, and so virtual and actual intermingle at the summit of the cone. As we have already seen with regard to the production of individual perceptions from the ‘totality of images’, memories play a key role in this process. In perception, individual images are dislodged from the ‘flow of time’ and condensed into recognisable units, which is possible only if we can draw on already familiar representations

436  On the limiting case of a ‘vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous’, which Bergson describes as an ‘arbitrary hypothesis’, see footnote 245. 437  See Sect. 3.3. 438  Bergson 1911, p. 170.

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and images.439 However, in the same moment actual perceptions become memories again, which are preserved in living images of the past or sink into the ‘latent state’440 of the unconscious. Bergson describes this bifurcation of experience as follows: Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment of life is split up as and when it is posited.441

The process of perception thus involves movement of duration in two directions, from the actual to the virtual and from the virtual to the actual. Importantly, it is only through the preservation of individual images that the fleeting events of the present acquire a definite form and significance. The fact that memories influence perception and are thereby themselves condensed into memory-images does not stop the flow of events, but it does at least capture parts of the whole in subjective snapshots of experience. This dual process of making-present of the virtual and the condensation of the actual also provides the foundation for conscious experience, which requires a certain degree of both similarity and distance. For while things become objects through being differentiated from other objects, the forms that are manifested in this process acquire a more definite outline when they are related to similar perceptions and memories. This is presumably what Bergson means in the above-quoted passage when he says that memory-images ‘complete’ perception ‘as they interpret it’. Insofar as memory-images shape the form of actual perceptions, with perceptions becoming memories in the very moment they occur, it seems scarcely possible to draw a clear line between the present and the past. And as we have seen, many of Bergson’s theoretical pronouncements support this conception.442 His summary of the difficult idea of a ‘memory of the present’ thus sounds almost like a statement of his philosophical programme as a whole: ‘It is a recollection of the present moment in that 439  A clear example of this is trying to identify a familiar person in a large crowd. On the production of individual perceptual images ‘from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally for our functions’, see footnote 187. 440  Bergson 1911, p. 181. 441  Bergson 1920, p. 165. 442  For instance, the difficulties in defining durée are attributable in particular to the fact that the simultaneity of past and present assumed by this notion is incompatible with spatialised or linear conceptions of time.

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actual moment itself. It is of the past in its form and of the present in its matter.’443—But despite the open boundaries and fluid transitions between actual perceptions and virtual memories, Bergson also points just as emphatically to the gulf between what is and what was. For instance, the relatively clear demarcation of experiences below and above that ‘decisive turn […] in the direction of our utility’444 is explicitly based on the idea of ‘pure memories’ and a ‘pure past’. It therefore needs to be shown, by reference to ‘habit’ or ‘bodily’ memory,445 how concrete perceptions and memories relate to the ‘pure’ phenomena posited by Bergson. With regards to the ‘recognition of images’, Bergson distinguishes between two forms of memory, ‘of which the one imagines and the other repeats’.446 The former type, which appears to bear no relation to present perceptions and sensations and is thus also referred to as ‘memory par excellence’ or ‘true memory’, is confined to pure memory-images and spontaneous daydreaming.447 The reference to dreams and involuntary images is meant entirely literally, inasmuch as we ‘cross the threshold of consciousness in all cases where we renounce the interests of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life of dreams’.448 Following Bergson, I have attempted to describe the ‘true self’, which immerses itself in the ‘heights of pure memory’,449 in terms of the ‘unextended’, ‘unconscious’, ‘virtual’ or ‘purely spiritual’; not least due to this terminology, we may detect at least a certain affinity to the ‘dreams of a spirit-seer’. ‘Habit memory’, by contrast, is presented very differently. Rather than reproducing ‘past images’ in a free, disordered fashion ‘exactly as they were, with all their details and even with their affective colouring’, this form of memory ‘shrink[s], or rather [becomes] thinned and  Bergson 1920, p. 167.  See footnote 166. 445  See esp. Bergson 1911, pp. 92ff. and 194–202. 446  Ibid., pp. 86 and 93. 447  Ibid., p. 95. As ‘true memory’ it is ‘co-extensive with consciousness … truly moving in the past and not’—by contrast with repetition-based bodily memory—‘in an ever renewed present.’ Ibid., p. 195. On the distinction between ‘representational’ or ‘recollection’ memory (mémoire-souvenir) and ‘bodily’ or ‘habit’ memory (mémoire-habitude), see also footnote 326. 448  Ibid., p. 199. Immediately prior to this remark, Bergson notes in a pedagogical vein that ‘the extraordinary development of spontaneous memory in most children is due to the fact that they have not yet persuaded their memory to remain bound up with their conduct’. Ibid., pp. 198–199. 449  Ibid., p. 197. 443 444

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sharpened, so that it presents nothing thicker than the edge of a blade to actual experience, into which it will thus be able to penetrate.’450 These are the words Bergson uses to describe the ‘man of action’, who lives ‘only in the present’ and responds ‘to a stimulus by the immediate reaction which prolongs it’.451 At the summit of the cone, where reactions need to follow stimuli as immediately as possible, there is little place for daydreaming or freewheeling thought. To penetrate into experience as if with a ‘blade’, a person needs a ‘quasi-instantaneous memory’452 on constant stand-by, which only draws on the past to improve an already-begun action or nip inapt responses in the bud. Thus, the reference to comparable experiences is made primarily in the service of practical ends. According to Bergson, the demands of a largely uncontrollable environment make it essential to build up as broad as possible a repertoire of alternative ways of acting, ranging from automatic behaviours to creative adaptations. And since the creative qualities are primarily put to the test on concrete needs and material obstacles, it is unsurprising that there is a particular focus in this context on the ‘sensori-motor systems organized by habit’.453 The transition from ‘imaginative’ or ‘representational’ to ‘habitual’ memory thus marks a shift in emphasis from a reflective, intellectual perspective to a mechanical one. Insofar as intuitive modes of reaction are manifested in spatial movements and physically embedded in ‘sensori-motor systems’, it would seem to make sense to speak of a ‘memory of the body’. According to Bergson, the function of the brain, as the ‘organ of attention to life’, is primarily confined in this context to appropriately coordinating bodily movements and ‘hindering … thought from becoming lost in dream’.454 In the case of familiar sequences of action, the external perceptual images are received and processed with maximum directness, subject to a being’s sensori-­ motor capacities. As the example of simple organisms shows, even minimally complex nervous systems can translate external stimuli into motor responses.455 Since the relation between sensory impressions and bodily  Ibid., p. 130.  Ibid., p. 198. Bergson further remarks that ‘the man who proceeds in this way is a man of impulse’ and that doing so is the ‘mark of the lower animals’. 452  Ibid., p. 197. 453  Ibid., p. 197. 454  Bergson 1946b, p. 87. See also footnote 185, where the brain is compared to a ‘central telephonic exchange’ that creates and defers connections. 455  See the amoeba example in footnote 180. 450 451

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responses is largely causally determined in such cases, Bergson stresses the necessity of a mechanistic interpretation of them. If, however, performing an action also requires an ‘effort of the mind’, insofar as representations from the past must be applied to the present, this brings about a crucial shift in perspective: ‘The recognition of a present object is effected by movements when it proceeds from the object, by representations when it issues from the subject.’456 We could take up this idea by saying that ‘bodily memory’ is externally activated and subject to mechanical laws, while ‘representational memory’ involves mental access to an internalised past. And although according to Bergson these two forms of memory exist independently, under the conditions of concrete perceptions and memories they are represented as unified. In virtue of its ‘sensori-motor systems’ and spatial constitution, the body has a twofold relation to the past forms and practical needs of life. It thus also marks the point of transition between inner representations and outer movements, and ‘is nothing but that part of our representation which is ever being born again, the part always present, or rather that which at each moment is just past’.457 It would seem that we have found the intermediary we have been looking for between the ‘integral survival of the past’458 and the constantly changing present. Bergson accordingly describes the body as ‘a section of the universal becoming’:459 It [the body] is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act,—the seat, in a word, of the sensori-­motor phenomena.460

The primary advantage of this conception is the special status it accords the body, by contrast with philosophical theories that abstract away from the body or are even downright hostile to it. But despite all the purported clarity about the body’s dual embedding ‘between the things’, it remains unclear how exactly the two forms of inner and outer memory, ‘representational’ or ‘imaginative’ memory and ‘habit’ memory, are related. Bergson only says, very vaguely, that  Bergson 1911, p. 87.  Ibid., p. 196. 458  Ibid., p. 194. 459  Ibid., p. 196. 460  Ibid. 456 457

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We pass, by imperceptible stages, from recollections strung out along the course of time to the movements which indicate their nascent or possible action in space.461

Given the assumption of ‘continuous duration’—whose transitions, by clear contrast to spatialised conceptions of time, are ‘fluid’—it seems prima facie logical for Bergson to understand the transition between memories and actions as ‘imperceptible’. But it is easy to overlook that the connection Bergson takes to exist between inner representations and sensori-­motor habits already presupposes the possibility of distinguishing them.462 Even if the boundary between ‘representational’ and ‘habitual’ memories cannot be precisely defined, it is still unclear whether we should assume any such boundary in the first place. Bergson is inconsistent on this point. While ‘pure duration’ is conceived as all-encompassing and constantly changing across all temporal and spatial limits, the forms of its individual apprehension are subject to concrete constraints. ‘External perceptions’ mingled with personal memory-images take the place of ‘pure perceptions’ directed towards ‘the Whole’ of experience—and at the lower end of the cone, instead of ‘pure memories’ of the ‘integral survival of the past’, the influences of ‘sensori-motor consciousness’ are already clearly apparent. In other words, throughout his writings Bergson defends the idea of a pure, overarching ‘duration in itself’463 that cannot simply be equated with the concrete experiences of a ‘duration for us’.464 Consequently, depending what perspective we adopt, the emphasis will be either on what separates or on what connects the virtual and the actual. And so for Bergson, if we look at matters from the perspective of the ‘metaphysical whole’, there exists a ‘difference in kind’465 between reflective, intellectual mémoire-souvenir and mechanical mémoire-habitude, whereas if we focus on the needs of practical life ‘the two terms [i.e. the  Ibid., p. 88.  See also the different arrangement of memories and spatial phenomena on the vertical and horizontal dimensions respectively in the cone schema. Although, geometrically speaking, the summit S belongs equally to both planes, this ‘dual relation’ always presupposes a difference between them. 463  From the preceding discussion of different aspects of ‘pure duration’, we should recall here Bergson’s remarks on inner consciousness (Time and Free Will), pure memory (Matter and Memory), the creative vital impetus (Creative Evolution) and historical dynamics (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion). 464  See footnote 354. 465  Bergson 1911, p. 91. 461 462

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two forms of memory] which had been separated to begin with cohere closely together’.466 To clarify this dual perspective on the two forms of memory, Bergson gives the example of learning a poem, which involves both imagining and repeating: The memory of a given reading is a representation, and only a representation; it is embraced in an intuition of the mind which I may lengthen or shorten at will; I assign to it any duration I please; there is nothing to prevent my grasping the whole of it instantaneously, as in one picture. On the contrary, the memory of the lesson I have learnt, even if I repeat this lesson only mentally, requires a definite time, the time necessary to develop one by one, were it only in imagination, all the articulatory movements that are necessary: it is no longer a representation, it is an action.467

On this view, the two forms of memory correspond to the two directions of movement of duration, which ‘for us’ is more strongly aligned to the past or present, while ‘in itself’ is supposed to exist without differentiating features. The above example suggests that in the intuitive representation of a ‘lesson I have learnt’, all temporal limits are subsumed into ‘pure duration’; the images of memory are evoked ‘with a single stroke’ and ‘made available’ in their supertemporal character. Sensori-motor repetition, by contrast, even if it is only carried out mentally, requires a definite length of time to be enacted. In habit memory, mental representations and intuitive images that bring the deeds of the past back to life are replaced by ‘the definite order and systematic character with which the actual movements take place’.468 Or in other words: while bodily memories are subject to mechanical necessities and laws, ‘true memory’ produces images of the mentally internalised past. These words give an especially clear expression of the contrast Bergson draws between mechanical necessities and mental freedoms: ‘sensori-­ motor’ reflexes are geared towards practical availability, while it is only the reflective spontaneity of the mind that allows direct access to the world of

 Ibid., pp. 195–196.  Ibid., p. 91. 468  Ibid., p. 93. The passage continues: ‘In truth, it [habit memory] no longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment.’ 466 467

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‘internal duration’ and ‘free self-determination’.469 This conception is questionable not just due to its ideal-typical opposition of inner freedoms and external constraints; the distinction derived from it between purely intellectual memories and bodily mediated habits also presupposes that a connection between the self-created images and externally determined mechanisms ‘exists in theory rather than in fact’.470 However, as the example of learning a poem illustrates, the ideal-typical distinction between mental freedoms and mechanical constraints is inadequate. The pupil who is reciting a text from memory and trying to find the right words—adopting a certain posture as they do so, knitting their brows, interlocking their fingers, perhaps gazing a little awkwardly at their feet—is not just remembering pure images or externally determined habits. This purported ­alternative misconstrues the indivisible relation between mental representations and bodily memories. If even learning a poem significantly involves certain physical postures and behaviours that become an ingrained, automatic habit, this also applies to ‘the memory of a given reading’. As Bergson stresses in the above-quoted passage, this memory induces not merely ‘a representation, and only a representation’ but also a certain way of talking, moving, holding one’s body, and so also a certain form of thinking and feeling.471 A clear awareness of this close relation between mental representations and physical habits can already be found in classical

469  ‘But the truth is that we perceive this self whenever, by a strenuous effort of reflection, we turn our eyes from the shadow which follows us and retire into ourselves. Though we generally live and act outside our own person, […] we can nevertheless always get back into pure duration, of which the moments are internal and heterogeneous to one another, and in which a cause cannot repeat its effect since it will never repeat itself.’ Bergson 1910, p. 233. 470  See footnote 250. 471  However, this relation may be opaque to the pupil: ‘The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of the consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, than the values given body, made body.’ Bourdieu 1977, p. 94. Elsewhere, Bourdieu expressly opposes the separation of memories into mental and mechanical: ‘The boxer who dodges a punch, the pianist or orator who improvises, or simply the man or woman who walks, sits, holds a knife (in their right hand …), raises their hat or nods their head in greeting, is not evoking a memory, a mental image, in which, for example, their first experience of the action they are performing is inscribed; and nor are they merely allowing material, physical or chemical mechanisms to play out.’ Bourdieu 1990b, p. 11.

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rhetoric’s rules of mnemonics.472 But as well as the technical side of instilling artificial memories (artificiosa memoria) through processes of deliberate learning and representation, one particularly surprising feature of the classical conception is that it took there to be a self-evident connection between material and physical properties on the one hand and the representations and images of memory on the other.473 This can be seen as supporting the ‘reciprocal determination of the sensuous by the spiritual and the spiritual by the sensuous’ that plays a significant role in Cassirer’s theory of symbols.474—But for now it shall suffice to say that, against this backdrop, the assumption of ‘pure memories’ and a ‘past existing in itself’ appears increasingly questionable and bizarre. If we accept the objections that have been raised here against the metaphysical separation of memory into pure representations and mechanical habits, Bergson’s distinction between internal freedoms and external constraints will also ultimately prove to be without foundation. The intuitive representation of a passage of a poem, which ‘I may lengthen or shorten at will’ and that evokes in us unconscious images of the past ‘with a single stroke’, is certainly not subject to the same mechanical laws that apply to the articulation or writing of the poem’s words. For that would presuppose that their conceptually formed meanings are already fully expressed by the individual sounds or letters, a view that nowadays not even

472  The basic form of mnemonics, which exists in many different variations, consists in combining individual representations and images (imagines) with particular positions and places (loci) so as to give a precise structure to the flow of thought. Since the rules of memory training were primarily developed for public speeches, where orators could not refer to written texts and a key role was played by rhetorical devices such as the use of the voice, facial expressions and gestures, special memorisation techniques were needed. The main purpose of forming an ‘artificial memory’ was to allow a speaker to reproduce a text as accurately as possible, acting as a substitute for a written copy. See Cicero 2001, pp. 145–146; for a more recent account of the relation between mind and matter in the evolution of memory, see Eccles 1991, pp. 146–178. 473  On the development and transformation of various mnemonic techniques, see for instance Yates 1966. 474  Cassirer 1955a, p. 318.

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proponents of logic-based linguistics hold.475 However, the clear difference between the material basis and semantic content of linguistic forms does not justify the assumption of a purely mentally determined representational memory wholly uninfluenced by or unmingled with anything external.476 As we have seen, this is a metaphysical postulation, with the terminology that is used serving to shield the ‘self in its original purity’ from the ‘obsession of the idea of space’ so as to maintain the illusion that our states of consciousness are free and our existence authentic.477 Thus, instead of harbouring the hope, as Bergson does, that ‘we can nevertheless always get back into pure duration, of which the moments are internal and heterogeneous to one another’,478 we need to give an explanation for the forgotten past’s continuing influence that does not resort to obscure intuitions and speculative fallacies. These ideas and concepts will only lose their metaphysical lustre once we stop looking for the history unavailable to conscious memory ‘beyond the turn of experience’, where it can be harmlessly equated with abstract freedom and purity. This ‘metaphysical lustre’ is in fact a sign of disenchantment, just as the metaphysical discourse of ‘inner freedom’, for instance, can be understood as a response  ‘The fundamental construction of a general theory of language has to take place in connection with a fundamental logic and on the basis of language, which language we have been speaking and understanding “all along”, but not on the basis of physics, since in fact physics is directed for its part to logic as the pre-school of reasonable discourse.’ Kamlah and Lorenzen 1984, p. 51. Today, we know that speaking a language is not simply a matter of being able to produce some arbitrary number of sentences, but primarily consists in the ability to perform communicative actions and speech acts, such as asking questions, making assertions or giving promises. The pragmatic meaning of linguistic acts is only revealed in processes of communication, and so the meaning of these acts cannot be found simply by producing grammatically correct sentences (using a speech synthesiser, for instance). Given this, it would be nonsensical to attempt to derive linguistic meanings from logical laws, since pragmatic propositional content is not reducible to syntactic/semantic forms. Moreover, as Habermas writes, the ‘logical analysis of language’ overlooks the ‘constitutive connection between the generative accomplishments of speaking and acting subjects, on the one hand, and the general structures of speech, on the other’. On this ‘abstractive fallacy’ underlying the analytic approach to the logic of science, see Habermas 1979, p. 5ff., and Apel 1988, pp. 406–423. 476  On the role of mimetic, analogical and symbolic forms of expression in the development of language, see Cassirer 1955a, pp. 186–197. 477  See Bergson 1910, p.  224. On the distinction between our ‘objectified’ life and the ‘genuine free self’, see ibid., pp. 218 and 231–232. 478  Ibid., p. 233. For Ingarden, this metaphysical capacity is typically ‘fleeting’ and ‘unclear’ because we are ‘intellectual beings above all else. Only by compelling ourselves and adopting tendencies [uns in Tendenzen versetzen] that, figuratively speaking, represent only our memory of our derivation from the general impulse of life and are present in us to an incomparably weaker degree, do we attain intuition for a moment.’ Ingarden 1994, p. 118. 475

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to the loss of ‘outer freedoms’ resulting from the increasing rationalisation of social and personal experience—a development that Max Weber, writing roughly contemporaneously, described as ‘peculiar to the Occident.’479 A similar observation can be made of Bergson’s assumption of a subjectively determined experience of time as duration, whose supposed quality and goodness is held to transcend calculable magnitudes and numerical relations. The true significance of this notion only becomes clear when it is placed in its sociohistorical context, i.e. the turn of the twentieth century, where we can observe that the emphasis placed on the ‘vitality of duration’ by Bergson, and later also by other authors,480 increased in proportion to the desubjectivation of human experiences of time. This modern ‘dissolution of the subject’,481 which reveals the ideological nature of the (likewise modern) conception of the indivisible self, is attributable above all to the advanced development of productive forces, as manifested in the increasing industrialisation and technologisation of public and private life that shapes concrete experiences of time and space.482 When Bergson looks ‘beyond the turn of experience’ in search of the living duration whose loss he laments, he is literally groping in the dark, without being able to give grounds for his sense that there has been a ‘disappearance of the subject’483 or for his rejection of the rationalisation of experience. Since he has made ‘life itself’ into a metaphysical, and hence purely conceptual, sanctuary from the universal threats of industrial expansion, Bergson’s promise of salvation from all the world’s ills ultimately also amounts to no more than pure speculations and conceptual tautologies. From a metaphysical standpoint, we are free ‘just because we are free’.484 479  These words come from the much-commented ‘author’s introduction’ to his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber 2005, p. xxxviii. It should be noted here in passing that the relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ was already a dominant topic in seventeenth-­ century philosophy, following the decline of the medieval cosmos in which the relation between inner and outer had been conceived in terms of a unifying principle. 480  This is especially true for Heidegger, who owes more to Bergson’s philosophy of life than the fleeting reference in Being and Time would suggest. Heidegger 1962, pp. 500–501. 481  This expression alludes to the historical ambivalence of subjectivity, which as the condition of possibility of autonomous action is always also a product of external constraints. The tragedy inherent in this state of affairs, which has profoundly shaped the genealogy of the subject, involves the clear-eyed recognition (as Foucault famously put it) ‘that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’, Foucault 2005, p. 422. 482  On the effects of the civilising process on experiences of space, time and movement, see in particular Elias 2007, Foucault 1995, Virilio 2005 and Schivelbusch 2000. 483  This is the title of a book by Peter Bürger (Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, 1998). 484  Bergson 1910, p. 219.

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Since this claim draws its power solely from its opposition to the determinations of spatially conceived object and social relations, it is unsurprising that Bergson describes our ‘conception of freedom’ as ‘indefinable’485: By the very fact of breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homogeneous space; in place of the doing we put the already done; and, as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism.486

Given ‘that metaphysics arises at the point where the empirical world is taken seriously, and where its relation to the supra-sensible world, which was hitherto taken for granted, is subjected to reflection’,487 this would suggest that the dualisms hypostatised by Bergson ultimately remain irreconcilable. Duration and space, life and matter, freedom and necessity, intension and extension, succession and simultaneity, heterogeneity and homogeneity—this incomplete list of opposites between which there appears to be no mediating tertia could easily be extended with other examples discussed by Bergson. And just as in the classical catalogues of metaphysical problems pure ideas, by contrast with the world of the senses, one-sidedly relate all assumed qualities and positive determinations to themselves, so that our access to them is restricted right from the outset, Bergson likewise says that we can only ever partially succeed in ‘listening to the uninterrupted humming of life’s depths’.488 But why this limitation? Why can we not immerse ourselves in the ‘flow of time’?489 Bergson either gives evasive answers that simply reaffirm the  Ibid.  Ibid., pp.  219–220. Other remarks, for instance that concerning ‘the evolutionary movement that we place ourselves [within], in order to follow it to its present results, instead of recomposing these results artificially with fragments of themselves’, are similarly nebulous or simply tautologous. Bergson 1922, pp. 390–391. Depending on our interpretative perspective, the dualisms that Bergson decries (despite having introduced them himself) will prove, in virtue of their metaphysical foundation, to be either eliminable or ultimately insurmountable: ‘And the more we immerse ourselves in it [real duration], the more we set ourselves back in the direction of the principle, though it be transcendent, in which we participate and whose eternity is not to be an eternity of immutability, but an eternity of life: how, otherwise, could we live and move in it?’ Bergson 1946c, p. 186, (emphasis mine). 487  Adorno 2001, p. 18. 488  Bergson 1946c, p. 176. 489  Bergson 1922, p. 362. 485 486

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presupposed dualisms,490 or goes into naive raptures that eloquently attest to his alienation from and rejection of the mechanisms and necessities of the ‘material world’.491 ‘Living knowledge’ does little to explain and so help remedy the states of affairs that Bergson complains of. Even if the ‘magic glance of intuition’492 may possess an element of truth insofar as it rejects the contrivances of conceptual, classificatory thought, ‘intuitive metaphysics’493 does not offer a higher type of experience. Even the images and representations that involuntarily flash into our minds and free us ‘with a single stroke’ from fixed ideas and habits come neither from an ‘original source of experience’ nor (as in theological construals of intuitionism) from some divine realm.494 Subsequent epistemological critiques came to understand the relation between involuntary representations and voluntary thoughts as neither spontaneous and contingent nor determined and controlled, but both at once: So-called inspirations are neither as irrational, nor as rhapsodical, as both Bergson and scientism claim. Unconscious knowledge not entirely subject to mechanisms of control explodes in inspiration and bursts through the wall of conventionalized judgements ‘fitting reality’. Since they do not participate in the manipulative activity of ego-regulated cognition, but rather passively and spontaneously recall what organizational thought calls sheer scandal in things, they are in fact ‘ego-alien’. But whatever is at work in 490  To give just one example: ‘The impetus of life, of which we are speaking, consists in a need of creation. It cannot create absolutely, because it is confronted with matter, that is to say with the movement that is the inverse of its own.’ Bergson 1922, p. 265. Similar instances can also be found for other dualisms, which are defined based on hierarchical distinctions in which (to put it in metaphysical terms) being and non-being are clearly separated by a ‘reversal of the habitual work of the intelligence’. Bergson 1946d, p. 208. 491  To give an example of this too: in 1932, one year before the National Socialists took power in Germany, Bergson wrote emphatically, ‘Let us not then merely assert that reason, present in each of us, compels our respect and commands our obedience by virtue of its paramount value. We must add that there are, behind reason, the men who have made mankind divine […]. It is these men who draw us towards an ideal society, while we yield to the pressure of the real one.’ Bergson 1935, p. 54. Although Bergson did not support totalitarian ideologies, these sorts of remarks underscore both the conceptual unclarity of his thought and a lack of forceful resistance to such ideologies. Of course, the present work is not concerned with Bergson’s personal sympathies and antipathies, which he shared with other contemporaries, but with his metaphysical concepts and distinctions. 492  Adorno 2013a, p. 45. 493  Bergson 1946f, p. 151 (in reference to Kant). 494  On Bergson’s influence on the Renouveau Catholique movement, see Rohls 1997, p. 22.

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rational cognition also enters into inspirations—sedimented and newly remembered—in order to turn for an instant against all the devices over whose shadow thought by itself cannot leap. […] Intuition is not a simple antithesis to logic. Intuition belongs to logic, and reminds it of the moment of its untruth.495

On this view, Bergson’s critique of the fixed forms of modern life and the loss of “living duration” fails due to its simplistic dualism of antithetical forms of knowledge. By failing to recognise that intuitive awareness cannot be separated from discursive thought, and instead understanding both as unmediated, Bergson transfigures ‘inner consciousness” into the ‘other of reason’496 and thereby also delivers it into the realm of objectified life.

3.6  Subjectivist Conclusions and Further Discussion Bergson takes intuitive knowledge to be immediate, as shown by the limiting cases of ‘pure perception’ and ‘pure memory’. But this supposition is contradictory due to the sharp opposition he draws between immediate knowledge and ‘impure’, spatialised experiences and memories, as illustrated by the conceptual contrivances to which he resorts to describe the purity of ‘inner experience’. For instance, ‘pure perception’, as ‘the very root of our knowledge of things’, appears to be wholly contained in the present moment, yet at the same time Bergson describes it as an ‘arbitrary hypothesis’ that ‘exists in theory rather than in fact’.497 ‘Pure memory’ is also only ‘independent in theory’,498 since the ‘integral survival of the past’ is likewise inaccessible to consciousness and ‘remains in the dark’.499 The immediate and absolute ‘inner experience’ directed at ‘duration in itself’ thus likewise appears formless and contentless, and phrases such as ‘living self’, ‘continuity of becoming’ and ‘undivided unity of

 Adorno 2013a, p. 46. For detailed discussion see Sect. 4.3 below.  This is the title of a book by Hartmut and Gernot Böhme (Das Andere der Vernunft, 1983). See also the discussion of ‘consciousness in general’ in Bergson 1922, p. 196. 497  Bergson 1911, pp. 24 and 26. See also footnotes 245 and 436. 498  Ibid., p. 170. See also footnote 438. 499  Ibid., p. 194. 495 496

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perception’500 come to seem downright mystifying,501 claiming validity precisely at the point where validity grounds are rejected. For according to Bergson, where we perceive ‘terms external to one another’ and other ‘symbols’, these terms ‘will no longer be the states of consciousness themselves’ but instead relate to the medium ‘which some call duration, but which is in reality space.’502 In light of this, the oppositions described by Bergson prove, due to their isolation from spatial determinations, to be either irresolvable or else already resolved and sublated in the identity of pure consciousness. There does not appear to be any tertia or ‘connecting thread’, unless we change our perspective and focus not on the ‘absolute law of our consciousness’, but rather the ‘region of subjective facts’.503 As we have seen, this shift in perspective is significant for Bergson too, since all the dualisms he describes are discursively analysed prior to their sublation in the ‘principle of identity’504 with a view to possible ­connections and transitions. Measured against the claim of intuitive knowledge, this method is internally inconsistent, and ensnares Bergson in a web of aporias and things in urgent need of explanation. It not only undermines the absolute status of his ‘pure’ premises and conclusions, but also hints at the possibility of relations that go beyond apodictic dualisms and abstract identities. Bergson himself expresses this idea at one point: But, just because we have pushed dualism to an extreme, our analysis has perhaps dissociated its contradictory elements. The theory of pure perception on the one hand, of pure memory on the other, may thus prepare the way for a reconciliation between the unextended and the extended, between quality and quantity.505

 Bergson 1910, p. 236, and Bergson 1911, pp. 178 and p. 215.  ‘No concept of the living can be thought unless it includes a moment of the identically persisting.’ Adorno 2013a, p. 47. 502  Bergson 1910, p. 163. 503  Ibid., pp. 207 and 1. 504  ‘The principle of identity is the absolute law of our consciousness: it asserts that what is thought is thought at the moment when we think it: and what gives this principle its absolute necessity is that it does not bind the future to the present, but only the present to the present: it expresses the unshakable confidence that consciousness feels in itself, so long as, faithful to its duty, it confines itself to declaring the apparent present state of the mind.’ Bergson 1910, pp. 207–208 (emphasis mine). 505  Bergson 1911, pp. 236–237. 500 501

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Based on what has been said up to this point, it is clear that for Bergson any such ‘reconciliation’ between ‘contradictory elements’ can succeed only if we are able ‘in a certain measure, to transcend space’506 and attend to ‘the fundamental structure of our mind’.507 This requires us to set aside the mind’s ‘superficial and acquired habits’ and ‘contingent form which it derives from our bodily functions and from our lower needs’.508 However, as physical beings, bound to material conditions and social constraints, the ‘internal lines of the structure of things’509 remain hidden from us. Although we sense that the ‘mechanical composition of the elements’510 has little in common with the idea of their ‘original freedom’ and the experience of their ‘continuous duration’, in order to fully realise this intuition and eliminate all dualisms, we would need to transcend our earthly existence and the bodily, practical necessities bound up with it. Once again, a tertia is either impossible or conceivable only as a forceful disruption of the ‘region of subjective facts’: By unmaking that which these needs have made, we may restore to intuition its original purity and so recover contact with the real.511

This brings Bergson’s metaphysics of life into close proximity with death—presaging the later approach of existential ontology, which no longer focused just on living beings’ lost connection to some fundamental core of life, but rather on the death in which their existence inevitably culminates. However, we shall not consider this idea further here. More important for present purposes is that the possibility of ‘a reconciliation between the unextended and the extended, between quality and quantity’512 is precluded by the oppositions Bergson presupposes as valid, since merely conceiving a mediation between them contradicts the idea of their unmediatedness. This means that the opening line of the preface to Matter and Memory gives us false expectations:  Ibid., p. 245.  Ibid., p. 241. 508  Ibid. In the same passage, Bergson speaks critically of the ‘impotence of speculative reason, as Kant has demonstrated it’ and describes how experience ‘above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, […] becomes properly human experience.’ 509  Ibid., p. 240. 510  Ibid., p. 243. 511  Ibid., p. 241. 512  See footnote 505. 506 507

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This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory.513

Bergson has decided in favour of the dualism ‘suggested by the immediate verdict of consciousness and adopted by common sense‘514 even before he begins his philosophical inquiry, which he undertakes with the aim ‘to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties’515— that is, as is now clear, with the aim to affirm the validity of oppositions whose validity is already presupposed. Now, we could content ourselves with simply showing the aporias and contradictions that result from the belief that intuitive knowledge is guaranteed only by an absolute—which means, essentially, a concept-less and subject-less—faculty of knowledge. If, by contrast, we take up Bergson’s critique of a conventional, materialist way of thinking by way of spontaneous, passive insights that, it was suggested above, as repressed or forgotten moments run counter to ‘exact’ thought, then our capacity for intuitive knowledge will no longer appear to be unmediated; rather, such knowledge will take effect unconsciously, ‘burst[ing] through the wall of conventionalized judgements “fitting reality”’.516 This represents a departure from the metaphysical postulation of ‘duration in itself’, which on Bergson’s view can only be conceived ‘purely’ and without reference to discursive understanding and spatial experiences. Instead of assuming a universal ‘consciousness of reality’ or ‘intellectual memory’ in which all perceptions and memories are supposed ‘in theory’ to be subsumed, it would entail turning our attention to the spatial segments and temporal moments that represent the juxtaposition and intermingling of specific perceptions and memories. This conception can be found in Bergson’s writings; however, due to his opposition to merely ‘derivative’ experiences, he considers it only so as to demonstrate its incompleteness and reject it. Above, it was discussed under the heading of ‘duration for us’.517 Although Bergson does not use this term himself, as it contradicts the idea of the ‘impersonal time’518 that  Bergson 1911, p. vii.  Ibid. 515  Ibid. 516  Adorno 2013a, p. 46. 517  See on this point footnote 354. 518  See footnote 356. 513 514

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Perceptions

Duration ‘for us’

Duration ‘in itself’

Internal and

Intuitive synthesis

external images

(Consciousness of

(Representational

reality)

consciousness) Memories

Temporally

Fluid transitions

articulated

(Intellectual memory)

progressions (Bodily memory)

Fig. 3.3  A breakdown of ‘la durée’

is supposed to exist independently of us, on the view defended here it designates the philosophically relevant content that remains if we relate the required adjustment to the matter at stake, the Sache selbst (‘duration in itself’), back to the knower and understand it relative to concretely determined memories and representations (‘duration for us’). This does, admittedly, change the sense of ‘duration’, since it is now expressly understood as spatially intermingled and subjectively mediated, and no longer, as it is for Bergson, as pure, original and cleansed of all inauthenticity. But this is the only way, in Bergson’s own words, to not only affirm the ‘reality of spirit and the reality of matter’ but actually attend to the ‘relation of the one to the other’ without having decided the matter in advance.519 The table below (Fig. 3.3) is intended to clarify this anti-metaphysical shift in perspective, which retains the concept of duration but discards the assumption of its immediacy: The table shows the differences between the two concepts that I introduced earlier, ‘duration in itself’ and ‘duration for us’. The prefix ‘pure’ has been removed from ‘perceptions’ and ‘memories’ so as to indicate the intermingling of spatial images and temporal progressions. For while, as we have seen, on Bergson’s view ‘consciousness of reality’ and ‘intellectual 519

 On the opening lines of Matter and Memory‚ see footnote 513.

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memory’ operate independently, with perceptions wholly subsumed into the things themselves and memories into the survival of the past, this does not apply to ‘duration for us’. As was shown by reference to movement-images and image-­ movements,520 we should instead hold that our present perceptions and representations are always related to past and future images. Because these images are located not just in things but also in our memory, they endure, which is to say that they have a past and a future. The fact that memories and perceptions remain incomplete and can only capture part of the ‘totality of the images of the material world’ limits the scope of their validity claim; it is not possible to derive from it the assumption of an intuitive synthesis of all images in a complete consciousness of reality. What matters, rather, is that our inner and outer perceptions can be set into relation with one another at all, albeit often only fleetingly. However, this generally occurs spontaneously and passively between representations, rather than exclusively in the things themselves, which is why the talk of ‘duration in itself’ promises far more than it can actually deliver. A similar point can be made about memories, which, as we have seen, likewise neither exist ‘as such’ nor are subsumed into a faculty of pure, intellectual memory. Rather, due to their connections to the material world they are manifested in a form that is both spatially and individually mediated.521 Their duration is also limited and cannot be conceived as an ‘indivisible continuity’ or ‘integral survival of the past’.522 Intuitive insights and memories are, instead, ‘lightning bolts of knowledge’523 that appear involuntarily and hence remain discontinuous. Consequently, it would be futile to attempt to trace ‘pure memory’ back to a ‘source’ prior to individual experiences in order to shore up the metaphysical assumption of an impersonal ‘duration in itself’, since ‘duration for us’ is always mingled with references to spatial things and individual perceptions that must be included in any analysis of the faculty of memory. This applies even, as already noted, for the externally activated bodily memory (mémoire-habitude), which, again by contrast with Bergson, is  See Sect. 3.3 and 3.4.  For a detailed discussion see Sect. 3.5. 522  See footnotes 422 and 458. 523  This is how intuition is characterized in Adorno 2013a, p. 46. A little later, he writes, ‘As the blind spots in the process of cognition—from which they still cannot escape—intuitions prevent reason from reflecting upon itself as a mere form of reflection of arbitrariness, in order to prepare an end for arbitrariness.’ Ibid., pp. 46–47. 520 521

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inseparable from intellectual memory (mémoire-souvenir).524 Experiences of both time and motion are fundamentally connected to embodied perceptions and memories. This idea, which is central to the present study, will be further elaborated in Part II, so for now it shall suffice to say that temporal changes and spatial transitions qua ‘duration for us’ are always already physically mediated and practically lived through, and do not possess absolute significance.525 This entails that the ‘continuity of experience’ should likewise not be conceived in abstract terms as a removal of images of the past from personal experiences. As ‘duration for us’, its progress is instead reduced to individual, uncontrolled flashes of sensations, impressions and memories.526 If its ‘intuitive synthesis’ and ‘blurring of transitions’ now occurs in bodily mediated perceptions and practically interrelated memories, there is no need for any ‘virtuality’ or ‘actuality’ hypostasised as ‘pure’ or ‘original’. Its significance ‘for us’, regardless of whether it is only momentary or more prolonged, must be created; it is not pregiven ‘in itself’. Although abandoning the notion of ‘duration in itself’ fatally undermines Bergson’s supposition of a ‘totality of images and memories’, ‘duration for us’ also points clearly beyond the static juxtaposition and succession of disconnected memories and representations. Only by doing away with metaphysical assumptions and apodictic postulates do the relations between spatial movements and durational changes come to view that are essential to understanding them. As I have shown, by failing to mediate 524  On Bergson’s distinction between these different forms of memory, see footnotes 447 and 460. 525  For Bergson, it is only in the identity of ‘pure actuality’ and ‘pure virtuality’ that ‘duration in itself’ is united with itself; in other words, that consciousness of reality and intellectual memory are conceived as the same. In logical, analytic judgements, by contrast, the self-­ coinciding forms triumph even without an intuition of determinate contents, which is why for Zeno motion and change cannot be conceived without contradiction. Both approaches conceive of content and form without any concrete mediation between them in order to prove, respectively, ‘absolute movement’ and ‘absolute immobility’. 526  According to Bergson, affective images (images-affections) are first transformed into perceptual images (images-perceptions) before becoming memory-images (image-souvenirs). This process could be understood as an initial act of symbolisation, from felt impression to imagistic expression. However, intuitionism’s rigid commitment to an immediate, intuitive consciousness of life means that on the whole it is too schematic for a semiotic interpretation of expressive images relating to the body. Once again, the dualism Bergson assumes between ‘pure duration’ and ‘extended matter’ stands in the way of understanding their reciprocal relationship.

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between the different poles, the conceptions of both ‘pure thought’ and ‘pure perception’ lead to a dogmatic dualism between absolute movement (Bergson) and absolute immobility (Zeno). It therefore needs to be shown what form this opposition would take if we were to dispense with categorical truth claims and ultimate universal grounds. As we shall see, the validity of the concepts assumed by different theories is dependent on how those concepts are formed. Our focus shall thus turn to aspects of the conceptualisation of spatiotemporal movements and changes, which will be ideal-typically divided according to whether the underlying principles have a primarily objectivist or subjectivist orientation. For even if we nowadays seem to have moved beyond metaphysical postulations and dualisms, they continue to operate where concepts are defined one-sidedly and used in isolation. This is especially true of theories that either one-sidedly subsume spatiotemporal changes under logical laws or raise subjective phenomena to the status of causa prima in order to establish their universal significance. In both cases, metaphysical dualism is continued by other means, with theoretical validity claims opposed to the forms of their concrete mediation. My goal in critiquing such oppositions is not to establish my own epistemological framework, but rather to more precisely define the boundaries between objectivist and subjectivist approaches so as ‘to objectify more completely [the] objective and subjective relation to the object’.527

527  This is how Bourdieu characterises the aim of his ‘critique of theoretical reason’ (1990a, p. 1).

PART II

Motion as a Phenomenon of Transition

Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same. G. W. F. Hegel

The identity between ‘pure being’ and ‘pure nothing’ asserted in the above aphorism from Hegel1 describes the ‘beginning of philosophy’ in all its contradiction: if being is conceived as pure and absolute, it will be indifferent and indeterminate, with ‘no difference within it, nor any outwardly’.2 Like ‘pure nothing’, pure being ‘is simple equality with itself, complete emptiness, complete absence of determination and content’.3 The supposed identity between ‘pure being’ and ‘pure nothing’ does not, therefore, purport to already be completely valid. Only in the transition between being and nothing, that is, only in the course of their differentiation, does it become possible to grasp them as distinct and antithetical, with this difference being manifested both in processual becoming and conceptual transition. The conceptual distinction between ‘pure being’ and ‘pure nothing’ marks the (admittedly still indeterminate) transition that finds expression only in becoming, that is, in the transition between nothing and being or being and nothing. The ‘dual character of appearance and disappearance’4 inherent to becoming gives concrete form to the difference between being  Hegel 2010a, p. 59.  Ibid. 3  Ibid. 4  Röttgers 2001, p. 123. 1 2

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and nothing, which in Hegel’s philosophical system is understood as already united in becoming and must be distinguished from the individual moments of becoming itself. Only under the aspect of reciprocal disappearance in the other do pure being and pure nothing form a unity and can they be distinguished, as moments, from each other and from their unity. Thus, for Hegel the concepts of becoming and transition differ not in substance [Sache] but only in aspect. Transition focuses on the aspect of what happens between two distinct things, while becoming refers to the disappearance of one in the other. But the form of the process as such is the same in both cases.5

While Hegel proceeds straight to the ‘whole’, we do not need to do so in order to recognise the dialectical relation between ideas of conceptual unity on the one hand and experiences that cannot be subsumed into them on the other. As we have seen, we can also demonstrate the contradiction between notions of purity and concretely mediated experiences by reference to individual phenomena such as motion (which poses a problem not in our everyday experience but only when considered through a speculative lens). I shall nonetheless use the dialectical model because it helps to make clear that the concept of ‘whole’, ‘purity’ or ‘origin’ can be grasped only in its finitude, thus replacing the idea of a unified object with an insight into its mediated, becoming character. I say ‘insight’, because we are not simply swapping one principle for another, as with Zeno’s ‘immobility of being’ and Bergson’s ‘being of motion’. The advantage of dialectics over these dogmatically posited principles can be seen in its claim (in a mode of immanent critique rather than ‘edification’) to sustain the mutual confrontation between concept and subject matter (Sache), rather than subsuming one into the other. Thus, critiquing the assumptions that underpin ideas of ‘absolute immobility’ and ‘absolute mobility’ and revealing their flaws (as was done in Part I) at the same time gives rise to an objective moment that exceeds the mere concept of the subject matter. ‘Pure being’ and ‘pure nothing’, which Hegel fundamentally considers ‘the same’, likewise exemplify this differentiation through transition, since the assumption of their unchanging significance is already subjectively mediated—in other words, it points beyond itself. The necessity of their change and mediation derives from the matter that is at stake, the Sache 5

 Ibid., pp. 123–124.

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selbst, since every determination, even if it proceeds purely conceptually and appears to correspond to the ideal of a complete definition, is possible only if at least one predicate is assigned to an object, both determining and restricting its meaning. Earlier, I described the contradictions that arise when we attempt to define ‘pure’ objects; the reason I refer here to the difficulties that attend the beginning of philosophy is to show that these contradictions are not a merely superficial flaw or error, but rather grounded in the Sache selbst. For this purpose, it is of no matter that idealist dialectics collapses the distinction between the concept of a Sache (thing, subject matter) and the essence of the Sache selbst. According to Hegel, the ‘movement of the concept’6 is not confined to the merely superficial ascription of concepts; he also understands things themselves as becoming and so as contradictory. On the conception of Hegel’s systematic philosophy or Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie, this entails that philosophy can master even that which is not a subject7—that is, we can reconcile identity with the non-­ identical. Hegel claims this can be done ‘only at the end’,8 i.e. after all individual determinations have been sublated in the unity of philosophical determinations in general. In the same passage, Hegel equates ‘the whole’ and ‘the true’,9 claiming that concept and subject matter are reconciled and the opposition of subject and object is sublated. On the view defended here, however, we do not need to think of the dialectical process in terms of its ‘end point’ or ‘the Absolute’ in order to understand both ‘concepts’ and ‘subject matters’ as becoming and changeable. Rather, with respect to both ordinary and theoretically mediated experiences, I take it that the concepts that we use and the things to which we apply them are not already sublated in a unified whole. So long as the object and subject of knowledge are different, there is no reason to accept or presuppose such an identity. If we follow this idea, we will observe that the difficulties that attend the beginning of philosophy apply equally to the totality of philosophical efforts aimed at achieving closure; however, these difficulties can be avoided if we do not rush to reconcile dialectical thought ‘starting at the end’.  Hegel 2018, p. 22.  According to Hegel, in the ‘exposition of the system’ of philosophy, ‘everything hangs on grasping and expressing the true not just as substance but just as much as subject.’ Hegel 2018, p. 12. 8  Ibid., p. 13. 9  ‘The true is the whole.’ Ibid. 6 7

CHAPTER 4

Motion as Phenomenal Contradiction (Hegel)

Both are manifested in motion […] pure negativity as time, continuity as space. G. W. F. Hegel

The example of the negative, as the ‘principle of all self-movement’,1 shows that immanent critique does not actually need an idealist reconciliation in the whole in order to recognise the contradictions between things and concepts, and comprehend their fermenting effect. For instance, Hegel writes with regard to ‘external, sensuous motion’2 that: Something moves, not because now it is here and there at another now, but because in one and the same now it is here and not here; because in this here it is and is not at the same time. One must concede to the dialecticians of old the contradictions which they pointed to in motion; but what follows from them is not that motion is not but that it is rather contradiction as existent.3

 Hegel 2010a, p. 382.  Ibid. 3  Ibid. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Bockrath, Time, Duration and Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7_4

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While in Part I4 these words served to designate a problem that had not yet been explicated, we can now see how on a dialectical conception the non-subsumability of concept and subject matter necessitates changes in both. For by deliberately violating the logical law of non-contradiction,5 inasmuch as something in the external movement is said to be simultaneously here and not here, the concept of spatial motion is not only criticised as inadequate but at the same time also modified. Instead of the rigid juxtaposition that characterised Zeno’s paradoxes, and instead of the dynamic succession and intermingling that Bergson claimed to be the principle of duration in general, Hegel holds that in ‘external, sensuous motion’ spatial and temporal moments are always already concretely mediated, without being subsumed into each other. This is by no means a new idea, but accords with the ideas that emerged out of the development of the ‘exact natural sciences’.6 However, the dialectical approach is not primarily interested in mathematical and scientific solutions, such as integral and differential calculus, which play a key part in defining movement in terms of mechanical laws. Although philosophy neither ignores nor disputes such knowledge,7 it is primarily concerned with comprehending the necessary differences between abstract postulations and reflections on the one hand and concretely mediated intuitions and experiences on the other, and relating them to the process of differentiation itself. Applied to our problem, this would entail that the difficulty demonstrated by Zeno if we attempt to actually complete an infinite number of tasks should be measured by reference to its opposite, experience, since on  See Hegel’s aphorism at the start of Part I above.  According to the law of non-contradiction, mutually contradictory propositions cannot both be true at once. 6  ‘It was only with Galileo that the old principle of operari sequitur esse, which the scholastics derived from a naive materialist view of the world, was invalidated. The principle begins with a general lawfulness of action, which claims universal and necessary validity independently of any particular features of empirical objects; only on this condition do the types and categories of being become distinguishable.’ Cassirer 1974, p. 401. According to Cassirer, geometry and numerology formed the basis for the universal rules that allowed Newton to calculate the path of the moon’s orbit around the earth down to ever smaller intervals of time, making it possible to give a precise mathematical specification of its motion at a given moment. 7  See for instance Hegel’s exposition of the principle of causality and the mathematical concept of quantitative infinity. Hegel 2010a, pp. 120ff. and 201ff. The relation between cause and effect is, famously, central to Kant’s theory of antinomies. See Kant 1998, B 448–B 461. 4 5

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a Hegelian conception the difference between logos and nature is understood as an opposition or contradiction.8 Conversely, the indivisible duration posited by Bergson must likewise take account of its opposite, i.e. the possibility of its being divided and rendered inert, since there is no point of comparison external to the comparanda—unless we dogmatically posit one, but that comes at a price and has already been rejected with good reason.9 We can object that both Zeno and Bergson ground their positions by making distinctions and revealing contradictions that cannot be settled ‘only’ empirically or ‘merely’ logically, and so contain a dialectical element that, to a certain extent, bridges the divide to reflective thought. For instance, Zeno’s paradoxes are based on an indirect method of proof, which begins by assuming the opposite of the conclusion that he seeks to prove, and then infers the truth of that conclusion from the contradictions that arise from assuming its negation. Bergson, meanwhile, constantly points to the difficulties that result if duration is conceived as a spatial category opposed to the ‘inner self’. However, and this is where we can see the crucial difference from the self-movement of thinking in contradictions, both Zeno and Bergson consider antithetical concepts and judgements in a way that reaffirms and reinforces their own position by demonstrating the inadequacy and impossibility of its opposite. The 8  By contrast, empirical oppositions, such as between black and white horses, would be ‘mere’ distinctions made by reference to the comparer or the property defined as ‘the same’ that the comparanda have in common. A similar point applies to logical distinctions, such as the law of identity (A is A), which only shows itself not to be ‘merely’ abstract, formal and tautological in confrontation with individual experiences. 9  Same and not-same (e.g. duration and time) cannot be separated solely using formal logic or empirical means. In a comparison, the point of comparison by reference to which something is determined to be the same or not the same at the same time assumes itself to be identical and non-identical; that is, it distinguishes itself both from that which is to be distinguished and from itself, when it conceives of itself as opposed to itself. Richard Kroner characterises the (self-)reflexivity expressed in this opposition as follows: ‘The empirical negation is also position, but as such a “merely” formal, “merely” logical tautology divorced from the empirical position, in which the logos “merely” posits itself; it is “merely” negative for empirical science [die Empirie], just as the empirical (simple, natural) judgement is “merely” positive for empirical science. The tautology, heterologically placed alongside heterology, is itself a “simple” judgement, it is “naive”, “natural”, “immediate”, i.e. reflectionless, “mere” reflection. […] The speculative negation is position and negation at the same time; “mere” negation and “mere” position are reflected in it as moments of the whole empirical judgement [des empirischen Urteilsganzen], which ceases precisely thereby to be “merely” empirical, and becomes reflectively empirical, speculative.’ Kroner 1977, pp. 356–357.

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contradictions that they show thus serve primarily to establish or delineate each thinker’s own position, which is why any mediation between the opposing poles seems to be not even possible. The binary opposites described by Zeno and Bergson are related to each other purely externally, i.e. without any reflexive mediation qua negation and contradiction. By contrast, immanent critique does not simply replace certain concepts with others (as was done, for instance, by the Sophists, who were always covertly smuggling in new meanings). Rather, the concepts themselves are constitutively confronted with their own contradictions: for instance, if they fail to express, or express something contrary to, their intended referent. The concepts and judgements in question are then not simply discarded or replaced, but modified so as to give greater emphasis to the non-subsumability of concept and subject matter. Insofar as we recognise, in a non-affirmative spirit, that the apparent ‘inadequacy’ of a concept or judgement is necessary, we will be impelled to reflect on or modify its meaning. On Kroner’s classical conception, the form of changed mediation or mediated change is understood as A system of three propositions, a conclusion that simultaneously combines and mediates in itself concept (position), judgement (limitation) and conclusion, or thesis, antithesis and synthesis, or the merely formal (tautological, identical, abstract) postulation A is A, the merely empirical (heterological, concrete) judgement A is B and the speculative (tauto-heterological, abstract-concrete) conclusion A is not-A, i.e. B.10

When Hegel claims that ‘external, sensuous motion’ is ‘contradiction as existent’, insofar as something that moves ‘in this here […] is and is not at the same time’,11 this is prima facie inconsistent with the belief that something cannot be in two different places at the same time. Two different notions of movement are being contrasted here. The conceptual-formal notion relates to the tautological identity (A is A) of movement, allowing it to be identified as one and the same. However, it cannot be shown purely in formal-logical terms how ‘in one and the same now’ something can be ‘here and not here’.12—The empirical-heterological notion, by contrast, focuses on the experience of transition between individual points, the changes in which mean they cannot be fixed by specifying their i­ dentity  Ibid., p. 355.  See footnotes 2 and 3. 12  See footnote 3. 10 11

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(A is B).—Thus, understanding movement as an object presupposes an abstract conception of identity that is inconsistent with concrete experience; this presents us with the challenge of how to mediate between both elements of the judgement. For thinking in contradictions, this means not setting formal and material standpoints against each other, by deciding either for the ‘immobility of being’ (Zeno) or the ‘being of motion’ (Bergson), but rather understanding contradiction itself as a moment of truth.13

4.1   Movement of the Concept Describing contradiction as a ‘moment of truth’ should not be misconstrued as the idea that the laws of formal logic should simply be ignored or suspended. Rather, it means that through the use of logical categories certain determinations come into contradiction with, and so transcend, themselves.14 The critique also bears on the logical concepts themselves, if these are applied to objects as supposedly fixed and secure parameters. Since we cannot simply assume that objects are organised precisely the same way as the categories that are applied to them, Hegel emphatically criticises the dogmatic equation of the two in logical consciousness. In his ‘Doctrine of the Concept’, he lucidly demonstrates both in general and by 13  Insofar as A is combined with B in an empirical judgement, it simultaneously limits and extends itself. For given that B can also be understood as not-A, A refers both to itself (A) and to everything outside itself (not-A or B). Kroner, who holds that the judgement A is B ‘is not empirically negated’ but ‘reflects [on] itself’ [sich reflektiert], comments on the matter as follows: ‘In his Logic, Hegel breaks down the empirical judgement (the “judgement of existence”) that the singular is the universal into the form of the “identical propositions” “the singular is singular” and “the universal is universal”, so as to show that it is self-­ contradictory and has its truth in its negation.’ Kroner 1977, p. 354. If, by contrast, as in the main body of the text above, we speak of contradiction as a ‘moment of truth’, this is to indicate that universal and singular, or A and B, are not only reflexively related, but can also be ‘empirically negated’. For if concept (A) and subject matter (B) do not agree, this prompts the question of how to mediate between them, which is by no means resolved in the apparently neutral ‘is’ between A and B, i.e. in speculative synthesis. By contrast with a Schellingian equation of A and not-A, universal and particular, being and nothing, etc., the two sides are not already positively sublated in the connecting ‘is’, but remain negatively mediated. 14  Especially in the second volume of the Science of Logic, Hegel addresses the validity claims and limits of traditional logic. He regards the two as inseparable, as ‘there already exists for the logic of the concept a fully ready and well-entrenched, one may even say ossified, material, and the task is to make it fluid again, to revive the concept in such a dead matter’. Hegel 2010a, p. 507.

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reference to particular examples that ‘cognition as such’, contra claims of objectivity, is still shut up within itself, since the simple logical forms necessarily acquire their changing empirical contents ‘from the outside’.15 However, in reflective philosophy—by contrast with the critique of reason—the oppositions between form and content are understood not as absolute but as reciprocally mediated moments that develop out of each other.16 The contradictions of knowledge, which find their specific expression in the non-assimilation of form and content, are consequently understood not as inadequacies of the understanding or failures of reason, but as an ‘organon of truth’,17 since each individual experience only becomes knowledge through contradiction. In his critique of the Eleatics, Hegel himself shows how reflecting on contradiction sets ‘pure thought […] in its rigid isolation and self-­ identity’18 in motion. He not only seeks to expose the limits of the understanding, which hardens the opposition between the bounded and the absolute ‘by positing the bounded as an absolute’;19 in addition, reflecting on the contradictory identity of the understanding also allows him to overcome this ‘form of boundedness’20 by understanding it as necessary but not absolute. The law of non-contradiction remains valid; that is, it applies in the domain of ordinary understanding in the same unmodified form as in the domain of formal logic. However, and it is here that we can see the speculative aspect of the philosophy of spirit, knowledge itself is understood as contradictory when it reflects on itself and so reveals self-­ contradiction as a necessary moment of self-knowledge: For this knowing [Erkennen] is directed not just forwards to intuitively given contents, but at the same time backwards to itself; it wants to grasp its contents in the gaze that is at the same time turned back on itself, wants to grasp them reflectively. So it must turn its forward-looking gaze into itself, it must take the positing that looks towards the content at the same time back into itself: it must negate the positing of the content or the content as  Ibid., p. 697.  Accordingly, the distinction between form and content is arbitrary, since reflecting on logical concepts makes them into content themselves or, to put it another way, individual contents can only be determined as such if they are formally brought into agreement. 17  Kroner 1977, p. 294. 18  Hegel 1955a, p. 240. 19  Kroner 1977, p. 158. 20  Ibid. 15 16

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posited, as proposition; it must have contradiction [Widerspruch] follow assertion [Spruch], negation [Gegensatz] follow proposition [Satz]. Or: it must presuppose [voraussetzen] the content, but sublate it as posited-ahead [als voraus-gesetzten aufheben], since it wants to reflectively know it, i.e. to posit it only through the act of reflection.21

According to Hegel, the ‘Eleatic propositions still have interest for Philosophy’,22 since they lie at the origin of dialectics. We shall therefore now turn to consider whether the ‘act of reflection’ brings the paradoxes of motion into conflict with themselves and suggests another way of understanding their dialectic. Hegel believes there is no doubt that Zeno makes reason the starting point,23 but it is an open question how the object of observation changes if it is derived from the contradiction of particular oppositions. Since I already analysed the inadequacies of assumptions of ‘origin’ in Part I by reference to Zeno’s conception of pure thought, below I shall confine myself to interpreting the paradoxes of motion as moments of truth in the above-described sense. This is in accord with Zeno’s own intentions: The point is not that there is movement and that this phenomenon exists; the fact that there is movement is as sensuously certain as that there are elephants; it is not in this sense that Zeno meant to deny movement. The point in question concerns its truth.24

Hegel agrees with Zeno that we cannot infer the truth of motion from our sensuous-certainty. But he does not conclude from this that only the One exists, as ‘the negation of motion’.25 For while Zeno only attains the One by negating the plural and changeable, sharply dividing being and nothing, Hegel allows both to be valid: We say God is unchangeable, change concerns finite things alone (which we represent as an empirical proposition); on the one hand we thus have finite  Ibid., p. 335.  Hegel 1955a, p.  240. Later on, he writes, ‘Zeno’s dialectic of matter has not been refuted to the present day; even now we have not got beyond it, and the matter is left in uncertainty.’ Ibid., p. 265. 23  See ibid., p. 261. 24  Ibid., p. 266. 25  Ibid., p. 261. 21 22

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things and change, and on the other, unchangeableness in this abstract absolute unity with itself. It is the same separation, only that we also allow the finite to be Being, which the Eleatics deny.26

Though Hegel describes his conception rather modestly as a ‘more ordinary way’ to ‘reach this abstraction’,27 it contains within it the full power of dialectical thought. For logically speaking, every ‘negation is itself again a determination’,28 and so even nothingness cannot be conceived purely by reference to itself, but only becomes meaningful by being contrasted with being. If we accept this idea, then being and nothing are mutually conditioned, which prompts Hegel to ask, ‘Whence comes determination and how is it to be grasped—how is it in the one, leaving the finite aside, and also how does the infinite pass out into the finite?’29 With this quaestio iuris, speculative thought turns against the fixed oppositions of the understanding, which are predicated on a contrast between a pure, unmediated Absolute and everything finite. Understanding the opposition of absolute and finite as a determination of reflective thought allows Hegel to relate the two sides to each other and conceive them as contradictorily connected moments of self-reflection. Instead of positing an abstract, universal infinity, reflective philosophy claims to add content to its purely formal determination by negating its opposite. For even if the infinite remains incomprehensible to the understanding, as a product of finite thought it is already included in the process of speculation. Hegel describes the Eleatics’ claim ‘that only the One exists and that the negative does not exist at all’ as a ‘great abstraction’,30 instead of processual determinations and relations descends into ‘the abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’.31 Only a mind that thinks in contradictions can overcome the one-sided limitation of the abstract identity of the understanding, since it not only presupposes but also negates and sublates itself, by separating from itself. This may strike us as an impossible and contradictory task, but in this self-differentiation we can at the same time find a central element of dialectical thought, in which subject and object of cognition are reflexively related. In other words, the  Ibid., p. 246.  Ibid. 28  Ibid., p. 261. 29  Ibid., p. 246. 30  Ibid. 31  Ibid., p. 243. 26 27

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self-­ reflexivity of thought is directed both towards itself and towards something outside itself—and only in this reflexive opposition does it become aware of itself in its contradictory mediation of self and other. On this view, the understanding is not self-sufficient; it cannot just posit itself, but must also differentiate itself from what it is not. This is what Hegel means when he says that self-reflexive thought simultaneously comprehends the identical as non-identical or antithetical. The contradictory doubling of identity and non-identity in self-­ knowledge runs directly counter to the Eleatic principle that only the self-­ identical ‘One’ exists. In his essay on ‘The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy’,32 Hegel sharply criticises the isolated proposition A = A, which in Fichte and (in modified form) in Schelling expresses ‘absolute identity’ as the ‘principle of an entire system’.33 Hegel considers it ultimately irrelevant whether we posit A = A or A = B, for ‘A = A contains the difference of A as subject and A as object’34 while, conversely, ‘A = B contains the identity of A and B together with their difference’.35 In both propositions, identity and non-identity are already mediated, which is why Hegel describes the Absolute as the ‘identity of identity and non-identity’.36 However, Hegel’s critique is not confined to formal-logical deliberations and assumptions. Rather, he believes that when we reflect on thinking and things, conceptual approximations and lived experiences exert a reciprocal influence on each other. More precisely speaking, the two are interdependent, particularly in virtue of the fact that preconceptual experiences are prior to conceptual knowledge; consequently, experience-less thought appears strangely lifeless, while concept-less thought lacks coherence. For instance, the concept of development encompasses both identity and non-identity, but not in the sense that they are externally connected or subsumed under a general concept. If we express the moment of identity through the unchangeable and the moment of non-identity through the changeable, as is done in the paradoxes of motion, the contradictory relation between the two yields neither an understanding of truth ‘devoid of any determination’,37 as in Zeno, nor an unambiguous conceptual  Hegel 1977.  Ibid., p. 155. 34  Ibid., p. 107. 35  Ibid. 36  Ibid., p. 156. 37  Ibid., p. 246. 32 33

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definition, which Hegel likewise rejects when he points to the contradictoriness of external sensuous movement.38 Hegel replaces absolute assumptions of identity and general definitions with relations and interactions between concrete experiences and conceptual abstractions. Since logical forms and concepts taken by themselves do not guarantee certain knowledge, they remain dependent on the world of everyday practices and experiences, whose meanings cannot be subsumed into categories, and so attempts to hypostatise them—universalia sunt realia—are rooted in a nominalist fallacy. Conversely, concepts are already more than mere labels inasmuch as they are directed towards knowing, which according to Hegel exceeds the bounds of ‘sensuous consciousness’.39 In order that the ‘immediate spirit’ can go beyond itself and ‘become genuine knowing’,40 categorial determinations and logical forms are essential. Dispensing with them would be tantamount to losing experience itself, which according to Hegel draws ‘attention to the present’.41 Insofar as conceptual moments are related to existential ones, which in turn are understood as categorially mediated, it would be wrong to set them against each other. Their interdependence does not, however, mean that all differences between them are eliminated. Hegel’s critique is directed in equal measure against supposedly pure concepts and seemingly concept-less experiences. By clear contrast with such positions, he emphasises the processual character of their contradictory mediation:

38  See footnote 3. For a fuller account of his fundamental objections to ‘definitions of concrete objects, of nature as well as of spirit’, see Hegel 2010a, p. 710. It should be noted in passing that in his genealogy of punishment, Nietzsche also rejects general definitions of concepts and objects. For him too, albeit for other reasons, historical phenomena remain ‘completely and utterly undefinable’. Nietzsche 1998, p. 53. 39  Hegel 2018, p. 17. 40  Ibid. 41  Ibid., p. 7. For Hegel, experiences always already have a conceptual moment; that is, we do not simply ‘have’ experiences, nor do they occur unmediated. According to the Phenomenology of Spirit, the reflective consciousness experiences itself simultaneously as subject and object that changes ‘in its knowing and in its object’ insofar as ‘we learn from experience about the untruth of our first concept in another object’ Ibid., pp. 57–58. We should not oversimplify matters by interpreting the ‘science of the experience of consciousness’ (the Phenomenology‘s original title) one-sidedly; ‘the truth of spirit’ includes both conceptual insights and the ‘concrete forms’ of existence and practical experience. Ibid., pp. 58 and 18.

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Knowing, as it is at first, or, as immediate spirit, is devoid of spirit, is sensuous consciousness. In order to become genuine knowing […] immediate spirit must laboriously travel down a long path.42

According to Hegel, the task of dialectics is to reveal the contradictory interdependences between individual experiences and universal concepts; that is, to show both their differences and their identities. Only then, ‘through the movement of the concept, [will] this path […] encompass the complete worldliness of consciousness in its necessity’.43 The term ‘identity’ is used in the plural to indicate the lingering tension between experiences and concepts in the process of cognition. For just as concepts change under the influence of concrete experiences, objects of experience also prove to be changeable and mobile in virtue of their conceptual mediation. If the objects of experience were already given in their entirety, we would have to suppress all their subjective aspects in order to know them. On the ‘long path’ to ‘genuine knowing’, however, the objects change relative both to themselves and our knowledge. Only constant reflection on thinking and on the living experience of things allows us to comprehend the contradictory relation between the changing forms of self–other distinctions, as a process that involves both the ‘culturally formative stages of the universal spirit’ and the ‘history of the cultural formation of the world’.44 A mode of thinking that emphasises the antagonistic character of existence, not least for the sake of its unity, must be understood as a ‘thinking in fractures’. We might even say that the purely formal concepts and determinations of identity in the paradoxes of motion, whose one-sided logic leads to the conclusion ‘that only the One exists and that the negative does not exist at all’,45 create the contradiction themselves. The immanent claim of dialectical thinking consists not in acting without contradiction but rather in attempting to ‘resolve the paradox of identity in non-identity not just by coming to a standstill here but by unfolding and advancing

 Ibid., p. 17.  Ibid., p. 22. 44  Ibid., p. 18. 45  See footnote 30. 42 43

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through these elements’.46 In light of this, it is understandable why Hegel considers Zeno’s paradoxes especially apt, in virtue of their contradictoriness, to show that the unreality of motion presupposed by the paradoxes is at once true and false, and thereby sets itself in motion: The reason that dialectic first fell on movement is that the dialectic is itself this movement, or movement itself the dialectic of all that is. The thing, as self-moving, has its dialectic in itself, and movement is the becoming another, self-abrogation.47

Thus, dialectic does not contrast two opposing positions and set the truth of the one against the untruth of the other. According to Hegel, this is the normal process ‘when one philosophic system contradicts another’,48 whereby one is asserted to be ‘directly true’49 and the other, accordingly, to be false. Hegel, by contrast, holds that both positions have an equal claim to validity and so little is to be gained by simple negation, which represents ‘the usual course in our mode of reasoning’.50 According to Hegel, simply negating opposing determinations leads to simple distinctions ‘that I form’;51 that is, it leads to contradictory thinking. This is to be distinguished from thinking in terms of the contradictions that appear in objects themselves. Instead of subjective differences in standpoint, whose truth is measured relative to self-sufficient beliefs and ideas and ‘outward conditions, laws or causes’,52 the ‘objective dialectic’53 46  This is how Adorno succinctly describes dialectics in Adorno 2017, p. 166. Elsewhere, he remarks that ‘the highly distinctive character of Hegelian philosophy and the dialectic in general lies in the way it undertakes to construe a certain impressive unity while seeking this very unity in the moment of dichotomy, that is, in the moment of contradiction.’ Ibid., p. 74. This view is considered something of an affront to the logical-axiomatic and empirical-­ analytic sciences, which likewise strive for objectivity, but there is no need to give special attention to this point here; plenty of responses to, and arguments against, this conception can found in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. See Adorno et al. (1976). 47  Hegel 1955a, p. 266. 48  Ibid., p. 263. 49  Ibid. 50  Ibid., p. 246. 51  Ibid., p. 263. ‘The subjective dialectic, which reasons from external grounds, is moderate, for it grants that: “In the right there is what is not right, and in the false the true.”’ Ibid., p. 265. 52  Ibid., p. 265. 53  Ibid., p. 263. Elsewhere, Hegel uses the term ‘true dialectic’, as distinct from ‘subjective’ or ‘external’ dialectic. Ibid., pp. 264–265.

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attends to contradictions that appear in an object seemingly automatically if we ‘put ourselves right into the thing’.54 I say ‘seemingly’ because the object is not simply given, but remains determined by thought, just as thought is necessarily mediated by the object; neither can be conceived independently of the other. When Hegel suggests that we ‘consider the object in itself, and […] take it in the determinations which it has’,55 he is expressing the idea (as he puts in the introduction to the Phenomenology) that ‘concept and object, the standard and what is to be examined, are present in consciousness itself’.56 However, the focus here is not on the assumption of an actual or hypothetical agreement between subjective and objective moments, which would exist only if concept and object could be fully subsumed into each other, but rather on their concrete mediation, which is shown in the fact that these two moments, ‘concept and object’, are ‘being-for-an-other and being-in-itself’.57 Consequently, an object cannot be judged by an external standard; rather, the standard of judgement is constituted in the mediation between thought and things, ‘such that’—as Hegel puts it—‘while consciousness examines its own self, the only thing that remains to us is purely to look on.’58 This remark is notable because it takes the object as such seriously. It enjoins thought to give itself over to the non-identical while simply ‘looking on’, thus taking account of both the spontaneous and the receptive sides of the consciousness that is constituted in experience. In a reflective interplay of conceptual and non-conceptual moments, the experiential objects also change, which explains why Hegel gives such emphasis to the immanent relation of dialectic and motion, and comments on it in such nuance and detail.59 He regards the dialectical ‘movement of the concept’60 (to take up the title of the present section again) as identical to the

54  Ibid., p. 265. The passage continues: ‘In regarding it thus, it shows from itself that it contains opposed determinations, and thus breaks up [hebt sich auf].’ Ibid. 55  Ibid. 56  Hegel 2018, p. 56. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid. 59  See footnote 47. Elsewhere, Hegel writes, ‘This dialectical movement which consciousness practices in its own self (as well as in its knowing and in its object), insofar as, for consciousness, the new, true object arises out of this movement, is properly what is called experience.’ Hegel 2018, p. 57. 60  Ibid., p. 22.

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‘living movement of the subject matter’,61 which is sustained by the non-­ subsumability of the two in the hidden ‘whole of cognitions’.62 Consequently, the dialectic remains constitutive both of ‘thought’ and of ‘all that is’.63 Given this, it would be wrong to assign the developing consciousness an adjudicating function, allowing it to settle any contradictions and oppositions from supposedly independent vantage points or by reference to higher-order standards. If we take the idea of mediation seriously, concepts are not sovereign over things; rather, ‘dialectical thought itself can move only through its extremes towards that moment with which it is not itself identical’.64 Hegel detects this ‘extreme’ in Zeno’s opposition of stasis and motion. The rudimentary ‘objective dialectic’ differs from merely ‘subjective dialectic’ in that it ‘no longer maintain[s] simple thought for itself, but see[s] the battle fought with new vigour within the enemy’s camp’.65 In the paradoxes of motion, ‘opposed predicates’66 are negated. This means that the truth of a determination is not demonstrated simply by assuming the untruth of its opposite; rather, it is revealed in its inherent contradiction: It does not help if I prove my system or my proposition and then conclude that thus the opposite is false; to this other proposition the first always seems to be foreign and external. Falsity must not be demonstrated through another, and as untrue because the opposite is true, but in itself.67

 Ibid., p. 33.  Hegel 1977, p. 180. To explain the ‘whole’ that is expressed in every single determination without being absorbed into it, Hegel chooses a vivid metaphor: ‘Center and circle are so connected with each other that the first beginning of the circle is already a connection with the center, and the center is not completely a center unless the whole circle, with all of its connections, is completed.’ Ibid. In the completeness of the ‘whole’, the circle and its centre would no longer require supplementation, but rather (as Hegel puts it with regard to the totality of reason and intuition) would be united ‘with the opposite subjective totality to form the infinite world-intuition, whose expansion has at the same time connected into the richest and simplest identity.’ Ibid., p. 114. 63  Bergson 1955a, p. 266. 64  Adorno 2017, p. 187. According to Adorno, dialectical mediation is produced only by ‘entering into the heart of the extreme, and it is precisely by driving this extreme to the uttermost point that we become aware of its opposite within the extreme itself.’ Ibid. 65  Hegel 1955a, p. 264. 66  Ibid., p. 263. 67  Ibid., p. 264. Adorno derives a negative concept of truth from this idea by modifying Spinoza’s famous principle that truth is the index both of itself and of falsehood (verum index sui et falsi) into the principle that falsehood is the standard both of itself and of truth (falsum index sui et veri). See Bloch 1988, p. 12. 61 62

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If we accept Hegel’s account, Zeno succeeded in demonstrating falsity in motion itself. The paradoxes of motion do not determine their object by either external reasons or subjective representations; rather the object ‘disintegrates itself in the entirety of its nature’.68 According to Hegel, the inference from contradictoriness to the pure negativity of motion prevents Zeno from further developing the contradictions he has demonstrated in thought. It is ‘necessary to think of motion as Zeno thought of it’, and yet also ‘to carry this theory of motion further still’.69 A dialectic that ‘leaves nothing whatever to its object’, and in which ‘the affirmative […] does not yet appear’70 remains unmediated and renders the contradictions immobile, rather than sublating them. Although ‘in the ancients’71 the one and the many, the same and the non-same, motion and immobility and so forth are posited and opposed, because the Eleatics ‘got no further than the fact that through contradiction the object is a nothing’72 they failed to deduce ‘the rational […] starting from the contradiction of determinate opposites’.73 We can only move past this limited understanding if we recognise that the posited object is, in virtue of its immanent contradiction, at the same time its opposite; that is, if we understand the paradoxical determinations of motion as simultaneously true and false. For only through contradiction, that is, only in the most extreme tension of self-reflexive thought, is ‘a new identity’ formed, with ‘the system advanc[ing] until the objective totality is completed’.74 But how is ‘the affirmative’ that is hidden from view in Zeno’s pure negation of motion to be conceived? If the concept of movement changes and goes beyond what has previously been thought, where and in what is the evolving ‘rational’ manifested? What ‘new determinations’ and  Hegel 1955a, p. 265.  Ibid., p. 268. 70  Ibid., p. 265. 71  Ibid. 72  Ibid. 73  This is an early remark by Hegel on the difference between the products of the intellect and the claims of reason. Hegel 1977, p. 111. 74  Ibid., p. 114. The fact that Hegel understands both self and nature as a self-construction of the Absolute, in which the identity of subject and object form a totality, shall have to pass without comment here. Hegel 1977, p.  169ff. Suffice it to say that many post-Hegelian philosophers emphatically rejected notions of identity and systemicity. Nevertheless, there must be at least some relation between subject and object in order for knowledge to be possible at all. On the influence of Hegel’s metaphysics of spirit in the nineteenth century, see especially Löwith 1981. 68 69

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‘identities’ can be expected if the negation of motion, which is ‘itself again a determination’ and ‘itself finite’,75 is drawn away from the ‘abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’ and turned towards ‘real being’?76 Until now, motion has been understood as an ‘existent contradiction’.77 It remains to be shown how the concept will change if, rather than conceiving motion one-sidedly in terms of the Absolute, we ‘also allow the finite to be Being, which the Eleatics deny’.78 It may be surprising to learn that we have already addressed these questions. For ‘the affirmative’ that Hegel speaks of should not be confused with a schematic determination of objects according to formally established rules or externally appended contents. He disparagingly refers to this superficial conception of dialectic, in which first a proposition and then its opposite are set forth and then, in a third and final step, this opposite is refuted, as ‘triplicity’.79 Hegel is not advocating a mechanical application of empty forms and abstract formulas. If dialectic were reduced to the simple schema of ‘triplicity’ and applied in pure form as a general method of thought for generating new insights and objects, we would miss precisely that which ‘constitutes the concrete, or actuality itself, the living movement of the subject matter’.80 Dialectical thought, by contrast, means ‘tak[ing] the rigorous exertion of the concept upon oneself’81 and thinking in terms of the fractures and contradictions that appear in concept and object alike, with both finding their corrective and critique in the other. Zeno’s conception of motion as ‘the merely negative’ can, following Hegel, be understood as ‘reflection into the empty I, the vanity of its own knowing’:82

 Hegel 1955a, p. 261. (Translation modified).  Ibid., pp. 243 and 246. 77  See footnote 3. 78  See footnote 26. 79  Hegel 2018, p. 30. Elsewhere, he remarks, ‘The flair for displaying that sort of wisdom is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practice, but when it becomes familiar, its repetition becomes as intolerable as the repetition of any other bit of sleight of hand once one has seen through the trick.’ Ibid., p. 32. 80  Ibid., p. 33. 81  This is what ‘matters to the study of science’. Ibid., p. 36. 82  Ibid., p.  37. Hegel is referring here to the supposed sovereignty of pure, contentless thought, and thus indirectly to Zeno. 75 76

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Because this reflection does not gain its negativity itself for its content, it is not immersed in the subject matter at all but is always above and beyond it, and thus it imagines that by asserting the void, it is going much further than the insight which was so rich in content. On the other hand, […] in ­comprehensive thinking, the negative belongs to the content itself and is the positive, both as its immanent movement and determination and as the totality of these. Taken as a result, it is the determinate negative which emerges out of this movement and is likewise thereby a positive content.83

If we apply this idea to ‘living movement’, then it becomes clear why Hegel understands space and time as ‘quantum’ and a ‘limited extension’ that can indeed be ‘measured off’.84 If, as is done consistently (albeit fallaciously) in the paradoxes of motion, we conceive of space and time as infinitely divided, our thought will be snared in abstract contradictions that appear to bear no relation to the ‘immanent content of the subject matter’.85 Or, to put it the other way round, because ideas of absolute space and infinite time necessarily remain empty, they cannot be used as the sole truth criterion for the determination of motion. This is the infinite, that no one of its moments has reality. […] What is represented either as such, or as an image of the conception, is not a thing; it has no Being, and yet it is not nothing; thus the universal—indifferently simple unity, whether in consciousness or outside it.86

By contrast, if we think of motion not in a one-sided, abstract manner, that is, as ‘absolute discontinuity [Punktualität]’ or ‘pure continuity’, both elements will appear within it: ‘pure negativity as time, continuity as space’.87 Hegel objects both to the idea of a pure opposition of space and time, and to the idea of their undifferentiated unity. Just like Aristotle, he holds that space and time exist for ‘the body which is in motion’88 and  Ibid.  Hegel 1955a, p. 270. 85  Hegel 2018, p. 33. 86  Hegel 1955a, p. 270. The final sentence (in German: so das Allgemeine – gleichgültig einfache Einheit, ob im Bewußtseyn oder außer ihm) does not appear in the original English translation. 87  Ibid. Hegel uses the terms ‘pure negativity’ and ‘absolute discontinuity’ synonymously here. 88  Ibid. On Aristotle’s treatment of the infinity of space and time in the paradoxes of motion, see the passage corresponding to footnote 10 in Chap. 2. 83 84

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hence are actually traversed. Even if, as we have already seen, this does not solve the problem of infinity but, in the terminology of transcendental logic, transposes it into a different form of modality—potential rather than actual89—it does allow him to understand ‘motion itself’ as ‘actual unity in the opposition’.90 This means that pure thought of space and of time necessarily leads to contradictions in motion; however, as mere moments of the truth they find their limit in their respective opposite, that is, in motion in space and in time. Conversely, ‘living movement’ is not self-sufficient, and only acquires its ‘being-in-itself’91 through mediation by thought. Zeno’s ‘pure negation’ of motion is replaced by ‘determinate negation’, which absorbs the contradictions manifested in motion into itself and comprehends them as opposing moments of their truth. Hegel himself expresses this complex, difficult idea as follows: Movement is the infinite as the unity of these opposites of time and space. But both these moments make their appearance as existent; if they are manifested indifferently, their Notion is no longer posited, but their existence. In them as existent, negativity is a limited size, and they exist as limited space and time; actual motion is progression through a limited space and a limited time and not through infinite space and infinite time.92 89  Hegel 1955a, p. 270. Hegel agrees with Aristotle that space and time are not infinitely divided in the paradoxes of motion, but rather conceived as infinitely divisible. The use of the term ‘form of modality’ appears to be a reference to Kant’s ‘transcendental table of concepts of the understanding’, which purports to set out the predicates of any possible experience; this reference is suggested by the fact that the category of ‘modality’ (‘possibility’, ‘existence’, ‘necessity’) clearly points beyond the domain of analytic, intellectual knowledge. Kant 2004, p. 55 and, earlier, Kant 1998, B 106. This shows that the critique of reason should also be understood in terms of speculative reflection on self-knowledge. In his commentary, however, Hegel rejects and disparages the Kantian critique—for instance, in his harsh polemic against the ‘understanding, which likes to put everything in its own little pigeon-hole’: ‘a table of contents is all that the understanding offers, but it does not supply the contents itself’. Hegel 2018, p. 33. 90  Hegel 1955a, p. 270. 91  According to Hegel, the ‘rigorous exertion of the concept’ involves the categories of ‘being-in-itself, being-for-itself, self-equality, and so on, or these are pure self-movements of the kind that one might even call souls were it not that their concept denotes something higher than that’. Hegel 2018, p. 36. While (simplifying somewhat) being-for-itself emphasises individual relations and self-relations (pro se esse), being-in-itself is disclosed through conceptual relations and mediations. 92  Hegel 1955a, p. 271. The first sentence (in German: Die Bewegung ist das Unendliche als Einheit dieser Entgegengesetzten der Zeit und des Raums) does not appear in the original English translation.

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Operating with quantitative representations and determinations allows Hegel to understand talk of spatiotemporal finitude or infinitude as a ‘contradiction of the infinite progress’93 and so show it to be the ‘principle of all self-movement’.94 For speculative thought demonstrates that even seemingly precisely determinable relations of magnitude cannot attain ‘the absolute determinateness which would be a being-for-itself’.95 Even an individual quantum cannot be understood in isolation but only in relation to other magnitudes, with the ‘infinitely great’ or ‘infinitely small’96 marking a limit that cannot be grasped in solely quantitative terms: Or again, the increase in the quantum is not an approximation to the infinite, for the distinction between the quantum and its infinity essentially has also the moment of being non-quantitative. This moment is only the sharpened expression of the contradiction that the quantum ought to be something great, that is, a quantum, and non-finite, that is, not a quantum.—Equally, the infinitely small is, as something small, a quantum and therefore remains absolutely, that is, qualitatively, too great for the infinite and opposed to it.97

It is hard to imagine a more emphatic rebuttal of the paradoxes of motion, since the necessary transition from quantity to quality is not simply posited, but elaborated in terms of logical-mathematical calculus. The infinite, which due to its indeterminacy and lack of content was earlier described as ‘indifferent’,98 now appears in a different light: for the ‘process to infinity’ would not be possible without ‘the reciprocal determination of the finite and the infinite’, in which each is constituted by reference to its opposite—with the crucial caveat that their interrelation is only ‘the expression of this contradiction, not the resolution of it’.99 The infinite itself thus remains contradictory. On the one hand, it requires finite spatiotemporal relations to be set in motion; according to Hegel, this gives rise to ‘the feeling of the impotence of this infinite […]  Hegel 2010a, p. 192.  Ibid., p. 382. Hegel is referring here to ‘the negative in its essential determination’. See also footnote 1. 95  Ibid., p. 192. 96  Ibid. 97  Ibid. 98  See footnote 86 above. 99  Hegel 2010a, p. 191. 93 94

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which would want to be master of the finite but cannot’.100 On the other hand, since space and time are placed in ‘an absolutely unattainable beyond’,101 the mere ‘flitting over limits’ and their overcoming are fetishised as such, that is, ‘held to be something sublime and a kind of divine service’.102 This progressus in infinitum is also problematic: In fact, however, this modern sublimity does not enhance the object, which rather takes flight from it, but bloats the subject who ingests such vast quantities.103

We can, moreover, find in Hegel both scorn for the infinite, which is too great and abstract to exercise a positive effect, and mistrust of the self-­ sufficient finite, which does not conceptually reflect on its own negation. By ‘conceptually’, I mean that talk of the infinite does not acquire its meaning from a simple opposition to the finite, but only from the context of a given use. For instance, the use of the concept of infinity in mathematics, which is concerned with universal forms and meanings, must be assessed differently than its use in relation to experiences in space and time, which is what Kant has in mind when he enquires into physical things’ relations of motion.104 Hegel therefore distinguishes between the

100  Ibid., p. 193. For Hegel, the feeling of impotence is connected to the finitude of our imagination and other faculties. To elucidate this subjective aspect, he refers to ‘Haller’s description of eternity, which Kant called horrifying’: ‘I heap up giant numbers, / Pile millions on millions; /Eon upon eon and world upon world, / And when I am on that endless march / And dizzy on that terrifying height / I seek you again. / The power of numbers, though multiplied a thousandfold, / Is still not even a fraction of you.’ Ibid., p. 194. In the passage quoted by Hegel, however, Kant immediately relativises the ‘dizzying impression’ that eternity makes, ‘for eternity only lacks the duration of things, but it does not sustain that duration’. Kant 1998, B 641. 101  Hegel 2010a, p. 195. In the same passage, Hegel speaks of the ‘power [of the ‘I’] over the ‘not-I’, over the senses and external nature’, and criticises Kant for transposing the concrete contradiction between the two ‘to the unending progress to infinity’ by positing a will to the moral law’. On Hegel’s view, this morality geared towards pure interiority and universalisability brings about a devaluation rather than an elevation of human powers, ‘for the “I” has fixed itself, on the one side, with its indigent and insufferable emptiness before it, and, on the other side, with a fullness which in being negated is still present as its beyond.’ Ibid. 102  Ibid., pp. 192–193. 103  Ibid., p. 193. 104  Kant 1981, pp. 565–581.

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‘true infinite’ and the ‘bad infinite’;105 this distinction is not intended to express a simple evaluation, but rather hinges on the question of ‘reference to oneself’.106 Self-reference returns to itself only through self-sublation (that is, only by grasping the finite as a moment of itself). If, by contrast, it returns to an abstract ‘beyond’, seemingly separate from anything finite, it will remain empty and strange.107 This also applies, albeit with different terms, for mathematical determinations and relations. For while the true concept of infinity is manifested in, for instance, the mathematical rule for forming an incomplete series of natural numbers, without us actually having to form such a sequence or bring it to any sort of end, the ‘bad quantitative infinity’108 refers in mathematics to: the perpetual movement back and forth from one side of the persistent contradiction to the other, from the limit to its non-being, and from the latter back again to the other, the limit.109

To paraphrase this idea, the mathematical rule sets the progression in motion and continues it perpetually; the continuation itself is ‘neither an advance nor a gain but rather a repetition of one and the same move, a positing, a sublating, and then again a positing and a sublating’.110 The setting and breaking of limits are mutually conditioned, but due to the abstract simplicity of the mathematical rule the ‘uninterrupted flitting over 105   See Hegel’s exposition of ‘existent’ and ‘quantitative’ infinity in Hegel 2010a, pp. 109–125 and 190–397. 106  The ‘infinite’ and true ‘reference to oneself’ is conceived, by contrast with the bad infinite, as an ‘internally self-moving unity.’ Ibid., p. 122. 107  On the positive significance of the ‘beyond’ in the process of its this-worldly or ‘existent’ mediation, Hegel remarks, ‘The finite comes first; then there is the transcending of it, and this negative, or this beyond of the finite, is the infinite; third, this negation is transcended in turn, a new limit comes up, a finite again.—This is the complete, self-closing movement that has arrived at that which made the beginning; what emerges is the same as that from which the departure was made, that is, the finite is restored; the latter has therefore rejoined itself, in its beyond has only found itself again.’ Ibid., p. 117. It should be added that the ‘progress to infinity’, which Hegel elsewhere compares to a circle ‘without beginning and end’ (ibid., p. 119), is not to be understood as a simple return. The passage through the determinations, contradictions and mediations is, in Hegel’s own words, ‘not in [its] ultimate truth’. Ibid., p. 116. 108  Ibid., p. 192. 109  Ibid. 110  Ibid.

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limits’ ultimately leads to a ‘perpetual falling back into them’.111 Consequently, in the quantitative process, the formal negation of finitude does not by itself yield a positive determination of infinity. Hegel accordingly describes the ‘bad infinite’ as ‘the beyond, since it is only the negation of the finite posited as real’.112 It remains unattainable and thus untrue, since it is only one-sidedly posited by contrast to the finite without understanding that this opposite is a moment of its own determination ‘and, through this mediation, the true infinite’.113 This means it is only the contradictory relation between infinite and finite that allows each to be grasped as a ‘moment of the other’ and so as ‘moments of the progress’, such that for Hegel ‘it is a matter of total indifference which is taken as the starting point’,114 since they both occur in this infinite progression only as moments of a whole […] each emerges only through the mediation of its opposite but, essentially, equally by means of the sublation of its opposite.115

Just as the merely formal negation of the finite in mathematics cannot give a positive meaning to the infinite, the ‘bad infinite’ also remains incomplete, ‘since it is only the negation of the finite posited as real’.116 It is only in the mediation of the finite and infinite that their double meaning is revealed, which consists in their being united in contradiction to and as moments of each other.117 Hegel therefore conceives the ‘negation of

 Ibid., pp. 192–193.  Ibid., p. 119. 113  Ibid., p. 118. 114  Ibid. 115  Ibid. In his study of ‘Hegel’s philosophy of mathematics’, Stekeler-Weithöfer rightly notes that the meaning of ‘bad’ (schlecht) in Hegel’s discussion of infinity should be understood etymologically, in the sense of the German schlicht or schlechtweg, as ‘plain’, ‘simple’, ‘immediate’, ‘straightforward’, ‘unmediated’ and hence ‘not adequately comprehended’. Stekeler-Weithöfer 1992. 116  Hegel 2010a, p. 119. 117  ‘The finite has the double meaning, first, of being the finite over against the infinite which stands over against it, and, second, of being at the same time the finite and the infinite over against the infinite. Also the infinite has the double meaning of being one of the two moments (it is then the bad infinite) and of being the infinite in which the two moments, itself and its other, are only moments.’ Ibid., p. 118. 111 112

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negation’ as the unifying moment that is ‘present in both’118—albeit again with the caveat that ‘the affirmative’ of the finite and the infinite ‘contains the negative of each’,119 and so is not simply given. On this view, Zeno’s paradoxes of motion persist in ‘the one-sidedness of the abstract negative’, that is, they lack ‘self-referring negation’.120 Hegel’s theory allows us to rule out two possibilities. Firstly, the unmediated alternative that either mobility or immobility is true; and secondly, the relativising assumption that the truth lies somewhere between the two, such that mobility and immobility are set indifferently side by side. Viewed through the lens of Hegel’s reflective philosophy, Zeno’s achievement consisted in holding up an unforgiving mirror to the relativising ‘both– and’ perspective, which attempts to balance and reconcile the two extremes by seeking a middle path between them. Insofar as the dialectic of ‘the ancients’ ultimately seeks not to avoid the contradiction but rather to take it to its furthest extreme, it already satisfies a key condition of dialectical thought. The inference of the immobility of being from the negation of motion likewise operates with purely formal postulates, which are only sublated or given a new determination in the double negation of themselves and their opposite.121 Thus, the paradoxes of motion do not arrive at a reflexive mediation between the extremes, which on Hegel’s dialectical view only enables a ‘turning back to itself’122 as a double negation; rather, they draw a sharp opposition between the pure truth of unchangeable being and the contradictory untruth or non-identity of mobile reality. Hegel, meanwhile, believes that it is only ‘through the mediation that the negation of negation is’123 that the truth of motion unfolds in the contradictory relation between motion and rest.

 Ibid., p. 116.  Ibid., p. 117. 120  Ibid., p. 120. 121  Hegel explains this contradictory relation as follows: ‘That into which the finite is sublated is the infinite as the negating of finitude. But the latter has long since been only existence, determined as a non-being. It is only the negation, therefore, that in the negation sublates itself. Thus infinity is determined on its side as the negative of the finite and thereby of determinateness in general, as an empty beyond; its sublating of itself into the finite is a return from an empty flight, the negation of the beyond which is inherently a negative.’ Ibid., p. 116. 122  Ibid. 123  Ibid. 118 119

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These are the determinations that it is essential to bring to view; the second point, however, is that in the infinite progression they are also posited, and how they are posited therein, namely, not in their ultimate truth.124

In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel expresses this weighty idea in an almost poetic form, reminiscent of the starting point of my own discussion of ‘pure being’ and ‘pure nothing’,125 but now with the addition of the idea of transition between the oppositions within their contradictory mediation: The truth is the bacchanalian revel where not a member is sober, because, in isolating himself from the revel, each member is just as immediately dissolved into it—the ecstasy is likewise transparently and simply motionless.126

4.2   Duration of Motion It is certainly no accident that ‘the truth’ referred to in the quotation above is described in terms of a contradictory combination of ‘simple motionlessness’ and living motion, which as a ‘bacchanalian revel’ also bears a strikingly close relation to unreason and madness. For as much as Hegel insists on conceiving ‘the whole’ in which the moments of rest and motion are sublated as ‘the true’,127 he cannot avoid recognising the non-­ identity of opposites. Even after the dialectical passage through individual determinations, oppositions and re-determinations, motion remains ‘existent contradiction’:128 that is to say, rest and motion are not truly united. Hegel nonetheless speaks of a ‘fulfilled whole’ in which ‘this concept grasps itself’ and, as a ‘conceptually comprehended and conceptually comprehending intuiting’, ultimately ‘sublates its temporal form’.129 In other words, while Hegel affirms the ‘quiescence of movement’,130 in his theory there is once again no tertia capable of deriving positive truth from the contradictions themselves. When Hegel, with a systematising aim, nonetheless attempts to reconcile the non-subsumability of concept and subject  Ibid.  See footnote 1 in Part II. 126  Hegel 2018, p. 29. 127  See footnote 9 in Part II. 128  See footnote 3. 129  Hegel 2018, pp. 461–462. 130  Adorno 1993, p. 32. 124 125

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matter in ‘the whole of the movement’131 within the self-knowing spirit, this shows only that the moment of untruth is inherent to the claim to systematicity itself. Directly following the above-quoted passage from the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel therefore stresses that the concept of motion is continuously expanded by its self-positing and self-limiting. This brings the unthinkable, understood here as negativity of thought, even more clearly to the fore, and raises the question of the duration of motion in general. Having described ‘emergence and […] passing away which does not itself emerge and pass away’132 as a ‘bacchanalian revel’ and as ‘simply motionless’, Hegel continues, In the whole of the movement, taken as being at rest, what distinguishes itself in it and what gives itself existence is preserved as the kind that remembers, as that whose existence is its knowing of itself, just as this self-knowing is no less immediate existence.133

The ‘whole of the movement’ does not refer here to the reconciliation Hegel speaks of when, starting ‘at the end’, he understands rest and motion as moments of the Absolute in which time resolves when ‘spirit’ grasps its ‘pure concept’.134 Rather, prior to our attaining ‘absolute knowledge’, the ‘whole’ instead denotes ‘the process which creates its own moments and passes through them all’.135 According to Hegel, it is ‘the whole movement that constitutes the positive and its truth’.136 But as long as the process is incomplete, ‘the negative’—or ‘what would be called “the false” if it were to be taken as something from which one might abstract’137—is a necessary constituent of the process itself. While in Goethe’s Faust ‘the negative’ is personified in the figure of Mephistopheles as ‘the spirit of perpetual negation’,138 Hegel does not substantialise the  Hegel 2018, p. 29.  Ibid., pp. 28–29. 133  Ibid., p. 29. 134  Ibid., p. 462. According to Hegel, spirit ‘appears in time’ as long as the concept of time ‘is represented to consciousness as empty intuition’ and ‘is only the intuited concept’. Time is sublated only in the ‘equality of the self with itself’. Ibid., pp. 461–462 and 464. 135  Ibid., p. 28. 136  Ibid. 137  Ibid. 138  Goethe 1998, p. 42. 131 132

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notion in this way.139 Instead, he regards what disappears’ as ‘essential, not as having the determination of something fixed, something cut off from the truth’.140 In order to enable ‘self-knowing’ in the ‘existent process’, determinate, identifiable moments are needed that, ‘in the whole of the movement, taken as being at rest’, give different things their ‘existence’. The ‘remembering’ that Hegel refers to in the above quotation, whereby a being preserves knowledge ‘of itself’ and of ‘existent things’, cannot be separated from the ‘bacchanalian revel’. Nevertheless, it offers at least a temporary foothold in the flow of life. At end of the Phenomenology, when he casts his gaze back over the work as a whole, Hegel refers to historical processes and conceptual developments, thereby drawing our attention back to the objective and subjective aspects of the whole ‘movement of life’: The aim, absolute knowing, or spirit knowing itself as spirit, has its path in the recollection of spirits as they are in themselves and are as they achieve the organization of their realm. Their preservation according to their free-­ standing existence appearing in the form of contingency is history, but according to their conceptually grasped organization, it is the science of phenomenal knowing. Both together are conceptually grasped history; they form the recollection and the Golgotha of absolute spirit.141

This passage emphasises the two critical moments in the ‘existent process’: one that appears in a contingent, inconstant form, and another which is ordered and controlled. As moments of ‘the whole’, history and knowledge cannot be comprehended separately; we could not, for instance, divorce the interplay of our living experiences from the organisation of conceptual knowledge. Rather, both lived and comprehended history are constantly confronted with their respective opposite. It has already been 139  This critique of the bourgeois concept of personhood, which is no longer based on an evil or rational essence but rather on bourgeois law and rights as an expression of capitalist property relations, is encapsulated in Marx’s Hegelian-inspired notion of a ‘character’ or ‘social’ mask [Charaktermaske]. See for instance Marx 2011, p. 89: ‘No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society [die Charaktermasken, worin sich die Menschen hier gegenübertreten], the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.’ 140  Hegel 2018, p. 28. 141  Ibid., p. 467.

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shown, by reference to the ‘movement of the concept’,142 that the thinkable and unthinkable interpermeate in every point of thought. The concept that opposes itself and thus, as I put it earlier, ‘gives itself over to the non-identical while simply “looking on”’,143 is already related to the moment of the unthinkable. The negativity of thought thus by no means excludes the moment of the irrational; rather, it appears as the limit of thought in confrontation with the object.144 The self-movement of the concept would be unthinkable if, rather than dissolving itself, it posited its fixed, formal determinations as absolute. However, and this is where reflective thought differs from merely confused irrationalism,145 the Hegelian dialectic attempts to understand precisely that which eludes rational thought and cannot be assimilated into the categorial forms of its logical order. In this way, the moment of irrationality, as an immanent contradiction of thought, is incorporated into thought itself; Richard Kroner aptly speaks of ‘irrationalism made rational’.146 The Hegelian dialectic must, we might say, be understood as an attempt to understand the irrational, which cannot be assimilated into rationality, as non-identical and inaccessible to thought. Only thus does reflective thought elevate itself above the opposition of rational and irrational. As we have seen, this includes the critique of logical forms—classification, differentiation, inference, etc.; these forms are not false, but as isolated determinations systematically fail to capture the ‘wealth of experience on which thought feeds in  See Sect. 4.1.  See the passage corresponding to footnote 59. 144  Rational self-restraint remains necessarily dependent on its opposite: ‘This impotence of Nature sets limits to philosophy’. Hegel 2004, p. 23. This means that self-positing encounters its own opposite in the negation of itself, which finds its most radical expression in the ‘impotence of nature’ and the ‘nothing of thought’. 145  Popper’s account of Hegelian philosophy, for instance, misunderstands Hegel’s dialectic and speaks of ‘Hegel’s confusion and debasement of reason’. Popper 2003, p. 35. 146  Kroner 1977, p. 272. In the same passage, he writes: ‘Hegel is without a doubt the greatest irrationalist that the history of philosophy has ever known. No thinker before him managed to irrationalise the concept, to illuminate the most irrational things by way of the concept, to such an extent as he did. Compared with him, all irrationalists that posit or postulate some sort of irrational outside of thought are actually rationalists, because they hold fast to that which they oppose [bei dem Entgegengesetzten verharren], and because opposing that does not oppose and sublate itself in contradiction is, rather, the essence of ratio, of understanding. Hegel is an irrationalist, because he emphasises [zur Geltung bringt] the irrational in thought, because he irrationalises thought itself, because, on the other hand, he shows the rationality peculiar to the superrational [überrational] precisely through this irrationalisation’. Ibid., pp. 271–272. 142 143

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Hegel’.147 The ‘labor of the negative’ in the process of self-reflective thought remains, on Hegel’s view, ineluctably bound up with experiences of ‘seriousness’, ‘suffering’ and ‘patience’.148 As moments of contradiction, they denote the experience of the negative itself, which for Hegel belongs to the ‘exertion of the concept’, whereas rational thought attempts to conceal or bracket off its influence on cognition. For Hegel, the measure of rationality is not one-sidedly determined by the ordering activity of the understanding; rather, it is only ‘through what is experienced’ that the ‘abstract idea’ is ‘transformed back into something living, just as mere material is transformed through the path thought travels’.149 This casts an unfavourable light on the claim that objects can be grasped ‘from within’. Anticipating Bergson’s ‘intuition of duration’, Hegel emphatically rejects ‘the inspiration which begins immediately, like a shot from a pistol, with absolute knowledge’.150 Although this critique is directed against Schelling’s doctrine of ‘intellectual intuition’, which Hegel shows to be an ‘arbitrary standpoint’,151 it would apply equally to approaches that claim to be able to grasp life immediately in its ‘pure unfolding’. Instead of attempting, in dialectical fashion, to grasp that which is opposed to conceptual thought in and through the contradiction of thought, such approaches construe this opposite as uncomprehended and irrational152 by instead seeking it outside of thought or at the purported origin of experience ‘above that decisive turn’.153 Hegel casts scorn on approaches of this kind that anathematise thought of non-identity, saying that they purport to be ‘already finished with all the other standpoints simply by declaring that [they] will take no notice of them’.154 He is therefore highly sceptical of Schelling’s intellectual intuition and similar ‘states of consciousness’, which depend ‘on whether someone, though not

147  This is how Adorno describes the internal relation between intellectual abstraction and concrete experience. Adorno 1993, p. 50. 148  Hegel 2018, p. 13. 149  Adorno 1993, p. 50. 150  Hegel 2018, p. 18. 151  Hegel 2010a, p. 54. 152  In this respect, it is similar to the ‘bad infinite’; see the passage corresponding to footnote 106. 153  On this metaphor of Bergson’s, see footnote 166 in Chap. 3. 154  Hegel 2018, p. 18.

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necessarily somebody else, discovers it within himself or is able to produce it there’.155 Hegel criticises both a one-sided rejection of logical criteria of the understanding in favour of claims to immediacy and absoluteness, and a clinging to lifeless concepts and contentless schemas that, taken by themselves, fail to capture ‘nature and life’.156 Taken in isolation and conceived as absolute, logical forms and living impressions are no more rational than that which they claim to give knowledge of. In the ‘labor of the negative’, that is, in the reciprocal confrontation of the mutually contradictory moments that exert themselves on each other in the ‘whole of the movement’, there is the prospect that ‘in knowing’s alteration, the object itself’ will ‘also in fact [be] altered’.157 On this view, it would be overly simplistic to flatly oppose the irrational to the rational and hive it off from the ‘whole of cognitions’ on the grounds that it is meaningless or false. As a moment of truth, it gives effect in the self-reflection of thought to that which is lost if the understanding is allowed to dominate one-sidedly. Simply opposing the irrational to the universality of thought makes it easy to discount it as either rationally untenable or romanticised nonsense. By contrast, ‘determinate negation’,158 in which rational and irrational are grasped in their contradictory relation, claims ‘to think thinking’159—without requiring, or delivering itself over to, a realm inaccessible to thought. When Bergson deploys the concept of ‘duration’ in an attempt to save ‘mobility’, which in pure thought is frozen into immobility, in a certain sense he reminds us of that which is opposed to simple thought and cannot be captured in fixed forms. Bergson contrasts reflective thought with ‘intuition’, a special source of knowledge about durational changes, which as living experiences, he claims, break through the crust of conventional perceptions and objectified concepts. By emphasising the uncontrollable, sudden and unmediated aspect of experience, he does indeed manage to escape the restrictive corset of ingrained, unvarying concepts and beliefs.  Hegel 2010a, p. 54.  Hegel 2018, p. 30. On Hegel’s critique of the ‘understanding, which likes to put everything in its own little pigeon-hole’, see footnote 89. 157  Hegel 2018, p. 57. These words set out one of the Phenomenology’s central themes. 158  Ibid., p. 53. 159  I have borrowed this expression from the Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘Enlightenment pushed aside the classical demand to ‘think thinking’ – Fichte’s philosophy is its radical fulfillment – because it distracted philosophers from the command to control praxis, which Fichte himself had wanted to enforce.’ Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 19. 155 156

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In this respect at least, intuition originelle delivers on its claim, and we can take Bergson at his word when he says that he was greatly surprised to discover, in the course of his inquiry into the physical, mechanical concept of time, that ‘scientific time has no duration’.160 This moment of surprise runs through Bergson’s entire work, which in place of established orders and routines offers up living, richly associative insights; we need only think of the developments that unfold successively in duration, or the unmediated emergence of new forms in creative processes.161 However, even if intuition, as an expression of the spontaneous and surprising, is an important aspect of living experiences, it would be wrong to assign it to the unfalsified, unmediated ‘zones of indetermination’162 that, on Bergson’s view, are the sole site of resistance to ‘the solidification in memory of such and such sensations, feelings, or ideas’.163 The key drawback of Bergson’s attempt to rescue intuition as a ground of knowledge sui generis is that it is decoupled from the ‘whole of cognitions’, which is supposed to make it possible to distinguish not just between true and false knowledge, but above all between ‘primitive’ and ‘practical’ discoveries, ‘living’ and ‘inelastic’ experiences, ‘unconscious’ and ‘alert’ sensations and ‘mobile’ and ‘mechanical’ impressions.164 Due to this decoupling, which essentially comes down to a distinction between ‘pure’, ‘original’ experiences and ones that are merely ‘derivative’,165 Bergson himself ultimately lapses into the very way of proceeding he otherwise criticises so emphatically and relentlessly. Specifically, he rejects an ordering, organising mode of thought that, in order to make distinctions, ‘must necessarily start from concepts with fixed outlines’,166 which evoke dogmatic ‘ideas of inertia, of passivity, of automatism’.167 By one-sidedly  Bergson 1972, p. 765 (English translation from Sinclair 2020, p. 11).  In particular in Matter and Memory, which emphasises the continuity and constancy of duration, and in Creative Evolution, which focuses on the discontinuity and unpredictability of qualitative change. See Bergson 1911 and 1922, and the relevant discussion in Part I of the present work. 162  Bergson 1911, p. 32. 163  Bergson 1910, p. 168. 164  See for instance the corresponding remarks in his discussion of laughter. Bergson 1914, pp.  1–29. As we have seen, the use of such oppositions is a characteristic feature right throughout Bergson’s work. 165  For a pointed expression of this view, see Bergson 1911, pp. 233–298. 166  Bergson 1912, p. 68. 167  On this characterisation of the ‘vital order […] offered to us piecemeal in experience’ by reference to geometric forms, see Bergson 1922, pp. 236–237. 160 161

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attributing to pure intuition the living force that he denies to ordering, organising thought, Bergson makes a rigid, closed-off division that (judged on the terms of his own theory) is, due to its tendency to impose fixed forms, unsuited to reconstituting ‘the mobility of the real’.168 Accordingly, the duration of motion should not simply be posited as absolute and detached from reflective thought; rather, the mobility of things is dependent on its conceptual opposite. If we follow Hegel, both the ‘movement of the concept’ and the ‘intuition of duration’ belong to the oppositional process of cognition: This dialectical movement which consciousness practices in its own self (as well as in its knowing and in its object), insofar as, for consciousness, the new, true object arises out of this movement, is properly what is called experience.169

While the experience of duration attempts to do justice to the concept of the living by assimilating into its thought the moment of the identically persisting, the metaphysics of duration panders to the ‘cult of pure contemporaneity’.170 But here too it is not a simple opposition, for ‘as the blind spots in the process of cognition’ intuitions belong to logic and remind it ‘of the moment of its untruth’.171 And in precisely this sense, the duration of motion at the same time sustains and stimulates its own dialectic.

4.3   Dialectic of Motion The intuition of duration, as Bergson construes it, can be understood as a ‘renunciation of dialectics’.172 However, it contains a dialectical moment that only becomes apparent in conceptual mediation. We should recall here Hegel’s remark about ‘purely looking on’173 in the introduction to the Phenomenology, which illustrates the necessary interplay of conceptual and non-conceptual moments in the process of forming experiences. Just 168  Bergson 1946d, p. 224. In this passage, Bergson is commenting on the ‘fixity of concepts’ and the system-constructing ‘dogmatism’ that attempts this reconstitution. 169  Hegel 2018, p. 57. 170  Adorno 2013a, p. 47. 171  Ibid., p. 46. 172  This remark comes from Schürmann’s account of Lebensphilosophie (‘philosophy of life’), as exemplified by Bergson. Schürmann 2011, pp. 78–88. 173  Hegel 2018, p. 56. See also footnote 58.

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as for Hegel, self-reflecting thought cannot generate the whole of experience by itself, but is entwined with that with which it is not identical, a sudden inspiration or intuitive thought likewise detaches itself from the ordering activity of the understanding, which only ceases once all judgements have been made, all conclusions have been drawn and all objects are known. Since science’s belief in progress is fuelled by this fiction of rational knowledge, the ordering, organising mode of thought is inherently suspicious of rhapsodic inspirations and uncontrolled insights, which not only disrupt the ordered process of determining objects, but contradict the supposed rationality of approaches that seek to obtain the truth by ‘deriv[ing] the particular from the universal’.174 Insofar as ‘inspirations’ appear to occur spontaneously rather than volitionally, they have a certain air of magic about them. On mythical and religious conceptions, the experience of suddenly being seized by a thought or idea is understood as an ‘inhalation’ of or ‘possession’ by a spirit or god (as in the original meanings of inspiration and enthusiasm, or the concept of epinoia), expressing the belief that the inspiration springs from a source external to the self. The ancient seer or poet does not claim authority over the wisdom they impart, but rather sees themselves as the recipient of a gift that they are passing on. The creative impulse comes from the divine realm itself; receiving and expressing this impulse marks the passive-spontaneous aspect of its mediation.175 Nowadays, admittedly, we would not construe this special attention to the merely given, which (or so it is supposed) is not the product of our own thought or action, as a consequence of divine assistance or inspiration from a higher source. The main reason Bergson nonetheless emphasises the involuntary power of intuitive insights is to expose the abridgements  Kant 1998, B 674.  This applies even to the phase of transition from mythos to logos: ‘A philosopher like Parmenides dresses up his strictly logical speculation in the guise of a myth that allows him to ascend to heaven so as to receive the ideas he promulgates as a revelation from the mouth of the “Goddess”, that is, Truth. Sophists like Protagoras and Prodikos likewise do not disdain to, very deliberately, cast their thoughts on the development of the human race or the moral decision between virtue and vice in the form of a myth that they themselves invented. And even Plato calls the highest and ultimate thing accessible to his thought “Ideas”, that is, forms that he beholds with his mind’s eye, and where he comes up against the limits of what is accessible to thought, he reaches for analogy, for myth, so as to give readers a sense of a transcendental world, the pre-existence of the soul or its fate after death through vivid images that aspire to be more than metaphoric references [Bilderhinweise] to a higher reality.’ Nestle 1975, p. 18. 174 175

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and distortions of conventional and scientific thought. Even though infinitesimal calculus has found a way to operationalise minutely small units and so appears to have made the problem of infinity mathematically tractable, this does not answer the question of the particular quality of individual sequences and transitions of movement. That requires another approach which gives particular attention to the object itself instead of immediately rationalising it and imposing conceptual classifications. This strong impulse against an objectifying mode of thought that one-sidedly subsumes reality has an inherent plausibility, which becomes clear when Bergson attributes a detemporalised way of thinking about movement to a ‘need [for] immobility’.176 Against this kind of unremembering thought, a demand to restore ‘to time its duration’ and ‘to movement its mobility’177 asserts itself, in particular on the grounds that discursive thought is able to perceive at most ‘a certain aspect of the whole’,178 not the entirety of a movement. However, as we have seen, this ‘whole’ cannot be grasped ‘from within’179 or ‘with a single stroke’.180 Even if Hegel’s notion of ‘purely looking on’, like Bergson’s notion of ‘intuition’, emphasises that which is excised by pure thought and cannot be brought into consciousness by logical concepts, what we have here is not a simple opposition between different epistemic faculties. Rather, the particularity of that which cannot immediately be assimilated into the object is disclosed only in thought’s reflection on itself, insofar as conventional or lawful determinations of objects come into conflict with ideas and memories that come to mind suddenly and unbidden,181 and in this negative mediation point beyond themselves. Thus, instead of ‘deriving the particular from the universal’,182 dialectics understands the moment of the particular as an immanent contradiction of the universal. From a dialectical perspective, intuition is no longer seen  Bergson 1946c, p. 169.  Bergson 1946a, p. 17. 178  Bergson 1946d, p. 201. In this passage, Bergson considers different determinations of objects that represent ‘a certain point of view of the object’ (ibid.) without themselves being part of the whole. Slightly further on, he sums up this idea as follows: ‘from intuition one can pass on to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition.’ (ibid., p. 213). 179  Bergson 1922, p. 378. 180  Ibid., p. 326. 181  ‘In intuitions ratio recollects what it forgot. In this sense, which he certainly hardly intended, Freud was right when he attributed its own sort of rationality to the unconscious.’ Adorno 2013a, p. 46. 182  See footnote 174. 176 177

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as a countermodel to logical thought, but rather reminds us of that which constantly eludes rationality because it is not identical with it. In his Aesthetics, in which the ideal artwork is not understood in a one-­ sided or narrowly subjectivist sense as ‘only the appearance of the inner spirit in the reality of external forms’, but as ‘the absolute truth and rationality of the actual world’, Hegel offers some suggestions for how it is possible to grasp the ‘true essence of all things’.183 In order to penetrate ‘the whole’184 of an ‘external configuration’, which is the medium of art’s production,185 we need, inter alia, ‘circumspection, discrimination, and criticism’.186 Hegel characterises the necessary contribution from the subject ‘who makes such creation his aim’ as ‘productive activity’.187 However, this activity only represents one side of artistic creation. The other is directed towards the substance or material of artistic creation, which comes ‘out of the abundance of life’ and not, as in philosophy and science, ‘out of the abundance of abstract generalities’.188 At first glance, Hegel appears to be drawing a simple opposition between the living particular and the abstract universal, which can be produced by either artistic or conceptual means. However, in fact he describes myriad different types of approach, seeing the task of artistic (by contrast with conceptual) activity as lying ‘not in the form of general propositions and ideas, but in concrete configuration and individual reality’.189 The focus of artistic attention is on the particular, which cannot be produced by conceptual means. A certain similarity to ‘intuition’ is suggested when Hegel says that the artist, after he ‘has made the subject-­ matter into something entirely his own’, must ‘be able to forget his own personality and its accidental particular characteristics and immerse himself, for his part, entirely in his material’.190 Bergson similarly claims that our mind must free itself from concepts with fixed outlines, so that ‘it can be installed in the mobile reality, adopt its ceaselessly changing direction,  Hegel 1975, p. 282.  Ibid., p. 283. 185  Ibid., p. 281. 186  Ibid., p. 283. 187  Ibid. 188  Ibid., p. 281. 189  Ibid., p. 282. 190  Ibid., p. 288. In what feels like a prescient dig at modern art, Hegel warns the inspired artist not to give themselves airs and self-centredly emphasise themselves as a subject, but rather to be ‘the instrument and the living activation of the theme itself’. Ibid. 183 184

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in short, grasp it intuitively’.191 However, according to Hegel, the artistic and ‘objective’192 dialectics are not confined to ‘put[ting] ourselves right into the thing’193 or being ‘entirely present in the theme’;194 rather, there are myriad different ways to grasp a theme or be ‘completely filled’195 with it, which emphasise either the conceptual or the material moment. Neither moment, however, is simply set unmediated beside the other; rather, the two moments, ‘concept and object’, are ‘being-for-an-other and being-in-­ itself’.196 This form of mediation is incompatible with the intuitive metaphysics of duration, which separates concept and subject matter and ‘claims to dispense with symbols’.197 Under the heading of ‘music from the outside’,198 Adorno gives a vivid example of how the contradictory relation between concept and object can be understood in terms of an intellectual mediation in the object itself. He describes how a musical phenomenon must be regarded from two different perspectives, internal and external, in order to recognise how conceptual and non-conceptual moments are mutually conditioned, though without being subsumed into one another. To avoid encountering a piece of music in a merely conventional or professionally trained manner, the early music critic modified his familiar mode of perception and observation, and understood ‘music from the outside’ in the literal sense of not hearing music as it sounds in the concert hall or the opera house, for example, but rather of hearing what an opera sounds like if we fail to return to our seats after the interval and then simply perceive all this noise from outside—of seeing what this noise tells us from outside; and I had the feeling that this brings out a side of music that we otherwise overlook, and what struck me here, in more general terms, was that we can really say something about a phenomenon only if, in a sense, we can also look at

 Bergson 1946d, p. 224.  See footnote 53. 193  Hegel makes this remark in the context of distinguishing between subjective and objective dialectics. See footnote 54. 194  Hegel 1975, p. 288. 195  Ibid. 196  On this Hegelian characterisation of the dialectical relation between concept and object, see footnote 57. 197  Bergson 1946d, p. 191. 198  See Adorno 1929. 191 192

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it from the outside rather than solely from the inside, that is, if we also consider the social context in which it stands.199

In order, as Hegel puts it, to be ‘entirely present in the theme’, we must, according to Adorno, simultaneously be alongside or above it. Only thus can we bridge the gap between (seemingly) unmediated hearing and mediated understanding, and relate them to each other as moments of musical experience that exert a reciprocal influence on each other. Or, to put it another way, bring together the universal and the particular, the hic et nunc and its concept, while remaining aware that there is no immediate or unmediated identity between these moments and that, indeed, they diverge from one another.200

Critical appropriation of something does not relativise or devalue its dignity; on the contrary, listening to music while simultaneously confronting its conceptual form gives the experience of listening a more binding and lively character. Whereas Bergson believes this liveliness can only be saved by construing intuition as an independent epistemic faculty that affords a different perspective on things, on a dialectical conception things only begin moving when they are referred to their own conceptual opposite. Instead of a simple distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ perceptions, on the basis of which ‘temporal’ and ‘spatial’, ‘durational’ and ‘fixed’, ‘direct’ and ‘mediated’, ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ and ‘intuitive’ and ‘conceptual’ determinations of objects can be separated, dialectics reveals the contradictory relation in the object itself, so that it ‘begins of its own accord to come alive’.201 On a dialectical view, it would thus be false or overly simplistic to understand the phenomenon of motion as a ‘purely intensive sensation of mobility’.202 However, it would be just as wrong (as Bergson correctly observed) to conflate ‘motion and the space traversed’.203 If we instead understand ‘the essential and qualitative element […] of time, duration’

 Adorno 2017, p. 154.  Ibid., p. 155. 201  Ibid., p. 157. 202  Bergson 1910, p. 112. 203  Ibid. 199 200

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and ‘the traversed space, which is motionless’204 as moments of motion that belong together yet cannot be subsumed into each other, then both of them, object and concept, begin moving themselves in their ‘reflection’ on their ‘negativity’.205 While this view rejects conceptions of the ‘immobility of being’ (Zeno) and ‘mobility of movement’ (Bergson) as equally one-sided and incomplete, these conceptions do prove meaningful in their oppositional and contradictory mediation inasmuch as, within the totality of their thought, they become aware of their own non-identity. In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, this critical stance towards one’s own concepts and the unavailability of objects is very aptly described as ‘freedom to the object’.206 What makes this description so apt is that it expresses that the contradiction is part of the totality of thought and acquires its sense through reflectively constituting itself on the object and thereby transcending itself. While the thought of motion, described by Hegel as ‘existent contradiction’,207 becomes ensnared in polarities, this is not a matter of a ‘mere mirage’208 or ‘antinomy of pure reason’.209 Rather, its ‘existent’ moment is shown in the “primacy of the object”’,210 that is, in what is expressed in the object but cannot be intellectually grasped. This emphatically brings in a materialist element that simultaneously marks the limit or ‘breakdown’ of ‘epistemology itself’.211 Perhaps the most eloquent  Ibid., p. 115.  Hegel 2018, p. 37. 206  Adorno 2017, p. 25. 207  See footnotes 3 and 77. 208  Kant uses this term in his description of the ‘skeptical method’ by way of contrast to ‘skepticism’ in Kant 1998, B 452. 209  Kant 1998, A 405ff. See also the exposition of this topic in the introduction to the present work. 210  Adorno writes, ‘There is hardly a stronger argument for the fragile primacy of the object and for its being conceivable only in the reciprocal mediation of subject and object than that thinking must snuggle up to an object, even when it does not yet have such an object, even intends to produce it.’ Adorno 2005a, p. 129. Elsewhere, he elaborates: ‘Rather, by primacy of the object is meant that the subject, for its part an object in a qualitatively different sense, in a sense more radical than the object, which is not known otherwise than through consciousness, is as an object also a subject.’ Adorno 2000a, p. 142. 211  Adorno 2013a, p. 147. To give the full context of the quotation: ‘No matter can be isolated from form . Nevertheless, form is only as the mediation of matter. Such a contradiction expresses a comprehension of nonidentity and the impossibility of capturing in subjective concepts without surplus what is not of the subject. It expresses ultimately the breakdown of epistemology itself.’ 204 205

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expression of this failure can be found in Plato’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to conceive of an instant in time as the connecting link between rest and motion: For, surely, it does not change from rest so long as it rests, nor does it change from movement so long as it moves; but the instant is that certain strange nature inserted in between movement and rest, being in no time, and it is into it and from it that what moves changes into resting, and what rests into moving.212

It remains to be asked whether this ‘certain strange nature’ can be restored into time as something ‘existent’, for, on Adorno’s view, ‘no matter how we define the subject, some entity cannot be juggled out of it’.213

 Plato 2003, Parmenides, 156d–e.  Adorno 2000a, p. 143.

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CHAPTER 5

Motion as a Process of Symbolic Formation (Cassirer)

The positive reality of the empirical object is constituted through a double negation: through its differentiation from the ‘absolute’ on the one hand and from sensory appearance on the other. E. Cassirer

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, from which the epigraph above is taken,1 takes up a central idea from the Phenomenology of Spirit, according to which ‘the aim of spiritual development is that cultural reality [geistiges Sein] be apprehended and expressed not merely as substance but “equally as subject”.’2 In concrete terms, this means that Cassirer’s theory considers not just scientific knowledge and claims to truth, but also other modes of access to the world with their own meanings and form-specific object domains. The four main such domains are myth, language, art and knowledge; these are supplemented by the symbolic forms of technology,

 Cassirer 1955b, p. 34.  Ibid., p. 26. Cassirer uses the terms Geist and geistig in broad-ranging ways that are hard to capture naturally using a single term in English. Existing translations have variously rendered them as ‘spirit’, ‘the human spirit’ or ‘geist’ and as ‘spiritual’, ‘cultural’, ‘mental’ or ‘intellectual’, depending on context. This variety has been preserved here, rather than attempting to impose uniform translations. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Bockrath, Time, Duration and Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7_5

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religion, law and morality.3 Each of these forms denotes particular modes of intellectual or cultural apprehension, which despite the interrelationships between them are not reducible or assimilable to one another. Building on our discussion in the previous chapter, we might say that ‘freedom to the object’4 manifests here not in the form of substantial assumptions such as the idea of the ‘unity of being’, which in the Kantian notion of the ‘thing in itself’ is ultimately ‘relegated entirely to the sphere of the unknowable’.5 Rather, Cassirer turns matters on their head; symbolic forms are now viewed as objectivations of spirit that represent ‘the true sphere of the knowable, with its enduring multiplicity, finiteness and relativity’.6 This idea can be encapsulated in the claim that myth, language, art and knowledge each generate their own, form-specific object domains. On this view, transcendental forms of intuition and concepts like space, time, substance and causality represent a particular configuration of experience. However, there are also other meanings and object domains that cannot be assimilated into these conceptual structures. In other words, the categorial and intuitive forms that Kant understood as the general conditions of possibility for knowledge are constituted and modified in different kinds of experiential context, so that spatial and temporal relations have a different significance in mythical consciousness than they do in, say, scientific thought. This explains why Cassirer considers the main task of

3  This list is based on various works and remarks by Cassirer; he himself is explicit that law and morality, as ‘basic forms of the community and the state’, are to be included. Cassirer 1953a, p. 44. 4  See footnote 206 in Chap. 4. 5  Cassirer 1955a, p. 76. 6  Ibid., pp. 76–77.

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epistemology to be a ‘critique of culture’.7 The model of scientific knowledge only offers one possible mode of access to the world. However, despite this expansion of scope, the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms leaves no doubt that ‘the articulation of the particular into a universal law and order’8 remains the ultimate goal of knowledge.

5.1   The Production of Meaning in the Symbolic Process Cassirer uses the example of a ‘simple line’ (which has, incidentally, become famous even beyond the bounds of academic philosophy) to illustrate the basic process of symbolisation: Let us, for example, consider an experience from the optical sphere. Such an experience is never composed of mere sensory data, of the optical qualities of brightness and color. Its pure visibility is never conceivable outside and independently of a determinate form of vision; as sensory experience it is always the vehicle of a meaning and stands as it were in the service of that meaning. But precisely therein it is able to perform very different functions and through them to represent very different worlds of meaning. We can consider an optical structure, a simple line, for example, according to its 7  ‘Thus the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture. […] As long as philosophical thought limits itself to analysis of pure cognition, the naive-realistic view of the world cannot be wholly discredited.’ Ibid., p. 80. The ‘materialist motif’ that in Cassirer’s theory appears in the symbolic forms as a strategy for objectifying the human spirit should be clearly distinguished from the above-described ‘primacy of the object’ (see footnote 210 in Chap. 4). For instance, Cassirer expressly notes that ‘every content of culture, in so far as it is more than a mere isolated content, in so far as it is grounded in a universal principle of form, presupposes an original act of the human spirit. Herein the basic thesis of idealism finds its true and complete confirmation.’ Cassirer 1955a, p.  80. Unfortunately, apart from a review of the Festschrift commemorating Cassirer’s sixtieth birthday (Adorno 1937), Adorno does not directly comment on Cassirer’s work. However, in an early essay he does critically observe that the ‘Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School’ has ‘indeed preserved its self-contained form as a system, but has thereby renounced every right over reality’. Adorno 2000c, p. 25. This criticism only partially applies to Cassirer, since he believes the ‘act of the human spirit’ cannot be separated from its symbolic forms; however, this comes at the price that the mental activity that he places at the source of values is, as Adorno puts it, ‘not binding within reality, not transparent within the mind’. Ibid. On the ‘non-theorisability’ of the form-giving ‘productive imagination’, which Schwemmer says is the very ‘point [Pointe] of Cassirer’s theory’, see Schwemmer 1997a, p. 44. 8  Cassirer 1955a, p. 77.

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purely expressive meaning. As we immerse ourselves in the design and construct it for ourselves, we become aware of a distinct physiognomic character in it. A peculiar mood is expressed in the purely spatial determination: the up and down of the lines in space embraces an inner mobility, a dynamic rise and fall, a psychic life and being. […] But these qualities recede and vanish as soon as we take the line in another sense—as soon as we understand it as a mathematical structure, a geometrical figure. Now it becomes a mere schema, a means of representing a universal geometrical law. Whatever does not serve to represent this law, what merely appears as an individual factor in the line, now becomes utterly insignificant; it has departed, one might say, from our field of vision. […] And once again we stand in an entirely different sphere of vision when we take the line as a mythical symbol or as an aesthetic ornament. The mythical symbol as such embraces the fundamental mythical opposition between the sacred and the profane. It is set up in order to make a separation between the two provinces, and to warn and frighten, to bar the uninitiated from approaching or touching the sacred. Yet here it does not act merely as a sign, a mark by which the sacred is recognized, but possesses also a factually inherent, magically compelling and repelling power. Of such a power the aesthetic world knows nothing. Viewed as an ornament, the drawing seems remote both from signification in the logical-­ conceptual sense and from the magical-mythical warning symbol. Its meaning lies in itself and discloses itself only to pure artistic vision, to the aesthetic eye.9

A design, a mathematical structure, a mythical symbol, an aesthetic ornament—these four symbolic ways of seeing a particular line at the same time denote four different ‘worlds of meaning’, which transcend sensuous perception and only attain their specific form as ‘structures of consciousness’.10 With a view to the ‘pregnance’ of ‘particular factors’ of perception,11 Cassirer comments as follows on this process by which meanings and forms are constituted: Every sensuous content, however elementary, is charged, as it were, with such a tension. It is never simply ‘there’ as an isolated and detached content, for in this very existence it points beyond itself, forming a concrete unity of presence and representation.12

 Cassirer 1957, pp. 200–201.  Ibid., p. 128. 11  Ibid., p. 114. 12  Ibid., pp. 128–129. 9

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This point can be clarified using the example of optical inversion.13 In ambiguous images, a sudden shift of the figure–ground schema brings about an abrupt change in how we perceive the image, so that the same optical stimulus can generate different gestalts; for instance, one and the same image can be seen either as two people facing each other, or as the outlines of a trophy. Importantly, the shift in perspective simultaneously brings about a change in the perceived object, which is never seen immediately and ‘as such’ but always ‘as something’. There is no intermediate state between the different ways of looking and the different gestalts. We see either two faces or a trophy; there does not appear to be any tertia. The point of reference itself can be shifted; the mode of relation can change; and whenever such a change takes place, the phenomenon takes on not only a different abstract signification but also a different concrete-­ intuitive meaning.14

The different ways of interpreting the line are possible only because the changes in perspective make reference to different contexts of meaning. In the context of a ‘design’, the ‘expressive meaning’ dominates; that is, the ‘optical structure’ becomes a definite form by being distinguished from other perceptions, impressions, affects and representations. The act of distinction is only possible if we ‘mould’ the fluid impression ‘by symbolic action in one direction or another’.15 There is a clear similarity to Bergson’s données immédiates, inasmuch as Cassirer also assumes ‘a specific activity of consciousness, which is differentiated from any datum of immediate sensation or perception, but makes use of these data as vehicles, as means of expression’.16 The difference from ‘immediate states of consciousness’ can be seen in the fact that Cassirer regards the ‘reciprocal determination of the sensuous by the spiritual and the spiritual by the sensuous’17 as a liberation from the constraints of the immediate, whereas Bergson sees in  Ibid., p. 158.  Ibid. 15  Cassirer 1955a, p. 107. 16  Ibid., p. 106; for the full quotation, see footnote 20. Bergson writes in a similar context: ‘Thus inextensive sensations will remain what they are, viz., inextensive sensations, if nothing be added to them. For their co-existence to give rise to space, there must be an act of the mind which takes them in all at the same time and sets them in juxtaposition.’ Bergson 1910, p. 94. 17  Cassirer 1955a, p. 318. 13 14

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this mediation a loss of freedom and spontaneity.18 Even if the expressive forms produced in each case, such as the ‘up and down of the lines in space’ in the present example, are still strongly marked by ‘peculiar moods’ and corresponding impulses, they already clearly point beyond immediately given sense-data and sudden stirrings of feeling. Cassirer explains this point using the example of ‘natural symbolism’,19 which is already at work in perceptual experience: In every linguistic ‘sign’, in every mythical or artistic ‘image’, a spiritual content, which intrinsically points beyond the whole sensory sphere, is translated into the form of the sensuous, into something visible, audible or tangible. An independent mode of configuration appears, a specific activity of consciousness, which is differentiated from any datum of immediate sensation or perception, but makes use of these data as vehicles, as means of expression.20

Like Hegel, Cassirer believes that spirit can only grasp and comprehend itself in its expressions. However, by contrast with Hegel, the ‘philosopher of culture’21 does not believe that the expressions of spirit on the path from ‘sensuous-certainty’ to ‘absolutely knowing’ are already united in ‘the whole of the movement’.22 As the example of the simple line shows, the activities of spirit point in various directions and pertain to different symbolic worlds. Common to all these symbolic form worlds is that they are based on ‘a basic productive function of the spirit’,23 which depending

18  For instance in his remarks on the ‘conception of freedom’; Bergson 1910, p. 219. On the differences between Bergson and Cassirer, see Sect. 3.5. 19  Cassirer 1955a, p. 106. 20  Ibid. 21  On this point, Krois writes, ‘Philosophy is a later development in the history of culture. Cassirer is acutely conscious of this and—like Hegel—he is especially aware of the place of his own thought in the history of philosophy. The philosophy of culture serves Cassirer as a medium for reflection on philosophy. In this regard it fulfills the function for Cassirer that the Phenomenology of Mind did for Hegel.’ Krois 1987, p. 73. 22  This is how Hegel describes the unity of the dialectical ‘whole movement’ in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. For more detail, see footnote 133 in Chap. 4. 23  Cassirer 1957, p. 158.

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on its particular form is conceived as a function of expression, representation or signification.24 Cassirer’s concept of ‘pregnance’ expresses the idea that meaning is already being produced at the stage of perception: By symbolic pregnance we mean the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents. Here we are not dealing with bare perceptive data, on which some sort of apperceptive acts are later grafted, through which they are interpreted, judged, transformed. Rather, it is the perception itself which by virtue of its own immanent organization, takes on a kind of spiritual articulation—which, being ordered in itself, also belongs to a determinate order of meaning. In its full actuality, its living totality, it is at the same time a life ‘in’ meaning. It is not only subsequently received into this sphere but is, one might say, born into it. It is this ideal interwovenness, this relatedness of the single perceptive phenomenon, given here and now,

24  Schwemmer observes on this point, ‘It also seems, moreover, as though with his distinction between representation and signification Cassirer has simply adopted the Kantian distinction between intuition and concept, with his only innovation being to add the function of expression as a critical, because at once relativising and foundational, aspect. The question of the distinguishability of representation and pure signification would thus be repeating itself, as a question of the adequacy of the dualism of intuition and concept.’ Schwemmer 1997a, pp. 65–66. This raises the fundamental question of whether the ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ should itself be understood as a symbolic form. Habermas touches on the same point when he remarks: ‘It is clear that the identity of the sense impression, as the point of reference of the different interpretations, can only be maintained when this impression is endowed with the significance of a reality “in itself”, independent of all interpretations. But Cassirer would then have to concede precisely that metaphysical separation of matter and form which he rightly wishes to avoid because of its contradictory consequences. On the other hand, he cannot give up on the premiss that there is a unity of reality within the multiplicity of perspectives. For as long as symbolic forms alone provide objectivity and validity, then they must all refer to the same reality. Today we would formulate the problem by saying that Cassirer cannot assert both of the following at the same time: that the different symbolic languages are incommensurable, and that they can nevertheless be at least partially translated into one another.’ Habermas 2001, p. 21. Cassirer himself at least hopes that it may be possible to find ‘a standpoint situated above all these forms and yet not merely outside them’. Cassirer 1955a, p. 82. However, this would leave his theory caught up in its own ideal conditions, referring to the self rather than directly to objective reality. For this reason, Cassirer uses the richly charged expressions the ‘unity of the spirit’ and the ‘diversity of symbols’ to emphasise the poietic character of symbolic formation, which requires an interplay between ‘product’ and ‘production’. Cassirer 1957, pp. 78 and 449.

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to a characteristic total meaning that the term ‘pregnance’ is meant to designate.25

This difficult passage, which is key to understanding the ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’, describes how sensory data and meaning are already related in the medium of sensory experiences and intuitive relations, rather than only being related at the later stage of the self-reflective spirit. Cassirer’s claim that a certain structure of meaning is already present in perceptual and expressive experience (and is not, say, created by a supplementary act of becoming-conscious) denotes a special form of understanding that ‘is essentially earlier than the knowledge of things’.26 This special understanding comprises all the prerational forms of intuition and expression that bear particular expressive meanings, spanning the full range of possible expressive phenomena from mimetic cries to bodily gestures to well-articulated sounds.27 A factor common to all these phenomena is that they cannot be understood as meaningful prior to being produced. This emphasises the spontaneous or productive aspect of expressive experience, which does not yet have a fixed order. This order gradually takes form through practical action and reaction ‘by virtue of [perception’s] own immanent organization’, as a form of conscious representation in experience and action. Before expressive phenomena are converted into conscious forms, the self is ‘tossed this way and that by the expressive factors of the various phenomena, which assault it suddenly and irresistibly’.28 For Cassirer, the process of becoming a subject is directly linked to the process of mediating and differentiating expressive phenomena that  Cassirer 1957, p. 202.  Ibid., p. 63. Elsewhere, in relation to the development of spoken language, he speaks of a ‘language of the senses’. Ibid., p. 231. 27  On the distinction between ‘the mimetic, the analogical, and the truly symbolical stage’ of expression, see Cassirer 1955a, p. 190. It is surely no accident that Cassirer also refers in this context to ‘animal consciousness’. Cassirer 1957, p. 63. However, unlike ‘philosophical anthropology’, which likewise emerged in the new era that followed the First World War and sought to ground the philosophy of the human as a philosophy of human nature, Cassirer understands expressive experience not as a ‘cardinal question of human existence’ (Plessner 1982, p. 437) but rather as the starting point for the dynamic symbolic process. Accordingly, his talk of human beings as an ‘animal symbolicum’ primarily focuses on different facets and forms of symbolic formation that cannot be assimilated into the anthropological concept of the ‘animal rationale’. Cassirer 1944, p. 44. 28  Cassirer 1957, p. 90. 25 26

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initially appear contingent but through active engagement are gradually condensed into ‘formations of a higher order’.29 However, prior to their taking conscious form, an ‘expressive meaning’ is ‘revealed to us in certain perceptive experiences’ without which ‘existence would remain silent for us’.30 While, purely theoretically, we might suppose that this meaning appears or gains significance only through the abstraction of ‘certain perceptive experiences’ and sensations, Cassirer believes that even the ‘higher’ forms of conscious representation remain bound up with the elementary forms of their expression: Where the ‘meaning’ of the world is still taken as that of pure expression, every phenomenon discloses a definite ‘character’, which is not merely deduced or inferred from it but which belongs to it immediately. It is in itself gloomy or joyful, agitating or soothing, pacifying or terrifying. These determinations are expressive values and factors adhering to the phenomena themselves; they are not merely derived from them indirectly by way of the subjects which we regard as standing behind the phenomenon.31

The similarity to données immédiates becomes palpably clear here, if it was not already.32 The state of being overwhelmed by individual expressive factors (which for Cassirer mark a ‘fundamental symbolic relationship’,33 given that they retain their significance even after object-specific divisions and organising schemas have formed), is strongly reminiscent of the ‘dreams’ in the ‘depths of consciousness’ that Bergson speaks of when describing the phenomena ‘which we dimly discern in the fundamental emotion’.34 However, Cassirer does not connect these dreams to the ‘inner states’ of the ‘fundamental self’35 hidden beneath the surface of everyday life; rather, the expressive character of all the events and 29  Ibid., p.  91. Cassirer draws a clear distinction between this and the advanced ‘self-­ consciousness’ that is still absent in the mythical ‘world of expression’: ‘For all experience and expression are at first a mere passivity, a being-acted-upon rather than an acting—and this receptivity stands in evident contrast to that kind of spontaneity in which all self-­consciousness as such is grounded.’ Ibid., p. 75. 30  Ibid., p. 73. 31  Ibid., p. 72. 32  See footnote 16. 33  ‘An authentic primary phenomenon, which can be shown to be a constitutive factor in all knowledge of an object.’ Cassirer 1957, p. 124. 34  Bergson 1910, pp. 8 and 18. 35  Ibid., p. 166.

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happenings by which we are affected is typified by ‘expressive values and factors’. It is to these events that he is referring in the passage on ‘symbolic pregnance’ when he speaks of a ‘life “in” meaning’, with which our perceptive experiences are ‘ideally interwoven’; and it is only in virtue of this interweaving that a ‘sensory experience’ can contain a ‘nonintuitive meaning’.36 On Cassirer’s view, it is not possible to escape from this ‘fundamental relationship’, since ‘this access to reality is given us […] only in the original phenomenon of expression and expressive understanding’.37 The world appears under the aspect of constantly changing expressive factors and characters, which hold us in their grip until we become aware of them and instead turn outwards in the ‘form of activity’:38 It is not mere meditation but action which constitutes the center from which man undertakes the spiritual organization of reality. It is here that a separation begins to take place between the spheres of the objective and subjective, between the world of the I and the world of things. The farther the consciousness of action progresses, the more sharply this division is expressed, the more clearly the limits between I and not-I are drawn. 39

 See the remarks on ‘symbolic pregnance’ in the passage corresponding to footnote 25.  Cassirer 1957, p. 73. In his discussion of ‘basis phenomena’, Cassirer speaks of a ‘“stream of consciousness” which constantly flows and knows neither rest nor quiet. We must take it as a primary phenomenon [Urphänomen] without attempting to give an “explanation” of it.’ Cassirer 1996, p. 128. 38  Ibid. This does not preclude the possibility that even under civilised or domesticated conditions, the spark of expressive experience can awaken, so that we are overwhelmed or enraptured by a moment so mesmerising that it seems to exist outside time. Here, at least, there are parallels to Plato’s characterisation of instants in time. See footnote 212 in Chap. 4. Cassirer describes how, following this ‘focusing of all forces on a single point’, ‘the tension finds release, as the subjective excitement becomes objectified’. Cassirer 1953a, p.  33. In mythical thinking, this form of ‘objectification’ gives rise to ‘momentary gods’, which in modern thought are transposed ‘into a realm of symbolic, hence merely significative and not immediate, “living” forms’. Cassirer 1996, pp. 122, 230. On this conception, neither ‘the instant’ nor ‘life’ itself are available without the intermediation of some expressive form. This applies to all cultural forms of expression, whether mythical, technical, linguistic or artistic, with their respective structure, dynamics, historicity and materiality determining what sort of articulation is possible. 39  Cassirer 1955b, p. 157. Elsewhere, Cassirer refers to ‘the “works” that we create’, as an objectified, independent form of this separation—which includes a separation from ourselves: ‘These works no longer belong to us; they mark the first level of “alienation”.’ Cassirer 1996, p. 130. 36 37

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In more modern terminology, we might call this a praxeological foundation of personal, social and cultural reality; I shall return to this topic later. 40 For now, it shall suffice to say that the distinctions, categories and forms that give ‘fixed form’ to the ‘chaos of sensory impressions’ 41 originate prior to the self-reflective spirit, and are already present in embodied perceptive and expressive factors. Although Cassirer emphatically attributes the ‘diversity of forms’42 to the ‘spontaneity of the spirit’,43 the key to this connection lies in practical or expressive activity. As we shall see later in relation to motion,44 even the Kantian forms of intuition of time and space, which combine spiritual and sensory aspects and cannot be conceived without contradiction, have a practical foundation that makes it possible to reconstruct their development. The formation of mental or spiritual representations (construed in the broadest sense) cannot, on Cassirer’s view, be separated from the practical processes out of which they emerge. The idea of a genealogical practice runs through all levels of symbolic formation.45 In light of this, let us now go back and see how the proposed theory of symbolic formation measures up when applied to the example of the ‘simple line’.46 While in the ‘design’ a ‘purely expressive meaning’, which attempts to give adequate expression to inner movement, is articulated in ‘the up and down of the lines’, with perception and ‘taking-for-true’47 not yet separated, the ‘mythical’ expressive meaning is more focused on the fateful divine or demonic powers of the mythical symbol itself. The line  See the discussion of the ‘praxeology of motion’ in Sect. 6.2.  Cassirer 1955a, p. 107. 42  Ibid. 43  Cassirer 1955b, p. 217. In the same passage, Cassirer remarks that at the level of ‘spiritual expressive functions’, the formative processes are largely unconscious: ‘In creating its mythical, artistic forms the spirit does not recognize itself in them as a creative principle.’ 44  See the subsequent sections of the present chapter. 45  Schwemmer explains this point as follows: ‘For Cassirer, myth is “as it were the primordial layer of the consciousness and the foundation of all its accomplishments [Leistungen]”. However, this positioning of myth at the origin does not entail a gradated model in which the different symbolic forms are successively ranked. For if all symbolic forms are based in myth, then a more apt choice to represent their development (at least with regards to the directions in which it proceeds) would be the image of a rosette, from whose mythic centre the leaves of the other symbolic forms grow: myth links them together, yet they develop in their own directions and distinctive forms.’ Schwemmer 1997a, p. 41. 46  See footnote 9. 47  Cassirer 1955b, p. 35. Cassirer is playing here on the literal meaning of German wahrnehmen (to perceive) as taking-true (wahr = true; nehmen = take). 40 41

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becomes a magical boundary, a vivid demarcation of ‘the sacred and the profane’ that links the imponderabilities of life to a ‘specific material substratum’48 and so allows them to be shaped and controlled. The expressive forms of the ‘design’ and the mythical ornament have in common that they both identify certain aspects of experience, such as the sombre and the joyous, the uncanny and the familiar, the sacred and the profane, with the phenomenon itself. Perception of things (Dingwahrnehmung), however, requires individual aspects to be dislodged from the totality of appearances and compared with others—that is, passive impressions must become active expression. Man has discovered a new mode of expression: symbolic expression. This is the common denominator in all his cultural activities: in myth and poetry, in language, in art, in religion, and in science. These activities are widely different, but they fulfil one and the same task: the task of objectification.49

As symbolic ideations, both the design and the mythical symbol refer to reflective representations and sensations, which in physical reactions (such as a person lashing out angrily with their fist) and in magical, ritual practices still lack direction. A physical reaction to a sudden surge of feeling may give the individual concerned a certain sense of relief; but this affect will ‘come to its end without leaving any permanent trace’.50 Even if the individual is entirely absorbed by the feeling in the moment—a powerful example of this can be seen in the propensity to collective devotion in the social context of magical ceremonies—they do not yet reflect on, or distance themselves from, their own activity. This happens ‘as soon as man begins to wonder about his acts’, at which point ‘he has taken a new decisive step […] which will in the end lead him far from his unconscious and instinctive life’.51 Even if it is an open question where exactly the line between sensuous experience and symbolic expression is located—in other words, at what point the dramatic becomes the epic, since the two do not exist separately52—we can observe that, unlike motor responses and affective expressions, in order to understand our own action in the mode of  Ibid., p. 56.  Cassirer 1946, p. 45. 50  Ibid., p. 46. 51  Ibid. 52  ‘Myth is the epic element in primitive religious life; rite is the dramatic element. We must begin with studying the latter in order to understand the former.’ Ibid., p. 28. 48 49

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symbolic expression, we need at least a vague idea of its meaning. For it is clear that ‘evaluation involves a form of looking back, looking ahead and looking over [Rückschau, Vorschau and Überschau] that in feelings, as mere passive states [bloße Zuständlichkeiten], is absent.’53 Two other possible ways of perceiving the line are as an aesthetic ornament or a geometric figure; these alternative ways of looking can likewise only be understood relative to the context in which they are embedded. While from an artistic point of view, a wavy hand-drawn line is perceived as showing a certain individuality of expression, which appears in the artwork as a form of representation freed from the artist, the same line becomes a geometric figure if it is viewed as a graphical representation of a mathematical formula or trigonometric function. The difference between the two perspectives can be seen in the fact that, under the aspect of geometric meaning, the ‘spatial form’ ‘remains the mere outward cloak of an essentially unintuitive mathematical idea’.54 In its signifying function ‘this idea does not stand for itself alone: in it a more comprehensive law, the law of all space, is represented’.55 Particular properties that matter when it is perceived as an aesthetic ornament, such as the colour, the proportions or the ‘sweep’ of the curve, ‘now becom[e] utterly insignificant’.56 And so, similarly to how the ‘peculiar mood’ of the expressive meaning and the mythical opposition of ‘the sacred and the profane’ produce different worlds of meaning right from the stage of seeing, the geometric and artistic perspectives also change the ‘modality of meaning’.57 This is possible because every perception is already embedded in a context of overlapping references, such that ‘mere sensory data’ and ‘pure visibility’58 are replaced by diverse perspectives and configurations. At the end of the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer remarks, with a view to the genealogy of symbolic formation (from expressive meaning (Sinn) to symbolic representation to pure signification (Bedeutung)) of ‘characteristic metamorphoses’, which are subject to the ‘law of continuity’:59

 Cassirer, cited in Schwemmer 1997a, p. 133.  Cassirer 1957, pp. 200–201. 55  Ibid., p. 201. 56  Ibid., p. 200. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid. 59  Ibid., p. 448. 53 54

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The later phase is not absolutely alien to the earlier one but is only the fulfillment of what was intimated in the preceding phase. On the other hand this interlocking of phases does not exclude a sharp opposition between them. For each new phase raises its own pregnant demand and sets up a new norm and ‘idea’ of the spiritual. Continuous as the progress may be, the accents of meaning are forever shifting within it—and each of these shifts gives rise to a new total meaning of reality.60

We could interpret this idea, presented as a summation of Cassirer’s work as a whole, as expressing the essence of symbolic formation and objectivation. However, that would fail to account for myth’s position at the origin of all other symbolic forms.61 For if it is correct that even ‘higher functions’ presuppose ‘the primary stratum of the experience of expression in its absolutely original form’,62 then it is unclear why, despite being separated in virtue of having their own particular logic, Cassirer supposes that their contradictory relations and connections can be subsumed ‘within the continuity of consciousness as a whole’.63 He explains the continuity of the objectivation process by emphasising the ‘organic’ nature of the transition between the individual phases, following the ‘law of continuity’.64 From this, it necessarily follows that the contradictions that occur will remain unmediated and external to each other. Given the undialectical way in which Cassirer brings them together, it is unsurprising that the ‘sharp opposition’ between the successive phases is characterised one-­ sidedly and apologetically as a ‘fulfillment of what was intimated in the preceding phase’.

 Ibid.  See footnote 45. 62  Cassirer 1957, p. 87. 63  Ibid., p. 78. 64  Ibid., p. 448. We should recall here Bergson’s unsuccessful attempt to grasp ‘the whole’ of a movement ‘with a single stroke’ and Hegel’s earlier critique of Schelling’s ‘intellectual intuition’, that ‘begins immediately, like a shot from a pistol, with absolute knowledge’. See footnotes 150 and 180 in Chap. 3. Although Cassirer does not begin ‘with absolute knowledge’, his reference to the ‘concrete unity’ of the ‘world of the spirit’ fails to acknowledge the contradictory mediation of its oppositions. On his theory, the ‘most extreme oppositions’ are not set against each other and taken, in contradiction with themselves, to their most extreme, non-identical moment, but rather appear, obscurely and indistinctly, ‘as somehow mediated oppositions’. Cassirer 1957, p. 78. On the dialectical form of mediation, by contrast, see footnote 64 in Chap. 4. 60 61

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For what constitutes the unity and totality of the human spirit is precisely that it has no absolute past; it gathers up into itself what has passed and preserves it as present.65

Even if we may agree with this genealogical idea, the reference to the ‘synthesis of the spirit’66 obscures the ‘reality of “symbolic forms”’.67 Given this reality, we can take the symbolic forms not as being based on an identity of spirit and nature (Identitätsphilosophie)68 but rather as c­ ontaining the ‘past’ within themselves as something concretely mediated. Only by tracing the effects of the past in the present does the past also appear as present and the present likewise as past;69 their mediation thus transcends familiar categories and limits. I shall now turn to consider how ‘the past’ persists in the ‘reality of symbolic forms’. For the claim that the relation between symbolic worlds of meaning is guaranteed solely by the ‘unity of the spirit’ not only contracts the idea of their mediation, but also implies ‘an emphatic use of the concept of the first itself’.70 By contrast, the discussion in the previous chapter of the dialectical use of concepts and the ‘existent contradiction’ showed that we should take the concept of the ‘unity and totality of the human spirit’, even if it only takes effect in its symbolic expressions, to be mediated rather than immediate. For Cassirer, the mediation remains external for as long as the various ‘worlds of meaning’ are one-sidedly determined as symbolic formations of ‘the human spirit’. If, by contrast, we take the ‘expressive meaning’, ‘mythical symbol’, ‘geometrical figure’  Cassirer 1957, pp. 78.  Ibid., p. 146. 67  Paetzold 1994, p.  123. In this work, Paetzold investigates, inter alia, the differences between Cassirer’s ‘myth of the state’ and Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. 68  See footnote 7. Adorno observes on this point that ‘the first of the philosophers makes a total claim: It is unmediated and immediate. In order to satisfy their own concept, mediations would always just be accounted for as practically addenda to thought and peeled off the first which is irreducible in itself. But every principle which philosophy can reflect upon as its first must be universal, unless philosophy wants to be exposed to its contingency.’ Adorno 2013a, p. 7. 69  This can be seen in particular in critical theories of culture and society that explore, for instance, the entanglements between myth and enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), affective and behavioural structures (Freud, Elias) or changes in constellations of knowledge and power (Foucault). 70  Adorno 2013a, p. 7. 65 66

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and ‘aesthetic ornament’ as concrete forms that are not identical with the human spirit, then the differences between them cannot be reduced to their creatively generated materiality. Rather, in dialectical spirit we should assume that ‘the analysis of the reified’ will ‘ru[n] into the given and vice versa’; ‘any attempt to pass justification on to a privileged category gets entangled in antinomy’.71 This perspective is at least implicitly suggested in Cassirer’s claim (in the context of his remarks on ‘symbolic pregnance’) that a certain structure of meaning is already present in perceptual and expressive experience, rather than being created by a supplementary act of becoming-conscious. However, Cassirer can only support his claim that intuitive signification (Bedeutung) and non-intuitive meaning (Sinn) comes together via the circuitous route of pre-existing ‘worlds of meaning’. It is not possible to definitively establish whether spirit or object has primacy (Cassirer, true to the ‘basic thesis of idealism’,72 favours the former). Consequently, in what follows I shall not attempt to set spirit against object and have the ‘critique of the first […] set off in quest of the absolutely first’.73 However, we can criticise the one-sided positivity of the notion of the ‘unity and totality of the human spirit’, which at the same time directs the process of formation towards ‘a unified, ideal center’74 which Cassirer characterises as follows: This center can never lie in a given essence but only in a common project. Thus, with all their inner diversity, the various products of culture—language, scientific knowledge, myth, art, religion—become parts of a single great problem-complex: they become multiple efforts, all directed toward the one goal of transforming the passive world of mere impressions, in which the spirit seems at first imprisoned, into a world that is pure expression of the human spirit.75

Only someone who holds an unbroken or one-sidedly optimistic view of culture and the human spirit could speak like this, someone who ignores 71  Ibid., p. 6. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the difference between the given and the reified is explained by reference to the opposition between art and science: ‘For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art.’ Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 13. 72  See footnote 7. 73  Adorno 2013a, p. 6. 74  Cassirer 1955a, p. 80. 75  Ibid., pp. 80–81.

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the contradictions inherent in the concept of enlightenment and progress, which ‘already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’.76 For Cassirer, the ‘world that is pure expression of the human spirit’, which in theoretical, physical thought is as it were reunited with itself, appears ‘as a structure of pure order’ that advances ‘toward ever more universal symbols’.77 This prompts the question: ‘Is it possible to eradicate this last remnant of contingency, of subjectivity, from the description of the natural process?’78 Cassirer believes that the greatest contrast to myth, which originates with ‘the projection of subjective properties onto nature’,79 is to be found in the idea of unity and objectivity governed by natural laws. Contrary to this view, the Dialectic of Enlightenment claims that myths were not just a victim of the Enlightenment but ‘were ­themselves its products’,80 so that the modern effacement of the subject in scientific thought is not as far removed from the mythical victim as Cassirer supposes to be the case for the ‘world of pure knowledge’.81 Horkheimer and Adorno describe this relation pointedly and without any illusion: Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.82

Even Schwemmer’s far less critical reading of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms concludes that, while Cassirer is right to distance himself from the notions of immediacy found in a Bergsonian metaphysics of life, the

76  On the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, which as ‘unreconciled nature’ exercises ‘power even within thought itself’, see Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. xvi and 32. 77  Cassirer 1957, pp. 477 and 478. 78  Ibid., p. 478. 79  Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p.  4. In full: ‘Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth.’ 80  Ibid., p. 5. 81  Cassirer 1957, p. xv. The ‘idea of the epistemological primacy of law over things’ (ibid.) is not, incidentally, inconsistent with the belief that ‘we shall never find the truly simple and ultimate element of all reality in things; but no doubt it may be found in our own consciousness’ (ibid., p. 23). The conscious subject does not, as it were, return into the process of objectivation through the back door, but instead assumes the role of an epistemological placeholder, like the Kantian ‘consciousness in general’, which ‘furnishes empirical judgments with universal validity’. Kant 2004, p. 52. 82  Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 8.

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one-­sided emphasis on pure knowledge and law-governed methods blinds us to the ‘substructure’83 of science: Cassirer’s tendency to ultimately follow the Enlightenment, with its schematisations and abstractions—one need only think of the sequence of mimetic, analogical and purely symbolic expression, or that of expression, representation and pure signification, of myth, language and knowledge— blinds him to the independent power of the concretising and individualising imagination and configuration. […] What has eluded him is the independence [Eigenständigkeit]—the intrinsic structure and intrinsic meaningfulness [Eigenstruktur and Eigen-Sinnigkeit]—of imaginative and productive coming-to-terms-with the world [Weltbewältigung]. And this applies not just to art and all other forms of creative imagination, but also to the sciences and technology.84

Although this passage highlights a specific ‘tension’ and ‘contradiction’ in Cassirer’s thought, which is torn back and forth between the perspectives and forms of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,85 it is above all in the ‘substructure’ of science that we can take up and expand the question of symbolic forms’ ‘intrinsic meaningfulness’. One objection is that the relations within the ‘architectonics’ of the symbolic form worlds are not solely mediated by spirit, and do not just lead upwards—‘from the primary configurations found in the world of the immediate consciousness to the world of pure knowledge’.86 Given this objection, it needs to be explained what possibilities would be opened up by moving ‘down’ instead. This ‘downward’ movement is not intended as a rejection or reversal of the ‘architectonics of the superstructure’, by contrast with Bergson’s invocation of ‘pure duration’ and the ‘original process of life’. For, as we have seen, this kind of opposition to enlightened thinking becomes caught up in the very snares of rationality that it is intended to

83  The image of a ‘substructure’ and the ‘organization’ and ‘architectonics of the superstructure – that is, of science’ comes from Cassirer 1957, p. xiii. Regarding the ‘universal constants for all description of physical process’, Cassirer remarks, ‘it is the invariance of such relations and not the existence of any particular entities which forms the ultimate stratum of objectivity’. Ibid., p. 473. 84  Schwemmer 1997a, pp. 239–240. 85  Ibid. 86  Cassirer illustrates this upward movement using the image of a ‘ladder’, a metaphor drawn from practical life that is extremely popular in philosophy. Cassirer 1957, p. xv.

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reject.87 Instead, it needs to be shown how independent forms of time, space and motion are constituted in the world of expression and intuition. For even if these concrete forms were wholly sublated in their conceptual meaning, their particularity would not be fully represented, since each symbolic content is formed ‘according to its nature and the laws of its structure’.88 Given the immanent contradictions of the ideal conditions and ideal centres posited by Cassirer, the advantage of a dialectical reading of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is that it will allow us to ‘determine the nature of theoretical form’ not through any one of its particular achievements’, but rather by ‘keep[ing] its total potentialities constantly in mind’.89 As we saw with the example of the ‘simple line’, these potentialities also include what Cassirer terms the ‘other strata of spiritual life’90 from the ‘substructure’ of science, which due to their concrete mediation manifest not just in conceptual, systematic forms but also intuitive, practical ones.

5.2  Becoming of Form Rather than taking ideas of space and time as given, Cassirer instead understands them in terms of their development from the substantial being of things to their conceptual ordering and interrelation; this allows him to construe their movement as oriented not only forwards ‘toward the world of objects’, but also back towards ‘the proper function of knowledge itself’.91 With regards to the development of the idea of space, he observes accordingly that It is not by copying a ready-made material model of ‘absolute space’ in our minds, but by learning to use the different, intrinsically incommensurate impressions of the diverse sensory spheres, particularly those of sight and

87  See Sects. 3.6 and 4.2. A similar critique of the notion of unmediated thought can be found in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘No matter which myths are invoked against it, by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge the very principle of corrosive rationality of which enlightenment stands accused.’ Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. 3–4. 88  Cassirer 1957, p. 1. 89  Ibid., p. 40. 90  Ibid., p. xiii. 91  Cassirer 2013c, p. 318.

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touch, as representatives and signs for one another, that we create our world of space as a world of systematically related perceptions.92

However, the different conceptions of space do not straightforwardly map onto the visual and tactile space of sensory perception. Even if sensuous intuitive space appears very similar to the mythical conception of space—insofar as bodily orientation, as an organic form of ‘knowing’,93 is determined by distinctions between above and below, in front and behind, left and right, inner and outer—the associated perceptions and sensations are not simply reproduced, but transferred into ‘spatial images and intuitions’.94 This is possible because ‘physiological’ space is articulated and ordered in a certain way. Sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste have their own distinct pregnance profile that cannot be freely interchanged, since each is connected to a ‘particular organ […] which belongs to it specifically’.95 For instance, we see a moving object by following it with our eyes and moving our head accordingly. When we listen, by contrast, our attention is more strongly focused on the dynamics of a sequence of movements, which can occur outside our field of vision. Moreover, as Bergson puts it, sensations of sound display ‘well marked degrees of intensity’.96 Accordingly, when listening to musical tones that form a clear harmonic series, we can easily hear any false notes due to the precise  Cassirer 1955a, p. 100.  The debate about ‘tacit knowing’ initiated by Michael Polanyi proceeds from the idea that ‘all thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of our thinking, and that all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body’. Polanyi 1966, p. x. On the relation between implicit and bodily forms of knowledge, see Bockrath 2008a, pp. 110–121. Cassirer remarks analogously that ‘We have seen in our investigation of language that the terms of spatial orientation […] are usually taken from man’s intuition of his own body: man’s body and its parts are the system of reference to which all other spatial distinctions are indirectly transferred’. Cassirer 1955b, p. 90. 94  Ibid., p.  86. In the same passage, he also speaks of a ‘peculiar schematism of space through which space assimilates the most dissimilar elements and so makes them mutually comparable and in some way similar.’ 95  Ibid., p.  87. Cassirer notes that bodily perceptions and movements involve ‘specific organic sensations’, such that each position and element is produced in a specific manner and has its own ‘particular accent’. Ibid., p. 85. 96  Bergson 1910, p. 43. By reference to different organic and sensory sensations, Bergson criticises the imprecision of our concepts when it comes to grasping ‘simple psychic phenomena’; ibid., p. 73. While this criticism may be correct, his supposition of ‘sensations which do not occupy space’ nonetheless remains rather dubious. Ibid., pp. 32–33. For a more detailed discussion, see Sect. 3.1. 92 93

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attunement between the individual tones, whereas the boundary between two colours (e.g. red and yellow) on a colour scale cannot be determined with such precision because we perceive the gradual transition from one to the other in its entirety. Thus, hearing is far more precise than seeing because it is able to make clear distinctions, whereas seeing is far richer than hearing because it is able to perceive multiple shades simultaneously.97 These examples could be extended almost indefinitely, and a closer examination of other pregnance profiles, such as that of the sense of balance, would certainly be a worthwhile endeavour.98 For present purposes, however, it is enough to note the relation between ‘physiological perceptions’ and ‘symbolic forms of intuition’. This relation, which Cassirer describes as the ‘primary formation’ and which ‘contains the true secret of all symbolic form’,99 does not entail ‘simply receiving’ given material impressions (which in themselves possess a fixed and definite character, a given quality and structure) and then grafting onto them, as though from outside, another form originating in the independent energy of consciousness.100

97  In a similar vein, Susanne K.  Langer (by reference to Cassirer and A.  N. Whitehead) describes the particularity of visual forms—‘lines, colors, proportions, etc.’—by contrast with discursive forms: ‘The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision.’ Langer 1948, p. 75. Elsewhere, she writes, ‘This kind of semantic may be called “presentational symbolism”, to characterize its essential distinction from discursive symbolism, or “language” proper.’ Ibid., p. 79. Importantly, on this view language can only inadequately express that which is (presentationally) expressed in artworks, rituals or myths. However, this sceptical and relativising assessment leads Langer to the expanded view that ‘the deadlocked paradoxes of mind and body, reason and impulse, autonomy and law’ should be resolved and discursive forms augmented by the forms of knowledge contained in art, ritual and myth. Ibid., p. 19. 98  One example worthy of mention from the now expansive field of sensory neuroscience and perceptual psychology is James Gibson’s theory of perception, which accounts both for species-specific factors and the role played by organisms’ activities in the reception and processing of information from their environments. See Gibson 1986. On the history of the senses, see Jütte 2005. 99  Cassirer 1955b, p. 94. 100  Ibid.

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Rather, ‘certain acts of linguistic, mythical, or logical-theoretical apperception’101 constitute a constructive process of formation in which every sensory impression—if Cassirer’s account of ‘symbolic pregnance’ is to be believed—can assume the form of expression or ‘apperception’.102 The reference to ‘the proper function of knowledge itself’,103 which emphasises both the constructive aspect of symbol and sign formation and its bodily embedding, would, admittedly, only acquire its full significance if, in Cassirer’s own words, ‘given material impressions’ could be apprehended ‘from within’. But since, as we have seen, ‘the demand for pure “intuitionism” (Bergson) cannot be fulfilled’ and we ‘must make the trip around the world’,104 the symbolic objectivations and formations are only valid to a limited extent or, rather, are dependent on a particular symbolic understanding that reveals that which purports to be nakedly given is, in fact, constructed: For us, in any case, it is certain that pure phenomenological ‘sensation’ and ‘sense-bearing’ are only given as an indivisible unity. We can never completely separate the sensory as such, as some naked ‘raw material’ of sensation, from the whole complex of sense [Sinnverbände]. Yet, we can indicate the different ways it configures itself and ‘says’ differently, according to the characteristic perspective of meaning, the focal point under which it comes.105

Since we can identify neither a beginning nor a definite end to the process of symbolic formation, but only individual forms and connections, ultimately even the symbolic forms themselves lose their ostensibly stable, substantial significance. Cassirer explains this point by reference to the symbolic form of language: If, instead of likening Language to an existing thing, we understand it rather in the sense of what it really does,—if we take it, in accordance with  Ibid.  ‘However high we may place our concepts and much as we may abstract them from the sensuous world, still images adhere to them. … For how should we give meaning and signification to our concepts if some intuition … did not underly them?’ Kant, as cited in Cassirer 1955b, p. 93 (ellipses in original). On ‘symbolic pregnance’ see footnote 25. On ‘apperception’, see footnote 233 in Chap. 3. 103  See footnote 91. 104  See footnote 330 in Chap. 3. Elsewhere, Cassirer remarks that for philosophy, ‘the paradise of mysticism, the paradise of pure immediacy, is closed’. Cassirer 1955a, p. 113. 105  Cassirer 2013b, p. 260. 101 102

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Humboldt’s injunction, not as an erg but as energy—then the problem immediately assumes a different form. Language then is no longer a given, rigid structure; rather it becomes a form-creating power, which at the same time has to be really a form-breaking, form-destroying one.106

Given this dynamic by which forms are made and unmade, Cassirer no longer seeks to explain the ‘concept of the symbolic’ by demonstrating ‘a very determined direction of spiritual apprehension and configuration’; rather, he attempts to comprehend ‘the expression of something “spiritual” through sensory “signs” and “images”, in its most general signification’.107 In other words, he wants to attain as comprehensive as possible an understanding of the ‘energy of spirit by which the content of spiritual signification is linked to a concrete and intrinsically appropriate sensuous sign’.108 In light of the shifting, changing nature of symbolic forms and relations of form, retreating to the spiritual principle of formation (a ‘closed and unified fundamental process’) allows Cassirer to at least tie symbolic forms to ‘the general character of symbolic formation’.109 The question of the ‘fundamental principle of the human spirit’ thus also goes right to the heart of the ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’, according to which the sensuous is not available as such, but only as spiritually mediated content. Although the ‘fundamental principle of the human spirit’ in general is characterised by the capacity for creative form-giving, expressive experience on the one hand and the signifying function of scientific knowledge formation on the other mark crucial junctures in the process of symbolisation. They merit slightly closer examination, since their content is characterised, respectively, as an act of ‘primary formation’110 and an ‘ultimate stratum of objectivity’111 However, my focus will not be on comparing differing claims to objectivity and validity, but rather on showing how Cassirer attributes the production of sensuous signs and images to the

 Cassirer 1949, pp. 878–879.  Cassirer 2013a, p. 75. 108  Ibid., p. 76. 109  Ibid., p. 75. 110  See footnote 99. Elsewhere, Cassirer speaks of an ‘objectivity of low degree’. Cassirer 1955b, p. 14. 111  Cassirer 1957, p. 473. 106 107

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‘spontaneous’ or ‘creative power’112 of the spirit. I am thus concerned with the idealist foundations of Cassirer’s thought, which (as we saw above) has been criticised for the primacy it accords to spirit in the process of symbolisation.113 Although Cassirer constantly points to the insoluble connection between ideal forms and material signs in the symbolic process, he also refers just as emphatically to ‘the principle of the “primacy” of the function over the object’ which ‘assumes in each special field a new form and demands a new and dependent explanation’.114 Accordingly he also attributes the ‘critique of culture’ to ‘an original act of the human spirit’ whose content ‘is grounded in a universal principle of form’,115 rather than being merely isolated. From today’s perspective—that is, at a temporal remove and with a critical awareness of cultural developments and interpretations—we could easily reject this assertion as one-sided and inadequate.116 But that is not my intention here; rather, I wish to ask how ‘function’ and ‘object’ come together and how they can be conceived as ‘an original act of the human spirit’. We can see here, incidentally, a certain parallel to Kant’s critique of reason, which restricts the objectivity of a subject’s knowledge only to then ground that objectivity in the subject themselves (and thereby ‘rescue’ it). Cassirer’s ‘“fundamental rule” that the spirit only arrives at its identity through being expressed’117 ascribes a similar power to the subjective capacity to create forms, but with the caveat that this power is disclosed only in the subject’s works and effects on the world,

 On the ‘spontaneity’ of the spirit, see Cassirer 1955b, p. 217; on its ‘creative power’ see ibid., p. 261. 113  See footnotes 7 and 72. 114  Cassirer 1955a, p. 79. 115  Ibid., p. 80. 116  Peter Gay, for instance, criticises Cassirer’s stubborn refusal to press deeper into either the inner, psychological realm or the outer, social one. See Gay 1967. It would, of course, be equally mistaken to therefore polemically label Cassirer a ‘conformist fool’, as Adorno did in a letter to Max Horkheimer dated 2 November 1934. See Adorno and Horkheimer 2003, p. 22; English translation in Müller-Doohm 2005, p. 196. 117  Schwemmer 1997a, p. 42. 112

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which is why the identity of the spirit ‘eludes all theoretical systematisation’.118 But how, on Cassirer’s view, do individual impressions, perceptions, representations and emotions become elements of consciousness, such that they are not merely contingently given or passively experienced119 but linked together by the spirit and finally turned into symbolic forms? These questions cannot be answered (as in traditional epistemology) by referring to the concepts of the exact sciences so as to reflectively explore the possibilities and limits of reason. Rather, ‘the understanding of expression is essentially earlier than the knowledge of things’.120 However, if Cassirer is asserting the existence of prerational relations of understanding and meaning, there must be a faculty that identifies expressive experiences as such and translates them into determinate representations of objects. It is this boundary between the intuitively given and the spiritually created that Cassirer is attempting to navigate when he remarks that expressive meaning is connected to the perception itself:

118  Ibid., p. 41. At the same point in the text, Schwemmer characterises Cassirer as a ‘“theorist of identity”, albeit at a higher level’. Elsewhere, he expands: ‘The spirit does not possess itself in a self-transparent presence to itself, in the identity of a self-consciousness in which the progression and bringing-to-mind [Vergegenwärtigung] of conscious processes would coincide in pure intuitive certainty [reine Evidenz]. The spirit must, so to speak, “achieve” itself, show its “original image-power [Bildkraft]” in the configuration of its own “image world” or “world of formations [Gebilden]” and thereby form itself, as an “inner realm” of thoughts, feelings and so forth.’ Ibid., p. 37. However, it remains unexplained why ‘the principle of the “primacy” of the function over the object’ should apply to this purportedly ‘higher’ theory of identity with respect to the expression and configuration of the spirit. See footnote 7. What remains is a reference to the ‘poietic character’ of our spiritual functions and activities, which is not just directed against the idea of immediate self-certainties, but also understands the act of mediation between spirit and object as an ‘original act of the human spirit’. This reveals the full contradiction of the assumption of identity, even if, as with Cassirer, it is conceived in terms of an ‘“expressive theory” of the spirit’ (Schwemmer 1997a, p. 37). After all, as we saw in the previous section, form and content are not identical, so there is no reason to accord a higher status to function than object. For just as forms and functions are necessarily mediated by contents, as expressed in Cassirer’s ‘expressive theory of the spirit’, it is also true that contents are never fully exhausted by, and can never be fully assimilated into, forms and functions. This idea, which above was described in terms of the ‘primacy of the object’ (see footnote 210 in Chap. 4) contradicts the posited origin or identity of the spirit, even if (at a ‘higher’ level) the spiritual is sought in the sensuous. 119  We should recall here Hegel’s notion of ‘purely looking on’; see footnote 58 in Chap. 4. 120  Cassirer 1957, p. 63.

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For the reality we apprehend is in its original form not a reality of a determinate world of things, originating apart from us; rather it is the certainty of a living efficacy that we experience. Yet this access to reality is given us not by the datum of sensation but only in the original phenomenon of expression and expressive understanding.121

We can see here what is probably the closest point of connection between Cassirer’s theory and a Bergsonian philosophy of life, for according to Cassirer the ‘original phenomenon of expression’ appears immediately; that is, its ‘certainty’ does not require conscious understanding, but instead denotes an existential experience.122 Even if we must make a ‘trip around the world’123 in our symbolic objectivations and formations, Cassirer believes that expressive experiences allow a more direct mode of access. Expressive meaning does not require an objective interpretation; it is already apparent in the ‘mode of its total manifestation’, that is, in ‘the character of the luring or menacing, the familiar or uncanny, the soothing or frightening, which lies in this phenomenon’.124 In common with other determinations of existence, Cassirer recognises that it is not the ‘world of the purely theoretical consciousness’ but ‘life as such’ that gives perceptions a particular, supra-personal ‘expressive tone’.125 This affectedness, which is still only incompletely expressed and lacks any fixed order, oscillates back and forth between contingently shifting impressions and sensations. Only gradually is the world of expression articulated into recurring forms and processes, as individual elements are picked out and perceived as the same: In its unremitting, constant flow certain favored points are gradually singled out, and around them the other members group themselves; certain forma-

121  Ibid., p.  73; see also the passage on ‘symbolic pregnance’ above corresponding to footnote 25. 122  If the concept were not now rather hackneyed, we could even speak in Cassirer’s sense of an existential or anthropological basic experience, since he understands the expressive function ‘as a truly universal and as it were world-encompassing function’. Cassirer 1957, p. 81. 123  See footnote 104. 124  Cassirer 1957, p. 67. Elsewhere he speaks of expressions’ ‘physiognomic individuality’ and ‘image magic’. Ibid., p. 69. 125  Ibid., pp. 67–68 and 73.

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tions arise which are held fast as clearly essential factors and as such endowed with a kind of special accent.126

Cassirer is describing here an initial act of identification that is possible only if individual elements suddenly stand out from the constant, uniform flow of impressions and perceptions. While Bergson regards this objectifying immobilisation as the original sin of analytic methods that reduce wholes to their individual parts (by contrast with the intuition originelle), Cassirer understands the practical impulses to articulate our perceptual world in expressive experience as a ‘mode of world formation which is independent of all modes of mere objectivization’.127 The perceived expressive forms are not mere things or soulless objects, but, insofar as they are ‘endowed with a kind of special accent’ and ‘singled out’ from the flow of life, appear as symbols ‘of independent significance and form’.128 They do not yet have the solidity of conceptual forms: Not only does one and the same being perpetually take new forms; at one and the same moment of its existence it also contains and combines within itself an abundance of different and even mutually opposed forms of being.129

In order to connect expressive meaning to the original act of perception, Cassirer stresses at several points that ‘the being that is apprehended in perception confronts us […] as a kind of presence of living subjects’.130 For Cassirer, sensory perception is not merely wax in which the forms of things are imprinted; rather, expressive forms manifest in their own  Ibid., p. 116.  Ibid., p. 67. 128  Ibid., p.  62. Elsewhere, he writes, ‘In any event, immersion in the phenomenon of perception shows us one thing—that the perception of life is not exhausted by the mere perception of things, that the experience of the “thou” can never be dissolved into an experience of the mere “it”, or reduced to it even by the most complex conceptual mediations […]. The farther back we trace perception, the greater becomes the preeminence of the “thou” form over the “it” form, and the more plainly the purely expressive character takes precedence over the matter or thing-character.’ Ibid., pp. 62–63. 129  Ibid., p. 61. 130  Ibid., p. 62. At another point, he writes in a similar vein: ‘Even sensation can never be conceived as preintellectual or nonintellectual; on the contrary, it “is” and exists only insofar as it is articulated according to determinate functions of meaning. But these functions are by no means limited to the world of theoretical meaning—in the restricted sense. To depart from the specific conditions of theoretical-scientific knowledge is not altogether to leave the realm of form.’ Ibid., p. 60. 126 127

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peculiar manner because our perceptions, feelings, ideas and thoughts are always already directed towards ‘other centers of life’.131 On his view, only if expressive experience is conceived as original and immediate (in other words, as unmediated by representations) does the whole structure of symbolic forms become apparent, encompassing both theoretical consciousness and the experiential world of myth: Here the given does not consist primarily in the merely sensuous, in a complex of sensory data, which are only animated and made meaningful by a subsequent act of mythical apperception. The expressive meaning attaches to the perception itself, in which it is apprehended and immediately experienced.132

On this conception, spirit is already present at the ‘origin’ of experience, since sensuous expressive experiences are combined with non-­ intuitive meanings in ‘perception itself’. In the subsequent process of symbolisation, the form-creating activity of the consciousness comes more strongly to the fore. Connections are forged between individual perceptual experiences and concentrated into centres of attention; the contents that are grasped in this process are symbolically imitated or varied133; a divide opens up between representing and represented; and dynamic contexts and meanings are given an increasingly clear structure. The formation of stable object relations in the symbolic structure of the world of intuitions, which I sketch here only briefly, serves to illustrate the ‘“dynamic view” of symbolic pregnance as a principle governing the emergence and evolution of the total accomplishments [Gesamtleistungen] of our consciousness and our symbolic culture.’134  Ibid., p. 89. On ‘life “in” meaning’, see the passage corresponding to footnote 36.  Ibid., p. 68. 133  Cassirer frequently suggests that every conscious representation contains an element of memory, such that any apparent ‘mere reproduction of past impressions […] not only repeats perceptions that were previously given but constitutes new phenomena and new data’. Ibid., p. 179. Elsewhere, he remarks, with regard to the ineluctable perspectivity of perception, that ‘the seeing of an image thus always comprises a definite evaluation of it: we do not see it as it immediately gives itself to us but place it in the context of the total spatial experience and thus give it its characteristic meaning’. Ibid., pp. 155–156. 134  Schwemmer 1997a, p.  122. In a section entitled ‘symbolic pregnance’, Schwemmer comments in great depth on the relation between perception and consciousness in Cassirer. He claims that, alongside the ‘primary’ features of the spiritual articulation of expressive life, there are also ‘secondary representations [Vergegenwärtigungen] of conscious processes’, which have in common that they ‘refer to something that they themselves are not but that is nonetheless present in them’. Ibid., p. 113. On his construal of symbolic pregnance as perceptual and significatory pregnance, see ibid., p. 116–125. 131 132

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Cassirer himself, borrowing an expression from Plato, speaks of ‘the becoming of form’,135 which he elucidates as follows: The realm of the ‘idea’ is made accessible to us and arises for us by the forms and functions that life has brought about for its own sake, out of its own dynamics to become independent and definite, so that life serves them, and submits itself to their order; this is what gives them their final value and significance.136

There is no sense here of any contradictions between ‘“Geist” and “Life”’.137 The ‘vital impetus’ (to use Bergson’s term) is transformed by the positive powers of the spirit, and makes accessible contents whose significance is, Cassirer supposes, wholly disclosed through the systematic process of symbolic formation. While Bergson critically remarks that there is ‘something artificial in the mathematical form’138 that we apply to living forces, Cassirer conceives of universal and particular being mediated through a ‘turn to the idea’ (Simmel), which he understands as a ‘turn to “symbolic form”’.139 Rather than contrasting the ‘“immediacy” of life’ with the ‘“mediacy” of thought’, he embraces a balance between them: ‘Not some absolute beyond all mediation, but only such mediation can lead us out of the theoretical antinomies.’140 The question ‘of how life “achieves” form, how form comes to life, is therefore, of course, unsolvable’.141 But instead of setting thought itself in motion, such that it ‘move[s] through its extremes towards that moment with which it is not itself identical’,142 Cassirer seeks a reconciliation between the two. He 135  ‘Werden zur Form’. Cassirer 1996, p. 15. In Robin Waterfield’s translation of the passage from Plato, this is rendered as a ‘birth’ (Plato 2006, Philebus, 26d) while Jessica Moss has ‘a coming toward being’ (2019, p. 227). 136  Cassirer 1996, p. 13. He is commenting on Georg Simmel and his The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays (Simmel 2015). 137  This is the title of the first chapter of The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, from which I am quoting here and which was originally intended as the conclusion to the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer 1996, p. 3. 138  Bergson 1922, p. 230. In the same passage, he writes: ‘In a general way, measuring is a wholly human operation, which implies that we really or ideally superpose two objects one on another a certain number of times. Nature did not dream of this superposition. It does not measure, nor does it count.’ Ibid., pp. 230–231. 139  Cassirer 1996, pp. 13–14. 140  Ibid., p. 14. 141  Ibid., p. 15. 142  See footnote 64 in Chap. 4.

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locates it in the ‘process of their mediation’,143 which (how could it be otherwise) he takes to be oppositional in nature but which does not transcend itself through contradiction; instead, it is all but forced into a harmonious equilibrium. This neutralisation, which can only be described as ‘detached from reality’, is apparent, for instance, in the pathos with which the oppositions between ‘spirit’ and ‘life’ are reconciled in the self-­assertion of the self-reflective spirit: Life as such knows no such turning back upon itself, no such reaffirmation. Of course, life does not appear to require it as long as it remains within itself in an unbroken unity, in which it rests ‘blissfully in itself’. Yet even this peace is not bliss in the full sense; it becomes such only for the eye of the mind that is directed toward it and turns back to see it. To pronounce something blissful or to damn it is only possible for something that is capable of negating itself, for this act of self-negation always also represents an act of self-assertion.144

The bombastic style of this passage may be attributable to the historical and intellectual context in which it was written, or to Cassirer’s own rarefied temperament. The lofty language used to describe the mediations between nature and spirit is, of course, ominously reminiscent of the ill-­ fated ‘jargon of authenticity’145 in Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was so forcefully critiqued by Adorno. Cassirer says nothing about the compulsion to have to assert oneself, has no thoughts on life’s estrangement from itself, makes no critical observations about the power structures underpinning ‘the human spirit’.—Instead of understanding ‘life’ and ‘spirit’ as opposites that are only able to discover the other in themselves by reflecting on this contradiction, Bergson falls halfway short of adequately capturing either, instead opting for a ‘centre’ that remains vague and indistinct despite the emphasis he places on it. Instead of confronting ‘spirit’ and ‘life’ with one another such that the idea of their truth can be glimpsed at least negatively, Cassirer overhastily seeks harmony and

 Cassirer 1996, p. 14.  Ibid., p. 33. 145  Adorno 1973a. 143 144

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reconciliation, which can only ‘pu[t]-themselves-in-the-right’146 in the empty abstraction of the detached universal.147 But despite these fundamental reservations, Cassirer’s definition of the ‘becoming of form’, which can equally be understood as ‘formation in becoming’, remains necessarily dependent on the idea of its reciprocal mediation. In the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, all spiritual forms require intuitive content, and all content must have a determinate form. According to Cassirer, this interdependence applies even ‘in modern relativistic physics’:148 The ‘form’ and ‘content’ of physical experience, ‘measurement’ and ‘observation’, the objects ‘in’ space and ‘in’ time, and time and space themselves now grow into one another in a completely new way. Each of these two aspects proves to be definable only in terms of and through the other.149

This assertion precludes any simple functionalism. On this view, space and time are not just the condition of all possible intuitions, but also themselves intuitively conditioned. While Kant conceived them

 Ibid., p. 4.  To give two examples of this: firstly, ‘even if the entire sphere of the intellect were conceived as something negative, even if all its activities were denied and rejected, the mere assigning of this negative meaning is itself a new act that holds us firmly in the sphere of geist that we had hoped to flee.’ Cassirer 1996, pp. 32–33. Secondly, Cassirer describes the ‘pure view of reality, as it is achieved in every one of the individual symbolic forms, as well as in their totality’, as follows: ‘For the ray of consciousness that here falls upon Being and seeks to illuminate and penetrate it, no longer belongs either to the world of things or to a practical context. This purely ideal ray leaves unaffected the “existence”, the mere content, of whatever it touches. Consciousness so conceived goes beyond the primordial ground of “life”, but life is thereby neither destroyed nor violated.’ Ibid., p.  28  – These are the depths to which ‘high philosophy’ can sink. In this passage, the ‘Will to Power’ appears in the seemingly innocuous guise of the ‘Will to Formation’. It is (so Cassirer wrote six years before the Nazis seized power in Germany) ‘not the naked domination of the world, but its formation’—the ‘concrete productions of geist’—that ‘language, art, knowledge, and religion are struggling with’. Ibid., p. 28. Meanwhile, it is only Cassirer’s rapt, platitudinous paeans to the human spirit that engender the requisite ‘awe, in face of that existent which pretends to be more than it is’; Adorno 1973a, p. 20. And last but not least, the elevation of existence helps to cast a favourable light on the ‘Olympian’ himself, for ‘one can trust anyone who babbles this jargon’. Ibid.; on the characterisation of Cassirer as an ‘Olympian’ see Paetzold 1995, p. 7. 148  Cassirer 1996, p. 22. 149  Ibid. 146 147

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contradictorily as ‘pure forms of intuition’,150 Cassirer takes up the thesis of their ‘infinitude’151 and presents them in intuitive-intellectual guise as ‘becoming of form’. Rather than considering time and space as a priori intuitions or as concepts stripped of anything empirical, he seeks to show how different conceptions of space and time are mediated in terms of content and condensed into symbolic meanings. Cassirer thus offers an explanation of how form and content are related to each other in the symbolic process. It can, however, be objected that their necessary mediation remains contradictory. For as Kant’s critical legacy teaches us, insofar as the spirit creates or (as Cassirer would put it) symbolically expresses its identity, it must recognise that its intuitions and ideas consist are not merely formal in nature.152

5.3   The Symbolic Character of Motion Cassirer understands the formation of ideas of space and time as a gradual transition ‘into their lawful order’.153 Before they reach this end point, the ‘cultural forms’ and ‘basic theoretical concepts of knowledge (space, time, and number)’154 pass through several stages of development. According to Cassirer, these changes are to be ‘taken in the ideal, not temporal sense’ since ‘there is no hiatus, no sharp temporal dividing line, […] between the theoretical and the mythical consciousness.’155 Until we have understood mythical thought’s ‘spiritual structure’, its limits will be undetermined,  See footnote 267 in Chap. 3.  See Kant 1998, A 25/B 40 and A 32/B 48. 152  We have already discussed scepticism about the idea of a universal mediation by intellectual forms in relation to the ‘primacy of the object’ (see footnote 210 in Chap. 4, footnotes 7 and 118). On this topic, Adorno remarks, ‘The subject’s key position in cognition is empirical, not formal; what Kant calls formation is essentially deformation. The preponderant exertion of knowledge is destruction of its usual exertion, that of using violence against the object. […] The subject is the object’s agent, not its constituent.’ Adorno 2000a, p. 146. 153  Cassirer 2013c, p. 322. In the same passage, he writes, ‘Space and time are not substances; rather, they are “real relations” [Relationen]. They have their true objectivity in the “truth of relations” [Beziehungen], not in any kind of absolute reality. […] The world is neither defined as a whole of bodies “in” space nor as an occurrence “in” time, rather it is viewed as a “system of events”, as Whitehead says. Space and time enter into the determination of these events, into their lawful order, as essential and necessary moments.’ Ibid., pp. 321–322. 154  Cassirer 1955b, pp. xiv–xv. 155  Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii. He continues with a rather unfortunate metaphor: ‘Science long preserves a primordial mythical heritage, to which it merely gives another form.’ 150 151

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and so we can expect ‘infringements of myth on the province of science’.156 Not least for this reason, Cassirer seeks to remedy ‘the lack of systematic insight into the “inner form” of mythology’.157 For he believes that in order to move past mythical thought we must first understand it, and cannot simply reject it. Knowledge can only definitively triumph over myth if there is a clear logical division’,158 since only then can myth be recognised as an ‘independent mode of spiritual formation’.159 Even prior to turning his attention to myth, Cassirer shows in his account of how time is represented in language that linguistic expressions for temporal factors and relations are not just passive reproductions of reality but spiritually determined symbols. While spatial designations such as ‘here’ and ‘there’ can be intuitively grasped as a ‘transposition from the sensuous to the ideal’160 this does not apply in the same way to temporal specifications of time. For instance, ‘now’, ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ already distinguish between individual temporal factors that are never, like things of objective intuition, given to the consciousness simultaneously. The units, the parts, which in spatial intuition seem to

156  Ibid., p. xvii. In the same passage, Cassirer refers to the ‘still inconclusive struggle ‘in theoretical physics ‘to free the concept of force from all mythical components’ and to the use of ‘pure methodology’ in history. 157  Ibid., p. xviii. 158  Ibid., p. xvii. 159  Ibid., p. xv. The dialectical idea that mythos and logos mutually condition and create each other is foreign to Cassirer. See footnote 82. 160  Cassirer 1955a, p. 215. In mythical and sensuous space, spatial intuitions and concepts are not yet abstractly mediated: ‘We have seen that physiological space differs from metric space in that here right and left, before and behind, above and below are not interchangeable, since motion in any of these directions involves specific organic sensations—and similarly, each of these directions carries specific mythical feeling values. In contrast to the homogeneity which prevails in the conceptual space of geometry every position and direction in mythical space is endowed as it were with a particular accent – and this accent always goes back to the fundamental mythical accent, the division between the sacred and the profane.’ Cassirer 1955b, pp. 84–85.

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c­ ombine of themselves into a whole, here exclude one another: the existence of one specification signifies the nonexistence of the others and vice versa.161

The individual temporal factors are only brought into an ordered combination when we no longer distinguish only between ‘now’ and ‘not-­ now’—analogously to ‘here’ and ‘there’—but when, by way of causal inferences, ‘every moment’ is assigned to a ‘specific position’.162 Cassirer understands this ‘work of the understanding’ as a ‘development from the feeling to the concept of time’,163 and distinguishes three stages of development: At the first stage the consciousness is dominated by the opposition of ‘now’ and ‘not-now’, which has undergone no further differentiations; at the second, certain temporal ‘forms’—completed and incompleted, continued and momentary action—begin to be distinguished so that a definite distinction of temporal modes is developed; the final stage is characterized by the pure concept of time as an abstract concept of order, and the various stages of time stand out in their contrast and interdetermination.164

On this conception, the stages of temporal intuition range from a still indeterminate sense of time ensnared in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ to a systematic understanding that no longer refers to substantial moments but instead converts them into a purely functional ‘form of relation and order, embracing all events, as a totality of moments each of which stands to the others in a specific and unambiguous relation of “before” and “after”, “earlier” and “later”’.165 161  Cassirer 1955a, p. 215. Thus, it is also no accident ‘that adverbs of time are formed appreciably later than those of place’. Ibid., p. 220. As Piaget showed in his study on the development of ‘the child’s conception of time’, in the formation of spatial concepts it is possible to abstract away from temporal relations, whereas the development of temporal conceptions is closely bound up with spatial movements: ‘It is only once it has already been constructed, that time can be conceived as an independent system, and even then, only when small velocities are involved. In the course of its construction, time remains a simple dimension inseparable from space.’ Piaget 2006, p. 2. For relevant examples from (as Cassirer calls them) the ‘languages of primitive peoples’, see Cassirer 1955a, p. 219ff. 162  Ibid., p. 218. 163  Ibid. 164  Ibid. It would certainly be interesting to compare these stages with Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. Suggestions for how this comparison could be approached can be found in Fetz et al. 2010. 165  Cassirer 1955a, p. 224.

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In a similar context, commenting on ‘basis phenomena’, Cassirer breaks down the ‘order of time’ into ‘“lived time” [Erlebniszeit], mathematical time, physical time, biological-organic time and historical (“ethical”) time’.166 He describes ‘psychological “lived time”’ as inhomogeneous, consisting purely of ‘now-points’ that form the common reference point for past and future events, whereas ‘organic developmental time’ is divided into discrete phases, which mark a ‘necessary thoroughfare [Durchgangs-­ Moment]’ for the development of determinate forms.167 By contrast, ‘mathematical-physical time’ is a ‘pure positional order [Stellenordnung]’ conditioned ‘by the form of number’:168 The moments do not differ qualitatively, nor in terms of content, but purely by virtue of their ‘position in time’, i.e. by virtue of the purely ordinal moment, by virtue of their positional numeral [Stellziffer]—time thus conceived is a purely homogeneous medium—there are no points in it that stand out from the rest—and as such it also tends to coincide with space.—The two differ as ‘forms’ of juxtaposition and succession [Nebeneinander und Nacheinander] […] but this difference is absorbed into a higher unity— only in their ‘union’ do they finally determine the concept of mathematical-­ physical ‘nature’ as an order of events.—In purely physical nature-time, no regard is given to any moment other than that of the order of events, the positional numeral.169

This passage affirms (now in the terms of conceptual analysis) Bergson’s surprising discovery ‘that scientific time has no duration’.170 The core of the mathematical-physical conception of time is captured in Cassirer’s concise summary of the conceptual form of number: In number multiplicity seems to merge with unity, analysis with synthesis, thorough differentiation with pure similarity. Before the ‘exact’ concept of

166  Cassirer 1995, p. 226. There are striking thematic overlaps with Bergson, who draws a similar distinction to characterise relations of duration, which range from the purely given intuition originelle to the evolutionary élan vital to the historically rooted concept of élan d’amour. See Chap. 3. 167  Cassirer 1995, pp. 227–228. Cassirer describes ‘historical time’, which I shall not comment on further here, as ‘essentially ethical time: time of the “pure future”’. Ibid., p. 228. 168  Ibid., p. 227. 169  Ibid. 170  See footnote 160 in Chap. 4.

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number could take form, all these oppositions had to be placed in purely intellectual balance with one another.171

This systematisation and standardisation of the concept of time comes at the expense of its ‘motley’172 character. But unlike Bergson’s impotent protest against the equation of space and time, and the way it flattens out all distinctions of quality, Cassirer’s critique is directed against a Schellingian assumption of an identity of spirit and nature that underpins the mathematical-­physical order of time itself. For even if every single moment can be assigned its precise position in the order of time in virtue of the pure ‘form of number’, this does not mean that ‘unity’ or a ‘purely intellectual balance’ has been attained between the opposing poles. The dialectical objection to seemingly self-sufficient thought applies here too: it is not the ‘positional order’ of ‘physical nature-time’ that is untrue, but rather its identification with truth.173 Although Cassirer does qualify his position by stressing that language cannot create the ‘purely intellectual balance’ needed for ‘the ‘exact’ concept of number’ to take form,174 in his analysis of scientific concept formation he does emphasise that ‘magnitudes and relations between magnitudes which provide the universal constants for all description of physical process’ form the ‘ultimate stratum of objectivity’.175 Even if, according to Cassirer, it is not possible ‘to eradicate this last remnant of contingency, of subjectivity, from the description of the natural process’,176 the conceptual symbols of the mathematical natural sciences do approximate the  Cassirer 1955a, p. 228.  I have taken this term from Marx, who speaks of the ‘motley crowd of labourers’ that are all alike ‘before capital’. Marx 2011, pp. 279–280. 173  On Hegel’s critique of a notion of understanding ‘devoid of any determination’ see footnote 37 in Chap. 4. 174  Cassirer 1955a, p. 228. 175  Cassirer 1957, p. 473. Cassirer believes all mental activity involves an organising, ordering aspect. But it is only the ‘progress from thing concepts to concepts of relation, from the positing of constant thing unities to that of pure lawful constancy’ that leads to a coherent and consistent order in which ‘the substantial is completely transposed into the functional’. Ibid. While the individual symbolic forms initially produce different concepts of truth and reality, modern science has advanced ‘toward ever more universal symbols’ and to an overarching ‘totality’ in which ‘the particularity of the viewpoint is not extinguished but preserved and transcended’. Ibid., pp. 478–479. On the ‘unity of the spirit’ and ‘diversity of symbols’ see footnote 24. 176  Cassirer 1957, p. 478. In the same passage, Cassirer refers to the ‘general theory of relativity’, according to which ‘certain determinations which we attribute to the object as its properties are definable only if […] we indicate the system of reference according to which they are thought to be valid.’ 171 172

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epistemological ideal of objectivity. This ‘turn toward the general’ would not be possible without ‘immersion in the empirical material’; however, for Cassirer this is ‘only the starting point, not the end—terminus a quo not terminus ad quem—a phase, not the goal of philosophical knowledge’.177 He draws a parallel between ‘Kant’s “critical” question’ and his own claims: ‘all the “works” of culture are to be investigated in regard to their conditions and presented in their general “form”’.178 Only then is it possible to interpret ‘the “material” for the philosophy of symbolic forms’, such as ‘the history of language, the history of myth, the history of religion, the history of art, the history of science’, according to their ‘inner form’.179 It is unsurprising that Cassirer uses the purely formal mathematical-­ scientific concept of reality to define symbolic forms, since the ideal of objective knowledge in the ‘exact sciences’ is measured against the standard of logically consistent propositions. He believes that ‘scientific knowledge’ is governed by a ‘universal structural law of the human spirit’180 that combines various symbolic forms and meanings. However, on Cassirer’s view, the precise specification of time or movement is confined, despite all necessary references to the ‘empirical material’, to the self-referential form of the abstract identity of the understanding, which ignores or conceals its own contradictions181 and oversteps the bounds of its validity. Is there not some world concept which is free from all particularities, which will describe the world as it is, not from the standpoint of this man or that man, but from the standpoint of no one? But insofar as this question is 177  Cassirer 1996, p. 165. This contrasts with Hegel’s idea of a subject ‘purely looking on’, or the supposition that subject and form are limited by the ‘unavailability of the object’. See footnotes 58 and 210 in Chap. 4. 178  Cassirer 1996, p. 165. 179  Ibid. 180  Cassirer 1957, p. 479. According to Cassirer, even ethical deliberations are based on the criterion of logical consistency and formal coherence: ‘Even in the domain of volition and action, a principle corresponding to the theoretical laws of identity and non-contradiction applies. Provided that we “will” at all, we require a unity, an inner consistency and coherence of volition, just as theoretical thought requires such a coherence and consistency in the conceptual representation of the perceptual world.’ Cassirer 1939, p. 67. Once again, no consideration is given to the opposing idea that the strict ‘coherence’ and ‘consistency’ of ‘volition’ and ‘action’ involves an element of constraint relative to action that is not fully ‘rational’. 181  By contrast, Hegel characterises the ‘identity of identity and non-identity’ as the ‘principle of an entire system’. See footnotes 33 and 34 in Chap. 4.

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admissible to begin with, it is in any case directed toward an infinitely distant point that is attainable at no given stage of science. Here we are dealing with a genuine transcendental idea in the Kantian sense, and no definite individual experience can accord with it.182

The regulatory knowledge claim asserted here reveals its full force and totality by showing the ‘turn toward the general’ to at the same time be a ‘genuine constitution’183 capable of generating ‘specific yet truly universal and original (because originary) forms of giving meaning’.184 Referring the ‘“structure” of works’185 back to their general form also changes their content: there is now a focus not just on the shifting phenomena of ‘the history of language, the history of myth, […] the history of science’ but also on the ‘interpretation of “language” in general […] of myth in general, of natural science and mathematics in general’.186 Everything that appears singular or contingent and ‘is accessible to us […] only in a historical form’187 is judged to be attributable to a mere difference of standpoint or one-sided perspectivism.188 Instead of attributing contradictions and necessary indeterminacies to the ‘primacy of the object’, that is, ‘whatever in the object is not a subjective admixture’,189 Cassirer believes that objects become more determinate as the process of formation advances ‘toward ever more universal symbols’:190 The more [scientific knowledge] concentrates in itself, the more clearly it grasps its own nature and strivings, the more evident becomes the factor in which it differs from all other forms of world understanding, and the meaning which links it with them all.191

 Cassirer 1957, p. 478.  Cassirer 1996, p. 165. 184  Ibid., p. 166. 185  Ibid., p. 165. 186  Ibid. 187  Ibid. 188  According to Cassirer, this also applies to the traditional ‘schools of thought in the theory of knowledge’, which are based on different forms of ‘certainty and evidence’. His distinction between ‘I-basis’, ‘you-basis’ and ‘it-basis’, understood as sources ‘from which all certainty springs’, is intended to provide a general framework for this idea. Ibid., p. 167. 189  Adorno 2000a, p. 146. 190  See footnote 175. 191  Cassirer 1957, p. 479. 182 183

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This is the final line of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which unfortunately leaves open how the factor that both differs from all other forms of understanding while also linking them together is supposed to be constituted. The ‘pure positional order’ of mathematical-physical time enabled by the ‘form of number’ suggests, however, that experience-less determination of knowledge can attain universal validity only if all that is left of the object itself is its pure form—its fleshless skeleton, as it were. Thus, Hegel’s reservation about Zeno—namely, that ‘great abstraction’192 from things is possible only because the self-positing understanding does not reflect on its own objecthood—would also apply to Cassirer. The ‘abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’193 criticised earlier in connection with Eleatic philosophy is shown inter alia in the fact that mathematical-­ scientific knowledge directed solely towards itself is supposedly both linked to and yet separate from ‘all other forms of world understanding’. This position remains indeterminate on Cassirer’s conception, because it lacks any definite content. It would only be informative if the linking and separating factors themselves were considered, instead of being abstractly subsumed into an overarching symbolic form. For even if the ‘universal structural law of the human spirit’ is directed towards ‘everything that we call knowledge’,194 the ‘objective content of individual experience’195 is not the product of a symbolic determination of form, but rather of a way of thinking that also measures itself against what lies outside its conceptual grasp. To escape the ‘abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’, it is not enough to subordinate the ‘empirical material’ to the ‘general form’ of knowledge. Rather, we must reflect on how conceptual orders and preconceptual experiences mutually condition and interpermeate one another. Their ‘turn toward the general’ would no longer be understood as ‘the goal of philosophical knowledge’, but rather as an expression of a one-sided development or a conception of unmediated objectivity.196  See footnote 30 in Chap. 4.  See footnote 31 in Chap. 4. 194  Cassirer 1996, p. 166. 195  Adorno 2000a, p. 146. 196  For instance, Cassirer claims that the ‘abandonment of thingness’ is a key hallmark of modern physics: ‘What we call the object is no longer a schematizable, intuitively realizable “something” with definite spatial and temporal predicates; it is a point of unity to be apprehended in a purely intellectual way.’ Cassirer 1957, p. 473. But even this ‘point of unity’ does not refer just to itself: ‘No matter how we define the subject, some entity cannot be juggled out of it. If it is not something—and ‘something’ indicates an irreducible objective moment— the subject is nothing at all; even as actus purus, it still needs to refer to something active.’ Adorno 2000a, p. 143. See footnote 213 in Chap. 4. 192 193

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Thus, Cassirer’s recourse to the pure signifying function of mathematical-­ scientific knowledge is incapable of providing ultimate philosophical grounds. The supposedly pure forms of knowledge remain dependent on determinate contents, just as ‘space and time cannot be represented without spatial and temporal things’.197 It is correct that forms and contents must be distinguished, but it is only by attending to their mediation that we can understand their contradictory relationship. Hegel expresses this idea as follows in the short section on ‘Form and matter’ in the Objective Logic: Matter, determined as indifferent, is the passive as contrasted to form, which is determined as the active. This latter, as self-referring negative, is inherently contradiction, self-dissolving, self-repelling, and self-determining. It refers to matter, and it is posited to refer to this matter, which is its subsistence, as to another. Matter is posited, on the contrary, as referring only to itself and as indifferent to the other; but, implicitly, it does refer to the form, for it contains the sublated negativity and is matter only by virtue of this determination.198

This passage describes a dialectic of form and content in which the two moments differ in their mediation. For while form as an active principle refers both to itself, as subject and object, and to others, matter only becomes an object through being determined by thought, though without being wholly subsumed into the determining forms. The contradiction is inherent to both of them. But while thought generates the ‘inheren[t] contradiction’ by setting and transcending its limits, matter remains indifferent. It is only when it is mediated by thought, rather than being taken ‘in isolation’, that its opposition to thought shows itself: Such a contradiction expresses a comprehension of nonidentity and the impossibility of capturing in subjective concepts without surplus what is not of the subject. It expresses ultimately the breakdown of epistemology itself.199

There are several possible ways to interpret Cassirer on the question of how ‘all the possible forms of connection’ are gathered ‘into a systematic

 Adorno 2013a, p. 147.  Hegel 2010a, p. 393. 199  Adorno 2013a, p. 147. 197 198

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concept’.200 As well as the ‘higher synthesis’ in which relations (‘functions’), rather than particular forms (‘substances’), are taken as a constitutive order, there is another, comparative meaning of ‘the universal’201: The different modes in which the human spirit gives form to reality are recognized as such, and no attempt is made to fit them into a single, simply progressing series. And yet, in such an approach we by no means abandon the idea of a connection between the particular forms as such; this approach sharpens, on the contrary, the idea of the system by replacing the concept of a simple system with the concept of a complex system. Each form, in a manner of speaking, is assigned to a special plane, within which it fulfills itself and develops its specific character in total independence—but precisely when all these ideal modes are considered together, certain analogies and certain typical relations appear, which can be singled out and described as such.202

Within a ‘complex system’, there are no absolute relations or oppositions between symbolic forms, but rather partial overlaps and differences. We touched on a similar idea earlier in relation to the possible reconciliation of ‘spirit’ and ‘life’.203 But while the process of reconciling opposites204 was rejected for being ahistorical and detached from reality, the concept of system used here implies a different relation. Instead of presupposed certainties and self-contained deductions (as in mathematical-­ scientific thought), the immanent comparison of symbolic forms is measured against criteria and relations to objects that have yet to be developed. The ‘complex system’ thus emphasises the process of establishing the truth as a necessary condition of its own validity, undercutting the supposed absoluteness of results derived from the ‘world of pure meaning’.205 In other words, dispensing with a positively defined tertium comparationis yields an open-ended system206 in which the ‘particular  Cassirer 1955a, p. 95.  Ibid., pp. 94–95. 202  Ibid., p. 95. 203  See footnote 141. 204  See footnote 143. 205  Cassirer 1957, p. 448. 206  Hegel makes a similar claim in the Phenomenology of Spirit with regards to Fichte’s theory of science: ‘Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, this in particular can be underscored: It is only as a science or as a system that knowing is actual and can be given an exposition; and that any further so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, if it is true, is for this reason alone also false just because it is a fundamental proposition or a principle.’ Hegel 2018, p. 15. 200 201

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forms’ are not subsumed under a uniform concept, nor set disconnectedly side by side, but rather related to one another in all their diversity and difference.207 This does not exclude the possibility of contradictions and displacements in and between the symbolic forms, as can be clearly seen in the history of religion, art and science. Thus, if the ‘empirical material’ of symbolic forms is not just taken as ephemeral appearance or a transitory stage through which philosophical knowledge must pass, but instead understood as a necessary aspect of the constitution of forms and knowledge, then the ‘turn toward the general’ will likewise ultimately prove to be necessarily mediated and non-identical. Just as we cannot presuppose an ‘absolutely first’,208 we likewise cannot conceive of an ‘absolutely last’, which is supposedly a necessity of thought, without contradiction. The ‘reciprocal determination of the sensuous by the spiritual and the spiritual by the sensuous’ of which Cassirer speaks209 also applies to the purportedly ‘objective structure of the physical world’,210 which in the ‘complex system’ of symbolic forms marks not the ‘end point’ of cognition, but the contradictory moment of an extreme form that has been rendered immobile in thought.211 The systemic character of symbolic forms is shown in the contradictory nature of their elements, but only their mediation turns the ‘complex system’ into a contradictory whole. This must not, however, be misunderstood as meaning that symbolic forms are related simply in virtue of being lined up side by side, nor, conversely, that their particularity is essentially determined by their ‘objective structure’. The relation of symbolic forms to each other and to the ‘complex system’ should, rather, be understood 207  Cassirer only refers here to Plato in passing. In the Sophist, Plato explicates three ways in which ‘kinds’ can be related: they can be the same, divided or ‘mixed’. On this view, the task of dialectics would be to establish ‘which sorts of kinds are in harmony with which and which are not receptive to each other’. Plato 2015, Sophist, 253b. 208  See footnote 73. 209  See footnote 17. 210  Cassirer 1957, p. 477. 211  I am referring here to the ‘progress’ of scientific thought towards the ‘pure lawful constancy’ in which everything changeable ‘is completely transposed into the functional’. See footnote 175. Cassirer’s talk of the ‘peculiar autarchy’ of physical theory is instructive here. Cassirer 1957, p. 464. Cassirer suggests that the sciences could resolve objects into conceptual forms and functions, which would turn knowledge into a tautology that referred only to things identical with it. By contrast, see Hegel’s remarks on the purported completeness of the ‘form of a judgment’ and the ‘non-identity of subject and predicate’ that ‘is not expressed in judgment’. Hegel 2010a, p. 67.

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as an interaction between determinations that both impose fixed forms and sublate them. In this dynamic constellation, there is an interplay between the ‘manifold’ of symbolic forms and the systematic whole in which they are combined.212 Neither is valid in and of itself nor absolutely; rather, their significance is revealed only in relation to their respective opposite. Thus, it is possible to speak of the ‘whole’ of symbolic forms only in relation to individual ‘form worlds’, while the symbolic phenomena only appear ‘as somehow mediated oppositions’213 against the backdrop of a corresponding horizon of reference. For Cassirer, the ‘concrete totality of the spirit’ is determined by the ‘principle of the “primacy” of the function over the object’, which ‘assumes in each special field a new form and demands a new and dependent explanation’.214 However, this overlooks the fact that ‘the particular symbolic forms cannot be compared directly, but only by the roundabout way of assigning their configurations to different spiritual functions’.215 This means that the spiritual functions of expression, representation and signification are likewise not valid independently and as such, but remain dependent on their respective contents and applications. The assumption that the primary significance of the ‘spiritual functions’ is as constitutive aspects of objects is attributable above all to the claim to be able to give a form to symbolic configurations at all.216 However, since the ‘whole’ of the symbolic forms is no more directly accessible than the ‘manifold’ of concrete configurations, the claim itself is revealed to be both one-sided and extreme. By contrast, ‘open experience’ (so called because it does not distinguish a priori between function and content) is based on a dynamic 212  Marx similarly remarked: ‘The concrete is concrete because it is a combination of many objects with different destinations, i.e. a unity of diverse elements.’ Marx 1904, p. 293. In the same passage, incidentally, he gives an illuminating critique of Hegel’s ‘illusory idea that the real world is the result of thinking which causes its own synthesis, its own deepening and its own movement.’ Ibid., pp. 122–123. However, we shall not consider this critique further here. 213  Cassirer 1957, p. 78. 214  Cassirer 1955a, pp. 79 and 83. 215  Schwemmer 1997a, p. 60. 216  Schwemmer further notes that the spiritual functions ‘are not evenly distributed in the individual symbolic forms. Rather, the expressive function dominates over the other functions in myth, the representational function in language and the signifying function in knowledge. Thus, the various symbolic forms and form worlds also differ in their spiritual “dimensioning”’. Ibid.

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interweaving of the intuitively given and the spiritually created. This is the only way to prevent the ‘unity and totality of the human spirit’217 from being posited as absolute and ‘the passive world of mere impressions’218 from being downgraded to a merely derivative phenomenon. In Cassirer, the ‘world of expression’ and ‘world of intuition’, which allow an ‘insight into the development of science’, acquire their significance as cultural forms primarily through ‘explain[ing] the direction and law of this movement’219 He leaves us in no doubt that if ‘we consider the matter from the point of view of a system of cultural forms’, then the ‘totality of symbolic forms’ and the ‘whole of their development’ will be ‘regarded not as a mere aggregate but as an organic, spiritual unity’.220 Given that he pays relatively little attention to the pure signifying function of mathematical-­ scientific knowledge, in which the process of symbolic formation culminates,221 it is surprising how decidedly Cassirer elevates the ‘world of exact science’ to a paradigmatic ‘special case of objectivization’.222 The reason is that on his understanding of function, the ‘unity of the world’ can only be established through the ‘unity and totality of the spirit’: For the highest objective truth that is accessible to the spirit is ultimately the form of its own activity. In the totality of its own achievements, in the knowledge of the specific rule by which each of them is determined and in the consciousness of the context which reunites all these special rules into one problem and one solution: in all this, the human spirit now perceives itself and reality.223

 Cassirer 1957, p. 78.  Cassirer 1955a, p. 81. For the full quotation, see footnote 75. 219  Cassirer 1955b, p. xvi. Elsewhere, he writes: ‘Essentially cognition is always oriented toward this essential aim, the articulation of the particular into a universal law and order. But beside this intellectual synthesis, which operates and expresses itself within a system of scientific concepts, the life of the human spirit as a whole knows other forms. They too can be designated as modes of “objectivization”: i.e., as means of raising the particular to the level of the universally valid.’ Cassirer 1955a, pp. 77–78. See on this point footnote 8. 220  Cassirer 1955b, p. xiv. This applies irrespective of the fact that ‘in [Kant’s] idealistic view, mathematics and physics do not exhaust all reality, because they are far from encompassing all the workings of the human spirit in its creative spontaneity.’ Cassirer 1955a, p. 79. Despite its finite capabilities, the ‘human spirit’ is nonetheless declared universally responsible. 221  See on this point especially the early investigations in Cassirer 1953b, chaps four and six, and the account of the ‘theoretical view of the world’ in Cassirer 1957, part III. 222  Ibid., pp. 447–448. 223  Cassirer 1955a, p. 111. 217 218

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This repeats a point that Hegel metaphorically expressed in terms of the self-beholding spirit’s ‘immersion in the abyss of the abstract identity of the understanding’:224 namely, the reduction to ‘pure forms’ and ‘conceptual meanings’ blinds us to what lies outside these forms and concepts and is only accessible through the negation of self-reflective thought. The ‘ultimate reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic’—which Cassirer describes as ‘the fundamental principle of philosophical idealism’225—cements the idea of a ‘higher unity’ and ‘strict systematic understanding’.226 Its actual aim, ‘to dominate the world of sensory experience and survey it as a world ordered by law’,227 is mentioned only in passing, where it is equated (as if it were self-evident) with philosophy’s claim to be ‘the supreme authority and repository of unity’:228 All cultural forms culminate in absolute knowledge; it is here that the spirit gains the pure element of its existence, the concept. All the earlier stages it has passed through are, to be sure, preserved as factors in this culminate state, but by being reduced to mere factors they are, on the other hand, negated. Of all cultural forms, only that of logic, the concept, cognition, seems to enjoy a true and authentic autonomy. The concept is not only a means of representing the concrete life of the spirit, it is also the truly substantial element in the spirit itself. So that, with all Hegel’s endeavor to 224  Hegel 1955a, p. 243; on Hegel’s critique of the concept of the ‘self-identity of thought’ in Parmenides, see footnotes 27 and 28 in Chap. 2. 225  Cassirer 1955a, p. 84. 226  Ibid. On the ‘higher functions’ and ‘higher unity’ of scientific knowledge, see footnotes 62 and 169. 227  Cassirer 1955a, p. 85. Cassirer refers here to ‘the concept of the “symbol” as Heinrich Hertz characterized it from the standpoint of natural science’. 228  Ibid., p. 82. Cassirer goes on to criticise previous ‘dogmatic systems of metaphysics’ and attempts instead to ‘find a standpoint situated above all these forms and yet not merely outside them: a standpoint which would make it possible to encompass the whole of them in one view, which would seek to penetrate nothing other than the purely immanent relation of all these forms to one another, and not their relation to any external, “transcendent” being or principle’. Ibid. Viewed through a historical lens, it is notable that the emergence of the sociology of culture in Germany around 1900 gave rise to a new competition over which academic discipline had interpretive primacy. Cassirer defends philosophy’s pre-eminence (by that point long lost) against this threat, formulating himself without his usual reserve: ‘The particular cultural trends do not move peacefully side by side, seeking to complement one another; each becomes what it is only by demonstrating its own peculiar power against the others and in battle with the others.’ Ibid. On the influences of ‘formal sociology of culture’ on the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, see Bösch 2004, pp. 4 and 138. On the concept of ‘social form’ as a ‘pure fact of socialisation’, see Simmel 1908, p. 9.

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apprehend the specific differentiations of the spirit, he ultimately refers and reduces its whole content and capacity to a single dimension—and its profoundest content and true meaning are apprehended only in relation to this dimension.229

However, the departure from the ‘world of sensory impressions’230 remains incomplete and contradictory. The ‘philosophy of form and formation—becoming-form, giving-form, self-forming’231—is ensnared, as Cassirer knowingly concedes, in a ‘strange dilemma’:232 If we hold fast to the postulate of logical unity, the universality of the logical form threatens ultimately to efface the individuality of each special province and the specificity of its principle—but if we immerse ourselves in this individuality and persevere in our examination of it, we run the risk of losing ourselves and of finding no way back to the universal.233

However, right from the first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the ‘theorist of identity’234 and ‘philosopher of the ‘system’235 has already decided against the ‘mere diversity of existing things’,236 which are not held together by any ‘consciousness’ of ‘the unity of being’,237 and instead favours the ‘postulate of a purely functional unity’.238 He justifies  Cassirer 1955a, pp. 83–84.  Ibid., p. 85. 231  This rather long-winded definition of the concept of form comes from Schwemmer 2002, p. 54. 232  Cassirer 1955a, p. 84. Notably, Cassirer describes this as a ‘methodological dilemma’, which is intended to convey that it is not the ‘ideal relation between the individual provinces’ as such that is in question, but only the ‘factor which recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two of them takes exactly the same shape’ Ibid. 233  Ibid. 234  On this characterisation, see footnote 118. 235  Cassirer sees the task of a ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ as being ‘to gather the various branches of science with their diverse methodologies—with all their recognized specificity and independence—into one system, whose separate parts precisely through their necessary diversity will complement and further one another’. Cassirer 1955a, p. 77. See also Cassirer’s references to Giambattista Vico, whose early ideas about the unity of spirit and culture are based on ‘the triad of language, art, and myth’. See Cassirer 1955b, p. 3. and, in more detail, Cassirer 2000, p. 9ff. 236  Cassirer 1955a, p. 76. 237  Ibid., p. 73. 238  Ibid., p. 77. 229 230

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his departure from the concept of being and the ‘unity of substance’239 on the grounds that ‘a common ideal content’ can only be found in the individual symbolic forms once ‘the whole cycle of forms has been comprehended’.240 Otherwise—that is to say, without the assumption of a ‘spiritual unity’ of symbolic forms and meanings that is to be found in the forms themselves—then [t]he philosophy of these forms would then necessarily amount to their history, which, according to its object, would define itself as history of language, history of religion and myth, history of art, etc.241

On this reading, the individual historical and empirical approaches remain disconnected and lack any ‘mediating function’242 (something that Goethe, in his polemic against the Naturphilosophie of his day, describes as ‘the link that’s missing’243). However, to quote Goethe further, it is scarcely possible to ‘study a living thing’244 if the pure ‘form of the ­concept’, as ‘the truly substantial element in the spirit itself’,245 would ultimately trap all content in the fixed ‘form of logic’. For in that case, the claim Hegel made with regard to the inadequacy of purely formal determinations would hold true, namely that an unmediated ‘judgment is one-­ sided on account of its form and to that extent false’.246 This means that abstract determinations, which for Hegel have the status of isolated ideas extracted from the ‘whole’, necessarily come into conflict with being if,  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 84. 241  Ibid.; see also footnote 179. On Cassirer’s theory, the shifting re- and devaluations of historical symbolic references are tied to their ideal, systematic conditions; it is only against this backdrop that the philosophy of symbolic forms can be understood as a ‘historical conception of action’ (Schwemmer 2002, p. 57). However, we can rule out the claim that his theory is similar in substance to historicism, or has affinities with it (Blumenberg 1981, pp.  163–164). Even Cassirer’s works on historical philosophy, especially the Renaissance, display ‘a systematic aspiration’ that goes ‘far beyond an archival interest’. Schwemmer 1997a, p. 222. 242  Cassirer 1955a, pp. 84–85. 243  ‘Fehlt, leider! nur das geistige Band.’ Goethe 1998, p. 58. On Goethe’s significance for the overall conception of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, see the relevant passages on ‘basis phenomena’ in Cassirer 1996, pp. 115–192. 244  ‘Was Lebendiges erkennen und beschreiben.’ Goethe 1998, p. 58. Translation modified. 245  See footnote 229. 246  Hegel 2010b, p. 71. On Hegel’s critique of logical identity as the ‘principle of an entire system’, see footnotes 33–36 in Chap. 4. 239 240

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elevated to a principle, they become uncritically wrapped up in themselves, rather than recognising their own mediation and critically reflecting on the ‘process which creates its own moments and passes through them all’.247 Some time after Hegel’s immanent critique of logical forms, Nietzsche astutely observed (likewise in an anti-idealist spirit) that ‘there is nothing in reality that would correspond strictly with logic’;248 if this is correct, then Cassirer’s ‘reciprocal determination of the sensuous by the spiritual’249 would only be realised if each were developed out of its opposite. Neither one-sided reflection on the pure ‘form of logic’ nor unreflective recourse to changeable empirical contents can yield knowledge. Only concrete experience of their contradictory relation can determine and change the boundaries between the sensuous and the spiritual, thereby not only setting the ‘abstract identity of the understanding’ in motion but also taking away its arbitrary character.250 By positing the ‘postulate of a purely functional unity’251 absolutely as the general condition and goal of knowledge, Cassirer fails to recognise the self-contradiction of the ‘diversity of existing things’, or its opposition to thought. Although the examples of ‘reciprocal determination of the sensuous and the spiritual’ that Cassirer considers give some indication of differences between the symbolic forms, their antithetical relation becomes apparent only when we examine the concrete mediation of myth, language  Hegel 2018, p. 28.  Nietzsche 1988, p. 327, cited in Adorno 1993, p. 76. 249  See footnote 17. 250  See Sect. 4.1. Also illuminating in this connection is the following comment by Richard Kroner on the necessary relation between reflection and contradiction: ‘Kant’s critique of reason discovers the interdependence of abstract and concrete, formal and material [inhaltlich], rational and empirical, a priori and a posteriori thought, insofar that the concrete, material, empirical, a posteriori within it reflects on itself, analyses itself, separates from itself, criticises itself. It grounds the validity of empirical science [Empirie] on the synthesis of both moments in cognising thought or the cognising subject, whose identity guarantees and makes comprehensible their mutually complementary conjunction [Zusammen]. But it proceeds “naively” insofar as its reflection is “merely” critical (and thus, depending how you look at it, either “merely” empirical or “merely” logical, analytic); insofar as it deduces the conjunction of the moments, the synthesis, merely for empirical knowledge, but sets its own knowledge against the empirical as “mere” reflection, as “merely” formal knowledge, hence not as knowing but as “mere” thinking, as non-knowing, i.e. non-metaphysical “logic”. It thus relates to metaphysics “merely” negatively, it sees in it only a self-contradictory way of thinking, which is precisely therefore contentless, self-negating, null—just as empirical knowledge sees the contradictions that arise within it.’ Kroner 1977, pp. 331–332. 251  See footnote 238. 247 248

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and knowledge, rather than abstract postulates of identity. The ‘strange dilemma’252 of the ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ is especially clear at the two extremes of Cassirer’s inquiry, which respectively concern the symbolic forms of myth and pure knowledge. The problem for a study of myth is that the ‘plethora of material which the research of the last decades has brought to light’253 can only be understood if it is analysed as a ‘wholly “subjective” illusion’.254 Meanwhile, the ‘advanc[e] toward ever more universal symbols’255 in scientific concept formation gradually strips away all reference to the sensuous world, resulting in a blind dominion of thought over ‘what can be encompassed by unity’.256 In both mythical subjectivism and conceptual objectivism, consciousness is unaware of its respective opposite. Myth disengages itself from ‘the mere receptivity of the sensory impression’,257 but ‘the two factors, thing and signification, are undifferentiated, because they merge, grow together, coalesce in an immediate unity’.258 By contrast, theoretical thought unites ‘the totality of aspects

 See footnote 232.  Cassirer 1955b, p. xviii. 254  Ibid., p. xiv. Cassirer attempts to overcome this ‘illusionism’ by emphasising the interconnectedness or ‘systematic unity’ of the cultural forms: ‘None of these forms started out with an independent existence and clearly defined outlines of its own; in its beginnings, rather, every one of them was shrouded and disguised in some form of myth. There is scarcely any realm of “objective spirit” which cannot be shown to have entered at one time into this fusion, this concrete unity, with myth.’ Ibid., p. xiv. Mythical consciousness does not apprehend itself directly, through its material references and contents, but only mediately through belief in its power and significance: ‘The phenomenon which is here to be considered is not the mythical content as such but the significance it possesses for human consciousness and the power it exerts on consciousness. The problem is not the material content of mythology, but the intensity with which it is experienced, with which it is believed—as only something endowed with objective reality can be believed.’ Ibid., p. 5. The ‘spiritual unity’ is revealed at this pole of the investigation to be a ‘subjective illusion’, ‘the origins of which are lost in a suprahistorical sphere’. Ibid. p. 6. 255  Cassirer 1957, p. 478. 256  Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 4. Cassirer says that the replacement of ‘particular concepts and signs with absolutely universal ones’ remains dependent on ‘basic instruments of representation’ (Cassirer 1957, pp. 478–479), since even the most abstract symbol still appears in sensuous form. We can object to this that the axiomatic use of logical signs and mathematical formulas transforms them into pure ciphers that do not represent any particular content but refer only to themselves. Or in other words: thought and mathematics become one. 257  Cassirer 1955b, p. 15. 258  Ibid., p. 24. 252 253

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resulting for different observers’,259 albeit at the price that ‘thingness’ resolves into ‘pure lawful constancy’.260 The ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ understands this as a ‘universal structural law of the human spirit’,261 and fails to recognise the contradictions inherent in the gradual advance ‘toward ever more universal symbols’. The search for a ‘standpoint’ capable of encompassing ‘the purely immanent relation of all these forms to one another […] in one view’,262 does not merely advert to a ‘strange dilemma’; rather, it reflects the irresolvable dialectic between the ‘postulate of logical unity’ and the ‘individuality of each special province’.263 Cassirer is, moreover, clear that the question of the ideal relation of symbolic forms is pertinent to the very concept of a ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’: For if we renounce this unity, a strict systematic understanding of these forms would seem to be unattainable. The only counterpart to the dialectical method is pure empiricism.264

Although this systematic understanding is no longer sought in ‘a unity of substance and origin’265 but rather in the relations of the ‘separate branches of cultural life’,266 it is not possible to combine the plurality of  Cassirer 1957, p. 479.  Ibid., p. 473. 261  See footnote 108. 262  Cassirer 1955a, p. 82. See also footnotes 24 and 228. 263  Ibid., p. 84. 264  Ibid. 265  Ibid., p. 77. 266  Ibid., p.  84. Thus, Cassirer speaks not just of the ‘incomparable particularity’ of the symbolic forms, but also of the ‘ideal relation between the individual provinces’, in particular ‘the basic functions of language and cognition, of art and religion’. Ibid. In 1910 (i.e. long before the publication of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), Cassirer commented, in a section entitled ‘Subjectivity and objectivity of the relational concepts’, on the distinction between functional and substantial concepts, remarking that ‘analysis teaches us very definitely that all these relational forms’—by this he means basic conceptual relations ‘of number and magnitude, permanence and change, causality and interaction’—‘enter into the concept of “being” as into that of “thought;” but it never shows us how they are combined, nor whence they have their origin. […] Thus the possibility disappears of separating the “matter” of knowledge from its “form” by referring them each to a different origin in absolute being; as when, for example, we seek the origin of one factor in “things”, and of the other in the unity of consciousness. For all the determinateness, that we can ascribe to the “matter” of knowledge, belongs to it only relatively to some possible order and thus to a formal serial concept.’ Cassirer 1953b, pp. 309–310. 259 260

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perspectives into a ‘function of the human spirit’, contra the ‘ultimate reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic’ implied by the ‘fundamental principle of philosophical idealism’.267 At the same time, however, the ‘empirical’ approach (contrary to Cassirer’s intentions and despite the axiomatically assumed ‘risk of losing ourselves and of finding no way back to the universal’)268 regains some of its significance relative to the ‘intellectual synthesis’.269 For when Cassirer speaks of the functions of the human spirit possessing an ‘original, formative power’ that ‘does not merely copy’,270 this is only half of the picture; the other concerns the ‘different modes in which an independent reality manifests itself to the human spirit’.271 One-sidedly interpreting symbolic forms as objective manifestations of the human spirit is not only fundamentally incompatible with the idea of their polymorphous becoming;272 the ‘new access to a universal philosophy of the cultural sciences’273 also fails, due to its fixed, preconceived notion of the spirit,274 to understand the social conditions of its own concepts and knowledge. Accordingly, Cassirer’s ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ remains blind to its own logic, and can presumably be classed among those ‘boldest of philosophies’ that ‘abandon’ their analysis ‘in mid-course, at the point where it would encounter the social’ (as Bourdieu remarks with regard to purely epistemological perspectives that place their faith in theory and disdain reality).275 To bring the process of symbolic formation down from the  Cassirer 1955a, p. 84; see also footnote 225.  See footnote 233. 269  Cassirer 1955a, p. 77; see also footnote 219. 270  Ibid., p. 78. 271  Ibid. By contrast, Cassirer insists one-sidedly in the same passage on the ‘objectivization’ or ‘self-revelation’ of the spirit. He makes no mention of the possibility of ‘purely looking on’ (Hegel) and giving ourselves over to the non-identical real or given. See footnotes 58 and 143 in Chap. 4. 272  ‘The particular forms simply stand side by side: their scope and specific character can be described, but they no longer express a common ideal content. The philosophy of these forms would then necessarily amount to their history, which, according to its object, would define itself as history of language, history of religion and myth, history of art, etc.’ Cassirer 1955a, p. 84. See also footnote 241. 273  Cassirer 1955a, p. 78. On the social mediation of philosophical concepts, see the introduction to chapter six below. 274  Cassirer himself describes his symbolic idealism as a ‘systematic philosophy of the human spirit’. Ibid., p. 82 (translation modified). 275  Bourdieu 2000, p. 50. 267 268

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theoretical heaven to the sociological earth,276 it is therefore necessary to not just explain theoretical insights and perspectives in theory-internal terms, but also to investigate those theories’ own conditions of knowledge. The survey of different theories in the preceding chapters has revealed a host of contradictions; this demands as a next step that we not just define philosophical determinations and meanings from within the limits of thought, but instead understand these limits themselves as particular forms of ‘world-making’. The next chapter will therefore move ‘beyond the “philosophy of symbolic forms” in Cassirer’s sense’277 and investigate the ‘symbolic character of motion’ as a social form: as a ‘practical logic’ or ‘logic of practice’.278

276  Here I am paraphrasing a remark attributed to Jacob Taube: ‘Bourdieu is probably the first to bring Ernst Cassirer’s “philosophy of symbolic forms” down from the theoretical heaven to the sociological earth.’ This quotation appears on the back cover of Bourdieu 1994b (a German collection of Bourdieu’s essays, published by Suhrkamp); according to the publisher, it is not possible to establish its precise origin. See on this point Magerski 2005, p. 112. 277  Bourdieu 2000, p. 16. 278  On this topic, see in particular Bourdieu 1977, p. 96ff., and Bourdieu 1990a, p. 80ff.

CHAPTER 6

Motion as Logic of Practice (Bourdieu)

Science has a time which is not that of practice. P. Bourdieu

In this concluding chapter, I shall now consider the ‘symbolic character of motion’ not just as a philosophical object of reflection, but as a social form; this change represents more than just a shift of perspective, and so requires some explanation. I have argued that the ‘immobility of being’ (Zeno) and ‘duration of motion’ (Bergson) cannot be grasped either purely conceptually or purely intuitively, but are instead concretely mediated, as ‘existent contradiction’ (Hegel). Cassirer’s theory of a process of spiritual formation, which identifies non-intuitive contents right from the level of symbolic expressive forms, ultimately fails due to the ‘postulate of a purely functional unity’, which unites the symbolic forms in a merely external manner. As we saw with regard to the ‘development from the feeling to the concept of time’, the one-sidedly emphasised ‘turn toward the general’ blinds him to possible relations between the ‘subjective illusions’ of the lived experience of time and the ‘objective orders’ of mathematically determined temporal relations, which run counter to the idea of the ‘unity of the spirit’.1 Cassirer’s call for a ‘strict systematic understanding’, which he believes is anchored in an ‘ideal relation’ of the symbolic forms, does not lead to genuine mediation, since the ‘diversity of existing things’ cannot be assimilated into the ‘spiritual unity’ of their formal determinations. 1

 See the passage corresponding to footnote 166 in Chap. 5.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Bockrath, Time, Duration and Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7_6

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We could instead, as has been done in sociology, derive the ‘ideal relation’ of the spiritual determinations of form from their social conditions and show that supposedly objective conceptions of time and space arise from social necessities, such as rules governing the succession of generations or the distribution of property.2 This explanatory approach, which has far-reaching implications, dates back to the early days of sociological thought; in response, we could rightly object that socially relevant spatial and temporal determinations can only be comprehended by reference to existing conceptions of space and time. Even the sociological reconstruction of temporal sequences and spatial distinctions relies on a conceptual form of intuition of space and time that is not wholly captured by concrete determinations. For instance, the description of a social succession of generations always refers to a general conception of temporal succession that cannot be derived from the observed phenomenon itself. Speaking in general terms, a pre-existing conception of space and time is needed in order to understand the social meaning of spatial-temporal functions.3 Accordingly, Cassirer speaks in his relatively short commentary on Durkheim of the latter’s unsuccessful ‘attempt to replace the “transcendental” deduction of the categories by a social deduction’.4 By contrast, Cassirer understands the ‘structure of society’ as an ‘ideally conditioned reality’.5 To support this position, he refers to ‘Max Weber’s fundamental works on the sociology of religion’, which appear to affirm the idea of the ‘primacy of religion’.6 And while Cassirer is disinclined to understand mythical signs and religious symbols in terms of their social function, he does insist that even society in ‘its empirically earliest and most primitive

2  Durkheim, for instance, reconstructs time and space (as well as logical categories such as causality, substance and contradiction) from social relations, understanding them as ‘collective realities’. See Durkheim 2001, p. 11ff. 3  ‘The structure of society […] is not the ultimate, ontologically real cause of the spiritual and particularly the religious categories, but rather is decisively determined by them. If we seek to explain these categories as mere repetitions and, as it were, copies of the empirical form of society, we forget that the processes and the function of mythical-religious formation have entered precisely into this real form. We know of no form of society, however primitive, which does not disclose some kind of religious imprint; and society itself can be regarded as a determinate form only if we tacitly presuppose the mode and direction of this imprint.’ Cassirer 1955b, p. 193. 4  Ibid., pp. 192–193. 5  Ibid., p. 193. 6  Ibid.

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form’, must be understood as ‘something spiritually conditioned and mediated’.7 Cassirer gives his own distinctive expression to the familiar objection that sociology appropriates major philosophical topics for itself and then addresses them in an utterly inadequate manner.8 While it is right that logical concepts and conceptions of space and time cannot be wholly derived from social conditions, since the categories and forms being defined must first be presupposed as valid, it is wrong to infer from this the primacy of ‘spiritual formation’.9 For the ‘transcendental’ derivation of spiritual forms is likewise beset by the problem of their presupposed validity, since space and time cannot be conceived in purely spiritual terms, that is, without any temporal and spatial aspects.10 This also applies, as we have seen, to opposing determinations, i.e. regardless of whether their validity ground is posited absolutely in ‘pure thought’ (Zeno) or in ‘pure perception’ (Bergson). The (problematic) relation between genesis and validity discussed here, i.e. between the social derivation of forms that cannot be conceived in purely spiritual terms on the one hand and reflection on the transcendental validity conditions of scientific propositions and inferences on the  Ibid., p. 194; see also footnote 3.  This charge of ‘sociologism’, whereby the interpretive human sciences were accused of overestimating the influence of the social world, emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Adorno commented on the matter as follows in 1931: ‘One of the most powerful academic philosophers of the present [Heidegger] is said to have answered the question of the relation between philosophy and sociology somewhat like this: while the philosopher is like an architect who presents and develops the blueprint of a house, the sociologist is like the cat burglar who climbs the walls from outside and takes out what he can reach. I would be inclined to acknowledge the comparison and to interpret positively the function he gave sociology for philosophy. For the house, this big house, has long since decayed in its foundations and threatens not only to destroy all those inside it, but to cause all the things to vanish which are stored within it, much of which is irreplaceable. If the cat burglar steals these things, these singular, indeed often half-forgotten things, he does a good deed, provided that they are only rescued; he will scarcely hold onto them for long, since they are for him only of scant worth.’ Adorno 2000c, p. 35. 9  Cassirer 1955a, p. 159. 10  See Hegel’s remark on the contradiction at the beginning of philosophy in footnote 1 in Part II. The ‘complete emptiness, complete absence of determination and content’ of pure thought described in the passage cited there can be seen here in the ultimately inconceivable emptiness that ensues if we attempt to grasp time and space as such; that is, devoid of any memory or connection to anything.—Once again, Hegel’s dictum applies: ‘Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same.’ Ibid. 7 8

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other, does not represent a simple opposition between two possible approaches. Genesis and validity are not simply and disconnectedly opposed, as the established distinction between sociology and philosophy might suggest. Rather, I argue, both concepts, and hence both disciplines, presuppose the other, referring to their opposite through their contradiction with themselves. Thus, when critiques of ideology identify general concepts of validity, they (with good reason) emphasise these concepts’ social significance; but at the same time, an advance in sociological knowledge requires epistemological self-reflection on the critic’s own social conditionedness.11 Equally, social phenomena such as the general validity of the principle of exchange in bourgeois society, only become comprehensible if the value of the exchanged commodities is ascribed not to the things themselves, but rather recognised as a result of social labour.12 In the exchange of commodities, however, the relation between concrete products and social processes assumes (as Marx observes) ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’,13 in other words, becomes valid, and so this mystification can be laid bare only by reference to its social conditions. As these examples suggest, validity and genesis are already mediated; that is, they are neither valid in themselves, nor do they exist in isolation. Consequently, it would be wrong to set them rigidly side by side, as in the

11  It can be objected that it was only the decoupling of truth and knowledge (a hallmark of classical sociological critiques of ideology, especially those of Karl Mannheim and Max Scheler) that drew the interest of sociology of knowledge to collectively shared epistemic orders, which have been taken up by modern theories of culture and are now no longer measured by the ‘standard of truth or distortion, but solely that of practical relevance’. Reckwitz 2000, p. 163. However, even this apparent suspension of concepts of truth and validity cannot disguise the fact that the release of modern ‘sociological object theory from the epistemological problem of relativism’ (ibid., p. 162) must still make reference to rational reasons in order to understand the relations between cultural meanings and patterns of behaviour. 12  In the section of Capital entitled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’, Marx writes: ‘A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.’ Marx 2011, p. 83. See also footnote 151 in Chap. 3. 13  Marx 2011, p. 83.

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‘quest [for] the absolutely first’14 or the ‘ultimate reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic’.15 The differences between validity and genesis are not absolute, nor are their responsibilities clearly defined, as the external division of labour between philosophy and sociology may suggest. The question is how these two opposites relate to each other, that is, how concept and subject matter are brought together. Adorno gives an example in which the two poles are understood as aspects of an only negatively definable whole that are at once separate from and mutually engender one another. It in no way follows from the fact that the generation and justification of judgements should not be ‘confused’, but rather that validity is something quite different from genesis, that the explication of the sense of validation features does not refer back to genetic moments as their necessary condition. […] Insofar as the relation of logical validity to genesis is necessary, this relation itself belongs to logical sense which must be explained or ‘awakened’.16

Adorno even goes a step further by understanding logical validity in terms of its opposite: It is not, as relativism would have it, truth in history, but rather history in truth.17

Since the meaning of a logical judgement is only actualised in the judgement itself, here too validity and genesis are interdependent, without it being possible to subsume the one into the other. Just as a critic of ideology must presuppose some idea of truth before they can criticise it, the logician must likewise formulate a judgement before they can demonstrate

 See footnote 73 in Chap. 5.  See footnote 225 in Chap. 5. 16  Adorno 2013a, p. 73. He is critiquing Husserl’s ‘logical absolutism’, which according to Adorno, like all theories on which knowledge is ‘exclusively reducible to the subject or the object’, delivers knowledge over ‘to its own relativity’. Ibid., pp. 87–88. 17  Ibid., p. 135. 14 15

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its validity.18 The dual meaning of a judgement is shown in the necessary entanglement of genesis and validity. As non-identical moments, concept and subject matter are interdependent; as opposing moments, they presuppose each other. It is only when either is one-sidedly posited as absolute that ‘despair over the loss of the static conception of truth’ ensues.19 But instead of advocating relativism or indifference, since an Absolute cannot be found either in pure subjectivity or pure objectivity, Adorno points to the incomplete dialectic between subject and object: The concept of objectivity, to which logical absolutism sacrifices the world, cannot renounce the concept from which objectivity draws its very model. This is the concept of an object: the world.20

Famously, Adorno’s attempt to understand thought itself as containing a non-identical moment, conceived as unspoiled nature, led his reflections on dialectical thought into the aporias of a critique that is ultimately closer to mimetic acts of art and aesthetic reflections on those acts than it is to the foundations of modern science.21 His critique of reason, which he elaborated with unrelenting consistency, prompts the question of whether 18  See also footnote 36 in Chap. 4. He expresses this idea as follows: ‘The judgement is thus only true if there is a corresponding state of affairs [Sachverhalt] that it expresses. But the state of affairs is present [vorhanden] only if I utter the judgement. […] This means the one cannot be thought of without the other, and any attempt to isolate one of the moments will always necessarily lead either to my arbitrarily hypostasising one moment and making it absolute, or, if I think consistently, to my thinking of the other at the same time; however, and this is the great difficulty, the difficulty of all dialectical thinking, although these two moments are interrelated, neither can exist without its opposite, yet at the same time they are not simply the same.’ Adorno 2011, p. 276. 19  Adorno 2013a, p. 87. 20  Ibid., p. 88. Elsewhere, he writes, ‘In truth, the subject is never quite the subject, and the object never quite the object; and yet the two are not pieced out of any third that transcends them. […] The division, which makes the object the alien thing to be mastered and appropriates it, is indeed subjective, the result of orderly preparation; but no critique of its subjective origin will reunify the parts, once they have split in reality. Consciousness boasts of uniting what it has arbitrarily divided first, into elements—hence the ideological overtone of all talk of synthesis.’ Adorno 2004, p. 175. 21  Habermas gives a strikingly harsh assessment of this position, which explores and transcends the bounds of the philosophy of consciousness, when he comments on the fine line between the ‘mindfulness [Eingedenken] of nature’ (Adorno) and reflective self-expression: ‘Negative dialectics is now to be understood only as an exercise, a drill. […] In the shadow of a philosophy that has outlived itself, philosophical thinking intentionally retrogresses to gesticulation.’ Habermas 1986, p. 385 (emphases mine).

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it is actually possible to free oneself from the ‘aporias of the philosophy of consciousness’22 if a subject is not confined to ‘the native realm of truth’23 but assessed relative to their social conditions. Even if we share Adorno’s view that ‘philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’,24 we still need to consider how the Hegelian distinction between subject and object will change if, rather than addressing it primarily in the mode of a constitutive critique of validity, we instead focus on the social conditions underpinning its ‘cosmopolitan’ significance.25 In this chapter, I shall therefore once again shift focus, placing greater emphasis on the genesis of subject–object relations, understood in terms of social practice. For even if ‘practice’ is no longer ‘the forum for appeals against self-satisfied speculation’,26 its mode of understanding does at least help to dispel the ‘illusion of the omnipotence of thought’.27 I shall begin by considering the view that the non-conceptual opposites deployed in critical self-reflection to demarcate the limits of thought involve social meanings and forms of understanding invested with practical significance and relevance.28 Addressing the theoretical question of how these social forms are actually shaped and ordered without being subsumed into ‘pure thought’29 opens up a way of approaching the practical ‘inclusion in the object of knowledge’,30 which Bourdieu describes as ‘the implicit’ and ‘the unconscious’, or, to be more precise, as ‘the  Ibid., p. 399.  This is how the stage of self-consciousness is described in Hegel 2018, p. 102. 24  This is the opening line to Negative Dialectics; Adorno 2004, p. 3. 25  Based on Kant’s distinction between the ‘scholastic’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ concepts of philosophy. While on the ‘scholastic concept’ the end of philosophy is ‘logical perfection of cognition’, on the ‘cosmopolitan concept’ philosophy is concerned with ‘the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason’. Kant 1998, A 839/B 867. 26  Adorno 2004, p. 3. For an example of opposition to speculative thought under the banner of social practice and change, see in particular Marx and Engels 1960. By contrast with this form of critique, Adorno believes that nowadays practice is in the service of existing things; it is ‘the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require’. Adorno 2004, p. 3. See also p. 147. 27  Bourdieu 2000, p. 9. 28  As Bourdieu remarks in passing in an interview with Pierre Lamaison: ‘I can say that all my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?’ Bourdieu 1994a, p. 65. 29  I am referring here to objectivist and subjectivist models of explanation that reproduce, seemingly without any presuppositions, a certain view of things that Bourdieu, borrowing from J. L. Austin, terms the ‘scholastic view’. Bourdieu 2000, p. 12. 30  Ibid., p. 10. 22 23

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collective history that has produced our categories of thought, and the ­individual history through which they have been inculcated in us’.31 This kind of approach is by no means new; rather, as already discussed, the question of the social conditionedness of forms of consciousness is one of the core themes of sociology. What is new, and relevant to the present discussion, is the critique of social theories that retain the traditional objectivism–subjectivism dualism and thereby systematically fail to understand what Bourdieu terms the logic of practice’.32 We therefore first need to show how the critique of dualistic social theories is carried over into a ‘social praxeology’33 involving a changed understanding of the relation between genesis and validity. This will prepare the ground for us to demonstrate, by reference to different social forms of ‘using’ time, aspects of a ‘praxeology of motion’ that is not exhausted by, or subsumable into, ‘pure thought’.34

6.1   Against Reductive Objectivist and Subjectivist Views The dual opposition described in the title to this section is primarily directed against theories of society and action that cleave to the traditional dualism of objectivism and subjectivism. I expressly reject approaches that perpetuate ‘the obligatory alternatives of dualistic thought’.35 My intention is not to simply transcend oppositions or sublate them into a ‘higher kind’ of social form,36 but rather to avoid ‘false antinomies’ that ‘obfuscat[e]  Ibid., p. 9.  This is the title of Chap. 5 of Bourdieu 1990a, starting on p. 80. In an earlier work, he speaks in a similar vein of ‘practical logic’. Bourdieu 1977, p. 96. 33  Wacquant 1992b, p. 1; the term ‘praxeology’ comes from Espinas 1897, p. 7. 34  I am referring here to the ‘objectivist’ (Zeno) and ‘subjectivist’ (Bergson) positions discussed in Part I as examples of dichotomous philosophical theories. Bourdieu uses the concept of leisure (scholé) to characterise the philosopher’s mode of social existence, regarding it as ‘the first and most determinant of all the social conditions of possibility of “pure” thought’. Bourdieu 2000, p.  12. Leisure creates a social distance, which back in ancient Greek times was reinforced by exempting philosophers from civic and household duties, and remains a doggedly defended social and epistemological privilege to this day. 35  Bourdieu 2000, p. 8. In the same passage, Bourdieu also refers to the influential theoretical distinctions between ‘mechanism’ and ‘finalism’. On the ‘mechanism of the understanding’ in Zeno, see footnote 57 in Chap. 3. On ‘finalism’, see the reference to the ‘internal finality’ of nature in Bergson in footnote 22 in Chap. 3. 36  As in the ‘constructive developmental framework’, a theoretical model for describing the socio-emotional organisation and development of thought according to which common sense develops through a series of stages, from understanding to reason to practical wisdom, before then looping back to a higher kind of common sense. Kegan 1982. 31 32

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the anthropological truth of human practice’.37 Even if speaking of ‘human practice’ in the singular is necessarily imprecise, as I shall show, pointing to the dichotomy between objectivist and subjectivist positions that a praxeological approach seeks to transcend helps us to understand their significance as ‘moments of a form of analysis’.38 This offers the prospect of a position beyond the objectivism–subjectivism dichotomy, which I shall attempt here at least to outline. The praxeological definition of the subject–object relation proceeds from the assumption of a ‘double reality’39 of society, which in the classical social sciences—sociology, history and ethnology—is generally construed one-dimensionally and hence incompletely. According to Bourdieu, the ‘buried structures of the various social worlds’ that sociology seeks to uncover consist on the one hand in unequal distribution of resources and means of appropriating socially desirable goods and values (‘objectivity of the first order’) and on the other in ‘mental and bodily schemata’ that are at work in social agents’ feelings, perceptions, judgements and actions (‘objectivity of the second order’).40 If these two ‘orders’ remain separate and theoretically unmediated, we will have a distorted picture of social reality: On the one hand, it can ‘treat social phenomena as things’, in accordance with the old Durkheimian maxim, and thus leave out everything that they owe to the fact that they are objects of cognition—or of miscognition—in social existence. On the other hand, it can reduce the social world to the

 Wacquant 1992b, p. 10.  Ibid., pp. 10–11. By contrast, Reckwitz points to the opposition ‘between “rationalist” social theories, which are also provocatively labelled “scholastic” and take up the old objectivism/subjectivism distinction, and “praxeological” social theories. As well as Bourdieu’s own theory, the latter include (as he notes at least peripherally) Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, American pragmatism and certain elements of Heidegger’s and Max Weber’s thought.’ Reckwitz 2000, p. 312. While Wacquant emphasises the centrality of the objectivism–subjectivism distinction to the development of the praxeological approach, Reckwitz highlights the distinction between ‘scholastic’ and ‘praxeological’ social theories, which he regards as the ‘key difference structuring the theoretical field’. Ibid. Both readings have in common that even the determinate negation of the objectivism–subjectivism opposition is, as Hegel puts it, ‘not in [its] ultimate truth’. For the ‘peculiar difficulty of sociology […] is to produce a precise science of an imprecise, fuzzy, wooly reality’. Wacquant 1992b, p. 23. 39  Ibid., p. 11. 40  Ibid., p. 7. 37 38

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representations that agents make of it, the task of social science then consisting in producing an ‘account of the accounts’ produced by social subjects.41

These two approaches respectively stand for ‘objectivism’ and ‘subjectivism’42 in sociological knowledge and theory building. Instead of flatly rejecting both modes of knowledge and so simply perpetuating their unmediated antagonism, Bourdieu attempts to move past their theoretical divisions and reductivisms ‘while preserving the gains from each of them (including what is produced by self-interested lucidity about the opposing position)’.43 This sounds like ‘good dialectics’, and we shall examine how, on a praxeological approach, the ‘double reality’ of the social world is comprehended through a ‘double negation’ of ‘theoretical reason’.44 In order to understand Bourdieu’s proposed way of structuring the field of social theory, we need to consider the crucial sociological dualism between social physics and social phenomenology. These labels roughly correspond to objectivist and subjectivist approaches, which despite all their differences and oppositions do at least have in common that they are predicated on the theoretical knowability of the social, even if they fail to acknowledge the rupture underlying ‘the epistemological and social conditions of [theoretical knowledge’s] production’.45 It is not Bourdieu’s intention ‘to discredit theoretical knowledge in one or another of its forms and, as is often attempted, to set in its place a more or less idealized practical knowledge’.46 Rather, he is primarily concerned with getting beneath the surface of conventional scientific ways of thinking and everyday truisms in order to assess and redefine the limits of the ‘common sense’ that prevails in both spheres. Bourdieu speaks of a ‘conversion of one’s gaze’47 that is necessary in order to recognise the merely apparent character of  Bourdieu 1994a, p. 124.  Ibid. This basic conceptual distinction is primarily directed against the dualisms in the social sciences, such as between holism and individualism, determinism and voluntarism or functionalism and interactionism, that create an artificial division in our knowledge of social reality if they are understood one-sidedly or in isolation. The two antithetical approaches are, however, ‘both equally opposed to the practical mode of knowledge which is the basis of ordinary experience of the social world’. Bourdieu 1990a, p. 25. 43  Ibid. 44  Cf. book 1 of the Logic of Practice, titled ‘Critique of theoretical reason’. Bourdieu 1990a, p. 23. 45  Ibid., p. 27. 46  Ibid. 47  Bourdieu 1992b, p. 251. 41 42

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ordinary and academic certainties. Suggestions for and examples of this ‘new gaze’48 can be found in a diverse range of fields, including literature and philosophy,49 in cases where they are able ‘to bring to light the theory of practice which theoretical knowledge implicitly applies’.50 Only ‘critical reflexion on the limits of theoretical understanding’51 can explain the rupture that results if we attempt to attain a purely theoretical understanding of social practices without factoring in our own standpoint: The unanalysed element in every theoretical analysis (whether subjectivist or objectivist) is the theorist’s subjective relation to the social world and the  Ibid.  Bourdieu also makes reference to the ideas of literary and philosophical authors, such as Jane Austen and Blaise Pascal. See Bourdieu 1989a, p. 45, and footnote 29; on the sociological relevance of literary studies of lifestyles and milieus, see Bourdieu 1989b, p.  25. On Bourdieu’s description of himself as a ‘Pascalian’, see Bourdieu 2000, p.  2. Although Bourdieu does not directly address Pascal’s work in the Pascalian Meditations, Pascal’s critique of reason did nonetheless influence Bergson’s understanding of philosophy—‘convinced that Pascal was right to say that “true philosophy makes light of philosophy”’, ibid., p. 2— and Bourdieu is guided by Pascal’s antischolastic stance in his work, which he says is in ‘permanent discord with the great humanist traditions of France, and some other European countries’. Bourdieu 2007, p.  18. However, precisely why Bourdieu chose to single out Pascal for special mention remains largely unexplained. The thinking in contradictions common to both authors lacks a theological foundation in Bourdieu’s case, though the following self-observation (referring, in retrospect, to his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France) could be interpreted that way by an unversed reader: ‘It is not the only time in my life when I have had the sense of being constrained by a greater force to do something that cost me dearly and the need for which was felt only by me.’ Ibid., p.  110. By ‘greater force’ he undoubtedly means the typical experience of social constraints and obstacles (what Durkheim would call contraintes sociales) that sociology has been concerned with since its earliest days and which Bourdieu is giving a personal account of here. His talk of an ‘initiation’ during his ‘apprenticeship’, as he made the ‘transition from philosophy to sociology’, should likewise not be misconstrued as describing an experience of spiritual faith. Ibid., pp. 58–59. Rather, it indicates how deeply the sociologist was absorbed in the development of his own habitus in the academic field. Whether Bourdieu’s ‘confession’ of experiences of ‘awakening’ is attributable to the genre of enlightened self-observation cannot be clarified here. Sociologically speaking, it is in any case more significant that the social ‘force of belief in truth’ is, on a purely epistemological interpretation, mistaken for the ‘intrinsic force of truth’, creating a ‘fiction of science’ whose social accreditation increasingly allows it to claim ‘a monopoly of the legitimate viewpoint’. Bourdieu 1988, p. 28. For Bourdieu, the task of sociology consists in uncovering the social foundations of this belief, both in the academic field and in the sociologist’s own habitus. 50  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 27. 51  Ibid. 48 49

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objective (social) relation presupposed by this subjective relation. […] This projection of a non-objectified theoretical relationship into the practice that one is trying to objectify is at the root of a set of interlinked scientific errors.52

The ‘reflexive objectivation’ of scientific objects and methods that Bourdieu advocates here applies equally to the above-mentioned ‘objectivity of the first order’ and ‘objectivity of the second order’, the mediation of which allows us to ‘recove[r] the practical relationship to the world’.53 One-sidedly referring either to subjectively grasped actions and perspectives or objectively determined structures, rules and models misunderstands the as yet unexplained relation between the two orders. According to Bourdieu, if rational explanations are simply equated with the practices and phenomena to be explained without at the same time reflecting on our own theoretical standpoint, this will bring about an imperceptible shift in our understanding, ‘substituting the observer’s relation to practice for the practical relation to practice’.54 Now, we could regard the task of science as being to establish—from a safe distance, i.e. largely unhindered by social constraints and bound only by our own rationality—theoretical knowledge whose conceptual validity and logical rigour presupposes a purely intellectual understanding of a given subject

 Ibid., p. 29.  Bourdieu 2007, p. 64. In the same passage, he also describes the ‘break with the structuralist paradigm, through the shift from rule to strategy, from structure to habitus, and from the system to the socialized agent, himself inhabited by the structure of the social relations of which he is the product.’ Ibid., pp. 63–64. However, this should not be understood solely in terms of fixed, superordinate categories; rather, it depends just as much on the particularities and imprecisions of the forms of practice being investigated. Thus, Bourdieu elsewhere explicitly characterises the praxeological approach as ‘“sociological” structuralism […] which investigates the structure of symbolic systems and social structures’. Bourdieu 1989b, p. 34. What appears contradictory at first glance proves on closer examination to be a central feature of praxeological understanding. Since for Bourdieu structures and practices are inseparable, on a praxeological view their relation is changeable and so must constantly be redefined. Although the structure of a social field comprises ‘a state of the distribution of the specific capital which has been accumulated’ and the ‘power relations among the agents or institutions engaged in the struggle’, it is not made up of facts or things—des choses in Durkheim’s terminology—but rather ‘governs the strategies aimed at transforming it’ and is consequently ‘itself always at stake’. Bourdieu 1993, p. 73. 54  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 34. 52 53

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matter.55 Against this ‘theoretism’, Bourdieu points to the ineluctable ­practical relation that precedes all thought, though without being discernible in the theories themselves (that is, in the procedures and products of thought): It is because we are implicated in the world that there is implicit content in what we think and say about it. In order to free our thinking of the implicit, it is not sufficient to perform the return of thought onto itself that is commonly associated with the idea of reflexivity; and only the illusion of the omnipotence of thought could lead one to believe that the most radical doubt is capable of suspending the presuppositions, linked to our various affiliations, memberships, implications, that we engage in our thoughts.56

If we follow this objection through, then the reflexivity that it requires will go beyond the mere ‘return of thought onto itself’. One example of this can be seen in Popper’s attempt to ground the objectivity of scientific knowledge in thought itself, which fails to account for ‘the collective history that has produced our categories of thought, and the individual history through which they have been inculcated in us’.57 This recasting of ‘the unconscious’ as ‘history’58 can be interpreted as a direct borrowing from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. But even if we could easily 55  Karl Popper, writing on the philosophy of science, expresses this idea as follows: ‘Scientific objectivity consists in the fact that anyone (with sufficient critical training) is capable, in principle, of testing scientific results (intersubjective testability). […] Scientific objectivity assumes, therefore, the construction and testing of theories (‘theoretism’).’ Popper 2012, p. 470; in a similar vein see also Popper 2002, p. 22. By way of contrast, see the critique of ideal-typical assumptions of objectivity in Feyerabend 1993, illustrated by the example of Galileo. Elsewhere, Feyerabend criticises the dangers of thinking in terms of grand concepts, as exemplified by Popper, and comes to a conclusion that bears striking similarities to Bourdieu’s praxeological theory: ‘So what’s wrong with a coherent philosophy that explains its principles in a simple and straightforward way? That it may be out of touch with reality, which means, in the case of a philosophy of science, with scientific practice.’ Feyerabend 1995, p. 90. 56  Bourdieu 2000, p. 9. 57  Ibid. On Popper, see footnote 55. On Popper’s theory, it is not just thought that reflects on itself but above all thinkers, as can be seen from the fact that scientific objectivity can ‘in principle’ be verified by anyone, but in practice only by suitably qualified individuals ‘with sufficient critical training’. Thus, in order to comply with and satisfy the conditions of scientific objectivity, social membership of the scientific field is needed so as to guarantee ‘adherence, which is unanimous within the limits of the field, to the doxa which distinctively defines it’. Bourdieu 2000, p.  11. On the weaknesses and deceptions of scientific expertise, see Feyerabend 1978. 58  Bourdieu 2000, p. 9.

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demonstrate such references, Bourdieu vehemently rejects the claim that our ‘categories of thought’ serve a higher-order adjudicating function, regarding this as a ‘scholastic illusion’ that replaces ‘practical comprehension’ with ‘a knowing consciousness’.59 Among the ‘scholastic illusions’ of ‘knowing consciousness’, Bourdieu includes first and foremost those social theories that, despite all their differences, share as a common factor a dualistic commitment to either an ‘objectivist’ or a ‘subjectivist’ logic. Both these modes of knowledge, are, on Bourdieu’s view, ‘equally opposed to the practical mode of knowledge’,60 which is why his critique of their theoretical premises promises something other than another reality-detached construct in the mode of the ‘theoretical “theses” of epistemological essays’.61 At an early stage in his argument, Bourdieu observes that it would ‘lose its meaning and its effectiveness’ if, by letting its fundamental praxeological conception ‘be dissociated from the practice from which it started and to which it ought to return’,62 it were reduced to a purely theoretical programme. On his view, ‘the knowing and the being-known, the recognizing and the being-­ recognized’, can only be held together if ‘the work of objectification’ 59  Ibid., p.  142. For his critique of Hegel as ‘one of the supreme incarnations of the (German) professor of philosophy’, see ibid., p.  47. Although Bourdieu rightly criticises Hegel for treating ‘the philosophies of the past’ as ‘mere stages in the development of Mind, that is, of philosophy’ (ibid., p. 46),—in other words, for developing reflective thought out of itself—he misunderstands the significance of ‘sensuous-certainty’ (Hegel 2018, p. 60) in Hegel’s theory, as a condition of knowledge that is already known yet at the same time first needs to be obtained through reflection, so as to be able if not to break the circle of epistemology then at least to reconstruct it in its mediation. Hegel’s insistence on making the faculty of knowledge itself, including ‘natural consciousness’, the object of epistemology is not so far removed from Bergson’s call for a theoretically obtained ‘practical relation to practice’. The following remark may serve to illustrate that the phenomenological critique of knowledge and sociological praxeology are not as irreconcilably opposed as Bourdieu supposes: ‘A further claim is made when it is said that we must know the faculty of knowledge before we can know. […] It is the old story of the σχολαστικός who would not go into the water till he could swim.’ Hegel 1955b, pp. 428–429. In both cases, knowledge and practice can be comprehended only by reflecting on a transitory phenomenon, which leads Hegel in the Phenomenology to describe and understand both ‘sensuous’ and ‘absolute’ knowing in terms of their development. Bourdieu’s objection to Hegel bears on the assumption of pregiven knowledge of the Absolute, but not on the critique of phenomenological experience as a form of reflection. 60  See footnote 42. 61  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 1. 62  Ibid.

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relates ‘position-takings to the positions from which they are taken’.63 By this, he means that the ‘critique of theoretical reason’ (understood here as a praxeological objectivation of knowledge) grasps its object from a dual perspective: ‘the point of view of the agents who are caught up in the object’ and ‘the point of view on this point of view’.64 It is only by bringing these two perspectives together that it is possible. to include in the (inevitably scholastic) theoretical reconstruction the truth of those who have neither the interest, nor the leisure, nor the necessary instruments to reappropriate the objective and subjective truth of what they are and what they do.65

According to Bourdieu, acknowledging the ‘twofold truth’ or ‘double reality’66 of the social world requires a ‘bifocal point of view’67 that (at first in merely negative terms) opposes social theories that cleave to the classical objectivism–subjectivism dualism. As the point of disembarkation for his praxeological approach, Bourdieu selects two prominent typologies of action theory, one which focuses on action as a product of social constraints and another that is centred on individual decisions. In the former case, agents are guided by social rules and normative expectations that act on them from the outside; in the latter, they consciously weigh up calculable means, ends and consequences in terms of self-determined preferences.68 Both types of theory, albeit with inverse premises, (a) presuppose an ‘inner–outer difference’69 between agents and social conditions, and  Bourdieu 2000, p. 189.  Ibid. 65  Ibid., p. 191. Feyerabend makes a similar critique of the faith in scientific objectivity: ‘It is of course true that we owe great discoveries to the sciences. But it does not follow from this that there is something like a “scientific way of thinking” that brought these discoveries about, and still less does it follow that the supposed custodians of this mythical “scientific way of thinking” understand the world, society and people better than anyone else.’ Feyerabend 1979, p. 164. On the reasons for the errors of ‘knowledge’ and ‘experts’, see ibid., p. 147. 66  Bourdieu 2000, p. 188. See also footnote 39. 67  Bourdieu 2000, p. 191. 68  Reckwitz explains these ‘two classical sociological explanations for action’ in terms of the concepts of ‘homo sociologicus’ and ‘homo economicus’. Reckwitz 2000, pp. 314–315. On the former model of explanation, see esp. Bourdieu 1976, pp.  203–227; on the latter see Bourdieu 1990a, pp. 42–51. 69  Reckwitz speaks of an ‘inner–outer difference between the mental and the social’. See Reckwitz 2000., p. 315. 63 64

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(b) represent a ‘picture of “hyperrationalised” action that comes at the cost of neglecting implicit systems of meaning’.70 As regards (a): Bourdieu’s critique is primarily directed against the ‘discrepancy between the practically experienced reasons and the “objective” reasons of practice’, which has by no means been overcome.71 For even if individual action is supposed to be determined by social constraints and rules, it remains unclear how—from ‘the viewpoint of an “impartial spectator”’72 and in isolation ‘from any practical situation’73—general rules for action are supposed to be translated into specific dispositions and actions. The ‘indeterminacy surrounding the relationship between the observer’s viewpoint and that of the agents’ is reflected in the ‘indeterminacy of the relationship between the constructs (diagrams or discourses) that the observer produces to account for practices, and these practices themselves’.74 Just as it is unclear how social requirements and mechanisms are translated into concrete action, the objectifying models, methods and tools that come into ‘contradiction in a quite practical way with the practical relationship’ due to their ‘distance and externality’ likewise prove inadequate.75 A theoretical use of reason must necessarily deny the ‘practical relationship to practice’ in order to ‘constitute the objective  Ibid., p. 314.  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 36. 72  Ibid., p. 31. 73  Ibid., p. 32. 74  Ibid., p. 37. 75  Ibid., p. 36. Here too we can see parallels to Feyerabend, who comments as follows on the conflict between theories, facts and practices: ‘However, the material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background. It is contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.’ Feyerabend 1993, p. 51. On Bourdieu’s ‘methodological polytheism’, which Wacquant believes, contra the similarities I have suggested, cannot be reduced to ‘“anything goes”, as in the epistemological anarchism (or Dadaism) of a Feyerabend’, see Wacquant 1992b, p. 30. Feyerabend and Bourdieu do agree that the ‘array of methods used must fit the problem at hand and must constantly be reflected upon in actu, in the very movement whereby they are deployed to resolve particular questions’. Ibid. It remains unclear how exactly the methods of the natural and social sciences are supposed to be related ‘in the very movement whereby they are deployed’. Some important suggestions on this point can be found in Feyerabend’s remarks on ‘science as an art’, which cast doubt on ‘the clear subdivisions of disciplines’ that give rise to experts and specialists but do not correspond to the actual ‘practice of these disciplines’. Feyerabend 1984, pp. 7–8. 70 71

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representation of practice’.76 For precisely because the indeterminate effects of practices are incompatible with rationality’s claim to give explanations free of any contingency or contradiction, in objectivist theories of action they are one-sidedly construed in a manner that conforms with the theories’ assumptions, in a similar vein to Hegel’s dictum that ‘what is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational’.77 Bourdieu argues along similar lines, albeit proceeding from a contrary premise, against ‘“rational actor” theory’.78 On the (admittedly unlikely) assumption that decisions are made by a coolly calculating ‘professional exponent of consciousness’,79 who then acts in a deliberate, considered manner on the basis of their calculations, subjectivist theories likewise suppose that individual decisions about how to act can be subsumed into general explanations of action. Here too, there is a bifurcation of individual and social, albeit one based on anthropologically grounded freedoms of volition and decision-making rather than social constraints and causally effective rules. The significance of social influences reduces in proportion to the degree of responsibility and reflectivity ascribed to the ostensibly sovereign subject with respect to their rational action decisions; in rational choice theory,80 for instance, these influences are factored in only as external conditions. On newer versions of classical theories of the homo economicus, social constraints and restrictions mainly motivate agents to act and decide in conformity with certain rules or conventions as a way to avoid negative sanctions. However, the drawbacks of these sanctions can be outweighed if individuals can reap benefits from acting in ways contrary to these rules. On such theories, the start and end point of action is self-­ interest, against which agents measure different options, so that even collective social phenomena are understood as the product of rational action.81 76  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 36. In the cited chapter, Bourdieu sets out his critique of structural thought by reference to Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Noam Chomsky and others. 77  Hegel 1991, p. 20. It should, however, be recalled that for Hegel, not everything that is real must be rational, but can also appear contingently and arbitrarily. 78  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 46. In the immediately following passage, having criticised ‘Sartre’s ultra-subjectivist imagination’, Bourdieu says that it has been ‘outdone by the ‘voluntarism of […] anthropological fictions’. Ibid., pp. 46–47. 79  Ibid., p. 46. 80  Bourdieu refers here to Elster 1979. 81  One example is the ‘Resourceful-Restricted-Evaluating-Expecting-Maximising-Man’ (‘RREEMM’) model, which was developed in the social sciences on the basis of rational decision theories. See Lindenberg 1985.

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Forceful objections were raised against this methodological individualism from a very early stage, which at their core concern ‘the relationship of the general to the particular in its historical concretion’.82 From this critique, it follows that the subjectivist focus on a ‘rational ethic’83 either excludes the socially effective driving forces of collective action as irrational (because uncontrollable) consequences of individual action or assumes the particular interests of strategically acting agents can be subsumed into a rational calculus of social practice.84 Since strategic self-preservation interests not only conflict with each other but also contradict the naive optimism that they can be sublated into a rational social whole, their claim to rationality remains problematic.85 However, Bourdieu’s intention is not to undertake another, immanent ‘critique of theoretical reason’ using the means of theoretical reason itself; rather, he criticises how, in subjectivist theories, agents’ perspectives are limited to rational models of actions whose ‘imaginary anthropology’86 theoretically presupposes things that have not yet been empirically established. Mathematical models like the 82  Adorno 2000b, p. 183. Immediately beforehand, he writes, ‘In the rigid opposition and complementation of formal sociology and the blind establishment of facts, the relationship between the general and the particular disappears. But society draws its life from this relationship, which therefore provides sociology with its only humanly worthy object. If one subsequently adds together what has been separated, then the material relationship is stood upon its head by the gradation of the method. The eagerness to quantify immediately even the qualitative findings is not fortuitous. Science wishes to rid the world of the tension between the general and the particular by means of its consistent system, but the world gains its unity from inconsistency.’ 83  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 289. This term refers to how rational action theories address ethical problems using ideal-typical assumptions about rational action and ‘arbitrary quantifications and calculations’. Ibid., p. 47. 84  For instance, in the mediation between subjective and objective reason in Kant’s moral theory, in which the freedom of the individual is conceived with reference to the social whole. See Kant 1997, pp. 44–45. 85  Kant, incidentally, does not avoid this contradiction when he observes, ‘On the other hand, to preserve one’s life is a duty, and besides everyone has an immediate inclination to do so. But on this account the often anxious care that most people take of it still has no inner worth and their maxim has no moral content.’ Ibid., BA 10 (4:398 in the numbering used in this edition). 86  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 99. He notes, further, that it is possible ‘to give an account of the logic of practice, that is, to generate—on paper—the universe of practices (conducts of honour, acts of exchange) really observed, which impress both by their inexhaustible diversity and their apparent necessity, without resorting to the imaginary ‘file of prefabricated representations’ […] that would enable one to ‘choose’ the conduct appropriate to each situation’. Ibid., p. 100.

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‘prisoner’s dilemma’87 use ‘rational calculus’ and ‘logical operations of thought’ to translate agents’ social practices and perspectives into formal relations and probabilities that are supposed to be applicable to any object or situation, so that they are familiar even before they actually come into view. Bourdieu objects to this method, which characterises subjective action decisions with mathematical precision, that it ‘presuppose[s] and encourage[s] denial of the social world’88 due to its pure, reality-detached logic. This ‘logic of the logician’ has little in common with the ‘logic of practice’,89 since social agents, contrary to formal-logical characterisations, lack precise decision algorithms and do not act in the uniform, neutral manner of calculating machines: Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it.90

As regards (b): if, as suggested, neither external influences in the form of social determinants nor inner motivations in the form of anthropological parameters can provide a plausible picture of social action, this prompts the question of what approach we can take instead to reduce the ‘discrepancy between the practically experienced reasons and the “objective”

87  Ibid., p. 47. On this example from game and conflict theory, which has been especially influential in the social and economic sciences, see in particular Axelrod 1984. I myself, it should be noted, have previously used the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ to analyse the advantages and disadvantages of doping in sport from an imagined agent’s perspective. This example offers further proof of how detached from reality such analyses are, which do nothing to explain actual doping practices or solve the problems associated with them. See on this point Franke and Bockrath 1995, p. 103. 88  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 48. A similar remark appears in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: the ‘untruth’ of all-subsuming instrumental reason ‘does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is prejudged. When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long familiar before any value has been assigned.’ Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 18. 89  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 86. See also endnote 2 on p. 294. 90  Ibid., p. 48. A little later, he elaborates: ‘But, at a deeper level, how can one fail to see that decision if decision there is, and the “system of preferences” which underlies it, depend not only on all the previous choices of the decider but also on the conditions in which his “choices” have been made, which include all the choices of those who have chosen for him, in his place, pre-judging his judgements and so shaping his judgement.’ Ibid., pp. 49–50.

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reasons of practice’.91 In order to answer this question, Bourdieu broadens his perspective. Having clearly shown the shortcomings of both objectivist and subjectivist social theories, he now places greater emphasis on the implicit social meanings neglected by the classical ‘picture of “hyperrationalised” action’. The strategy he adopts does not follow a clear pattern: he continues to develop his ‘theory of practice’ by directly engaging with established social and cultural theories, but at the same time he elaborates his own conception with ever-greater clarity by comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the theories that he analyses and so understanding them in terms of their mediation. On the one hand, the objective structures which the sociologist constructs in the objectivist moment, by setting aside the subjective representations of the agents, are the basis of subjective representations and they constitute the structural constraints which influence interactions; but, on the other hand, these representations also have to be remembered if one wants to account above all for the daily individual and collective struggles which aim at transforming or preserving these structures.92

Both these theoretical approaches, ‘logocentric structuralism’ and ‘phenomenological subjectivism’,93 remain incomplete if taken by themselves, despite all the insights into social relations that they afford in their own specific way. To counter this problem, we must transcend the ‘artificial opposition […] between structures and representations’ and ‘break away from the mode of thought that Cassirer calls substantialist’.94 Bourdieu further notes that ‘the major contribution of what one has to call the structuralist revolution consisted in applying to the social world a relational way of thinking, which is that of modern physics and mathematics, and which identifies the real not with substances but with relations’.95 We have already seen in the chapter on Cassirer that this change of  See footnote 71.  Bourdieu 1994a, pp. 125–126. 93  On this distinction between the ‘two classical accounts of action in cultural theory’, see Reckwitz 2000, pp. 313 and 316. Bourdieu’s critique of structuralism as a theory of cultural symbolic systems primarily focuses on Lévi-Strauss; in the 1970s, he also engaged intensively with theories of social and cultural phenomenology such as symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. 94  Bourdieu 1994a, p. 126. 95  Ibid. Elsewhere, Bourdieu explicitly highlights this influence when he says that he is ‘trying to develop a genetic structuralism’. Bourdieu 1994a, p. 14. 91 92

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­ erspective, which is not only oriented forwards ‘toward the world of p objects’, but also back to the ‘proper function of knowledge itself’,96 prevents us from ‘separating the “matter” of knowledge from its “form”’.97 If we apply this idea to social phenomena, it would entail that ideas and structures must be understood in terms of their reciprocal mediation, that is to say, as a. set of invisible relations, those very same relations that constitute a space of positions exterior to each other and defined by their proximity to, neighbourhood with or distance from each other, and also by their relative position—above or below, or even in between, in the middle. Sociology, in its objectivist moment, is a social topology, an analysis situs […] an analysis of relative positions and objective relations between these positions.98

The strength of this relational approach is that it allows us to understand objective structures as transsubjective symbolic orders that are not valid by themselves but only in interaction with individual perspectives and positions that in turn constitute social reality as a field of power’ or ‘space of power positions’.99 The reason Bourdieu speaks of ‘invisible relations’ between ‘power positions’ is that it is not the interactions between agents but, as Marx puts it, ‘relations […] independent of their will’100 that mark the ‘objective relations […] between the positions occupied in the distributions of resources’.101 The social competition for resources and scarce goods that are used ‘like the trumps in a game of cards’ involves various  See footnote 91 in Chap. 5.  See footnote 266 in Chap. 5. On the lack of social mediation of this (as Cassirer himself puts it) ‘new access to a universal philosophy of the cultural sciences’ see footnote 273 in Chap. 5. 98  Bourdieu 1994a, p. 126. 99  Ibid., p. 127. 100  Marx 1904, p. 11. On the break with aspects of Marx’s theory of class, see Bourdieu 1985. 101  Bourdieu 1994a, p. 128. The ‘objective relations’ are manifested in interactions, albeit only incompletely. Thus, for instance, we can ‘use the objective distances so as to have the advantages of proximity and the advantages of distance’, as in ‘strategies of condescension’ where ‘agents occupying a higher position’ negate social distances so as to ‘gain the profits of recognition’. Ibid., pp. 127–128. Typical examples of this are the symbolic advantages that an influential politician gains if they lapse into the local dialect at a campaign event, or the symbolic benefits of having a prestigious scientist present a popular science show. The ‘objective distances’ between the positions are by no means eliminated but rather reinforced, inasmuch as they are now also expressed at a symbolic level (‘Minister X is a man of the people’; ‘Professor Y is in touch with the real world’, etc.). 96 97

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forms of capital; Bourdieu, expanding on Marxist theory, includes not just economic but also cultural, symbolic and social capital.102 If individual agents occupy similar positions in social space, it is more likely that they will develop similar dispositions and practices. This finding, for which Bourdieu showed extensive empirical support in his earlier work, Distinction, appears to transcend the rigid division between social and mental that above was described in terms of an inner–outer difference.103 For it is neither the case that social constraints work one-sidedly on agents from the outside, nor that agents act in a purely self-determined, rational manner. Rather, in line with structuralist theory, ‘the social’ exists ‘in the collective mind: in the cognitive schemas of agents, which are represented as transsubjective codes.’104 Structuralism’s advantage over subjectivism, which ‘inclines people to reduce structures to interactions’, comes with the disadvantage of objectivism, which ‘tends to deduce actions and interactions from the structure’,105 and Bourdieu believes it also ultimately fails. Using numerous examples, he shows that the theoretical assumptions and constructions that structuralism uses to analyse familiar and unfamiliar forms of behaviour have little in common with actual practices. The ‘distance between practical logic and theoretical logic’, which structuralism claims to transcend by conceiving of its logical reconstructions as structurally functioning symbolic orders that agents remain unaware of, cannot, on his view, be eliminated by construing ‘every understanding, even practical understanding’ as ‘an interpretation’.106 Instead of adopting the structuralist assumption of a social unconscious of cognitive schemes that are 102  Ibid., p. 128. On the ‘break with the economism that leads one to reduce the social field, a multi-dimensional space, solely to the economic field’, see Bourdieu 1985, p. 273. For a more detailed account of the different types of capital, see Bourdieu 1986. On the ‘forms and effects’ of symbolic capital, which is mediated through practices of recognition and misrecognition pertaining to different forms of capital, see Bourdieu 1992a, p. 119. 103  See section (a) and footnote 69. On correspondence analysis as a method of field analysis, see Bourdieu 1984, pp. 114–168, 260–266 and 283–294. 104  Reckwitz 2000, p. 319. Reckwitz observes that in addition to transcending the inner– outer distinction, another advantage of structuralism is that it refutes the ‘intellectualist myth of the self-transparent subject’ and the notion of ‘theoretical substantialism’. Ibid., pp. 319 and 320. Bourdieu himself speaks of a ‘symbolic system, which, like the system of phonemes, is organized according to the logic of difference, differential deviation, thereby constituted as significant distinction.’ Bourdieu 1985, p. 730. 105  Bourdieu 1994a, p. 129. 106  Bourdieu 2000, pp. 52 and 53.

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described using formal means and methods (genealogies, models, statistics, etc.) without regard to the discrepancy between theoretical interests and practical needs,107 Bourdieu seeks to incorporate agents’ subjective perspectives and actions into his theoretical accounts, but without repeating the mistake made by subjectivism whereby ‘the naive philosophy of action and of the subject’s relation to his action […] is applied in their spontaneous sociology by subjects concerned to defend the lived truth of their experience of social action’.108 Bourdieu is not simply denying the merits of structuralism here; however, the use of phenomenological-hermeneutical approaches does help to explain agents’ practical understandings, which on a structuralist reading are already tied to ‘the guiding thread of systematisation’109 before being considered as specific phenomena. In light of the structuralist insight that agents’ social positions can only be defined in terms of their relative place within a multidimensional social space, which he vividly characterises as a ‘field of forces’ or ‘set of objective power relations’,110 Bourdieu points to an unavoidable ‘break with a mode of thinking and perception attached to 107  ‘Because he forgets what defines its specificity, the social scientist credits agents with his own vision, and in particular an interest in pure knowledge and pure understanding which is normally alien to them.’ Ibid., p. 53. By reference to practical examples, such as the use of surveys in empirical social research, Bourdieu illustrates the oft-overlooked misunderstandings that result when respondents are asked ‘to be their own sociologists’. Ibid., p. 59. 108  Bourdieu et al. 1991, p. 17. 109  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 15. 110  Bourdieu 1985, p. 724. He is referring to the dependencies and antagonisms between agents in social fields, which he expressly does not understand in terms of ‘some kind of immanent self-development of the structure.’ Bourdieu 1992a, p. 104. Elsewhere, Bourdieu does admittedly write that ‘in highly differentiated societies, the social cosmos is made up of a number of such relatively autonomous social microcosms, i.e., spaces of objective relations that are the site of a logic and a necessity that are specific and irreducible to those that regulate other fields’. Ibid., p. 97. But in the same interview, he says just as emphatically that ‘the products of a given field may be systematic without being products of a system, and especially of a system characterized by common functions, internal cohesion, and self-regulation—so many postulates of systems theory that must be rejected’. Ibid., p.  103. Thus, instead of reducing the dynamics and coherences of social fields to communicatively produced relations of meaning and system-specific codes, Bourdieu advocates greater (empirical) consideration of the ‘forces that are active in the field’. Ibid., p. 101. He believes this is the only way to determine the limits and effects of social fields, which cannot be established ‘by an act of imposition’. Ibid., p. 100. Nassehi notes the ‘primacy of the social dimension’ in Bourdieu, which he says is the ‘most stable structuralist legacy of his sociology’ and marks ‘something almost like a non-empirical, hence transcendental aspect of social processes’. Nassehi 2004, pp. 173–174. If we put aside the unexplained consequences of this view, we can agree with Nassehi that Bourdieu’s ‘unmasking of practice as practical, real-time application of a “social” logic’ is necessarily opposed to any ‘rigid structuralist top-down logic’. Ibid., p. 173.

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pure immediacy’,111 including with regard to his demand that agential practices and understandings be taken into account. He had earlier criticised the ‘phenomenological’ mode of knowledge, which unquestioningly apprehends the social world as ‘self-evident’ and ‘natural’ without reflecting ‘on itself’ and the ‘conditions of its own possibility’, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice.112 This ‘spontaneous sociology’, which has been highly successful in academic sociology ‘under various guises’113 despite its flaws, promises, in the name of ‘lived experience’ and the rights of subjectivity’,114 to elevate agents’ perspectives, almost without mediation, to the status of the starting point of analysis and the standard of interpretation. Bourdieu criticises this naive form of ‘misunderstood humanity’,115 which seeks to capture ‘lived’ or ‘primary’ experience, on the grounds that a ‘science of the social world’ that proceeds in this way merely enables an ‘inventory of the crudely given’ and hence is effectively part and parcel of ‘the dominant order’.116 Interpretations of purportedly intentional understandings that totalise subjective attitudes and perspectives prevent us from ‘inquir[ing] into the conditions and limits of validity of that experience’.117 Consequently, a ‘specific experience of the social world, connected to a determinate set of economic and social conditions’,118 is generalised in a way that is sociostructurally underdetermined. Bourdieu therefore believes it is essential to break with this theoretical tradition based on interpreting or reconstructing meaning.  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 19.  Bourdieu 1977, p. 3. 113  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 18. 114  Bourdieu 1977, p. 4. 115  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 18. 116  Bourdieu 1977, pp. 3–4, and Bourdieu 1976, p. 150. The same point also applies, for instance, to the method of grounded theory, which was developed based on symbolic interactionism and is intended to allow subjective perspectives to be reconstructed with minimal preconceptions and assumptions. See Glaser and Strauss 1967. However, neither the participant perspectives that are to be reconstructed nor the theoretical formulations based on this reconstruction can be understood as an analytic zero point. Both are structurally committed to a large number of assumptions, despite purporting not to be a ‘theory’ but rather a ‘methodology for finding the theories latent in the data’. Legewie and Schervier-Legewie 2007, p. 73. (N.B. Bourdieu 1977 and 1976 refer respectively to the English and German translations of Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, which at some points diverge significantly both from the French original and from each other.) 117  Bourdieu 1976, p. 151. 118  Ibid. 111 112

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This break is expressed not least in Bourdieu’s firm rejection of ‘Sartre’s anthropology’, which was highly influential in post-war French philosophy and seeks to maintain a ‘rigorous dualism’ between ‘the pure transparency of the subject and the mineral opacity of the thing’.119 But despite all his legitimate criticisms (both biographically and theoretically grounded) of Sartre’s powerfully eloquent subjectivism, Bourdieu also finds valuable suggestions in Sartre for how to answer a question that was of central importance to him: how can the ‘difference between the theoretical viewpoint and the practical viewpoint’, which is ignored by both subjectivist and objectivist approaches, be theoretically expressed in the reconstruction of practical acts of understanding so as to attain a ‘correct understanding of practice perceived in terms of its own logic’?120 For one crucial aspect of the reconstruction of particular practices and collective action schemes, which are reducible neither to social structures nor to conscious volitions, is that (to paraphrase Sartre) they must not be ‘merely carried toward an end’ but rather directed towards themselves121 in order to ‘escape the obligatory alternative between subjectivism and objectivism’.122 And although Bourdieu, as we have seen, describes himself as a proponent of 119  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 43. It is notable that Bourdieu did not exactly choose ‘small fry’ when it came to positioning his ‘critique of theoretical reason’ within the scientific field, contrasting it on the one hand to Sartre and Elster and on the other to Lévi-Strauss, Saussure and Chomsky. On Bourdieu’s assessment, Sartre’s work is paradigmatic of the ‘mythology’ of the ‘free’ or ‘total’ intellectual (Bourdieu 2007, p. 23), while Lévi-Strauss is the personification of a scholarly attitude that ‘makes it possible, in a somewhat paradoxical way, to hold the social world at a distance, even to “deny” it in Freud’s sense, and thereby to aestheticize it’. Ibid., p. 42. Against the backdrop of his ethnological experiences in Algeria, these two beliefs led Bourdieu early in his academic career to ‘a decisive break with scholastic experience’ and ‘a deep refusal of the scholastic point of view which is the principle of loftiness, a social distance, in which I could never feel at home, and to which the relationship to the social world associated with certain social origins no doubt predisposes.’ Ibid., pp. 37 and 41. 120  Bourdieu 2000, p. 54. 121  Sartre 2003, p. 473. In the same passage, Sartre writes: ‘The for-itself which exists in the voluntary mode wishes to recover itself in so far as it decides and acts,’ adding, in a subjectivist vein, that ‘to the extent therefore that the will is an instance of reflection, the fact of its being placed so as to act on the voluntary level demands for its foundation a more profound intention’. Ibid., p. 474. In his commentary on Sartre, Bourdieu does rightly note that there are other passages in the earlier writer’s work that give greater emphasis to the constitutive conditions of action. See Bourdieu 1990a, p. 43. This does not, however, change his fundamental critique of ‘Sartre’s anthropology’, but rather points to the points of contact between phenomenological and praxeological theories, which we have not yet considered. 122  Bourdieu 1989c, p. 72.

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‘genetic structuralism’,123 it is striking that his elaboration of his ‘theory of practice’ was influenced by philosophical positions124 that, all his criticisms and rejections of them notwithstanding, offer Bourdieu the sought-after ‘modus operandi’ that allows agents to relate their social activities to each other in a way that makes their environment practically comprehensible and (at least to some degree) controllable.

6.2   Praxeology of Motion The rejection of mere differences of viewpoint, which Bourdieu criticises with reference to the ‘obligatory alternatives of dualistic thought (mechanism/finalism, objectivism/subjectivism, holism/individualism)’,125 can be understood as a form of ‘thinking in contradictions’. Instead of drawing a rigid contrast between opposing social theories, in which the purported truth of one is set against the purported untruth of the other, Bourdieu points to the contradictory relation between subjectivist and objectivist positions. Whereas according to Hegel the mediation between thought and things is constituted by ‘consciousness examin[ing] its own  See footnote 95.  This indicates the lasting impact that the three ‘big Hs’—Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, who profoundly influenced Sartre’s generation in 1930s France—had even on the critic of ‘scholastic thinking’. One need only think of Bourdieu’s reminiscences about Husserl and Heidegger, who played a key role in his choice to ‘escap[e] from the choice between a structuralism without subject and the philosophy of the subject’ Bourdieu 1994a, p. 10. Reckwitz remarks that, especially in the Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu’s ‘conceptualisation of body and mind’ is ‘blatantly’ inspired by ‘Heidegger’s Being and Time’, while his ‘analysis of subjective temporality’ is ‘explicitly’ based on Husserl. Reckwitz 2000, p. 318, n. 223. Even the astute critic of The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Bourdieu 1991a) reports that he read Heidegger‘s magnum opus Being and Time ‘with a certain fascination’ and that, along with Husserl’s Ideas, it helped him ‘a great deal’ in his ‘efforts to analyse the ordinary experience of the social’. Bourdieu 1994a, p. 5. Even the titles of his works (compare the Pascalian Meditations, for instance, to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations) hint at Bourdieu’s ambivalent philosophical inheritance, albeit one that is rarely explicitly addressed or acknowledged by direct quotations in the texts themselves. In his ‘critique of scholastic reason’, Bourdieu appears to be attempting to make up for this omission by summarily returning to questions that he ‘would rather have left to philosophy’. Bourdieu 2000, p. 7. However, this critique of the scholastic worldview, formulated as part of a retrospective on his work as a whole, does not save Bourdieu from being confronted with the lingering residues of his own philosophical past. 125  Bourdieu 2000, p.  8. On Hegel’s distinction between ‘thinking in contradictions’ [Denken in Widersprüchen] and ‘contradictory thinking’ [Widerspruchsdenken] with corresponding ‘differences of viewpoint’, see footnote 51 in Chap. 4. 123 124

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self’, allowing the ‘movement of the concept’ to be experienced as the ‘movement of the subject matter’,126 Bourdieu flatly rejects this claim as ‘a fetishism of reason and a fanaticism of the universal’.127 Although Hegel, as we saw earlier, enjoins the thinking subject ‘purely to look on’128 at the object, thereby describing both the spontaneous mediation and the receptive side of consciousness, Bourdieu insists on the ‘ignored or repressed difference between the common world and the scientific worlds’, which on his view is scholastically misunderstood or dogmatically concealed in the conceptually required ‘monopoly of the universal’.129 Since this assessment is primarily based on Hegel’s construal of philosophy as history of philosophy, ‘which saves the past by integrating it into the ultimate and therefore eternal present of absolute knowledge’,130 it should be noted that Bourdieu misses what was earlier (in the discussion of the relation between genesis and validity) described as ‘history in truth’,131 which according to Hegel’s Phenomenology would be simply inconceivable without reference to experience and practice. It is of course true that ‘Hegel’s philosophy, a philosophy of spirit, held fast to idealism’.132 However, this misses the dialectical aspect of Hegelian philosophy—‘the hovering, suspended quality’—for which ‘the choice of a starting point’ is a matter of indifference because it ‘does not recognize a first something of this kind as a fixed principle that remains inalterable and identical with itself as thought progresses’.133 This is not just of historical or theory-internal significance, but points to the element of motion in dialectical thought itself, which ‘performs the negative labor—the dissolution of individual concepts, the reflection of the immediate and then the sublation of reflection.’134 Bourdieu, by contrast, focuses solely on the  See footnotes 58, 60 and 61 in Chap. 4.  Bourdieu 2000, p. 78. 128  See footnote 58 in Chap. 4. 129  Bourdieu 2000, pp. 50 and 70. 130  Ibid., p.  46. It is notable that Bourdieu makes this critique solely with reference to Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Hegel 2009. 131  See footnote 17. 132  Adorno 1993, p. 10. 133  Ibid., p. 12. The Phenomenology proceeds from ‘sensuous-certainty’, while in the Logic the movement of thought begins with ‘being as such’. Hegel 2018, p.  60, and Hegel 2010a, p. 56. 134  Adorno 1993, p.  10. In the same passage, Adorno remarks that it is only the self-­ contradictory ‘identity of subject and object’ in Hegel’s idealism that gives it the ‘strength of totality’ that performs this negative labour. 126 127

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‘extreme formulations’ found in Hegel’s ‘history of philosophy’, which ‘by dissolving anything not proper to consciousness—in other words, the given moment of reality—into a positing by the infinite subject’135 attempted to outdo the earlier idealism of Kant. We could criticise this for being faulty philosophical reasoning or reject it as a scholastic idiosyncrasy, but what appears more important here is the reference to the praxeological interpretation of ‘anything not proper to consciousness—in other words, the given moment of reality’, which Bourdieu connects not to Hegel but to Marx and his Theses on Feuerbach.136 Bourdieu even places the first half of Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach as an epigraph at the start of his Outline of a Theory of Practice: The principal defect of all materialism up to now—including that of Feuerbach—is that the external object, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an object or an intuition; but not as concrete human activity, as practice, in a subjective way. This is why the active aspect was developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism—but only in an abstract way, since idealism naturally does not know real concrete activity as such.137

This thesis initially claims that knowledge begins with ‘intuition’, rather than a spirit or concept extracted from it. However, Marx immediately adds the crucial qualifier, directed against Feuerbach, that ‘materialism up to now’ has one-sidedly reduced intuition by grasping it merely in ‘the form of an object’, whereas he (Marx) understands it as concretely and subjectively mediated, i.e. as ‘concrete human activity’ and ‘practice’. In his interpretation of the Theses, Ernst Bloch remarks that Feuerbach ‘is “not content” with cerebrality, he wants his feet on the perceived ground’.138 However, it becomes clear. that with contemplative sensoriness, the only kind Feuerbach understands, his feet cannot yet move and the ground itself remains unnegotiable. The  Ibid., pp. 10–11.  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 50 and Bourdieu 2000, p. 136. 137  Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach, as cited in Bourdieu 1977, p. vi. Cf. Marx and Engels 1960, p. 197. The thesis continues: ‘Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.’ 138  Bloch 1995, p. 255. 135 136

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person who perceives in this way does not even try to move, he remains standing in a state of comfortable enjoyment.139

A similarly vivid passage in Capital makes clear what Marx means by ‘real concrete activity’. In almost praxeological terms, he describes concrete labour under capitalist conditions of production and valorisation as a human practice: [Man sets] in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.140

The ‘real concrete activity’, whose description bears the clear imprint of Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’, is subject to the necessities and constraints of the bourgeois-capitalist mode of production. The notion of ‘practical-critical activity’ is already far removed from a contemplative materialism that absolutely rejects the ‘practical or subjective view [Anschauung]’, regarding it as ‘not pure’ and as ‘tainted with egoism’.141 However, there is a striking, paradoxical similarity to idealist epistemology in Marx’s conception of the productive spirit as labour. He is aware of this when, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, he highlights ‘the outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie’, which ‘grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labour’.142 Admittedly, he does also refer in unequivocal terms to Hegel’s ‘one-sidedness’ and ‘limitations’, and claims that he ‘sees only the positive, not the negative side of labor’ and defines it—in idealist spirit—as ‘abstractly mental’.143 Thus, while Feuerbach attempts to transcend abstract thought and ‘seeks real Objects 139  Ibid. This passage comes from the section entitled ‘Epistemological Group: Perception and Activity’, which deals with the first, third and fifth theses. 140  Marx 2011, p. 198. 141  Feuerbach 2004, p. 199. The passage continues: ‘On the contrary, the theoretic view is joyful, self-sufficing, happy; for here the object calls forth love and admiration; in the light of the free intelligence it is radiant as a diamond, transparent as a rock-crystal. The theoretic view is aesthetic, whereas the practical is unaesthetic.’ 142  Marx 1959, p. 131. 143  Ibid., p. 67.

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rather than reified thoughts’144 but without ever comprehending ‘real concrete activity’, Hegel takes ‘seriously the dynamics of the epistemological concept of work, at least in historical-idealistic terms’145 but without, as Marx critically notes, comprehending ‘the real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being’.146 One (albeit merely conceptual) advantage of the metaphysics of spirit over merely intuitive materialism is that it emphasises the ‘subject- and activity-factor’,147 which manifests as ‘the constantly oscillating subject– object relation called work’.148 It thereby shows that what appears to be immediately given has in fact already been processed—that is, in Hegel’s terms, it is an absolute metaphysical principle. Epistemologically, it can be granted that we must appropriate something through work before we can know it. Marx’s critique is therefore directed against the ‘alienation of man who knows himself’ in the abstract ‘doings of philosophy’.149 Bourdieu takes up this idea when he rejects Hegel’s scholastic way of thinking. However, as we have seen, this critique only bears on conceptions that understand the given as produced by spirit but do not consider the mediating moment of social labour.150 It thus rejects the idealist notion of the privilege of intellectual labour, which as a purportedly self-sufficient substance (that is to say, one decoupled from physical labour) ultimately finds its truth in itself. The ‘exposition, taken to the extreme, of the bourgeois celebration of labor’ that can be found in Hegel’s thought, and also in its own way in Marx, fails on account of its hubris, since the ‘deceptive identification […] with the absolute’ cannot be brought off.151 Just as spirit and labour cannot be equated, nor can ‘real concrete activity’ sovereignly create its own object. This is especially true under antagonistic class relations, which  Bloch 1995, p. 258.  Ibid., p. 257. 146  Marx 1959, p. 131. 147  Bloch 1995, p. 260. 148  Ibid., p. 257. 149  Marx 1959, p. 131. 150  While in the Phenomenology, the relation between master and servant is still defined by reference to ‘determinate being’ and describes ‘a freedom that remains bogged down within the bounds of servility’, Hegel regards the third stage of ‘natural religion’ as a self-created product of the human consciousness, ‘in which spirit encounters spirit’. Hegel 2018, pp. 116 and 403. 151  Adorno 1993, p.  25. According to Martin Jay, in an unpublished remark Adorno accused Marx of wanting to turn the whole world into ‘a giant workhouse’. Jay 1996, p. 57. 144 145

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Marx, unlike Hegel, does not translate into ‘something transcendent, however positive its nature’.152 However, the same is also true for Hegel if we distinguish his concept of system from that of the positive sciences. What makes the difference here is the spirit of speculation, such that the truth of a philosophical system remains incomplete unless the ‘identity of subject and object’153 is redeemed. And since neither spirit nor labour, neither absolute nor conditioned, neither actus purus nor actus personae are reconciled, their dialectic remains a thorn in the side of any attempt build a philosophical system. ‘Spirit knows that without being permitted to know it; this is the poverty of philosophy’.154 But practice also knows it, yet without being able to eliminate the contradiction ‘after the attempt to change the world miscarried’.155 When Bourdieu claims that Hegel’s philosophical history is a ‘theodicy, which saves the past by integrating it into the ultimate and therefore eternal present of absolute knowledge’,156 this is only half the truth. For Hegel as for Marx, the ‘poverty of philosophy’ is bound up with the ‘poverty of practice’, even if the shortest and best known of the theses on Feuerbach purports to transcend the philosophical viewpoint and replace it with ‘instructions for real intervention’.157 But as long as the ‘blind fury of

 Adorno 1993, p. 27.  Ibid. 154  Ibid., p. 26. 155  Adorno 2004, p. 3, referring to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. 156  Bourdieu 2000, p. 46. 157  Bloch 1995, p. 275. Bloch is referring here to Marx, according to whom ‘philosophy cannot realize itself without the abolition of the proletariat’, which coincides with the ‘final act of communism’. Ibid., p. 281. Bloch interprets the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which is antithetically opposed to Feuerbach and Hegel—‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx and Engels 1960, p. 199)—in terms of ‘an active philosophy’ that ‘set[s] sail’ to complete its ‘proletarian revolutionary mission’. Bloch 1995, pp. 278 and 280. It has been objected to Bloch’s optimistic orthodox view that both its concrete and its utopian conditions remain in the realm of the abstract and that, despite aspiring to be an ultima philosophia, it retains the structure of a prima philosophia: ‘The colour that Bloch intends becomes grey in its totality. Hope is not a principle.’ Adorno 1980, p. 60. 152 153

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activity’158 remains the credo of bourgeois labour and commodity production, ‘real concrete activity’ will be under the spell of social necessities.159 Bourdieu’s analysis of ‘forms of capital’160 is not intended as a totalising ‘critique of political economy’. While Marx begins his analysis of the capitalist mode of production by examining its most basic ‘unit’, the ‘commodity’,161 Bourdieu, as we have seen, advocates a ‘break with the economism that leads one to reduce the social field, a multi-dimensional space, solely to the economic field’.162 This allows him to demonstrate class relations even in domains such as taste or personal preference where a traditional view would hardly have suspected they might be found, or else where they would have been overhastily rejected as symptoms of ideological delusion. Thus, while Marx, in an objectivist spirit, develops an economically determined understanding of class based on ‘the twofold character of the labour embodied in commodities’163 and regards the abolition of private ownership of the means of production as the necessary condition for abolishing capitalist relations of production, Bourdieu is more interested in ‘different kinds of power or capital’ that serve ‘as principles of construction of […] social space’.164 Although the difference between the classes of those who own the means of production and those who do not is central to the ‘critique of political economy’, Marx’s analysis primarily focuses on ‘the capital-relation itself’,165 whose social character is

 Adorno 1978, p. 156.  Bloch is well aware of ‘how great the falsifiability of Thesis 11 is […] in the heads of scorners of intelligence and practicists.’ Bloch 1995, p. 276. To a modern reader, his ‘solution’, which he bases on the claim that ‘real practice cannot take a single stride without having consulted theory economically and philosophically’ while simultaneously referring to Lenin’s dictum that ‘Marx’s doctrine is all-powerful because it is true’, will seem more like black and white painting based on rigid principles. Ibid., p. 277. 160  See footnote 102. 161  Marx 2011, p. 41. 162  See footnote 102. 163  Marx 2011, p. 48 (in the original context, this is the title of a section). 164  Bourdieu 1985, p. 724. 165  Marx 2011, p. 673. Notably, a rudimentary analysis of ‘classes’ only appears at the end of the third volume of Capital, appended by editor Friedrich Engels’s terse remark ‘at this point the manuscript breaks off’. Marx 1991, p. 1026. The fact that Marx does not ‘make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them’ (Marx 2011, p.  15) is clearly expressed by his description of ‘characters who appear on the economic stage’ as ‘personifications of the economical relations that exist between them’. Ibid., p. 97. 158 159

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‘inseparable from the production of commodities’.166 For Bourdieu, class and capital are likewise mutually conditioned, and he even classes economic capital as the dominant form of capital.167 But he pays little attention to the historical emergence of the different kinds of capital ‘that are current in the different fields’.168 His investigation of the ‘principles of construction of social space’ instead takes the existence of the various forms of capital as given, and focuses on the unequal availability and distribution of these resources. The structure of their distribution is an expression of unequal power potentials and class differences that are not reducible to a ‘universal explanatory principle’169 since they vary from field to field and hence must be analysed in a manner specific to each field. On this view, a person’s particular taste (with regards, for instance, to their bodily comportment) is a subjective expression of the ‘deepest dispositions of the habitus’ and the ‘most indisputable materialization of class taste’.170 Particular tastes can be incorporated and formed ‘quite unconsciously’171; but since the importance of their effects can vary between social classes, different classes may rank them ‘in very different ways’ and using different ‘categories’.172 Thus, people are not mere bearers of universal relations of power and exploitation, but rather social ‘agents’, who are to be understood neither as mere ‘characters’ or ‘character masks’ nor as sovereign subjects.173

 Ibid., p. 83.  See Bourdieu 1985, p. 724, and Bourdieu 1986, pp. 241–242. 168  Bourdieu 1985, p. 724. 169  Bourdieu 1984, p.  113. Bourdieu warns against defining a social class ‘based on its objective relations to other classes’ (Bourdieu 1994b, p. 57) and instead speaks of ‘a balance-­ sheet, drawn up at a particular moment, of the class struggle’ Bourdieu 1984, p. 114. 170  In full: ‘Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It is an incorporated principle of classification which governs all forms of incorporation, choosing and modifying everything that the body ingests and digests and assimilates, physiologically and psychologically. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste, which it manifests in several ways. It does this first in the seemingly most natural features of the body, the dimensions (volume, height, weight) and shapes (round or square, stiff or supple, straight or curved) of its visible forms, which express in countless ways a whole relation to the body, i.e., a way of treating it, caring for it, feeding it, maintaining it, which reveals the deepest dispositions of the habitus.’ Bourdieu 1984, p. 190. 171  Bourdieu 1986, p. 244. Bourdieu is speaking here of the acquisition of cultural capital. 172  Bourdieu 1984, p. 190. 173  ‘Agents do not act only for themselves but, as social beings, always also for society, that is to say, society works mediately through them.’ Krais and Gebauer 2002, p.  84, n. 1. (‘Agents’ in the original is ‘handelnde Individuen’; the authors specifically note that German does not have a precise equivalent for the French and English ‘agent’.) 166 167

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By contrast with Marx, who classified the ‘three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production’ according to their different sources of income, namely ‘wages, profit and ground-rent’,174 Bourdieu observes that ‘propositions that claim universal validity about whole societies or constitutive groups of those societies are nothing but abstract classifications’.175 As well as the economic positions in social space that objectively distinguish classes and their members, there are also ‘symbolic relations’ that function as ‘distinguishing signs’ between people and classes and ‘through which subjects express their position in the social structure’.176 Given the praxeological emphasis on the ‘subject- and activity-­factor’,177 this raises the question of how individual actions are translated into social practices and incorporated into collective structures of meaning. For if this cannot be done by one-sidedly drawing on universal constructs such as ‘culture’, ‘structure’, ‘social classes’ or ‘modes of production’ that purport to be ‘autonomous realities’,178 and nor can particular ‘forms of practice and works directed at the subjective end of action’179 by themselves provide an adequate understanding of the social world, then on a praxeological conception the only option is. to return to practice, the site of the dialectic of the opus operatum and the modus operandi; of the objectified products and the incorporated products of historical practice; of structures and habitus.180  Marx 1991, p. 1025.  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 56. 176  Ibid., pp. 57 and 58. Bourdieu refers to Max Weber’s distinction between ‘class’ (economic situation relative to the goods and labour market) and ‘status’ (social position relative to symbolic goods such as honour and prestige). Unlike Weber, he does not separate the two, but attempts to always keep them ‘simultaneously’ in view. For although the ‘distinguishing signs, as a symbolic doubling of the positional values that attach to every position, every “rank” in the social structure’, are characterised as ‘second-order differences’, relative to the ‘economic order’ they do still possess a certain ‘autonomy’ and ‘logic’, with their own signs and meanings. Ibid., pp. 58 and 59. ‘Therefore out of all the distinctions, the ones with the greatest prestige are those that most clearly symbolise position in the social structure, such as clothing, language or accent and, in particular, “manners”, taste and cultivation. For they give the impression of being fundamental qualities of a person.’ Ibid., p. 60. 177  See footnote 147. 178  Bourdieu 1976, p. 159. 179  Ibid., p. 164. 180  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 52. Elsewhere, he puts this idea as follows: ‘Knowledge of the social world has to take into account a practical knowledge of this world which pre-exists it and which it must not fail to include in its object, although, as a first stage, this knowledge has to be constituted against the partial and interested representations provided by practical knowledge.’ Bourdieu 1984, p. 467. 174 175

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Bourdieu’s attempt, under the heading of a ‘theory’181 or ‘logic’182 of practice, to conceptualise this ‘site of the dialectic’ reveals even the simple models and methods of sociological research used to classify everyday practices to be artefacts ‘as impeccable as they are unreal’.183 But even practical customs, such as the use of a map that ‘substitutes the homogeneous, continuous space of geometry for the discontinuous, patchy space of practical pathways’,184 alters our mode of access to reality insofar as it presupposes the validity of an artificial way of seeing that no longer has anything in common with the ‘geometry in the tangible world’.185 A similar observation could be made about the practical use of a calendar, which. substitutes a linear, homogeneous, continuous time for practical time, which is made up of islands of incommensurable duration, each with its own rhythm, a time that races or drags, depending on what one is doing.186

By contrast with the theoretically assumed or ideal-typically constructed homogeneity of social meanings and perceptual schemes, the practically produced worlds of meaning follow an ‘approximate, “fuzzy” logic’187 that provides agents with a practicable, straightforward way to manage and respond to rapidly changing circumstances and requirements. The peculiar feature of this ‘practical logic’ or ‘logic of practice’ is that it can only be wholly comprehended in action itself—at the price that its constitutive conditions and limitations, functions and mechanisms, illusions and dangers, remain unknown: ‘Real mastery of this logic is only possible for someone who is completely mastered by it, who possesses it, but so much so that he is totally possessed by it, in other words depossessed’.188  Bourdieu 1977.  This is the title of chapter five of Bourdieu 1990a. 183  Ibid., p. 85. See also footnote 107. The discussion that follows has been adapted from the relevant passages on the Logic of Practice in Bockrath 2008b, pp. 57–66. 184  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 84. 185  Ibid., p. 93. In the same passage, Bourdieu remarks that in the ‘language of mathematics’ terms lose their ‘practical senses as movements of the body’ and assume different meanings instead. 186  Ibid., p. 84. 187  Ibid., p. 87. 188  Ibid., p. 14. Elsewhere, he adds that ‘the truth of practice’ consists in ‘a blindness to its own truth’. Ibid., p. 91. If we wish to interpret this idea dialectically, we could add that the ‘truth of practice’ is the lingering non-identical or resistant element that cannot be grasped conceptually. 181 182

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However, the ‘theory of practice’ by no means simply abandons its theoretical claims in favour of practical experience, nor does it idealise practice.189 Bourdieu’s frequent assertions that the ‘logic of practice’ will elude any attempts to capture it using theoretical models and constructs are intended to encourage us to instead approach its practical meaning by bringing it ‘back to its basis in practice’.190 On this view, although theoretical constructs and explanations can be used to illuminate conceptual relations, they are not suited to resolving practical issues: ‘One can say that gymnastics is geometry so long as this is not taken to mean that the gymnast is a geometer’.191 Given (to stick with Bourdieu’s metaphor) that in everyday life geometers are the exception and gymnasts are the rule, this makes clear how we should understand the ‘logic of practice’. Insofar as social actions are primarily of practical relevance—that is to say, they are practically performed and comprehended before they are dissected, analysed and interpreted by theory, they need to be understood in terms of their present, situated entanglements, exigencies and necessities, which must be faced ‘in the heat of the moment’, ‘on the spot’.192 Universalising (synoptic, analogical, synchronising, totalising) forms prevent this.193 Only if we grasp the practical and bodily significance of social actions, for instance by defining temporal sequences in terms of their ‘duration’194 and

 See footnote 43.  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 93. 191  Ibid. 192  Ibid., p. 82. 193  On the historical development and significance of these forms, see Foucault 2005, pp. 55–85. 194  On the use of this term, borrowed from Bergson, see Bourdieu 1990a, p. 84. Elsewhere, he remarks, ‘Practice unfolds in time and it has all the correlative properties, such as irreversibility, that synchronization destroys. Its temporal structure, that is, its rhythm, its tempo, and above all its directionality, is constitutive of its meaning.’ Ibid., p. 81. 189 190

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spatial relations as ‘geometric practice’,195 does their practical logic reveal itself, which differs significantly from the ‘logic of the logician’.196 Instead of an external, supposedly sovereign viewpoint from which the described social phenomena can be objectified, and instead of eliminating distance through practical involvement, Bourdieu suggests that social practices such as gestures, habits, actions and judgements are to be understood as expressions of social meaning that cannot be adequately explained by either objectivist or subjectivist theories. The praxeological approach attends to relations between bodily behaviours, practical forms of understanding, field-specific conditions and cultural patterns of meaning, and rejects all social and cultural theories that treat structures and practices in isolation. It is thus no accident that the mediation of the two poles is central to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The concept of habitus helps to clarify the praxeological conception by explaining the relations between the positions that agents occupy in social space and their behaviours and lifestyles. Bourdieu as it were situates habitus between structures and actions, orders and perspectives, positions and dispositions: What I call habitus serves as an intermediary between position or status within a social space and specific practices, preferences, etc.; it is a basic, general attitude, a disposition towards the world, which leads to systematic position-takings—but that, because it is a condensation of an agent’s prior biography, can be relatively independent of the position they occupy at a given point in time. In other words, highly disparate things (and in my view this is surprising enough) are in fact related: how a person speaks, dances, 195  Loïc Wacquant explains this Bourdieuian idea using an example from the world of sport: ‘For the player in action the soccer field is not an “object”, that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the “yard lines”; those which demarcate the “penalty area”) and is articulated into sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field.’ Wacquant 1992b, p. 21. 196  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 86.

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laughs, reads, what they read, what they like, who their friends and acquaintances are, etc. All these things are intimately connected.197

It is notable that the relations and connections described here can be shown by analysing a particular habitus in its own right, and do not need to be reconstructed using general structural analyses or intentional analyses of action. We need look no further than everyday practices and customs to observe the knowledge and skills developed in the course of acquiring the habitus, which (subject to certain limits) stand ‘in a twofold relationship, structured and structuring, to the environment’.198 On a praxeological view, it is significant that these habitual skills and knowledge are not an intellectual capability, but instead manifest as ‘comprehension through the body’ or ‘corporeal “intelligence”’.199 Unlike in consciousness-­ centric understandings of knowledge (episteme) and skill (techne), which subsume practically acquired experiences and abilities (technai) under unifying concepts, theories or ideas,200 the concept of habitus makes explicit reference to practically inculcated habits and skills (empeiria), which are constitutive of action independently of theoretical insights or rational goals. On the basis of routine sensory experiences, habitus enables a ‘practical understanding’201 that can be applied relatively reliably to recurring  Bourdieu 1989b, p. 25.  Bourdieu 2000, p. 144. 199  Ibid. 200  This applies not only to knowledge in its modern form, which inaugurated the productive combination of law-governed reason and experimental experience, but also, albeit in a highly particular manner, to Plato’s true knowledge of the good (logos), which by contrast with practical skills and forms of knowledge, such as skilled trades or the art of war, lays claim to universal validity. See Heinrich 1986, p.  164, as well as the discussion of Heinrich in Bockrath 2012a, pp. 10–14. 201  Unlike Max Weber, Bourdieu does not distinguish social actions according to whether or not they correspond to a subjective meaning. Rather, he differentiates between actions that are preceded by reflection on ends and means, and those that are directly woven into social practices and are based on a logic of practice that ‘understands only in order to act’. ‘Practical sense’ is, according to Bergson, ‘caught up in “the matter in hand”, totally present in the present and in the practical functions that it finds there in the form of objective potentialities’. Consequently, ‘practice excludes attention to itself (that is, to the past). It is unaware of the principles that govern it and the possibilities they contain; it can only discover them by enacting them, unfolding them in time.’ Bourdieu 1990a, pp. 91–92. Elsewhere, he writes, ‘the action of practical sense is a kind of necessary coincidence—which gives it the appearance of preestablished harmony—between a habitus and a field (or a position in a field). Someone who has incorporated the structures of the field (or of a particular game) ‘finds his place’ there immediately, without having to deliberate, and brings out, without even thinking about it, ‘things to be done’ (business, pragmata).’ Bourdieu 2000, p. 143. 197 198

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situations and objects and, at least in the relevant social field, opens up various strategic options for dealing with those situations and objects. By contrast with mental operations that intentionally ascribe meanings, Bourdieu understands the ‘practical sense’ (situated prior to the division between physical and psychical events) as ‘social necessity turned into nature, converted into motor schemes and body automatisms’.202 There are two aspects to the embodiment of habitus. Firstly, it functions as a ‘memory pad’203 or ‘depositor[y] of deferred thoughts’;204 it is ‘history become nature, which as such negates because realised as second nature’.205 On a praxeological view, this form of realisation mainly involves processes of corporeal and affective exchange with an agent’s social environment, and by and large excludes acts of becoming-conscious. Sociocultural structures, rules and values are primarily incorporated through bodily processes of learning, in which habitus is gradually formed in accordance with field-specific schemes of perception, evaluation and action. In these processes, as Bourdieu puts it, ‘the social order inscribes itself in bodies’.206 However, this ‘inscription’ is not simply a passive occurrence. Bourdieu describes the ‘social sense’ generated by habitus as ‘a practical, doxic consensus on the sense of practices’,207 thus emphasising the active side of bodily behaviours. Just as when speaking our linguistic training allows us to produce an unlimited number of sentences, seemingly without effort and without our being aware of the ‘structures of the linguistic market, which impose themselves as a system of specific sanctions and censorships’,208 the structural side of action is likewise actualised imperceptibly in seemingly unmediated bodily practices. For it is only in a  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 69.  Ibid., p. 68, Bourdieu 1976, p. 199; and Bourdieu 2000, p. 141. 204  Bourdieu 1990, p. 69. Thomas Alkemeyer and Robert Schmidt assign the body a key role as the repository of past practices and the medium and agent of present practices, and thereby expand the corporeal dimensions of habitus to include its possibilities of change. See Alkemeyer and Schmidt 2003. 205  Bourdieu 1976, p. 171. 206  Bourdieu 2000, p. 141. 207  Bourdieu 2000, p. 33. In this work, Bourdieu investigates masculine domination as a form of symbolic violence and emphasises how it is produced and reproduced through agents’ activities: ‘Women themselves apprehend all reality, and in particular the power relations in which they are held, through schemes of thought that are the product of embodiment of those power relations and which are expressed in the founding oppositions of the symbolic order.’ Ibid., pp. 33–34. 208  Bourdieu 1991b, p. 38. 202 203

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state of activity that ‘the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned’209 is realised. Accordingly, the praxeology of movement is bound up with the corporeality of practices. Scholastic thought fails to acknowledge this relation of immanence. This ultimately leads to the traditional belief ‘in the dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter’, which also typifies the ‘scholastic viewpoint on the body from outside’.210 On Bourdieu’s opposing view, one cannot conceive of spontaneity and creativity without the intervention of a creative intention, or finality without a conscious aiming at ends, regularity without observance of rules.211

However, this requires that both sides of the subject–object relation be viewed not as independently existing entities that are externally related or originally mediated—insofar, for instance, as a conscious intention to perform an action is taken as a necessary condition,212 or movement itself is conceived as the medium of a bodily intentionality.213 The assumption of a priori knowledge, whether intellectual or bodily in nature, is constitutive of both conceptions. They also agree that the actual performance of a conscious action or bodily movement is always determined by concrete

 Bourdieu 1990a, p. 68.  Bourdieu 2000, p. 133. Elsewhere, he writes: ‘Twenty centuries of diffuse Platonism and of Christianized readings of the Phaedo incline us to see the body not as an instrument of knowledge but as a hindrance to knowledge, and to ignore the specificity of practical knowledge, which is treated either as a simple obstacle to knowledge or as incipient science.’ Ibid., p. 137. It should be added that even dialogues that are less negative towards the body, such as the Symposium, emphasise the body’s character as a material thing that can only be transcended by the mind. On this interpretation, see Bockrath 2000. 211  Bourdieu 2000, p. 137. 212  See footnote 80. 213  According to Merleau-Ponty, ‘our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia’, which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary.’ Merleau-­ Ponty 2005, p. 162. On ‘motor intentionality’ and the thesis of its original identity as an ‘I can’ by contrast with a Kantian ‘I think that’ see ibid., pp. 127 and 159. 209 210

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mediations in the subject–object relation.214 This contradictory agreement will not be surprising if we recall the contradictions that attend the beginning of philosophy.215 For as we have seen with regards to Hegel’s critique of first or ultimate grounds,216 a fixation on metaphysical foundations tends to contribute to differences being played out at the level of fundamental principles and to philosophers claiming to be ‘already finished with all the other standpoints simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them’.217 On a scholastic view, the intuitive mediations in the subject– object relation would amount to mere differences of standpoint, without affecting the standpoints themselves. On a praxeological view, by contrast, their significance comes from their being regarded as constitutive aspects of the subject–object relation itself which, as we put it earlier, work on each other in ‘the whole of the movement’.218 On this view, the ‘whole of the movement’ can only be separated from individual practices and movements at the price of abstraction. We already discussed this idea earlier when considering the relation between genesis and validity.219 Here, however, the idea assumes a new form, since on a praxeological view genesis and validity are understood as two sides of one coin, each of which exerts a reciprocal influence on the other: By relating themselves to their environment through movement, people form and produce themselves as social subjects, and in the same process 214  An intention to act includes the performance of the action as the causal conclusion or actual affirmation of its presupposed validity. And even in movements performed reflexively, physical aspects are interwoven with mental motivations: ‘Psychological motives and bodily occasions may overlap because there is not a single impulse in a living body which is entirely fortuitous in relation to psychic intentions, not a single mental act which has not found at least its germ or its general outline in physiological tendencies’. Merleau-Ponty 2005, p. 101. The primordial experience of intentionality, which according to Merleau-Ponty begins with the body and its movements, serves as the point of departure for his reflections, even if ‘psychological motives and bodily occasions’ (ibid.) cannot be separated in the ‘embodied mind [esprit incarné]’ (Merleau-Ponty 2000, p. 37). 215  See the passage corresponding to footnote 1 in Part II. 216  On this point, see footnote 150 in Chap. 4 on Hegel’s reservations about ‘the inspiration which begins immediately, like a shot from a pistol, with absolute knowledge’. 217  Hegel made this polemical remark against Schelling’s theory of ‘intellectual intuition’. See footnote 150 in Chap. 4. 218  See footnote 154 in Chap. 4. As we saw earlier, on Hegel’s theory ‘the whole of the movement’ refers to the ‘existent’ process by which its moments are exchanged and not to a substantial conception of the Absolute. See also footnotes 135 and 139 in Chap. 4. 219  See footnote 10.

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appropriate their environment and imbue it with meaning. On the other hand, the environment through which the agents move is not amorphous, but is rather a social world that is always already formed, shot through with and shaped by power relations, cultural techniques and ‘socially defined structures of meaning’, and hence is not unrestrictedly available and formable.220

The relation between subject and object described here in terms of the phenomenon of bodily movement is based on relations of exchange between social agents and social structures that can only be understood reciprocally. Concepts such as ‘power relations’, ‘cultural techniques’ and ‘structures of meaning’ go far beyond an analysis of simple social facts, what Durkheim called ‘faits sociaux comme choses’.221 For while early positivist sociology, analogously to the prevailing theoretical approach in the natural sciences, rejected subjective concepts in order to be able to make maximally objective statements about social relations, on a praxeological view social relations and individual bodily movements are understood as

220  Alkemeyer 2003, p. 348. In a similar vein, Gunter Gebauer writes: ‘Because the conditions of existence are constructed by human beings and human beings in turn emulate the regularity of those conditions through the regularity of their own practical activity, subjects are on the one hand constructed by the conditions of their existence, but on the other become their co-constructors through the actions engendered by habitus.’ Gebauer 1997, p. 512. Elsewhere, he writes: ‘Movements thus trigger processes of internalisation and externalisation. It is important to recognise this double movement. Neither is action directed by an inner entity, nor does the outer world determine the subject’s inner world.’ Gebauer and Wulf 1998, p. 52. 221  See footnote 120 in Chap. 5. This kind of anti-speculative approach to sociology is not confined to the distant past. For instance, René König advocates an understanding of sociology that ‘begins by eliminating all philosophical perspectives’ and ‘in the end tends toward a sociology which is nothing but sociology – namely, the scientific and systematic treatment of the general categories of social existence, its dynamics and developmental laws, its relation to the natural environment, to the general culture, to the specialised domains of social life, and finally to the sociocultural personality of the individual.’ König 1958, p. 7 (part of translation adapted from Jaeggi and Fantel 1976, p. 65). This positivist spirit lives on to this day, for instance in the belief that scientific objectivity can be achieved in empirical social research by having the data collected independently of the investigators and their evaluative judgements. For empirical research practice, the exclusive nature of this sociological ‘purity law’ has the striking consequence of making sociological concepts less important than formal quality criteria.

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interdependent aspects of social reality.222 The traditional oppositions between subject and object, which are here considered in terms of their concrete mediation between individual and society, do not refer to simply given or independently pre-existing social facts ‘which first exist separately and then subsequently “interpenetrate”.’223 While positivist theories treat social phenomena as externally observable things that can be objectively explained without reference to any pretheoretical concepts, social praxeology attends to the practically produced and bodily mediated ‘ontological complicity’ between ‘the social agent and the world’,224 whereby. external social structures are not just transformed by people into inner (mental, psychical, etc.) structures, but literally incorporated and thus embodied. By moving around in the world, people form a ‘second’ historico-­ social nature in which their ‘first’ biological nature is dialectically sublated. Insofar as movements are constituted, formed and refined in myriad social practices, and so behavioural routines and an individual body history take shape, the natural and the cultural, the individual and the social, the physical and the mental intersect in them.225

 Alkemeyer 2003, p. 347. Referring to Reckwitz, he observes that the ‘movements of the body […] are understood as the smallest units of sociological analysis’. Ibid. Elsewhere, Reckwitz claims that, on a praxeological view, the social includes both the ‘materiality of practices’ and the ‘materiality of things’. These ‘things’ are ‘artefacts—from computers to buildings, from aeroplanes to items of clothing’ that function as ‘constituents of social practices’. Reckwitz 2003, pp. 290–291. 223  This remark comes from Norbert Elias, commenting on Talcott Parsons. Elias 1978, p. 229. Earlier in the same passage, he remarks, ‘It can be stated with great certainty that the relation between what is referred to conceptually as the ‘individual’ and as ‘society’ will remain incomprehensible so long as these concepts are used as if they represented two separate bodies, and (above all) bodies normally at rest, which only come into contact with one another afterwards as it were’. 224  Wacquant 1992b, p. 20. 225  Alkemeyer 2003, p. 351. Gebauer and Wulf pithily summarise this complex idea as follows: ‘The body is itself part of the social world, and, moreover, this world itself is embodied in it [wird in ihm selbst körperlich].’ Gebauer and Wulf 1998, p. 53. 222

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Again, this is not a new idea; it is a core element of dialectical thought and critical theory.226 What is new, however, is the explicit reference to bodily practices, such as movements, stances and gestures, as practical embodiments of social forces and constellations that ‘without moving through discourse and consciousness’227 offer a direct ‘point of departure for a sociological analysis of the bodily dimension of the social’.228 On Hegel’s view, the empirical content of experience is not grasped immediately but is conceptually and spiritually mediated, while ‘negative dialectics’, which attends to the non-conceptual aspect of experience only to reject it as ‘experience-less’,229 likewise alternates between determinate

226  We need only recall Adorno’s essay on the ‘logic of the social sciences’. Commenting on the relation between sociology and psychology, he writes, ‘The human subjects, whom psychology pledges itself to examine, are not merely, as it were, influenced by society but are in their innermost core formed by it. The substratum of a human being in himself who might resist the environment—and this has been resuscitated in existentialism—would remain an empty abstraction. On the contrary, the socially active environment, no matter how indirectly and imperceptibly, is produced by human beings, by organized society. […] Society is a total process in which human beings surrounded, guided and formed by objectivity do, in turn, act back upon society; psychology, for its part, can no more be absorbed into sociology than can the individual being be absorbed into its biological species and its natural history.’ Adorno 1976, p. 119. 227  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 74. 228  Krais and Gebauer 2002, p. 76. This approach is exemplified by Bourdieu’s deconstruction of aesthetic judgement in the form of a ‘social critique of the judgement of taste’, whereby ‘taste’, which ‘classifies, and […] classifies the classifier’, serves as a point of departure for sociological analysis. Bourdieu 1984, p. 6. Elsewhere, Bourdieu remarks ‘that the ultimate values, as they are called, are never anything other than the primary, primitive dispositions of the body, ‘visceral’ tastes and distastes, in which the group’s most vital interests are embedded’. Ibid., p. 474. 229  For instance, Adorno critically describes Kant’s notion of ‘pure intuition’ as ‘experience without experience’, in order to emphasise the full extent of its contradiction. Adorno 2013a, p. 146.

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negation and negative experience230 so as ‘to escape the infernal machine, the coercive mechanism of self-enclosed thought’;231 however, both these dialectical conceptions are still caught up in the aporias of conceptual thought. This applies even to the Aesthetic Theory’s attempt to take ­objectifying thought to its limits by making the mimetic quality of artworks, rather than the grounding principle of modern science, the condition for the ‘freedom to the object’.232 For although the subject is understood here in terms of ‘self-relinquishment’, the ‘opposite of the philistine demand that the artwork give him something’,233 this view still cleaves to the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness: ‘as long as the particular and the universal diverge there is no freedom’.234 Adorno’s criticism of the ‘untruth of the immanent context’,235 originally intended as a criticism of the philosophy of spirit, also applies (albeit in inverted form) to praxeology, inasmuch as the practical ‘incorporation of culture’,236 following its own logic, ‘leads the mind unconsciously along 230  For a detailed account of the differences between Hegel’s and Adorno’s conceptions of experience, which are only sketched in broad terms here, see Bockrath 2012b: ‘Immediacy, we could also put it, points beyond itself but without yet representing “the whole”. For Hegel, who understands each of “the parts of philosophy”—and so also every stage of unfolding consciousness—as a “philosophical whole”, the individual elements of experience are grasped in a relation of mediation, “so that the system of its distinctive elements makes up the idea in its entirety, which appears equally in each one of them”. Adorno, by contrast, avoids this identification, according to which “part” and “whole” form a conceptual unity, and instead attends to the concept of “moment”, also used in this connection by Hegel, which systematically refers to both moving (immediate) and moved (mediated). However, Adorno does not detect in either aspect an immutable ground for the formation of experience, and so he advocates understanding them in terms of their (contradictory) relation. If we follow this line of thought, then immediacy as a moving moment does not, as for Hegel, represent ‘unity’ or ‘totality of the whole’; instead, it is replaced in Adorno by the openness of the experiential process, which as “mediated immediacy […] reproduces itself at all stages of unfolding consciousness’. Ibid., p. 143. 231  Adorno 1973b, pp. 209–210. 232  Adorno 2017, p. 25. 233  Ibid. 234  Ibid., p. 56. In art, the main thing that changes is the way we approach experience: ‘After the default of any higher, subordinating jurisdiction, the process between the whole and the particular has been turned back to a lower court, to the impulse of the details themselves, in accord with the nominalistic situation. At this point, art is conceivable only on the condition that any pre-given subordinating standard be excluded.’ Ibid., p. 213. 235  Adorno 2004, p. 30. He is referring to the fact, overlooked by idealism, that the spirit is ‘in league with the blind predominance of merely existing things’. 236  Bourdieu 1976, p. 199.

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with it’.237 Although there are examples of ‘blips’ occurring in practically trained behaviours and strategies ‘into which there may slip a form of reflection’, Bourdieu claims that on the whole conscious awareness ‘remains turned towards practice’.238 The ‘critical self-reflection’ that shields the subject ‘from the supposition that its being-for-itself is an in-­ and-­for-itself’239 bears little relation to ‘what Pascal calls “the automaton”’:240 The effect of symbolic domination (sexual, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, etc.) is exerted not in the pure logic of knowing consciousness but in the obscurity of the dispositions of habitus, in which are embedded the schemes of perception and appreciation which, below the level of the decisions of the conscious mind and the controls of the will, are the basis of a relationship of practical knowledge and recognition that is profoundly obscure to itself.241

However, and here we come full circle, the sociological work of objectivation is not confined to reconstructing the ‘pre-verbal taking-for-­ granted of the world’242 from the perspective of agents in a way that avoids detached, distorted scholastic interpretations. Drawing on bodily forms of knowledge and practical forms of understanding also allows the above-­ described ‘relationship of practical knowledge and recognition that is profoundly obscure to itself’243 to be integrated into the process of objectivation so as ‘to render explicit what in both cases is taken for granted, and to offer a practical vindication of the possibility of a full

 Bourdieu 1990a, p. 48.  Bourdieu 2000, p. 162. In full: ‘Habitus has its “blips”, critical moments when it misfires or is out of phase: the relationship of immediate adaptation is suspended, in an instant of hesitation into which there may slip a form of reflection which has nothing in common with that of the scholastic thinker.’ In the same section, Bourdieu speaks, with a view to the improvisational skills of musicians and gymnasts, of ‘practical reflection’. On the forms of practical knowledge generated ‘in the practices (of the tennis player, of teaching, of doing science, etc.) themselves’, see Alkemeyer 2012, p. 115. 239  So Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics of the necessary ‘interaction’ between ‘theory and mental experience’. Adorno 2004, p. 31. 240   Bourdieu 2000, pp.  168–169. A similar remark appeared earlier in Bourdieu 1990a, p. 48. 241  Bourdieu 2000, pp. 170–171. 242  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 68. 243  See footnote 241. 237 238

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sociological objectivation of the object and of the subject’s relation to the object’.244 The ‘bifocal point of view’245 that was mentioned earlier fulfils its positive function by allowing us to recognise the social meaning of subjective practices and understandings, albeit at the price ‘that scientific construction cannot grasp the principles of practical logic without forcibly changing their nature’.246 Praxeology’s reflexive character is shown in the fact that it incorporates the unavoidable rift between ‘the point of view of the agents who are caught up in the object’ and ‘the point of view on this point of view’247 into the sociological work of objectivation. This not only gives adequate theoretical expression to the ‘twofold truth’248 of social reality, but also reveals the ‘limits of objectivist objectivation’,249 whereby the rift with social reality is understood not as a theoretically addressable possibility (a ‘thing of logic’), but as a praxeologically realised necessity (‘logic of things’).250

 Bourdieu 1992a, p. 68.  See footnote 67. 246  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 90. 247  Bourdieu 2000, p. 189. 248  See ibid., p. 188, and footnote 66. 249  Bourdieu 1992b, p. 254. 250  Bourdieu 2000, p. 79. On the role played by reflexivity in scientific practice and the construction of scientific objects, see Wacquant 1992b, 36–46. Although ‘the point of view of the agents engaged in practice’ is supposed to be incorporated into the sociological work of objectivation—Bourdieu 2000, p. 191—Bourdieu seeks ‘to wrench scientific reason from the embrace of practical reason, to prevent the latter from contaminating the former’. Bourdieu 1992b, p. 247. A little later, he writes: ‘Objectivation of the relation of the sociologist to his or her object is […] the necessary condition of the break with the propensity to invest in her object which is no doubt at the root of her “interest” in the object. […] Participant objectivation, arguably the highest form of the sociological art, is realizable only to the extent that it is predicated on as complete as possible an objectivation of the interest to objectivize inscribed in the fact of participating, as well as on a bracketing of this interest and of the representations it sustains.’ Ibid., pp. 259–260. The line between epistemological detachment and political engagement is frequently blurred in Bourdieu’s life and work, demonstrating that participation and objectivation can likewise be practically mediated. For instance, Bourdieu answered the question of how to defend the autonomy of the scientific field as follows: ‘One of the insights that comes out of this kind of work is that freedom is not an individual quality, but a collective accomplishment. A person does not free themselves as an individual, and especially not by somewhat immature acts of self-assertion.’ Bourdieu 1989d, p. 54. 244 245

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6.3  Social Use of Time The title to this section suggests treating time like a thing that we can make use of. In Hegel and Kant, we can find the idea of an a priori given or conceptually produced form of temporal intuition. And just as the separation of sensuousness and understanding, or of time and concept,251 is unsustainable, since both formal and absolute conceptions of time systematically fail to capture the ‘factual substrate that is and passes in [time]’, conversely ‘a factuality without its place in the time continuum is not conceivable either’.252 Accordingly, time is not a ‘thing of logic’; rather, it needs to be shown how objective determinations of time and subjective experience of time are mediated—though without either being subsumed into the other, as Adorno emphasises in his critique of subjective and objective idealism: An element of truth might even be squeezed out of Hegel’s theory of time, provided one will not let logic produce time by itself, as he does; to be perceived in logic, instead, are coagulated time relations, as indicated variously, if cryptically, in Critique of Pure Reason, in the chapter on schematism in particular. Preserved likewise in the discursive Logic—unmistakeably in its conclusions—are time elements that were detemporalized as subjective thinking objectified them into pure legality; without such detemporalization, on the other hand, time would not have been objectified at all.253

As a ‘thing of logic’, the experience of time atrophies into an absolute form or static law, a phenomenon that Bergson draws on when he distinguishes between temps durée and temps espace in a vain attempt to resist the objectification of living experience. Even his efforts to restore the ‘mobility of duration’,254 which Bergson directly opposes to the ‘eternity of a concept’,255 cannot shake off the latter’s claims to power and breathe life 251  ‘The Notion, however, in its freely self-existent identity as I = I, is in and for itself absolute negativity and freedom. Time, therefore, has no power over the Notion, nor is the Notion in time or temporal; on the contrary, it is the power over time, which is this negativity only qua externality. Only the natural, therefore, is subject to time in so far as it is finite; the True, on the other hand, the Idea, Spirit, is eternal.’ Hegel 2004, p. 35. 252  Adorno 2004, p. 332. In the same passage, he writes, ‘there is no dynamics without that in which it occurs’. 253  Ibid., p. 333. See also footnote 18. 254  See footnote 24 in Chap. 3. 255  See footnote 29 in Chap. 3.

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into itself. Even the seemingly most direct mode of access to ‘pure duration’, which Bergson ascribes to the ‘fundamental self’,256 is subject to the formalism of its quantification: Sufficient to elucidate this is the triviality that, measured by clock time, subjective time experiences invite delusion, although there would be no clock time without the subjective time experience which the clock time objectifies.257

The objectification of time in the calculable, rhythmic movements of a clock hand or pendulum thus neither exists in itself, nor is the ‘heterogeneous duration of the ego, without moments external to one another’,258 given by itself. The two remain unreconciled. Just as the spell of the concept realises its claim to power against the vitality of experiences in the constant rhythm of the clockwork, the ‘dialectical salt was washed away in an undifferentiated tide of life’.259 The ‘living duration’ in which Bergson claims life triumphs over immobility and death has long been part of the ‘reality of spirit’260—albeit not, as on Bergson’s hypostatising conception, ‘above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, [experience] becomes properly human experience’,261 but rather ‘whenever a relation of necessary determination is found between causes and effects’.262 It is now scarcely possible to distinguish the subjective experience of time from the chronometric concept of time, even if ‘the intuitive mode of mental conduct does continue to exist in fact as an archaic rudiment of mimetic reactions’ and ‘what preceded its past holds a promise beyond the ossified present’.263 But since this promise ‘has long become the conventions’ weapon against uncomprehended life’264—inasmuch as 256  On Bergson’s distinction between ‘two different selves’—the ‘fundamental self’ and the ‘superficial ego’—see footnote 21 in Chap. 3. 257  Adorno 2004, p. 334. Elsewhere, he writes, ‘The celebrated intuitions themselves seem rather abstract in Bergson’s philosophy; they scarcely go beyond the phenomenal time consciousness which even Kant had underlying chronological-physical time—spatial time, according to Bergson’s insight.’ Ibid. p. 8. 258  Bergson 1910, p. 108. 259  Adorno 2004, p. 8. 260  See footnote 164 in Chap. 3. 261  See footnote 166 in Chap. 3. 262  See footnote 204 in Chap. 3. 263  Adorno 2004, p. 8. See also footnote 181 in Chap. 4. 264  Adorno 2004, p. 334.

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the present is perceived only as an ephemeral episode, in accord with the compulsive pace of social change—the intuition originelle likewise appears in objectified form, just like the causal, mechanistic thinking that on Bergson’s theory is abstractly negated. There is almost no trace of the ‘free self-determination’ and ‘internal duration’265 that Bergson deploys against the detemporalisation of time—or, expressed more generally: ‘life does not live’.266 If we take this idea further, we will run into the difficulty that time and life cannot simply be converted back into that which is renounced by ‘identity-thinking’. ‘Negative dialectics’, which seeks to not overhastily reconcile the particular with the universal but instead to acknowledge the non-identical moment of the particular, highlights the problem that it is not possible to discursively produce that which eludes conceptual determination: Cognition aims at the particular, not at the universal. It seeks its true object in the possible determination of the difference of that particular—even from the universal, which it criticizes as nonetheless inalienable, But if the mediation of the universal by the particular and of the particular by the universal is reduced to the abstract normal form of mediation as such, the particular has to pay the price, down to its authoritarian dismissal in the material parts of the Hegelian system.267

For Adorno, the ‘sense of the particular […] for which Hegel’s philosophy is groping’,268 remains inscrutable. The mimetic ‘adaptation to otherness’269 is likewise unable to plug the gap between spirit and nature that has opened up in the civilising process and is experienced anew in every act of individuation: ‘All that remains of the adaptation to nature is the hardening against it’.270 A theory of mimesis that instead considers the ‘mindfulness of nature’271 would be impossible due to the unity of logical

 See footnote 469 in Chap. 3.  Adorno places this aphorism by the Austrian author and journalist Ferdinand Kürnberger as the epigraph at the start of his Reflections from Damaged Life. Adorno 1978, p. 19. 267  Adorno 2004, p. 329. 268  Ibid., p. 330. 269  Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 148. 270  Ibid., p. 149. 271  See footnote 21. 265 266

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thought that Adorno requires .272 ‘Negative dialectics’ therefore understands itself primarily as a critique, including of its own thought, whereby domination is recognised as irreconciled nature, instead of nature becoming ‘mere objectivity’.273 One possible way out of this aporia that Adorno himself mentions is the ‘determination of the difference of that particular’274—provided that the emphasis is placed not on the substance of a given particular, but on the symbolic relation between different particulars. As we have seen, the categorial and intuitive conditions of knowledge will vary if they are taken to be contingent on different experiential contexts; that is, if the critique of knowledge is understood as a ‘critique of culture’275 and the symbolic forms in terms of their relationality. If, accordingly, we hold that myth, language, art and knowledge each produce their own, form-specific object domains, without (as Cassirer supposes, based on an assumed identity of spirit and nature) it being possible to convert them ‘into a universal law and order’,276 then the first key question will be how specific symbolic meanings can be practically generated in different experiential contexts. However, it is only the ‘determination of the difference of that particular’ that (as Bourdieu puts it) allows us ‘to recognise the objective structure of the relational system in which the practice takes place’.277 The two ‘orders of the social’278 that Bourdieu discusses integrate the aspect of knowledge 272  In addition to Plato and Aristotle, three other sources are crucial to Adorno’s conception of mimesis: firstly, Sigmund Freud, whose notion of a mimetic ‘adaptation to death’ offers a regressive means of alleviating psychic tension; secondly, Roger Caillois, who understands mimétisme as a way of ‘assimilating to space’ or ‘identifying with matter’; and thirdly, Walter Benjamin, who identifies in different systems of signs the mimetic power to produce ‘non-sensuous similarities’. For a detailed account, see Früchtl 1986. Although in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory the mimetic power assumes objective form in art, at the same time the claim to knowledge is dropped: ‘Negative dialectics and aesthetic theory can now only “helplessly refer to one another”.’ Habermas 1986, p. 384. 273  Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 6. 274  See footnote 267. 275  See footnote 7 in Chap. 5. 276  On this general ideal of knowledge (modelled on the ‘exact’ sciences) in Cassirer’s theory, see footnote 8  in Chap. 5. For a critique of Cassirer’s one-sided interpretation of symbolic forms as objectivations of the human spirit and the ‘ultimate reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic’, see footnote 267 in Chap. 5 and the detailed discussion in Sect. 5.3. 277  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 38. 278  Ibid. Elsewhere, Bourdieu speaks of the ‘relations between objective relations’ and the ‘relations between individuals’. See Bourdieu 1994b, p. 39. On the interpretation of these relations as ‘moments of a form of analysis’, see footnote 38.

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by understanding its subjective and objective moments in terms of their constitutive significance for the heterogeneous relations between social structures and practices279 rather than as irreconcilably opposed, as in the paradigm of philosophy of consciousness. Bourdieu agrees with the older critical theory that the subjective can only be objectified by eliminating the ways that agents represent their practices to themselves. However, given that ‘here as elsewhere, phenomena are in the service of phenomena’,280 it is also necessary for theorists to stand back from their own objectivations, which as products of theory follow a different logic to the ‘product[s] of practices’ based on ‘the principle of the economy of logic’.281 Bourdieu refers, in a praxeological vein, to a ‘third-order system of relations from which it is possible to recognise the unity both of practice and ideas […] and of the objective structure of the relational system in which in which the practice takes place’,282 and he insists that the ‘question of the relation between these two types of relation’283 must be incorporated into the theorist’s own work of objectivation so as to avoid falling into reductive subjectivist or objectivist views or imperceptibly passing from model to reality. However, this is not an orthodox conception that can simply be applied to different social phenomena and objects like an incorrectly understood dialectic triad.284 Praxeology’s understanding of itself as anthropologie réflexive is, rather, based on the insight (which can probably be obtained only by preserving a certain mix 279  Andreas Reckwitz characterises the historical context of the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences as follows: ‘Theories of culture and methods of cultural research that are centred on the dependence of action, practices or communication on systems of meaning and orders of knowledge became influential in the precise period when these systems of meaning were, due to the experience of their contingencies and differences, becoming increasingly problematic and hence “visible” at various levels in the social world itself.’ Reckwitz 2000, p.  45. Although Reckwitz makes reference to the ‘four theoretical revolutions in twentieth-century philosophy’ (phenomenology and hermeneutics, structuralism and semiotics, Wittgenstein’s theory of forms of life and language-games, pragmatism and symbolism) that fundamentally shaped the context in which the ‘cultural turn’ emerged, he ignores the question (whose significance extends beyond social philosophy) of why ‘modern theories of culture in the social sciences no longer [rest] on the conceptual ground of German idealist philosophy’. Ibid., p. 21. 280  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 15. 281  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 86. 282  Bourdieu 1994b, p. 38. 283  Ibid., p. 39. 284  By this I mean the mechanical sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. See footnote 79 in Chap. 4.

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of naivete and scepticism) that practice cannot be assimilated into its concept, but will necessarily remain non-identical and resistant.285 Whereas for Adorno non-identity and resistance are incorporated into a concept that can only be characterised negatively, for Bourdieu it is important ‘to reflect not only on the limits of thought and of the powers of thought, but also on the conditions in which it is exercised’.286 Critical theory and praxeology both understand the construction of theories as critique of domination, but to very different ends: the former radically ‘renounc[es] the goal of theoretical knowledge’287; the latter attempts to construct a ‘materialist theory which […] is capable of taking back from idealism the “active side” of practical knowledge that the materialist tradition has abandoned to it’.288 It seems as though philosophy and ­praxeology have switched roles. But regardless of what responsibilities we assign to them and where we take the disciplinary boundaries to lie, the two approaches do both share a focus on the unexplained relation between validity and genesis.289 The temporal relation between validity and genesis is thus still determined by the oppositional relation between constitution and history.290 Since this relation is expressed at different levels of abstraction, its significance will vary between them. For instance, Norbert Elias speaks of the ‘fetish-character of the concept of time’, whereby ‘the properties of the processes whose changing aspects this concept symbolically represents’ are attributed to ‘“time” itself’.291 The capacity ‘for envisaging together and, thus, for connecting to each other what happens “earlier” and what 285  It is thus unsurprising that the praxeological approach ‘is not free of contradictions, gaps, tensions, puzzlements, and unresolved questions’. Wacquant 1992a, p. xiii. 286  Bourdieu 2000, p. 2. 287   Habermas makes this remark with regard to Adorno’s later work. Habermas 1986, p. 385. 288  Bourdieu 2000, p. 136. One justification that Bourdieu gives for his ‘inquiry that hopes to open the way to truths that philosophy helps to make it hard to reach’ is a desire to ‘dispe[l] illusions, especially those that the philosophical tradition produces and reproduces’. Ibid., p. 1. He also recalls the unacademic weapons of critique—‘irony, pastiche or parody’— that, driven by a subversive, practically oriented impulse, he used ‘to fight the symbolic violence that is often exercised […] in the name of philosophy’. Ibid., p. 2. 289  On the dialectic of validity and genesis, and the division of labour between philosophy and sociology in relation to it, see footnotes 10 and 11. 290  We do not need to refer to Hegel for this idea. We need think only of Kant’s remarks on the faculty of memory and prediction, which he believes can be regarded as an indication of the categories’ historical origin inasmuch as the subjective experience of time is taken as a standard. See Kant 2006, p. 75. 291  Elias 2007, p. 61. See also ibid., pp. 100–101.

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happens “later”, what happens “before” and what happens “now” in a sequence of events’, is ascribed on this view not to time itself, but to ‘people’s capacity for synthesis’.292 Elias attributes the disenchantment of the ‘fetish-character’ of time to ‘people’s own contribution’ or ‘their capacity for seeing-together’—that is, their ability ‘to visualise simultaneously what happens successively’.293 He supports this view by referring to the social conditions under which time has been measured and conceptualised throughout history, which in turn are subject to constant change and so have yielded diverse ways of understanding time—ranging (simplifying somewhat) from repeated observations of the path of the sun in agrarian societies in order to determine the right time to sow and harvest crops,294 to a linear organisation of time and the ‘self-regulation in terms of “time” which one encounters almost everywhere in later-stage societies’.295 According to Elias, the common point of reference for this shift in the forms of social organisation and representation of temporal events is the intellectual capacity to ‘visualise together what does not happen together in actual fact’: Timing is thus based on people’s capacity for connecting with each other two or more different sequences of continuous changes, one of which serves as a timing standard for the other (or others). It is an act of intellectual synthesis that is far from simple.296

We could take up this idea by saying that, for Elias, the question of validity remains tied to the intellectual capacity to generate ‘sequence-­ related syntheses’297 between individual events. Although this allows us to grasp the historical dimension of the problem of constitution, it does not 292  Ibid., p. 61. In the same passage, he uses the term ‘timing’ (Zeiten) to emphasise the active aspect of determining time. 293  Ibid., p. 62. Elsewhere, he writes, ‘It is always those living at a given moment in relation to whom events have the character of a present, a past, or a future.’ Ibid., pp. 65–66. 294  Ibid., p. 73. 295  Ibid., p. 121. 296  Ibid., p. 60 (emphasis mine). This also applies, Elias claims, to ‘time-concepts which articulate the experience of the flow of events’ and likewise distinguish between ‘what is “today”, “yesterday” or “tomorrow”’. Ibid., p. 67, translation modified. 297  Ibid. As with Cassirer, this capacity is an activity of consciousness, which Elias describes in terms of a ‘fifth dimension of the universe’ (‘in addition to the four dimensions of space and time’): ‘a fifth dimension of consciousness, experience, or however else one may express it. Everything which takes place within the purview of human beings now becomes capable of being experienced and represented by human-made symbols, and needs in this sense to be defined no longer by four co-ordinates but by five.’ Ibid.

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solve it, since determinations of time can neither be understood as Durkheimian social facts298 nor subsumed into the logic of their historical development. Even the determinations of time reconstructed by Elias remain dependent on at least a rudimentary form of intuition, which is not deducible from temporal derivations and developments.299 Or in other words: the constitution of historical mediations is not identical to the historical mediations of their constitution. By contrast, praxeology’s understanding of time is not based on the intellectual capacity to link events together that formed the subject of Elias’s longitudinal investigation. In place of the ‘acts of intellectual synthesis’ that on Elias’s theory explain ‘how events cohered “in time”’,300 in Bourdieu it is the complex ‘properties’ of social practices and structures that are ‘constructed in time’ from which it receives ‘its direction and meaning’.301 On a praxeological view, the references to ‘in time’ and ‘from time’ do not map onto the philosophical distinction between immanent and transcendental temporality.302 Rather, our social organisation of and

 See footnote 4.  Whereas for Cassirer space and time gradually take form in the process of symbolisation, provided that they are connected to ‘experience’ and ‘consciousness’, Elias takes them to be indeterminately pregiven: ‘Yet the epistemological status of experiential concepts such as “past”, “present” and “future” which represent this fifth, specifically human dimension, has so far remained uncertain.’ Elias 2007, p. 67. Elias focuses on the question of these concepts’ development and change; the question of their validity, by contrast, which touches on a ‘wide-ranging set of problems […] not all of [which] can be explored here’, he considers secondary Ibid., p. 79. 300  Ibid. Elias claims that it took ‘a painfully slow and laborious intellectual effort to get as far as we have today along the road towards a wider synthesis over-arching the long sequence of the ancestral syntheses’. 301  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 98. 302  I should briefly mention here Husserl’s concepts of ‘protention’ and ‘retention’, which refer respectively to the capacity of consciousness to keep things that have already happened present to our mind, and the capacity to anticipate things that have not yet happened. On the ‘phenomenology of internal time-consciousness’, see Husserl 1964. On the role of temporal consciousness in constituting pregnance in the process of symbolic formation, see footnotes 25 and 134 in Chap. 5. Bourdieu was interested in this topic from as early as the 1950s, when he proposed a thesis on ‘the temporal structures of emotional life’ that was to be supervised by Georges Canguilhem and would have included a critique of Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of the experience of time. In his ethnological and sociological studies, he examines the social effects of temporal practices and phenomena at a number of different points. See for instance Bourdieu 1976, pp. 378–388; 1984, pp. 114–124; 1988, pp. 90–104; 1990a, pp. 98–111; 2000, pp. 206–245. 298 299

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engagement with time is shaped by a practically cultivated sense303 for temporal relations and structures but without being narrowly causally determined by it. Social practices of time are primarily geared towards practical necessities that are inadequately captured by theoretical models of action and linear time, particularly given that these practices involve a certain degree of unpredictability; they ‘do not just unfold in time, they also play with time’.304 Bourdieu describes this dual relation between prevailing social structures of time on the one hand and the habitual schemes of time based on them on the other, which take practical effect in social agents’ feelings, perceptions, judgements and behaviour, as ‘two modes of existence of history’.305 History, in turn, is continuously being produced and influenced by temporal strategies: Far from being a condition a priori and transcendent to historicity, time is what practical activity produces in the very act whereby it produces itself. Because practice is the product of a habitus that is itself the product of the em-bodiment of the immanent regularities and tendencies of the world, it contains within itself an anticipation of these tendencies and regularities, that is, a nonthetic reference to a future inscribed in the immediacy of the present. Time is engendered in the actualization of the act, or the thought, which is by definition presentification and de-presentification, that is, the ‘passing’ of time according to common sense.306

In this passage, time is described as a product of ‘real concrete activity’; ‘in time’ and ‘from time’ are two sides of the same coin. While in Elias’s theory timing is understood as an ‘act of intellectual synthesis’ that ‘visualise[s] together what does not happen together in actual fact’,307 on Bourdieu’s view the temporal dimensions of past and future are actualised in the present—specifically, in social practice:

303  ‘The form of the temporal habitus is dependent on the very different norms of time in different cultures, which at the same time have a sustained influence on social forms through the mediation of the practical sense of time.’ Gebauer and Wulf 1993, p. 294 (emphasis mine). 304  Schmidt 2012, p. 53. On the peculiarities and imprecisions of ‘practical logic’, see footnotes 89 and 188. 305  Bourdieu 1992a, p. 138. See also the distinction between ‘objectivity of the first order’ and ‘objectivity of the second order’ in footnote 40. 306  Bourdieu 1992a, p. 138. 307  This is how Elias characterises memory in Elias 2007, p. 61.

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Practical activity, insofar as it is makes sense, as it is senseé, reasonable, that is, engendered by a habitus adjusted to the immanent tendencies of the field, is an act of temporalization through which the agent transcends the immediate present via practical mobilization of the past and practical anticipation of the future inscribed in the present in a state of objective potentiality. Because it implies a practical reference to the future implied in the past of which it is the product, habitus temporalizes itself in the very act through which it is realized.308

This passage can be read as a condensed statement of the praxeological concept of time. It explains how practices can produce enduring temporal effects that are bound up with these practices and so cannot be adequately reconstructed from the perspective of an uninvolved observer. For while practice ‘unfolds in time’, with ‘its rhythm, its tempo, and above all its directionality’ being ‘constitutive of its meaning’,309 the reflective observer ‘tends to ignore time and so to detemporalize practice’.310 It is only from a safe distance that it is possible to isolate or piece together particular sequences, which as they unfold follow their own ‘tempo’ based on the practical necessities of action rather than theoretical models of explanation. This relation becomes even clearer if, surveying matters from a detached retrospective vantage point, we reverse the directionality of time that is so critical to the practical mode of understanding: for instance by inferring backwards from the outcomes of an action to the intentions or purposes underlying it. Here too, it is assumed that the practical sense of time will correspond to the model used to reconstruct that sense, and hence that practices (like actions)311 are determined by relations of causation and coherence. Bourdieu objects that social agents’ temporal strategies are neither random nor systematically planned; rather, their practical development and application ultimately hones them to a state of

 Bourdieu 1992a, p. 138.  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 81. Bourdieu illustrates this point using an example earlier used by Husserl: ‘As with music, any manipulation of this structure, even a simple change in tempo, either acceleration or slowing down, subjects it to a destructuration that is irreducible to a simple change in an axis of reference.’ Ibid. On Bergson’s characterisation of ‘duration’ in terms of the interrelationship between a melody and the individual musical notes that compose it, see footnote 7 in Chap. 3. 310  Ibid. 311  For a critique of different explanatory models of action, see footnote 68. 308 309

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‘automatic reliability’ that ‘can make it possible to respond instantaneously to all the uncertain and ambiguous situations of practice’.312 But while it may be possible to reliably apply the temporal strategies in practice, they elude attempts at theoretical explanation. Bourdieu illustrates the practical significance of the social use of time using the example of the exchange of gifts among the Kabyle people: It is all a matter of style, which means in this case timing and choice of occasions; the same act—giving, giving in return, offering one’s services, paying a visit, etc.—can have completely different meanings at different times, coming as it may at the right or wrong moment, opportunely or inopportunely. The reason is that the lapse of time that separates the gift from the counter-­ gift is what allows the deliberate oversight, the collectively maintained and approved self-deception, without which the exchange could not function.313

The ‘collectively maintained and approved self-deception’ comprises an illusion that is necessary for social games to function in practice. This illusion consists in activities such as giving, accepting and reciprocating gifts generally being conducted in a way that disguises the associated social expectations and consequences, in particular approval or disapproval, so that it seems as though they bear no direct relation to the actions themselves: Everything takes place as if the agents’ strategies, and especially those that play on the tempo of action, or, in interaction, with the interval between actions, were organized with a view to disguising from themselves and from others the truth of their practice, which the anthropologist brutally reveals simply by substituting the interchangeable moments of a reversible sequence for practices performed in time and in their own time.314

Uncovering the social mechanisms underlying the use of time and so laying bare the ‘objective truth of the game’315 inevitably results in a rift  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 104.  Ibid., p. 105. 314  Ibid., p.  106. Even seemingly selfless utterances like ‘Oh, that wasn’t necessary!” or ‘That’s too much!’ reinforce the social ‘veil’ cast over the ‘truth of practice’, rather than lifting it. The latter would require the status of gift and counter-gift as a standard and expression of social relations of recognition to be made transparent, as sometimes happens when tacit expectations are disappointed, leading to open conflicts. 315  Ibid., p. 105. 312 313

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between ‘the point of view of the agents who are caught up in the object’ and ‘the point of view on this point of view’.316 This rift is a necessary condition for objectifying the interests that we wish to objectify. But it is equally important to objectify the interests motivating the objectification itself through a ‘sociology of sociology—and of the sociologist’317 that traces the ways in which we ourselves are socially conditioned and caught up in the object. Bourdieu includes among the ‘blind spots’318 that need to be explained the strategy, essential to the sociological work of objectivation, of ‘assur[ing] victory to their “truth” in order to tell the truth of the game, and thus to secure victory in the game [of science] for yourself’.319 Only if this social condition for the possibility of establishing scientific truth is itself made an object of study, and if the interest motivating our work of objectivation is revealed and suspended, are we able to open up an ‘all-encompassing view’320 on our own game, which we can only perceive as such if we step outside it. A praxeological approach thus entails a change in focus: epistemological insights and ‘objective truths’ are replaced by various truth and power games underpinned by different social logics. With regard to the social mechanisms governing the use of time, this means that these mechanisms are not valid in isolation, but become comprehensible only when viewed in relation to competing temporal practices and relations.321 For even if ‘objectivism falls short of objectivity’,322 inasmuch as it is predicated on substantialist assumptions and concepts, it is, conversely, possible to relate objectivations of the social to each other and thereby attain a conception

 See footnote 247.  Bourdieu 1992b, p. 259. 318  Ibid. 319  Ibid. 320  Ibid. The interplay of inclusion and distance described here is attributable to a faith in the meaning and meaningfulness of scientific (power) games whose (implicit and explicit) social rules must be recognised in order to objectify them. On ‘participant objectivation’ as the ‘highest form of the sociological art’ see footnote 250. 321  Bourdieu remarks with regard to the ‘sociology of symbolic forms’: ‘Nothing could be more mistaken than holding that symbolic actions (or their symbolic aspect) signify nothing beyond themselves: they always give expression to social status, following a logic which is precisely that of the social structure itself, i.e. the logic of distinction.’ Bourdieu 1994b, p. 62. 322  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 110. 316 317

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of reality whose heterogeneity and variety constitute ‘the most indisputable form of objectivity’.323 The differences in the social use of time, which according to Bourdieu are associated ‘with the exercise of power over other people’s time’,324 are especially evident when culturally divergent structures of and dispositions towards time collide. In his ethnological studies on Kabyle society, Bourdieu shows how traditional practices of rulership, which were mainly exercised symbolically, were gradually assimilated to a logic of economic rationality as monetary exchange became universal. These studies are instructive because comparing premodern and capitalist practices reveals the interest-bound fictions underpinning different logics of action that, despite all the obvious contrasts between them, do at least have in ­common that they are ‘responsible for reproducing the appropriate habitus’.325 The Kabyle concept of time, for instance, is characterised by a strong emphasis on the present, which is stabilised by experiences handed down from one generation to the next, whereas they reject forward-looking planning of future events that fall outside existing possibilities: Nothing is more foreign to the precapitalist economy than the idea of the future as a field of possibilities available to be explored and mastered by calculation. […] Economic activity is based, rather, on a ‘future’ that is directly graspable in experience or grounded in the accumulated experiences that make up a tradition.326

In light of this, Bourdieu explains that when people in such precapitalist societies buy agricultural or domestic appliances, they do not think in terms of profitability (i.e. in terms of investing in a better future) but rather attempt to measure up favourably to others: that is, they are motivated by feelings of pride and self-respect. Whereas on an entrepreneurial perspective capital is generally invested with a view to the future (for 323  Ibid. It remains unclear whether, as Cassirer puts it, there is ‘a standpoint situated above all these forms and yet not merely outside them’. See on this point footnote 24 in Chap. 5. It should be noted that the ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’ retains the systemic requirement of an ‘ultimate reduction of all cultural forms to the one form of logic’—see footnote 267 in Chap. 5—whereas the sociological work of objectivation is to be understood as a critique of symbolic forms of violence, which are ‘exercised through rational communication’ and follow the logic of a ‘monopoly of the universal’. Bourdieu 2000, pp. 83 and 70. 324  Ibid., p. 228. 325  Bourdieu 1977, p. 196. 326  Bourdieu 1976., p. 378.

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instance to open up new markets), the Algerian farmers focus on the recurring agrarian cycles of the calendar year and the immediate interests bound up with them. Like the often-told parable of the poor fisher and the successful businessman,327 being firmly rooted in the concretely given provides a sense of directly experienceable constancy and goodness that is preferred to the ‘irreality of the imaginary’.328 One way that the focus on concrete objects with tangible qualities is expressed is in the widespread mistrust of money as a universal means of payment: While an exchanged object discloses its possible use, which like weight, colour or smell is inscribed in it, to immediate intuition, money, the indirect good par excellence, does not offer any direct satisfaction. […] With paper money, one no longer has things but signs of their signs in one’s hands: ‘a product’, so it is said, ‘is worth more than its (monetary) equivalent’; ‘better to acquire products than money’. As a means that can be used anywhere by anyone for any transaction, money, which ‘is good for nothing, and so good for anything’, serves first and foremost to predict an undetermined use and to quantify the infinite purposes whose virtuality is contained within it; it thereby allows a correct accounting of expectations.329

Money is viewed here not, as Marx puts it, as ‘but the reflex, thrown upon one single commodity, of the value relations between all the rest’,330 but rather as a promise of the future in general. Even if possessing it gives us the prospect of satisfying our needs and desires, ‘for the fellahs compensation in money is pointless, as they will spend it again immediately’.331 Simply possessing money requires the possessor to calculatingly weigh up the future uses to which it could be put and ‘rationally’ order them in a way that compares the expected costs. By contrast, the Kabyle’s’ practical interests are more strongly connected to the intuitive use-values of the objects being exchanged, as illustrated by the ‘tale of the fellah who died in the middle of the desert, with the sheepskin full of gold pieces that he 327  Probably the most famous version of this story is Heinrich Böll’s ‘Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity’ (Böll 1995). 328  Bourdieu 1976, p. 380. 329  Ibid., pp. 380–381. 330  Marx 2011, p. 102. 331  Bourdieu is citing the French politician Maurice Violette, who in 1936 introduced the Blum–Viollette proposal together with Léon Blum, which would have granted a limited number of Algerians equal civil rights to the French, subject to certain conditions. Bourdieu 1976, p. 383.

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had just found lying beside him’.332 Any shift of focus to the future, which on the Algerian farmers’ conception lies outside their sphere of influence and represents a world ‘governed by an entirely different logic […] whose central peculiarity is that it need not occur’,333 is frowned upon because it tests ‘God’s generosity’.334 Bourdieu therefore concludes: Of all the economic institutions and techniques introduced by colonisation, undoubtedly the one most alien to the logic of the precapitalist form of economy is credit, which presupposes a reference to an abstract future that is defined by a written contract and guaranteed by a comprehensive system of sanctions, and moreover, with the concept of interest, gives time a calculable value.335

By contrast, the Kabyle issue loans based on trust in the honesty and honour of the various parties: Since agreements can only be made between people who know each other, that is, between family, friends and relatives by marriage, the future of the relation is guaranteed in the present itself.’336

Examples like this show how simplistic and superficial it would be to assume just one socially homogeneous dimension of time. Despite this, reducing complex temporal structures and practices to linear sequences and models is part of the standard repertoire of (social) scientific research. Bourdieu refers at several points to a characteristic ‘theorization effect’337 that artificially synchronises temporal sequences that are generated in the ‘heat of the moment’ and unifies them in a way that removes any logical contradictions. By contrast, social practice itself is an example of how references to past, present and future time are created in actu and hence 332  Ibid., pp. 381–382. Elsewhere, Bourdieu infers from this that ‘the theory of properly economic actions only represents a particular case within a general theory of the economy of action’. Ibid., p. 345. 333  Ibid., p. 386. 334  Ibid. Bourdieu gives the example of the traditional prohibition on counting in public, which is regarded as a sign of excessive concern about one’s future. 335  Ibid., p. 384. 336  Ibid., p. 385. Debt thus functions like a moral weapon, capable of wounding the debtor no matter whether it is scrupulously called in or generously waived. On the anthropological significance of debt in the history of economics, see Graeber 2011. 337  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 86.

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manifest heterogeneously: overlapping, intermingling, alternating, excluding and so forth. We can recognise this without necessarily having to refer to intercultural differences in the social use of time; since every social practice generates specific temporal references, such that the enactment of the practice actualises the past and preforms the future, it is normal for different ways of relating to and organising time to exist within a single culture. Accordingly, Bourdieu characterises ‘the relation between habitus and field’ in terms of ‘two modes of existence of history’.338 Consequently, on the one hand, habitus itself must be understood in terms of its temporality, inasmuch as past experiences are present within it, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.339

On the other hand, bodily dispositions and habitual schemes are equally dependent on the ‘products of collective history’340 that preserve and perpetuate past practices in social institutions (laws, titles, conventions, etc.) and material artefacts (things, objects, spatial arrangements, ‘heterotopias’,341 etc.); this in turn makes these practices available to practices of appropriation and reinterpretation in the present. Bourdieu is unequivocal that the ‘products of collective history’ acquire significance only through their practical appropriation.342 Since habitus and field, as ‘two modes of existence of history’, cannot be subsumed into one another without contradiction, the social use of time is likewise determined mainly by strategies geared towards acquiring ‘power over […] time’.343 On this view (which is central to Bourdieu’s thought), power is exerted both on the ‘objective tendencies of the social  Bourdieu 1992a, p. 138.  Bourdieu 1990a, p. 54. 340  Ibid., p. 57. 341  Foucault defines heterotopias as ‘other places’ or ‘counter-spaces’. These ‘localised utopias’ include cemeteries, libraries and museums, which were specially created to slow down the ‘usual passage of time’. See Foucault 1966. 342  ‘The habitus is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation, which exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social, that the king, the banker or the priest are hereditary monarchy, financial capitalism or the Church made flesh.’ Bourdieu 1990a, p. 57. 343  Bourdieu 2000, p. 228. 338 339

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world’ and on ‘subjective aspirations or expectations’.344 Bourdieu describes different temporal strategies that either slow the pace of action by ‘holding back or putting off, maintaining suspense or expectancy’ or accelerate it by ‘hurrying, hustling, surprising, stealing a march’.345 Regardless of which strategy is chosen or deemed apt in a given situation, in the unequal ‘symbolic struggle of all against all’ the ‘hope or fear, associated with objective and subjective uncertainty as to the outcome’,346 remains a key determinant of social reality. It is inscribed both in the individual habitus and in the social institutions that attempt to give at least some grounding to the investments in the competition over social recognition and esteem. By contrast with these futile attempts (which fail because they simply affirm the unceasing alternation of power and impotence), Bourdieu speaks of an. anthropological datum which our habits of thought tend to consign to the metaphysical, namely the contingency of human existence, and above all its finitude, of which Pascal observes that, although it is the only certain thing in life, we do everything we can to forget it, by flinging ourselves into diversion or fleeing into ‘society’.347

Bourdieu is thus not unaware that restricting our gaze to social mechanisms and ways of using time brings with it the risk that society will end up celebrating and worshipping itself, as in the aphorism attributed to Durkheim: ‘society is God’.348 But Bourdieu does not draw a metaphysical conclusion from this. Rather, his critique is directed against both ‘scholastic reason’ and to any ‘sociology’ that ‘leads to a kind of theology of the last instance’.349 It is in this dual opposition that we can see the dialectical character of praxeology, which approaches its object by steering a course between these two poles.  Ibid., p. 227.  Bourdieu 1990a, p.  107. He also mentions ‘the art of ostentatiously giving time (‘devoting one’s time to someone’) or withholding it (‘no time to spare’)’. Elsewhere, in a similar vein, he remarks that ‘the all-powerful is he who does not wait but who makes others wait.’ Bourdieu 2000, p. 228. 346  Ibid., p. 238. 347  Ibid., p. 239. 348  Ibid., p. 245. Durkheim, who regards the religious ideas of ‘primitive’ societies as projections of a collective mind, asks, ‘If the totem is both the symbol of god and of society, are these not one and the same?’ Durkheim 2001, p. 154. 349  Bourdieu 2000, p. 245. 344 345

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Index1

A Absolute identity, 179 Absolute spirit, 196 Abstract unity, 23, 58 Adorno, Theodor W., xi, 4n14, 7n39, 8n41, 12n66, 15n84, 16, 17n102, 19n113, 21, 25, 26n168, 85n167, 96n217, 107n267, 118n317, 120n322, 159n501, 163n523, 182n46, 184n64, 184n67, 198n147, 199n159, 203n181, 205–208, 207n210, 207n211, 211n7, 223n67, 223n68, 223n69, 224n71, 225, 225n76, 225n79, 227n87, 232n116, 238, 239n147, 240n152, 247n196, 257n256, 263n8, 265–267, 265n16, 266n18, 266n20, 266n21, 267n26, 278n82, 279n88, 287n134, 290n151,

291n157, 304n226, 304n229, 305, 305n230, 305n235, 306n239, 308, 309n257, 310, 310n266, 311, 311n272, 313, 313n287 Alienation, 124n336, 126n347, 157, 218n39, 290 Animal symbolicum, 23, 216n27 Aristotle, 34–37, 39–41, 41n24, 44n29, 45–47, 46n33, 77n132, 187, 187n88, 188n89, 311n272 Art, xii, 6n31, 19, 76n127, 87n177, 107, 109n273, 116, 126, 204, 204n190, 209, 210, 220, 224, 224n71, 226, 229n97, 239n147, 245, 250, 254n235, 255, 258n266, 259n272, 266, 276n75, 298n200, 305n234, 307n250, 311, 311n272, 319n320, 324n345 Augustine, 2, 2n7

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Bockrath, Time, Duration and Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40590-7

339

340 

INDEX

B Bad infinite, 191, 191n106, 192, 192n117, 198n152 Basis phenomena, 218n37, 243, 255n243 Being of motion, 49, 51–165, 168, 175 Bergson, Henri, vii, 1, 31, 49, 51–165, 168, 172, 213, 261 Bloch, Ernst, 49n43, 288, 291n157, 292n159 Blumenberg, Hans, 255n241 Bodily experience, 300n213 Bourdieu, Pierre, vii, viii, 24–29, 24n156, 24n158, 25n166, 27n174, 28n189, 83n161, 152n471, 165n527, 259, 260n276, 261–324 C Cassirer, Ernst, vii, viii, 17–24, 18n106, 18n111, 19n113, 19n119, 20n122, 20n124, 21n127, 23n149, 27, 72, 111n280, 122–126, 122n331, 123n335, 124n336, 125n340, 125n341, 126n347, 153, 172n6, 261–263, 262n3, 280, 281n97, 311, 311n276, 314n297, 315n299, 320n323 Change, ix, 10, 14, 31, 36, 36n10, 39, 40, 49, 51–57, 55n14, 58n27, 59, 61, 62, 65, 65n60, 67, 69–73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 92–94, 98, 100, 101, 107–109, 116, 121, 127, 128, 130–133, 135, 140, 141n415, 142, 143, 159, 162, 164, 164n525, 165, 168, 172, 174, 177, 178, 180n41, 181, 183, 185, 186, 199, 200n161, 208, 213, 221,

223n69, 240, 246, 256, 258n266, 261, 267, 267n26, 280, 285n121, 289, 291, 291n157, 299n204, 305n234, 310, 314, 315n299, 317n309, 319 Chomsky, Noam, 277n76, 285n119 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 153n472 Common sense, 26, 86, 161, 268n36, 270, 316 Consciousness, vii, 8, 13, 14, 16–18, 22, 23, 52, 53n8, 55n14, 56, 56n16, 61, 62, 65–69, 69n90, 71n94, 73n104, 74, 75, 77, 77n130, 78, 80–84, 82n153, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 100n234, 102–104, 102n241, 107, 112–115, 114n296, 122–124, 122n329, 127–129, 131, 133, 134, 136, 138, 142, 147, 147n447, 150, 150n463, 152n471, 154, 158, 158n496, 159, 159n504, 161–163, 164n525, 164n526, 175, 180, 180n41, 181, 183, 183n59, 184, 187, 195n134, 198, 201, 203, 207n210, 210, 212–214, 216n27, 217, 218, 219n45, 222, 225n81, 226, 229, 233, 234, 236, 236n133, 236n134, 239n147, 240–242, 252, 254, 257, 257n254, 258n266, 266n20, 266n21, 267, 268, 274, 274n59, 277, 286–288, 290n150, 297n195, 304–306, 305n230, 309n257, 312, 314n297, 315n299, 315n302 Contingency, 65n60, 107, 109, 196, 223n68, 225, 244, 277, 312n279, 324 Continuity, 4n14, 34–38, 40, 40n21, 43, 46n33, 53, 57, 57n25, 58,

 INDEX 

67, 73, 107, 108, 111, 130, 140, 145, 158, 163, 164, 187, 200n161, 221, 222 Copernican Revolution, 12 Cultural development, 17, 20n122, 232 Cultural formation, vii, 181 D Darwin, Charles, 2n5, 98 Deleuze, Gilles, 63n52, 92n200, 122 Descartes, René, 52, 79, 79n143, 80n144, 133n386 Determinism, 133n386, 156, 270n42 Dichotomy, 34–38, 40, 40n21, 44–46, 46n33, 55, 57n25, 59, 61, 62, 119, 122, 123, 138, 182n46, 268n34, 269 Discreteness, 38–43, 57 Double reality, 29, 269, 270, 275 Dualism, 52, 79, 82, 84, 85, 121, 144, 156–161, 156n486, 157n490, 164n526, 165, 215n24, 268, 270, 270n42, 275, 285, 300 Duration (durée), ix, 1, 51, 172, 243, 295 Durkheim, Émile, 3n12, 262, 262n2, 271n49, 272n53, 302, 324, 324n348 E Einstein, Albert, 2, 2n5 Eleatic method, 15 Elias, Norbert, 223n69, 303n223, 313–316, 314n296, 314n297, 315n299, 315n300, 316n307 Engels, Friedrich, 22n141, 267n26, 288n137, 291n157, 292n165 Eternity, 54n11, 58, 58n29, 59, 156n486, 190n100, 308

341

Evolution, 92, 93, 96n217, 97n220, 98, 107, 153n472, 236 Existent contradiction, 186, 194, 207, 223, 261 Experience, vii, 2, 33, 52, 168, 172, 210, 261 Expression, vii, 2, 18, 18n111, 20, 23, 24n156, 25, 30, 45, 54n11, 57, 61, 68n82, 71, 72, 73n107, 74, 76–78, 76n127, 76n129, 77n131, 81, 82, 91, 94, 96n217, 101, 104n253, 110n279, 116, 120, 122, 125, 129, 131–133, 151, 153n472, 154n476, 155n481, 164n526, 167, 176, 189, 196n139, 197n144, 199n159, 200, 207–208, 213–227, 215n24, 216n27, 217n29, 218n38, 230, 231, 233, 233n118, 234, 237, 241, 247, 251, 252, 263, 293, 297, 307, 318n314, 319n321 F Feuerbach, Ludwig, 288, 288n137, 289, 289n141, 291, 291n155, 291n157 Feyerabend, Paul, 273n55, 273n57, 275n65, 276n75 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 179, 199n159, 249n206 Form of reflection, 12, 163n523, 274n59, 306, 306n238 Forms of capital, 282, 282n102, 292, 293 Foucault, Michel, 70n91, 155n481, 155n482, 223n69, 323n341 Freedom, xii, 90n188, 91, 116n306, 117, 124, 133n386, 144, 151–156, 160, 207, 210, 214, 214n18, 277, 278n84, 290n150, 305, 307n250, 308n251

342 

INDEX

Free Will, 14n81, 52, 65n60, 69n88, 132n378, 150n463 Freud, Sigmund, 143n427, 143n429, 203n181, 223n69, 285n119, 311n272 G Genesis, vii, xii, 12, 12n62, 13, 17, 27, 263–268, 287, 301, 313, 313n289 Genetic structuralism, 25, 280n95, 286 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 95, 195, 255, 255n243 H Habermas, Jürgen, 12n62, 154n475, 215n24, 266n21, 311n272, 313n287 Habitus, 24, 24n158, 271n49, 272n53, 293, 293n170, 294, 297–300, 298n201, 299n204, 302n220, 306, 306n238, 316, 316n303, 317, 320, 323, 323n342, 324 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, vii, viii, xi, 11–13, 14n79, 15–20, 16n98, 17n102, 17n103, 23n149, 25n161, 27, 29–31, 43, 47, 47n38, 118n311, 167–169, 169n7, 171–208, 214, 214n21, 214n22, 222n64, 233n119, 244n173, 245n177, 245n181, 247, 248, 249n206, 250n211, 251n212, 253, 253n224, 255, 255n246, 256, 259n271, 261, 263n10, 267n23, 269n38, 273, 274n59, 277, 277n77, 286–291, 286n124, 286n125, 287n130, 287n133, 287n134, 290n150, 291n157, 301, 301n216, 301n217, 301n218, 304,

305n230, 308, 308n251, 310, 313n290 Heidegger, Martin, viii, xi, 118n314, 155n480, 238, 263n8, 269n38, 286n124 Homo economicus, 275n68, 277 Horkheimer, Max, 118n317, 119n321, 199n159, 223n67, 223n69, 224n71, 225, 225n76, 225n79, 227n87, 232n116, 257n256, 279n88 Humboldt, Wilhelm, 231 Hume, David, 69n90, 79n142 Husserl, Edmund, 85n167, 120n322, 122, 122n329, 123n335, 265n16, 286n124, 315n302, 317n309 I Idealism, 11, 16, 33, 133, 133n386, 137, 138, 211n7, 224, 253, 259, 259n274, 287, 287n134, 288, 305n235, 308, 313 Identity, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 43, 45, 47n38, 49, 57, 96n217, 100, 100n234, 112, 117, 118n311, 120, 120n322, 136, 143, 159, 159n504, 164n525, 167, 169, 173n8, 174–176, 178–181, 184n62, 185, 185n74, 186, 206, 215n24, 223, 232, 233, 233n118, 240, 244, 245, 245n180, 245n181, 247, 253, 254, 255n246, 256, 256n250, 257, 287n134, 291, 300n213, 308n251, 311 Illusion, xi, 2, 3, 11n56, 29, 107, 138, 141, 154, 225, 257, 257n254, 261, 267, 273, 274, 295, 313n288, 318 Image, 18, 34, 59n32, 76, 82n153, 83, 84, 86, 86n172, 87, 87n177, 89–91, 94, 95, 101–104, 106, 108, 109n273, 110, 111, 115,

 INDEX 

127, 129, 130, 130n367, 133, 134, 136–138, 137n398, 141, 145–148, 146n439, 151–153, 151n468, 152n471, 153n472, 157, 162–164, 164n526, 187, 202n175, 213, 214, 219n45, 224n71, 226n83, 226n86, 228, 230n102, 231, 236n133 Immobility of being, 15, 33–49, 57, 99, 168, 175, 193, 207, 261 Impossibility of motion, 35, 40, 43, 47 Infinite progression, 192, 194 Inner self, 173 Intellect, 64, 86n171, 90, 93, 97, 97n221, 112, 113, 185n73, 239n147 Intuition, xii, 4–8, 5n27, 6n31, 7n40, 8n45, 8n46, 9n47, 9n48, 10–12, 11n61, 15, 15n84, 19, 21, 36, 51, 79n143, 83, 87n177, 89, 96n216, 96n217, 97, 97n221, 98, 104–115, 107n267, 109n273, 110n277, 111n281, 118, 138, 139n407, 141, 143, 144n430, 151, 154, 154n478, 157, 158, 160, 163n523, 164n525, 172, 184n62, 195n134, 198–201, 203, 203n178, 203n181, 204, 206, 210, 215n24, 216, 219, 222n64, 227–229, 228n93, 230n102, 236, 239–242, 241n160, 252, 262, 288, 304n229, 308, 309n257, 315, 321 Invisible relations, 281 Irrationalism, 139n407, 197 J James, William, 122

343

K Kant, Immanuel, xi, xii, 2–12, 3n9, 4n15, 4n16, 5n21, 5n22, 5n27, 6n31, 7n39, 7n40, 8n45, 8n46, 9n47, 9n48, 10n52, 10n55, 11n57, 11n61, 19, 28, 60n39, 79n140, 96n216, 100n232, 100n234, 106–108, 106n264, 107n267, 107n269, 109n273, 110–114, 110n277, 111n280, 111n281, 117, 125n340, 127n354, 137–139, 138n406, 139n407, 160n508, 172n7, 188n89, 190, 190n100, 190n101, 207n208, 210, 230n102, 232, 239, 240, 240n152, 245, 252n220, 256n250, 267n25, 278n84, 278n85, 288, 304n229, 308, 309n257, 313n290 Klages, Ludwig, 143n429 Kleist, Heinrich, 122, 122n330 L Labour, 13, 17, 17n102, 17n104, 116, 196n139, 264, 264n12, 265, 287n134, 289–292, 294n176, 313n289 Langer, Susanne K., 111n280, 229n97 Language, xii, 19, 25n166, 125, 127, 154n475, 154n476, 209, 210, 215n24, 216n26, 220, 224, 226, 228n93, 229n97, 230, 231, 238, 239n147, 241, 242n161, 244–246, 251n216, 254n235, 255, 256, 258n266, 259n272, 294n176, 295n185, 311 Laughter, 200n164 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 277n76, 280n93, 285n119 Limits of thought, 26, 27, 260, 267, 313

344 

INDEX

Logic of practice, 83n161, 260–324 Logos, 21, 120, 173, 173n9, 202n175, 241n159, 298n200 Löwith, Karl, 185n74 M Marx, Karl, xi, 22n141, 81n151, 196n139, 244n172, 251n212, 264, 264n12, 267n26, 281, 281n100, 288–292, 288n137, 290n151, 291n155, 291n157, 292n159, 292n165, 294, 321 Memory, 2n7, 12, 15n86, 55, 73n104, 75, 81, 81n149, 81n150, 84, 85, 102–104, 121–159, 121n326, 161–164, 164n524, 164n525, 200, 203, 236n133, 263n10, 299, 313n290 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 79n141, 121, 300n213, 301n214 Metaphysics, xi, xii, 9, 52, 94, 138, 139, 143, 144, 144n434, 156, 157, 160, 185n74, 201, 205, 225, 253n228, 256n250, 290 Mill, John Stewart, 133n386 Mimesis, 310, 311n272 Mind, x, 2, 2n7, 5, 5n22, 8, 8n45, 32, 52, 58n27, 69, 71n94, 78, 79, 79n142, 81, 82, 84, 85, 90, 92n200, 106n264, 108, 112–114, 120–123, 130n367, 133, 137, 138, 141, 143, 145, 149, 151, 153n472, 157, 159n504, 160, 178, 190, 202n175, 203, 204, 211n7, 213n16, 227, 229n97, 238, 274n59, 279, 282, 286n124, 300, 300n210, 301n214, 305, 306, 315n302, 324n348 Mobility, 13, 13n78, 14, 53, 57, 58n29, 59n32, 61, 62, 66–69, 73, 74, 76, 83, 98, 115, 137,

141, 168, 193, 199, 201, 203, 206, 207, 212, 308 Moment of truth, 175, 175n13, 199 Movement, vii, 12n62, 36, 52, 169, 172, 214, 276n75 Musil, Robert, 100n234 Mysticism, 92n199 Mythical thought, 18, 124n336, 240, 241 N Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, 81n149, 180n38, 256 Non-identity, 14, 30, 120n322, 179, 181, 193, 194, 198, 207, 245n181, 250n211 O Objective dialectic, 182, 184, 205n193 Objective knowledge, 45, 245 Objectivism, 25, 257, 268, 269n38, 270, 282, 285, 286, 319 P Paradox, xii, 14, 15, 29, 33–49, 33n1, 42n26, 44n29, 45n32, 46n33, 49n42, 52, 53, 57–84, 86, 87, 92, 97, 99n230, 121, 128, 137, 172, 173, 177, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 187n88, 188n89, 189, 193, 229n97 Parmenides, 33, 33n2, 34, 34n5, 42, 43, 47, 49, 134, 202n175 Parsons, Talcott, 303n223 Phenomenological experience, 12, 274n59 Piaget, Jean, 242n161, 242n164 Planck, Max, 2n5

 INDEX 

Plato, 76n129, 77n131, 89n186, 202n175, 208, 218n38, 237, 237n135, 250n207, 298n200, 311n272 Plessner, Helmuth, 88n181, 216n27 Polanyi, Michael, 228n93 Popper, Karl Raimund, 197n145, 273, 273n55, 273n57 Power positions, 281 Power relations, 28, 272n53, 283, 299n207, 302 Practical knowledge, 270, 294n180, 300n210, 306, 306n238, 313 Practical sense, 295n185, 298n201, 299, 317 Practical understanding, 282, 283, 298 Praxeology, vii, x, 26, 27, 30, 268, 274n59, 286–307, 312, 313, 315, 324 Presence, x, 94n208, 125, 212, 233n118, 235 Process, vii, 12, 31, 33, 52, 168, 172, 261 Productive imagination, 211n7 Proust, Marcel, 130n366 Pseudo-problems, 74, 74n112 Pure activity, 21, 22 Pure being, 167, 168, 194, 263n10 Pure concept, 6, 6n31, 7n37, 48, 109n273, 111n281, 180, 195, 242 Pure continuity, 187 Pure expression, 217, 224, 225 Pure form, 4, 6, 7, 15, 110n277, 111–113, 111n280, 116, 120, 121, 186, 240, 247, 248, 253 Pure immediacy, 120n322, 230n104, 284 Pure intuition, 5, 10, 51, 107n267, 110n277, 111, 201, 304n229 Pure knowledge, 12, 225, 226, 257, 283n107 Pure memory, 84, 103, 121–159, 121n326, 163

345

Pure negativity, 185, 187, 187n87 Pure nothing, 167, 168, 194, 263n10 Pure perception, vii, 14, 31–32, 62, 68, 75, 84, 101–121, 129, 131, 136, 144, 145, 150, 158, 159, 165, 263 Pure practice, 13 Pure quality, 68, 72, 74, 81, 82, 100 Pure reason, 9, 9n51, 11, 11n57, 107, 111n281, 207 Pure signification, 215n24, 221, 226 Pure thought, vii, 10, 14, 15, 22, 31–34, 38, 42–49, 57, 60, 63, 84, 89, 97, 99, 100, 103, 120, 121, 128, 165, 176, 177, 188, 199, 203, 263, 263n10, 267, 268, 268n34 Pure visibility, 211, 221 R Rational concept, 11n61 Reality, 17, 17n102, 18, 23–25, 27–29, 33, 35, 36, 44–46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 58, 59, 59n32, 62, 63, 64n58, 65, 68, 71n94, 73, 80, 81n151, 83n159, 84–86, 86n171, 89n186, 92n200, 94n209, 95–97, 99n230, 100n232, 101n235, 103, 104, 106–108, 110, 113–115, 117, 119, 123, 126, 131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 144, 157, 159, 161–163, 164n525, 187, 193, 202n175, 203, 204, 209, 211n7, 215n24, 218, 219, 222, 223, 225n81, 234, 238, 239n147, 240n153, 241, 244n175, 245, 249, 252, 252n220, 256, 257n254, 259, 262, 262n2, 266n20, 269, 269n38, 270, 270n42, 273n55, 275, 279n87, 281, 288, 294, 295, 299n207, 303, 307, 309, 312, 320, 324

346 

INDEX

Relativism, 264n11, 265, 266 Religion, 19, 77n131, 92n199, 119, 210, 220, 224, 239n147, 245, 250, 255, 258n266, 259n272, 262, 290n150 Representation, 3–5, 5n21, 6n31, 7n37, 8, 8n45, 8n46, 9n48, 10, 21, 23, 52, 57, 61, 63, 66, 72, 75, 86, 86n171, 87, 87n177, 89–92, 95, 102, 105n257, 107n269, 110n277, 113, 122, 123, 127, 129, 130, 130n367, 133–136, 137n398, 138, 141, 145, 149–153, 153n472, 157, 162–164, 185, 189, 212, 213, 215–217, 215n24, 219–221, 226, 233, 236, 236n134, 245n180, 251, 257n256, 270, 276–277, 278n86, 280, 294n180, 307n250, 314 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 71n94 Russell, Bertrand, 46, 91n193 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 277n78, 285, 285n119, 285n121, 286n124 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 277n76, 285n119 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 169, 179, 198, 222n64, 301n217 Schematism, 6, 6n31, 109n273, 228n94, 308 Scholastic view, 267n29, 301 Science, xii, 51, 60, 65, 65n60, 80n144, 82, 83, 87n177, 91, 92n199, 93, 95, 111, 133n386, 139, 143n429, 144n434, 154n475, 172, 173n9, 180n41, 182n46, 196, 202, 204, 220, 224n71, 226, 226n83, 227, 233, 240n155, 241, 244–246, 244n175, 249n206, 250,

250n211, 252, 253n227, 254n235, 256n250, 259, 263n8, 266, 269, 269n38, 270, 270n42, 271n49, 272, 273n55, 275n65, 276n75, 277n81, 278n82, 279n87, 281n97, 281n101, 284, 291, 300n210, 302, 304n226, 305, 306n238, 311n276, 312n279, 319 Self-reflection, 178, 199, 264, 267, 306 Sensation, 5, 5n22, 6, 61, 68–82, 70n92, 71n94, 76n126, 82n153, 84, 87, 96n216, 99, 105–107, 114, 121, 123n335, 125n340, 142, 144, 147, 164, 200, 206, 213, 213n16, 214, 217, 220, 228, 228n95, 228n96, 230, 234, 235n130, 241n160 Signification, 20n122, 21, 22, 212, 213, 215, 215n24, 221, 224, 226, 230n102, 231, 251, 257 Simmel, Georg, 237, 237n136, 253n228 Simultaneity, xi, 3, 7, 54, 55, 56n16, 64n56, 65, 66, 68n82, 83, 128, 146n442, 156 Social agent, 25n166, 269, 279, 302, 303, 316, 317 Social constraints, 160, 271n49, 272, 275–277, 282 Social form, 81n151, 253n228, 260, 261, 267, 268, 316n303 Social illusions, 29 Social order, 28, 299 Social position, 283, 294n176 Social practice, vii, 27–29, 29n192, 267, 267n26, 271, 278, 279, 294, 297, 298n201, 303, 303n222, 315, 316, 322, 323 Space, 3, 33, 53, 187, 212, 262 Spatial relations, 40, 53, 56, 62, 66, 77, 297

 INDEX 

347

Spengler, Oswald, 124n338, 143n429 Spirit, viii, 11, 34, 82n155, 84, 174, 210, 261 Spiritual activity, 23 Spiritual formation, 22, 241, 261 Spontaneity, 5, 65n60, 91, 108, 109n273, 112, 113, 116n306, 117, 151, 156, 214, 217n29, 219, 252n220, 300 Subjectivism, 25, 257, 268–270, 269n38, 275, 282, 283, 285, 286 Substance, ix, 7, 11, 19, 35, 41n24, 47, 52, 65n60, 79, 81n151, 104, 111, 112, 114–117, 116n306, 125, 168, 169n7, 204, 209, 210, 240n153, 249, 255, 255n241, 258, 262n2, 280, 290, 311 Superficial ego, 56n21, 309n256 Symbolic forms, vii, 17–20, 20n122, 20n124, 22–24, 23n149, 73n107, 111n280, 122, 123, 124n336, 126, 135, 141, 154n476, 209, 210, 211n7, 214, 215n24, 216, 219n45, 222, 223, 226, 229–231, 233, 236, 237, 239n147, 244n175, 245, 247, 249–252, 251n216, 255–259, 255n241, 258n266, 261, 311, 311n276, 319n321, 320n323 Symbolic order, 281, 282, 299n207 Symbolic practices, 24 Synthesis, 4, 5, 11n61, 58n27, 73, 96n216, 163, 164, 174, 175n13, 223, 243, 249, 251n212, 252n219, 256n250, 259, 266n20, 312n284, 314–316, 315n300 System of relations, 312

Temporal relations, vii, 3, 31, 41, 42, 66, 83n161, 134, 210, 242n161, 261, 313, 316 Time, vii, 1, 34–38, 51, 168, 172, 210, 261 Transcendental, 6–9, 10n55, 11, 11n57, 25, 107n267, 107n269, 108, 111n281, 188, 188n89, 202n175, 210, 246, 262, 263, 283n110, 315 True infinite, 191, 192 Twofold truth, 29, 275, 307

T Tacit knowing, 228n93 Temporal continuum, 3

Z Zeno, vii, 14, 31, 33–49, 51, 168, 172, 247, 261

V Validity, vii, ix, xii, 9, 11–14, 17, 24, 32, 36, 43, 46, 47, 49, 74, 78, 83, 97, 99, 100n232, 102, 105, 106, 109, 159, 161, 163, 165, 172n6, 175n14, 182, 215n24, 225n81, 231, 245, 247, 249, 256n250, 263–268, 264n11, 272, 284, 287, 294, 295, 298n200, 301, 301n214, 313, 313n289, 314, 315n299 Virilio, Paul, 155n482 Vital impulse, 52 W Warburg, Aby, 18, 18n106 Weber, Max, 155, 155n479, 262, 269n38, 294n176, 298n201 Weizsäcker, Victor, 141n415 Whitehead, Alfred North, 53n7, 111n280, 122, 229n97, 240n153