I write philosophy, but most of my reading is outside the field of philosophy. This is how most philosophers read. Nietzsche liked to read novelists such as Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, and Petronius. Thoreau liked to read books by travelers and explorers. Montaigne said that he read mostly poetry and history, and among historians, his favorites were those who wrote about what they had experienced themselves — Julius Caesar, for example. If Montaigne read philosophy, it was unsystematic philosophy — Plutarch’s essays or Seneca’s epistles.
A philosopher’s style of writing is usually borrowed from the philosopher who inspired him. Montaigne wrote essays because Plutarch wrote essays. I write aphorisms, mini-essays, because that’s what Nietzsche wrote. Nietzsche wrote aphorisms because he admired French aphorists, like La Rochefoucauld and Pascal, and because he liked Schopenhauer’s aphorisms.
Recently I read the first quarter of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution. I hope to come back to it in the future, and read the remaining three-quarters (the book has four chapters of 90 pages each). I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg, then imported it into Google Books.
One might call it systematic philosophy — a treatise, rather than essays or aphorisms. The ideas are large, the style usually clear, but it’s a bit dry and academic. It feels like the author is in a library, whereas when you read Thoreau or Montaigne, you feel like the author is in the world, there’s dirt on his pants.
Lin Yutang wrote, “He who is afraid to use an I in his writing will never make a good writer.”1 Bergson avoids “I” so his writing is somewhat dry.
One of Bergson’s main ideas is Duration. Bergson argues that time is always flowing, but human thought often overlooks this important fact. Logic and language prefer to deal with separate states, not constant flow. “Intellect turns away from the vision of time. It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies everything it touches. We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect.”
If you want to see time flowing, look inside your own mind, you’ll find that your thoughts are continually moving, shifting, jumping. As William James argued, “consciousness is not a state or a sum of impressions, not a pool or a reservoir, but a stream.”2 James and Bergson were contemporaries and kindred spirits; they met each other, and admired each other’s writings.
Our present is always molded by our past. Bergson said, “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”3 As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
We’re shaped by the past, by our experiences, by all the time we’ve lived through.4 And, as I argued in a recent issue, we’re shaped by all that our ancestors lived through; their experiences leave residues in our unconscious, residues that Jung called archetypes. As Bergson said, “What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth — nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions?”
The past is preserved in our memory, preserved automatically. “All that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there.” The vast storehouse of our memory is largely unconscious, only a few stray pieces emerge into consciousness. “At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door.” One thinks of Proust’s unconscious memories being awakened by the taste of a madeleine.
A person’s situation is unique because his history is unique. You’re not the same person as your neighbor, and you’re not the same person that you were a year ago. Hence we can’t “solve for another the problems by which he is faced in life. Each must solve them from within, on his own account.... To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Bergson emphasizes creativity, hence his book is called Creative Evolution.5
Some people might say, “How can evolution be creative? I can understand how human beings can be creative, but how can plants and animals be creative?” Creativity is often unconscious, and animals may possess unconscious powers similar to ours.
Bergson argues that even the most primitive animals have a kind of psychology, their behavior can’t be explained by chemistry. Bergson writes,
| A physico-chemical explanation of the motions of the amoeba... seems impossible to many of those who have closely observed these rudimentary organisms. Even in these humblest manifestations of life they discover traces of an effective psychological activity. |
Plants have a certain intelligence; in an earlier issue, I discussed how trees communicate and share resources.6 Quantum physics shows us that inorganic matter has a kind of consciousness. Surely plants have at least as much consciousness as inorganic matter has.
Life is constant change, the present is always unique. “Consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history.” But our rational-scientific thinking wants things to be constant and enduring; we want to be able to reproduce the experiment that we did a year ago, and get the same result. “All our belief in objects, all our operations on the systems that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea that time does not bite into them.”7
Science deals with isolated systems, common sense deals with detached objects, but actually nothing is isolated or detached. Bergson speaks of, “the universal interaction which, without doubt, is reality itself.” Even the solar system isn’t independent, it’s impacted by things outside the solar system.8
Is Bergson’s idea of Duration optimistic? Should we rejoice that time is always flowing, that time is the central fact of existence? Chekhov wrote, “King David had a ring with an inscription on it: ‘All things pass.’ When one is sad, those words make one cheerful, and when one is cheerful, they make one sad.”9
Wyndham Lewis felt that Bergson’s teaching (that time is always flowing) stripped life of meaning; Lewis tried to rebut Bergson in Time and Western Man. The French writer Céline was depressed by the flow of time, and wanted to stop time. Céline used a passing crowd to symbolize the flow of time, and wrote, “Make them stop... don’t let them move anymore at all... There, make them freeze... once and for all!... So that they won’t disappear anymore!”10 Zen emphasizes time and change, but doesn’t long to stop time, Zen appreciates the passing moment.
The idea of evolution, which we associate with Darwin, emphasizes the flow of time, as do the novels of Proust, as do philosophers like Bergson and James.11 Is the idea of time important in this period? Is Bergson’s work an example of this trend?
And what about my own work? My theory of history says that societies are influenced by life- and death-instincts, instincts that are shared by the members of a particular society. These instincts aren’t static, they’re moving, causing renaissance and decadence. So my theory emphasizes movement and time.12
My theory also emphasizes “groupiness,” i.e., the way individuals are shaped by the group, shaped by factors common to the group. Renaissance and decadence, in my view, are caused by the group mind, group instincts. Likewise, Bergson says that evolution is caused by group action; the evolution of something complex (such as the eye) “must certainly be related to some sort of effort, but to an effort of far greater depth than the individual effort... an effort common to most representatives of the same species.”
Notice that word “effort.” Bergson traces evolution to effort, “vital impulse” (élan vital). He rejects the Establishment view that evolution is about random mutation and natural selection. He understands that something as complicated as the eye or brain couldn’t result from a random process, as monkeys hitting keys randomly could never create Hamlet, no matter how many eons they spent.
Bergson understands the Mousetrap Problem: developing one element of a system is of no use unless that element is coordinated with other elements. As Michael Behe put it,
| The system needs several components before it can work properly. An everyday example of irreducible complexity is a mousetrap, built of several pieces (platform, hammer, spring and so on). Such a system probably cannot be put together in a Darwinian manner, gradually improving its function. You can’t catch a mouse with just the platform and then catch a few more by adding the spring. All the pieces have to be in place before you catch any mice. |
Substitute the elements of a cell for the elements of a mousetrap, and you see the problem: evolution by mutation is difficult enough, but the co-evolution of different elements of a system is beyond rational explanation, beyond mechanical explanation. We need to bring in the non-rational factors that horrify the Establishment:
Bergson points out that the same miracle of evolution sometimes takes place multiple times. The complexity of the vertebrate eye, for example, is matched by that of a mollusc eye; the evolution of the eye took place twice, on two different branches of the tree of life.
| Let us place side by side [Bergson writes] the eye of a vertebrate and that of a mollusc such as the common Pecten. We find the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous elements. The eye of the Pecten presents a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own. There is even that peculiar inversion of retinal elements which is not met with, in general, in the retina of the invertebrates. Now, the origin of molluscs may be a debated question, but, whatever opinion we hold, all are agreed that molluscs and vertebrates separated from their common parent-stem long before the appearance of an eye so complex as that of the Pecten. Whence, then, the structural analogy? |
There are three possible answers, Bergson says.
Bergson says that Darwin’s theory can’t solve the Mousetrap Problem, can’t explain how the different elements of an eye evolve by “insensible variations.” Such variations offer no survival advantage until they accumulate, and are coordinated with the other elements of the eye. As Bergson puts it, “If the accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible variations, some good genius must be appealed to — the genius of the future species — in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for selection will not look after this.”
A similar objection can be made to the theory of de Vries. A jump forward of one eye-element would be damaging to a primitive power of vision, unless it were coordinated with other jumps. “For the previous function to go on or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have happened together must be complementary.”
As for Lamarck’s theory, it has some merit (in Bergson’s view), but can’t solve the problem by itself. Bergson writes,
| Neo-Lamarckism [is], of all the later forms of evolutionism, the only one capable of admitting an internal and psychological principle of development.... And it is also the only evolutionism that seems to us to account for the building up of identical complex organs on independent lines of development. For it is quite conceivable that the same effort to turn the same circumstances to good account might have the same result. |
But (according to Bergson) researchers have come up with few examples of Lamarckian evolution. Bergson says that there is “hardly a single unquestionable example of acquired and transmitted peculiarities.... Hereditary transmission is the exception and not the rule.”
Would Bergson have been more impressed with Lamarckism if he had known about Kammerer’s work? Creative Evolution was written in 1907, while Kammerer became known around 1920. Did Bergson eventually become familiar with Kammerer’s work (Bergson died in 1941)? If so, what was Bergson’s view of Kammerer’s work? Kammerer was a writer as well as a researcher. Did Bergson read any of Kammerer’s books?
So Bergson raises objections to Darwin, de Vries, and Lamarck. That doesn’t mean, however, that he completely rejects any of them. He writes,
| Each of them, being supported by a considerable number of facts, must be true in its way. Each of them must correspond to a certain aspect of the process of evolution.... But the reality of which each of these theories takes a partial view must transcend them all. And this reality is the special object of philosophy, which is not constrained to scientific precision because it contemplates no practical application. [Philosophy offers] a more comprehensive, although thereby of necessity a less definite, idea of the evolutionary process. |
Bergson would probably agree with my view that the philosopher is well-suited to address the problem of evolution; indeed, the philosopher is the only person who can solve this problem. It’s not a problem for specialists, it’s a problem that can only be solved by those who look at the whole, i.e., philosophers.
One way to think about evolution is to compare it with historical events. Consider, for example, an episode from Lincoln’s life: When Lincoln was about 20, he bought a barrel of miscellanies for $1. Inside the barrel was a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on English Law. This book started Lincoln on his legal path, which led to his political career. Is this chance? Destiny? Will? Synchronicity? It’s difficult to say precisely what this is, but I suspect it’s more than chance, and I suspect that the factors at work here are the factors at work in evolution. If we understand how the world works, it will enable us to understand history, biology, and other fields.13
Another way to think about the evolution of species is to compare it to the emergence of the first spark of life. How did the first spark of life arise from inanimate matter? Chance? Destiny? Will? Synchronicity? Perhaps it arose from the same factors that led Lincoln to Blackstone’s Commentaries, the same factors that created the eye and the brain. It must be more than chance.
I realize that few people want to read my thoughts on evolution. Most people believe that this issue was settled long ago, and that specialists can explain it. I would point to the Shakespeare controversy, and say, Here’s a case where all the specialists agree, and all the specialists are utterly wrong. Furthermore, the origin of life and the origin of species is a large question, a philosophical question, hence it’s even better suited for philosophers than the Shakespeare controversy.
The Shakespeare controversy and the evolution controversy both pit the Establishment against leading thinkers. Leading thinkers like Freud, Whitman, and Mark Twain opposed the conventional view of Shakespeare. Likewise, leading thinkers like Bergson, Shaw, Nietzsche, and Koestler opposed the conventional view of evolution.
Mankind struggles with questions of will, spirit, the non-material. As Bergson put it,
| Our intellect [is] intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves — in short, to think matter.... The human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools.... Our logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids... our intellect triumphs in geometry. |
The ancient Greeks developed logic and geometry. They made a laudable attempt to fathom the universe, but their focus on abstractions (like logic and geometry) often led them away from reality. On the other hand, primitive man was ignorant of abstractions, ignorant of logic and geometry, but comfortable with realities, realities like will and spirit and action-at-a-distance. So we’re developing a new appreciation of primitive thought, and we’re not as impressed with Greek thought as earlier generations were.
Bergson continues,
| Our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? ....Our reasoning, so sure of itself among things inert, feels ill at ease on this new ground. It would be difficult to cite a biological discovery due to pure reasoning. |
As I wrote in my essay on Coleridge, “What does it mean to say a car ‘begins to move’? As far as the Understanding is concerned, it is either already moving, or it is at rest. Beginning, change, motion itself, development, evolution, life... eludes the rigorous either/or of the mere understanding.”14
When logic struggles with problems like “the car begins to move,” philosophers decide that human thought can’t grasp the essence of things. Bergson writes,
| Boldly [philosophy] proceeds, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles in its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very speedily renounces its first ambition. “It is no longer reality itself,” it says, “that it will reconstruct, but only an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image; the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; we move among relations; the absolute is not in our province....” But for the human intellect, after too much pride, this is really an excess of humility. |
We’ve became too humble, Bergson says; we can grasp the essence of things. In my view, the best way to grasp the essence of things is to turn to our own experience, our own daily life, and historical episodes like Lincoln’s barrel of miscellanies. Bergson recommended intuition. Reason helps us to survive, but intuition puts us into direct contact with reality. Our own inner life is a microcosm of the world. “Matter and life, which fill this world, are equally within us. We feel within ourselves the forces that operate in all things.”15
The freedom, spontaneity, and creativity that we feel within ourselves teach us about the world; the world is also creative. “Intuition takes us into the heart of the world.”16
Intuition can also enable us to understand someone else. This kind of intuition, sympathetic intuition, puts ourselves into the mind of the other, and “attains the absolute.”17
Reason operates with uniform time, clock time, but intuition has a different kind of time; the heart has its own clock.
Life is movement and change, Bergson says. Bergson emphasizes Duration, he wouldn’t be flummoxed by “the car begins to move.” Bergson says that modern geometry and math are also focusing on movement:
| Ancient geometry [was] purely static, [it] worked with figures drawn once for all. [Modern geometry] studies the varying of a function — that is, the continuous movement by which the figure is described.... The introduction of motion into the genesis of figures [is] the origin of modern mathematics. |
Bergson says that modern physics begins by considering time: Galileo focuses on the time it takes an object to fall, while Kepler focuses on the time it takes a planet to cover a certain distance.
One of my favorite writers on evolution is Arthur Koestler, who was born in 1905, 46 years after Bergson. What did Koestler think of Bergson? Koestler calls Bergson an “arch-vitalist,” and Koestler says that it’s okay if his own view is called vitalism: “I have no objection, and shall quote in reply a profound remark by that arch-vitalist, Henri Bergson: ‘The vitalist 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.’”18
Koestler speaks of an “Unforgettable aphorism of Bergson’s: ‘The unconsciousness of a falling stone is something quite different from the unconsciousness of a growing cabbage.’”19 So Bergson thinks that a plant has a vital impulse that a stone doesn’t have. “Bergson’s attitude,” Koestler writes, “is close to panpsychism: the theory that some rudimentary kind of sentience is present throughout the animal kingdom and even in plants. Some speculatively inclined modern physicists would attribute a psychic element even to sub-atomic particles. [On the other hand,] Cartesian dualism regards consciousness as an exclusive possession of man, and places a kind of Iron Curtain between matter and mind.”
Bergson seems unaware of quantum physics, so he doesn’t “attribute a psychic element [to] sub-atomic particles.” In general, I don’t think Bergson goes far enough; he doesn’t view the universe as magical, he doesn’t see the kinship between the organic and the inorganic, he doesn’t appreciate Jung and synchronicity. But he makes an honest effort to tackle difficult issues, and he’s a profound thinker; he’s certainly one of the leading philosophers of his time.
Both Koestler and Bergson see some sense in teleology, also known as finalism. We’re pulled by the future, as well as pushed by the past. Lincoln’s future in politics was pulling him toward that barrel of miscellanies, as much as his past pushed him to it. Koestler writes,
| Evolution has been compared to a journey from an unknown origin towards an unknown destination, a sailing along a vast ocean; but we can at least chart the route which carried us from the sea-cucumber stage to the conquest of the moon; and there is no denying that there is a wind which makes the sails move. But whether we say that the wind, coming from the distant past, pushes the boat along, or whether we say that it drags us along into the future, is a matter of choice. The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past. Causality and finality are complementary principles in the sciences of life; if you take out finality and purpose you have taken the life out of biology as well as psychology.20 |
Jung would agree. Jung argued that the goal of the psyche was wholeness, and people are pulled toward that goal. We’re pulled toward our destiny, at the same time that we’re pushed by our history. “The psychic process,” Jung wrote, “like any other life-process, is not just a causal sequence, but is also a process with a teleological orientation.”21
But neither Koestler nor Bergson subscribe to radical finalism, neither believe that everything is mapped out in advance. Radical finalism, like radical mechanism, denies creativity. The human mind has a tendency toward finalism and mechanism. The mind makes plans, hence we tend to see the universe as “the realization of a plan” (finalism). The mind proceeds “by calculation, by adapting means to ends and by thinking out mechanisms,” hence we tend to see the universe “as an immense machine regulated by mathematical laws” (mechanism).
So the human mind has a penchant for finalism and mechanism.
| Originally, we think only in order to act [Bergson writes]. Our intellect has been cast in the mold of action. Speculation is a luxury, while action is a necessity. Now, in order to act, we begin by proposing an end; we make a plan, then we go on to the detail of the mechanism which will bring it to pass. |
So finalism and mechanism are related, complementary. Both deny creation, the creation of the unforeseeable. But the artist and the philosopher are comfortable with creativity and spontaneity, since art and philosophy aren’t designed for action. “Disinterested art is a luxury, like pure speculation.”
Bergson says that action deals with the surface of things, philosophy with the forces beneath the surface. Action makes use of intellect, philosophy makes use of intuition. Bergson’s view resembles Coleridge’s view, which I discussed in a recent issue:
| Coleridge used the old term natura naturans for the forces/energies/instincts that are hidden in nature.... A deep thinker... wants to focus on hidden forces and energies, growth and change, natura naturans.... The highest powers of the mind, Reason and Imagination, deal with the intangible forces in nature (natura naturans). The Understanding can’t grasp these intangible forces; the Understanding can’t grasp change, life, evolution. |
Natura naturans are the driving forces of the universe; natura naturans can be translated “nature naturing,” or “nature driving forward.” Natura naturans is present tense (naturans is the present participle). The opposite of natura naturans is natura naturata, which is past tense (naturata is the past participle).
What Bergson calls Intellect can’t deal with the hidden forces, the driving forces, the present tense; Intellect deals with surfaces, natura naturata. Bergson writes,
| Reality appears as a ceaseless upspringing of something new, which has no sooner arisen to make the present than it has already fallen back into the past; at this exact moment it falls under the glance of the intellect, whose eyes are ever turned to the rear. |
My focus has always been on hidden forces, natura naturans; I’ve always focused on the life- and death-instincts. And when I discuss Connections, I focus on intangible connections, hidden connections.
Bergson’s “creative evolution” is more upbeat than mechanical Darwinism, with its emphasis on chance. In an earlier issue, I described how Jacques Maritain and his wife made a pact to commit suicide together, but changed their mind after hearing Bergson lecture.
Click here for my earlier discussion of Bergson.
Two years ago, I wrote, “It’s likely that Putin is behind the microwave attacks against American officials, attacks that began in Havana, and more recently have occurred inside the U.S.” Now some 1,500 Americans have been attacked by these microwave weapons, sometimes called “directed-energy weapons” or “radio-frequency” weapons. Many of these attacks have taken place inside the U.S. Often the victims are employees of the FBI or the CIA, counter-intelligence operatives who are trying to catch Russian spies.
The attacks have taken place on every continent. Russia has the global reach, the ruthlessness, and the technical skill to carry out such attacks. Specific Russian operatives have been traced to locations where the attacks have occurred, and Russian operatives with training in this field have been arrested in the U.S. Attacks have occurred in places like Cuba and Vietnam, places where the U.S. is trying to improve relations, and Russia is trying to hold on to old allies. The victims of the attacks are government employees — diplomats, spies, etc. — and their families. The attacks cause lasting damage to the brain, the ear-canal, etc., and sometimes require surgery.
The CIA and the State Department are reluctant to say that Russia is behind the attacks. The attacks are an act of war, and would call for a military response. Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration have been wary of going to war with Russia, and have preferred to say, “We’re not certain who’s behind the attacks, it’s probably not a foreign adversary. No microwave weapon has been found, and traced to a specific country.” Since the U.S. government has taken a timid approach, the attacks have continued.
Click here for a report on this subject by “60 Minutes.” Some of the research for the report was done by Christo Grozev, the famous Internet investigator who helped Navalny.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | The Importance of Living, Ch. 12, #4 back |
| 2. | This is a quote from Robert D. Richardson, not from James. See Richardson’s biography of James, Ch. 35, “The Wonderful Stream of Our Consciousness.”
As time flows for individuals, so too it flows for nations. We like to divide history into periods, separate states, but actually history is continuous flow. We say that World War II lasted from 1939 to 1945, overlooking Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, and Japan’s invasion of China, which took place throughout the 1930s. So the borders of historical periods are fuzzy, change is continual, separate periods are artificial. back |
| 3. | Creative Evolution, Ch. 1 back |
| 4. | Individuals grow and mature over time, and so do societies. In the field of philosophy, our society can solve problems that earlier philosophers couldn’t because time is on our side, we’ve matured more than earlier philosophers, our wisdom has had more time to ripen. This assumes that civilization endures, and the maturing process continues. back |
| 5. | The idea of creating oneself every day, every moment, reminds me of Sartre and Existentialism. Did Bergson influence Sartre? Or did Bergson influence Sartre indirectly, through some other thinker, perhaps Heidegger? Or did Bergson express ideas that were “in the air,” ideas that several thinkers were coming to independently?
Surely Sartre would have liked Bergson’s idea that we create ourselves, we define ourselves: “What we do,” Bergson wrote, “depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually.” back |
| 6. | If we go even lower than the amoeba, if we look at cells, we find something at work besides chemistry. Bergson mentions a “truly admirable book” by the American biologist E. B. Wilson. The book was called The Cell in Development and Inheritance, and Bergson quotes from it the following sentence: “The study of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world.”
Perhaps the best way to narrow this “enormous gap” is to reflect that life came from the inorganic, so it must have some kinship with it, just as you must have some kinship with your parents. And when we look at the Paired Particles experiment, we find that, yes, there is a striking similarity in behavior between the organic and the inorganic: they both have an awesome and inexplicable telepathic power, a telepathic power that indicates a high degree of connectedness. back |
| 7. | Bergson believed that one of the chief differences between the organic and the inorganic is that time impacts the organic, but “glides over” the inorganic “without penetrating.” We see this most clearly, Bergson says, when we contemplate evolution as a whole, from the lowest forms of life to the highest, when we view evolution as “a single indivisible history.” What a long and remarkable history! This history shows that life is about time and change, whereas the inorganic has no comparable history. back |
| 8. | I discussed “universal interaction” in 2000, 2007, 2010, etc. back |
| 9. | “My Life,” #19 back |
| 10. | Quoted in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Ch. 1 back |
| 11. | As I wrote more than thirty years ago, “While Don Quixote is always the same, Proust’s narrator changes over time. The narrator’s attitude toward Albertine, for example, changes over time; though the narrator is obsessed with Albertine, and is crushed by Albertine’s flight, he eventually puts Albertine out of his mind and becomes indifferent to her. Proust depicts how time changes one’s idea of the world, and also how time changes the world itself.”
Time and movement seem to be important in this period of intellectual history, this moment of collective consciousness. We shouldn’t assume, however, that one thinker influenced another; for example, we shouldn’t assume that Darwin influenced Bergson, or that Bergson influenced Proust. It’s more likely that time and movement were “in the air,” in the collective consciousness, and each of these thinkers came to his ideas independently.
My theory of history emphasizes time and movement, and I developed it when I was about 20, before I knew anything about Proust or Bergson. One might say that big ideas are in the air and the thinker is a kind of antenna, receiving signals from the universe. Thinkers living at the same time receive the same signals, hence their thinking has a “family resemblance.” back |
| 12. | What would Bergson say about Freud’s theory of life- and death-instincts? Bergson was born in 1859, three years after Freud. When he became aware of Freud, Bergson’s worldview was probably formed already; he probably didn’t have room in his worldview for Freud.
On the other hand, there may be some overlap between Bergson’s ideas and Freud’s ideas. The following remarks by Bergson seem to overlap with Freud’s life- and death-instincts: “Vital properties are never entirely realized, though always on the way to become so; they are not so much states as tendencies.... In the domain of life... the interaction of antagonistic tendencies is always implied.” The life- and death-instincts are indeed tendencies, not states, and they are indeed antagonistic.
Like Bergson, Coleridge viewed life in terms of antagonistic tendencies. Coleridge’s goal was “the reduction of the idea of Life to its simplest and most comprehensive form or mode of action; that is, to some instinct or tendency, evident in all its manifestations.” back |
| 13. | How the world works may be how the mind works. The world works through non-rational factors like intuition, fate, instinct, and these non-rational factors also operate in our search for truth. As Bergson put it, “It is necessary that these two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory of life, should join each other, and, by a circular process, push each other on unceasingly.”
What was the cause of Lincoln’s purchase? There were numerous causes, infinite causes:
So if we understand history, it helps us to understand evolution; if we understand causality in general, we might be able to understand the causes of evolution. A biology specialist can’t understand evolution, only one who looks at The Whole can understand evolution. back |
| 14. | This is a quote from Owen Barfield’s What Coleridge Thought, p. 110. Zeno’s paradoxes resemble “the car begins to move.” Zeno’s paradoxes show how Greek rationality struggled to deal with motion. back |
| 15. | Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Ch. 3, p. 53, quoting Bergson. back |
| 16. | Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Ch. 3, p. 53, quoting Safranski. back |
| 17. | This is a quote from Bergson. I found it in Richardson’s biography of William James, Chapter 70. Richardson says it comes from Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics, 53. back |
| 18. | Janus, Ch. 11, #9 back |
| 19. | Janus, Ch. 12, #1 back |
| 20. | Janus, Ch. 11, #9 back |
| 21. | Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, (Collected Works, v. 7), “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious” back |