Bergson's philosophy and influence

Posted by Sue Lewis on 7 November 2009 | 2 Comments

To commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Henri Bergson on 18 October 1859, David Lorimer held a dialogue with Rupert Sheldrake at the Study Centre last month. RS described his first reading of Bergson’s Matter and Memory in 1972, at a time when he was reflecting on morphogenetic fields and the formative influences on living organisms in relation to plant morphogenesis, as a life-changing experience.  Their discussion triggered a range of connections from the audience and this is a continuation.

Bergson’s philosophy was popular during his lifetime, but also attracted criticism from sources as widely different as the Vatican and the scientific community. After his death, in 1941, his wife destroyed his papers in accordance with his wishes, and his work fell into obscurity until Gilles Deleuze published Bergsonism in 1966. Nevertheless his perceptions had infiltrated many fields of arts and sciences and continue to inspire those of us in search of deeper meaning and continuity.

At the heart of Bergson’s philosophy is his theory of time and consciousness, known as “duration” to differentiate it from mechanistic clock time. In our inner life clock, memories grow and change, as the present moment becomes the past. No two moments are identical because the later one contains the memory of the former. This experience of memory is central to Proust’s great masterpiece, A la Recherche du temps perdu (volume I appeared in 1913); and Proust’s writing in turn influenced Virginia Woolf.

In “An Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903) Bergson explains that an object can be known absolutely and relatively. Relative knowledge is gained through intellectual analysis; absolute knowledge is gained through the experience of intuition. The English translation of the essay was greeted with enthusiasm by William James and had a far-reaching influence on American pragmatism and literature.

To illustrate his comprehensive idea of intuition, Bergson reconstructed a city with photographs taken from every viewpoint and angle, an image that may have influenced the development of Cubism.  Another contemporary, Wassily Kandinsky highlighted the inadequacies of Cubism, “in which natural form is often forcibly subjected to geometrical construction, a process which tends to hamper the abstract by the concrete and spoil the concrete by the abstract”. Kandinsky played the cello and the piano before he worked with oil paints. Bergson, the son of a Polish musician, specified that each of his images was incomplete. Both men sought to express a totality of experience, encompassing visual, auditory and kinesthetic responses, and moving beyond the purely sensory to “something that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul” (Concerning the Spiritual in Art [1911], p52).

Bergson’s sister, Mina, trained at the Slade School of Art in London and studied Egyptian art at the British Museum. There she met Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founding member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. They married in 1890, she became Moina, and they performed the Rites of Isis at a theatre group in Paris.

There does not appear to be any evidence that their magical practices influenced Henri Bergson, who derived his initial interest in states of consciousness beyond immediate memory from observing sessions of hypnosis from the 1880s.  In 1913, he was appointed President of the Society for Psychical Research in London, where he gave an inaugural Presidential Address entitled “Phantasms of the Living and Psychical Research.” Earlier that year he lectured on “Spirituality and Liberty” to a packed audience at Columbia University, New York.

The astrologer, musician and artist, Dane Rudhyar, a pioneer in the development of twentieth-century psychological and spiritual astrology, acknowledged his debt to Bergson in his major philosophical work, The Planetarization of Consciousness (1970), where he refers to duration as “the continuum of events experienced by living organisms and by the consciousness inherent in them” (p41) and then addresses Bergson’s theory of nothingness:

“What he tried to convey by means of logical arguments is that one cannot actually conceive ‘nothingness.’ What this negation of all existence really means is that our mind, having exhausted all possibilities of different forms of existence, covers up its defeat under a convenient mantle-word. Thus the term, non-existence, does not actually mean what it seems to say – i.e. the absolute denial of existence in any possible form or condition. It simply means that there is a state of reality which transcends any conceivable human idea of order and reality.

The great Hindu philosophers – for instance, Sri Aurobindo ... – knew well that Brahman did not mean non-existence but rather an inconceivable state in which both non-existence and existence were included, much as Yin and Yang are two poles of that which encompasses them both, Tao. Similarly some of our freest philosophical spirits, including many great scientists, are beginning to realise that order and chance (or randomness) are the two aspects of the all-inclusive fact of existence; so also are negentropy and entropy.

“What this means, with reference to our discussion of time, is that time and timelessness are no more real opposites than, in philosophical Buddhism, samsara and nirvana are absolute opposites. What we call this timeless state is not a state in which time does not operate, but a state in which another order of time is experienced. Nirvana is not really the denial of existence and change, but a condition in which existence and change take on a new character and meaning. Nirvana can be experienced in samsara. They are two aspects of existence.” (pp 45-46)

Do these conclusions reflect the essence of Bergson’s thinking, or is Rudhyar using his understanding of Bergson’s philosophy as a trigger to stimulate his own thought processes?

Which parts of Bergson’s philosophy do you relate to most easily?

Has he influenced your immediate experiences, recollections or thought processes?

What connections are you making?