Bergson’s philosophy – like much modern biology – established that what we are, and perhaps more importantly what we can be, is not given by nature; but the nature of our creativity or indetermination has yet to be worked out with any precision. It is here that Bergson’s social thought can make a major contribution to the understanding of his philosophy in general. Our action may not be determined, but nor is it entirely unconditioned, and in this chapter we will examine the difference between the abstract conception of individual freedom most commonly ascribed to Bergson on the basis of his early work, and his later understanding of individual freedom in more concrete terms, as a participation in natural and cultural evolution. We have seen that society and individuality evolve culturally as well as biologically, and that while, at the biological level, we cannot have any idea of the direction in which we are tending, of the mutations in which we, at a genetic level, are participating, we can consciously participate in the evolution of ourselves and our world at a cultural level, and we can do so in such a way as to enjoy some degree of emancipation from the ‘authority, hierarchy, and immobility’ (TSMR 244; O 1215) that the biological organisation of ourselves and society would impose on us. In this chapter I will examine the status of the individual within this real evolution of society.
This chapter will consider one central theme from a number of angles: the experience of the ‘deep self’ that Bergson described in Time and Free Will is revealed, by the time ofThe Two Sources of Morality and Religion, to open out into an experience of what we might call ‘deep ecology’. Why? Because it is only at the intellectual level – the level that constitutes nature as a set of spatially discrete objects, and human nature as a discrete subjectivity stranded among them – that the distinction of inside and outside holds good. As we saw in chapter one, the internal dynamics that distinguish a living system from a material object have as their profound cause their dissociation within a broader system, which is itself one and multiple like the organism it embraces. The same is true of consciousness: if ‘inner’ duration is a virtual multiplicity that is because the body, life, and ultimately the universe is a virtual multiplicity also, and to discover the depths of the self is to discover the ‘outer’ duration that has no
respect for such boundaries, having created them and continued to create through them. From Time and Free Will to The Two Sources of Morality and Religion there is a transition from the freedom of the individual from conditions to the freedom of the individual to participate in thecreation ofconditions (perhaps we should say, the creation of the conditions of further creation, if we are to give an adequate impression of theindefinitenature of the open future). From this point on, we cannot remind ourselves of the following statement often enough:
The future must lie open to all sorts of progress, and especially to the creation of new conditions. (TSMR 243; O 1215)
We have seen in relation to biology, and will see again in this chapter in relation to psychology, that Bergson is not a reactionary thinker, who in criticising determinism immediately affirms total liberty as its opposite. To do so would be to reduce creativity and freedom to some abstract unconditioned activity that springs out of nowhere (out of an abstract Virtual). An incredibly important point, too often overlooked, is that a key aspect of Bergson’s rejection of abstract determinism is his preservation of real determinations. It is through the study of these determinations, or ‘articulations of the real’ as he more usually calls them, that precision can be brought to creative action (understood as participation in community and nature rather than reactionary individualism). In order to escape the already known it is not necessary that our leap into the future be a completely blind one. We can, quite literally in Bergson’s terms,intuitour way.
In re-assessing Bergson’s account of individuality in the context of his social thought, I will set out a certain view of his philosophy as a whole, and develop it (both in this chapter and on into the conclusion) in a very different direction to that which currently occupies centre place in Bergson scholarship following Deleuze’s re-interpretation of Bergson in terms of methodology, ontology and individual freedom. I will emphasise practice and ethics over methodology and metaphysics, cosmogony over ontology, and participation in community and in nature over individualism. Above all, I will emphasise that freedom is not merely an abstract (individual) or theoretical (contemplative) matter. It is not merely an academic topic. In Bergson freedom is communal rather than individual, emotional rather than intellectual, and it is characterised above all by participation in natural and cultural evolution. If a rather bland and
conservative notion of ‘creativity’ has come to characterise freedom in current assessments of Bergson’s philosophy, perhaps there is something to be said for the fact that it is academics who come up with such definitions; it is freedom considered in the abstract rather than worked out in practice, and we may wonder whether Bergson’s shift towards a greater emphasis on the concrete conditions through which creativity must act, yet which it can also transform or re-create, in part resulted from his diplomatic work during World War One and in setting up the International Commission for Intellectual Co-operation shortly after. At the very least these practices would have heightened his awareness of the real conditions that creative political action must deal with.
Such a suggestion must necessarily remain highly speculative, but there is a serious point to be made here, because neither a purely contemplative, nor a purely individual freedom can ever, on Bergson’s view, achieve the complete and active freedom that he describes through the example of Christian mysticism in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. For example, Bergson concludes his 1920 essay “The Possible and the Real” with this warning:
In this speculation on the possible and the real, let us guard against seeing a simple game. It can be a preparation for the art of living. (CM 106; O 1345)
In this chapter I will re-examine certain key aspects of individual consciousness and freedom as described inTime and Free Willin light of the account of society we have traced so far, noting on each point a shift in emphasis: first, from two conscious multiplicities to two social multiplicities (that is to say, two relations between the individual and society – the open and the closed – which suggest a conceptual shift away from a ‘pure’ and towards an ‘articulated’ freedom); second, a shift from an epistemological to an existential engagement with consciousness (which reveals – in much the same way that Bergson claims that the notion of freedom as a mere choice not only misrepresents but actually limits our freedom – that the notion of freedom as merely individual actually inhibits our ability to participate in the open society, taking part instead in the totality of mutual determinations that characterise the hierarchy and immobility of the closed); and third, a shift from an internal emphasis on the ‘deep self’ to an external emphasis on what I will call ‘deep ecology’. Overall, these three
moments suggest an evolution of Bergson’s thought as a whole from the theoretical engagement with individual consciousness that characterised Time and Free Willto the ethical engagement with social action that characterisedThe Two Sources of Morality and Religion (and which, in my view, must by its own logic be extended to nature). I will characterise the freedom of the individual in Bergson as that which opens out onto a participation in the creation of the self, of society, and of nature. As we will see, there is an abstract freedom as contemplation that fails to open out to society or nature and remains individual, as opposed to a real freedom asparticipationthat opens out into action. It is the abstract freedom that has been wrongly attributed to Bergson and unthinkingly celebrated by commentators such as Deleuze, just as it has been criticised by others such as Bachelard, for its lack of sense and distance from practical issues.
The TwoSocialMultiplicities
In Time and Free Will Bergson approached the question of individual consciousness and freedom in a number of ways, some of which take up the same concepts in very different senses, as we will see. However, one above all grasped the imagination of philosophers and has dominated Bergson studies in a way that does not do justice to the variety of approaches he employed: I refer to ‘the two multiplicities’ – continuous and discrete. The emphasis on these clear cut concepts – the most abstract concepts in the book, worked out in relation to problems in mathematics and ancient rationalist philosophy rather than evidence from either psychology or immediate experience – has resulted in a certain homogenisation of Bergson’s thought, overdetermining an understanding of the many pairs of concepts he uses (heterogeneity and homogeneity, quality and quantity, duration and space) and resulting in a starkly dualistic reading of this text; a reading that is disastrous for his social thought. The greatest problem of the two multiplicities is the way they erect an absolute barrier between the inside and outside of consciousness (something that many of the other pairs of concepts in this text either de-emphasise (quality and quantity) or actually contradict (duration and space). In order to bring Bergson’s early engagement with consciousness and freedom within the view of his philosophy we have gained by
looking at his social thought, we will have to separate out the different ways in which he approaches the problem, and recover the original diversity ofTime and Free Will from those interpretations that have reduced it to its most simplistic conceptual aspects.
We will find that when the two multiplicities are to be applied to society, that is to say, when a collectivity of individuals are understood as continuous or interpenetrating, their freedom or agency can no longer be atrributed to them alone, in much the same way as when the collectivity of mental states are understood as continuous, freedom is found not in the action of a single state but in the organisation of the whole of consciousness. It will then remain to relate the whole of consciousness (itself a discrete entity in Time and Free Will) to the whole of society in which it is indistinct. It is this relation that we indicate when we refer to two social multiplicities. In what should by now be a familiar formulation, the recognition of society as an active holistic reality does not involve the rejection of its ‘parts’, individuals, as active holistic realities in their own right. On the contrary, it is only by recognising the real activity of the whole that we can recognise the real activity of the parts within it. Hence, while the two multiplicities of Time and Free Will inadvertently rendered society an abstract whole by maintaining a strict internality of consciousness and freedom within each individual, the two social multiplicities of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion not only retains but actually clarifies the nature of individual freedom by replacing it in the social life that is its true context. Thus we are not swapping individuality for society, we are swapping mere – and therefore abstract – individuality for a concrete relation between society and individuality. In the next two sections I will follow the implications of this shift for the ‘deep self’ (which we will see opening out towards what I will call ‘deep ecology’) and for freedom (which we will see in context as a participation in social and natural evolution). For now, the important points in this section are:
the account of consciousness and freedom found inTime and Free Willis ambiguous; on some readings, such as Deleuze’s, it would tend to distract from, if not exclude, an understanding of Bergson’s social thought;
be situated in a holistic understanding of all Bergson’s works and importantly how it can be reconciled with the reality and efficacy of society that is fully revealed inThe Two Sources of Morality and Religion the two multiplicities of consciousness have to be understood in the context of the project of the book on the one hand, and in the context of the two social multiplicities that Bergson develops much later on the other
There is a general movement of Bergson’s thought from the characterisation of duration and freedom as a deep internal aspect of the individual consciousness, to their characterisation as a participation in broader social and ecological processes that, themselves enduring in their fashion, do not recognise the inside-outside distinction, nor indeed the discrete nature of the individual. Let us examine these issues in Bergson’s work on individual freedom.
From the Two Multiplicities to the Two Social Multiplicities
Bergson’s project in Time and Free Willis to ascertain the mode of organisation proper to consciousness and work out its implications for individual freedom. His view is that the discussion between determinists and libertarians has been conducted with reference to an inadequate conception of consciousness drawn from the physical sciences, which he tackles on two fronts.38 – First (in chapter one), he examines the principle underlying the still relatively new science of psychology: that the intensity of a psychic state can be measured.39 Bergson’s primary reference points, Gustav Theodore Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt, first established and were both committed to this principle.40 The aim of this science, known as ‘psychophysics’ because of its application to the mind of methods drawn from the physical sciences, was to discover mathematical laws of consciousness by exposing subjects to the controlled manipulation of stimulus. The subject would be given tests designed to establish the smallest unit of sensation that consciousness can register (this idea that there are ‘minima’ of conscious experience goes back to Leibniz); they would be given objects of different weights and asked to report if one of them is heavier, or sounds of
different volumes and asked to report if one is louder. Bergson describes an experiment of this kind performed by Delboeuf with candles to investigate the sensation of changes in brightness (TFW 51-60; O 37-42). Through a comparison of the methods and results of psychophysics with those of “immediate experience” Bergson found that any change in sensation is not in fact due to an increase or decrease in intensity of a single state, but to the shifting dynamics of the whole of consciousness (and in chapter one this consciousness is explicitly regarded as embodied). – Second (in chapter two), Bergson looks at the general conception of consciousness that is implied in both experimental psychology and the debates over free will, and identifies this as a “discrete multiplicity” of conscious states that occupy a “homogenous medium” of consciousness. Again, he suggests that immediate experience reveals the very opposite: consciousness is better understood as a “heterogeneous medium” in which conscious states form a “continuous multiplicity”. – The model of consciousness set out in these two chapters forms the basis of the critique of determinism and libertarianism, and the new conception of freedom that Bergson develops in the third.41 If the mind is not adequately represented as a collection of discrete mental states, then freedom cannot be a choice between alternative possibilities, nor can action be causally determined. Bergson introduces a third option, based in his new conception of consciousness; a definition of freedom as a holistic self-organisation of consciousness that is neither reducible to the intensity of, nor interaction between states, and is therefore neither determined nor predictable.
The significance of this early text for an understanding of Bergson’s social thought depends to a large extent on how we interpret it. The difficulty lies in the fact that the central theoretical components of the work all form part of the account of the reality and efficacy of society that Bergson will develop later, but in the specific context of his Time and Free Will project – where they are used to clarify the nature of consciousness and freedom – they actually appear to preclude any real efficacy of the social in the individual, and thus rule out any concept of freedom as an intrinsic participation in social evolution. It is essential, then, that we separate concepts such as duration, freedom and continuous multiplicity from their specific applications in this text if we are to see how they may be applied in the context of the very different project of The
Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Let us see how the two multiplicities that Bergson worked out in his first text can be re-interpreted in light of the two social multiplicities that he worked out in his last.
The lasting contribution of Time and Free Will is the disanalogy that Bergson introduces between time and space, based in his definition of conscious duration as a continuous multiplicity that occupies a heterogeneous medium. It is a distinction that Bergson will use throughout his work, and underlies the many dualisms he uses, including the concepts of the closed and the open that he introduces in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Yet we have said that the concept of the open was absolutely new in that text, and that it shifted the focus of his whole philosophy away from individual freedom and towards an emphasis on a participation in the evolution of society and nature. This raises the question of the whole movement of Bergson’s philosophical work (which, incidentally, mirrors that of creative action in his work): how can the concept of a continuous multiplicity, which Bergson initially characterised as internal to individual consciousness, come in the end to characterise society and even entail a critique of the individual itself as, in retrospect, an abstract conception? This is, in fact, only a contradiction as far as the intellect is concerned; that is to say, it is only a problem if we think a relation between parts – in this case the social