Homework: 10-MarBergson, Creative Evolution: 53c-63a&84b-97a Reading: Chapter 2 The Divergent Directions of the Evolution of Life Topor, Intelligence, Instinct: o "Life and Consciousness," 176b-185a Difficult reading: concentrate on the distinction between intellect and intuition Today I would like to bring together a number of different questions into a single whole. We don't have enough time to discuss every one of the reading questions, and I don't have the inclination to do so. However, some of these questions are quite important to point out and to understand in the context of Bergson's presentation. Before we begin, however, I want again to emphasize the focus of our readings. Though I've asked you to read the final section f Chapter 2, we have centered our analysis of Bergson's thought almost exclusively on his analysis of mechanism and teleology in the apprehension and explanation of the evolution of life. It is with an eye toward understanding this analysis that I look at these questions today. For your convenience, I will mention the question by number as they occur in the reading question handout and all cited material by page and paragraph number. First, let's turn to two questions at once, nos. 7&8 within pages ix-15a. "Is our psychic life essentially continuous or discontinuous?" and "what does Bergson mean by duration?" Turing to page 4a-b, we can see that Bergson argues that this life is essentially continuous. "If our existence were composed of separate states with an impassive ego to unite them," he argues in 4a, "for us there would be no duration." However, for us there is duration. Hence our existence is not composed of separate states. This enduring whole is the very ground from which we intellectually analyze our psychic life into parts. That is to say, our life as it is lived, not thought, endures. "Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances." (4b) Duration, in other words, is the time of our lives, and Bergson is here distinguishing this concrete time from the abstraction of time into now-moments, t, t', t'', etc. Let's now change our focus from ourselves to those entities which we encounter perceptually, i.e., material objects. "A material object, or whatever kind, presents opposite characters to those which we have just been describing," Bergson asserts on Bob Sandmeyer 1
page 7b. "Either it remains as is it is, or else, if it changes under the influence of an external force, our idea of this change is the displacement of parts which themselves do not change." (7-8) Notice that Bergson is expressing the physical concept of inertia here in nuce. That is to say, Newton's first law of motion, as it is usually expressed, is this: In the absence of forces, ("body") at rest will stay at rest, and a body moving at a constant velocity in a straight line continues doing so indefinitely. 1 Thus material bodies are either moved only by forces external to themselves or set to rest by such external forces. Bergson explicated asserts, however, that every material body is composed of parts, parts which we can either distinguish perceptually or which we conceive (e.g., "to the molecules of which the fragments are made, to the atoms that make up molecules, to the corpuscles that generate the atoms, to the 'imponderable' within which the corpuscle is perhaps a mere vortex" 8a), and these fundamental elements remain identical through any transformation or local change. In this sense, the material body is an accidental unity of parts whereas the organism, i.e., the living body, or, indeed, any sort of natural individual (see question 19) is an systematic unity of "unlike parts that complete each other."(12b) By an individual, therefore, Bergson means essentially a whole. The natural unities that Bergson identifies are either our own psychic life, a living organism, or at its farthest reaches, the universe as a whole. Each of these is a natural whole, where the function of the parts is determined by the whole in which they subsist. This natural whole he opposes to non-natural wholes, i.e., unorganized bodies, which are in essence functional parts artificially isolated and "cut out by my senses and understanding" (10a) all working in tandem. Where the living body is a system closed off by nature and hence an individual in the genuine sense of the work, matter, on the other hand though it is "has a tendency to constitute isolatable systems"(10b), remains nevertheless organized only by external influences. We see then that the living organisms have an analogical relation to my own psychic life. For the these natural individuals endures in the same sense as my own psychic life. An organism is, as he says, a duration 1 http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/snewton.htm Bob Sandmeyer 2
and form of existence like our own. (11c) The form of this duration is essentially continuous, a swelling up where the past is contained in the present. However it is important to recognize that, as individuals, none is absolutely distinct. No living being is a mere unit of time just as it is not a system absolutely closed off from everything else. Vital properties are never entirely realized, though always on the way to become so; they are not so much states as tendencies. And a tendency achieves all that it aims at only if it is not thwarted by another tendency. How, then, could this occur in the domain of life, where, as we shall show, the interaction of antagonistic tendencies is always implied? In particular it may be said of individuality that, while the tendency to individuate is everywhere present, in the organized word, it is every opposed by the tendency towards reproduction. For the individuality to be perfect, it would be necessary that no detached part of the organism could live separately. But then reproduction would be impossible. For what is reproduction, but the building up of a new organism with a detached fragment of the old? Individuality therefore harbors its enemy at home. Its very need of perpetrating itself in time condemns it never to be complete in space. (13a) What this suggests is a principle of utmost importance toward understanding Bergson's conception of creative evolution. Evolution is the current of life that continues from individual to individual, generation to generation, species to species. "Duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new," he says early in the text. Then later he makes explicit the analogy of this duration to life itself. "Organic evolution resembles the evolution of consciousness, in which the past presses against a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedent." (27b) Though this evolution expresses a continuity, it is defined by tendencies at odds with each other. Life from its origin, is the continuation of one and the same impetus, divided into divergent lines of evolution. Something has grown, something has developed by a series of additions which have been so many creations. This very development has brought about a dissociation of tendencies which were unable to grow beyond a certain point without becoming mutually compatible. (53c) "Life does not proceed by association and addition of elements, but by dissociations and division. (89a) If we look to questions 5 & 7 from 15b-30a, we can see clearly now that life cannot be analysed into a succession of distinct moments without destroying (by abstraction) the whole, itself. i.e., the unbroken Bob Sandmeyer 3
continuity of evolution that finds its present terminus in the living body. "The present moment of a living body does not find its explanation in the moment immediately before, that all the past of the organism must be added to that moment, its heredity in fact, the whole of a very long history." (20a) "In other words, to know a living being or natural system is to get at the very interval of duration, while the knowledge of an artificial or mathematical system applies only to the extremity. (22f) Put another way, we can know the living body from within, so to speak, and come to an apprehension (really an intuition) of the organism as it a living, enduring activity. This indeed is the function of philosophy, to rise up or "do violence" against the habit of intellectual analysis so natural to our kind of being and grasp the "movement <that> constitutes the unity of the organized word a prolific unity, or infinite richness, superior to any that the intellect could dream or, for the intellect is only one of its aspects or products." (105a) "All this we can feel within ourselves and also divine, by sympathy, outside ourselves, but we cannot think it, in the strict sense of the word, nor express it in terms of pure understanding. (164a, italics mine) More bluntly stated, the intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. (165) So what does Bergson mean when he says "life is a kind of mechanism?" (31a) Notice the way he frames the question in this passage, because it is really very illuminating. "But is it a mechanism of parts artificially isolated within the whole of the universe, or is it the mechanism of the real whole?" (Ibid.) Again, the question centers on the whole-part relation. A living organism is a natural whole which, itself, expresses the full history of evolution to this point. "Analysis will undoubtedly resolve the process of organic creation into an ever-growing number of physico-chemical phenomena, and chemists and physicists will have to do, of course, with nothing but these. But it does not follow that chemistry and physics will ever give us the key to life." (Ibid.) What we obtain by analysis, therefore, are but partial views of a more comprehensive reality. Indeed radical mechanism and radical finalism are, themselves, but partial views of life. They are external views of life. Bob Sandmeyer 4
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. Perhaps it is even necessary that a theory should restrict itself exclusively to a particular point of view, in order to remain scientific, i.e., to give precise direction to researches in detail. 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. (84b) Philosophy offers us the possibility of an internal view of life. Where science is the product of intellect, philosophy is the product of intuition. Where the intellect concerns itself with matter, intuition concerns itself with life. Bob Sandmeyer 5