Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824)

On The Origin of Duration

(Notes towards a “Genealogy” of Time)

Time is invention, or it is nothing.

Henri Bergson

Time is a stutter, a clue, a signal from beyond which comes from within. The concept “temporality” breaks itself, already expresses divergence, it forever escapes our control.

The flow of time outruns itself, it is always diachronous, bringing thought straight back to its origin, to the quality without quantity, to an intensity issuing neither in number nor form, but rather in pure expressivity itself, in the depth and fullness of experience. Memory is the form of this recurrence, through the continuous variation of matter along certain axes of symmetry, the flowing solution of a complex problem of folding events, unfolding new durations.

Becoming is a transmission received in convoluted mazes, actualization is labyrinthine: not only a million decisions, but a million ideas — and so a million qualities, varieties and dimensions of time, tucked away and tiny, alive in the cracks between the problems and the idea, between memory and the future, waiting to be explored.

Let us take as our starting point the distinction made by Bergson regarding the dynamic and non-instantaneous nature of time; that is, that time is not formed simply of seconds, minutes, centuries, and so on, but is already a continuous and dynamic flow of experience, a more or less intense duration and not an evenly-divided series of instants.

Temporality therefore presents two salient aspects for our consideration: flow and divergence. In what sense does time present us with difference? Consider the rate of the flow of time. A pure temporal differential, the self-referential speed of speed: one second per second. But is this still an abstraction? To what extent are the models of flow and division themselves a false clarity, an imagined orderliness to cover over a deeper mystery?

That we feel the flow of time seems incontestable. We experience duration not initially as divided but precisely as continuous, a dynamism as opposed to a series of static instants. In this sense, time embodies itself as matter, resistance to difference, as the power of connection and solidarity, indifferent to differences. Such time oozes along, eternally viscous, resistant to other times rhythms, allergic to alien meter.

Nothing dangerous, fluid, or unusual can occur in these sticky one-way channels — except for an unexpected intervention, from somewhere beyond. Adhesive surfaces in particular are naturally generative of strange ruptures.

But there are many other phenomenological classes of temporality. Already the non-instantaneous approaches from another kind of time altogether, a more profound order of time, in the sense of being extruded from deep beneath the earth, allowing the spontaneous ascent of new celerities from out of the non-human depths of bodies: the emergence of an alternate temporality from within the body of an already-existing, mobile temporal order. Birth. In a real sense, then, these phenomenological categories are not, in fact, separate modalities of time; but these divergent aspects are welded together into a machine, a concept which must then become intractable paradox: for just as an expression is inseparable from its content, flow is inseparable from divergence, from an initial declination.

It is curious that the two faces of time echo the two faces of science, human and non-human; and more curious still that the division seems to have been idealized as a classical theoretical foundation, a substitute for a material investigation of time as a diachronous vector of transformation, a materialism of time as the constant deterrence of other flows of time.

The process of the individuation of time is ontologically prior to any particular regime of temporality. Time lacerates, it opens the state onto new kinds of flows of energy.

Transformation makes possible the impossible. The question is not only about mobility but receptivity, not only celerity but capacity to become informed, to learn. The anxious power of ideas… It’s like Victor Hugo’s voids and lanterns, and Caspar David Friedrich’s generative mists: obscurities produce revelations, they are able to be dispersed, capable of being pierced by the light of a lantern.

Ideas burst open the iron bars of prejudice, of habit. But ideas become exposed themselves to a relational milieu, as they move through expression into actualization, they begin to take on the status of events as son as they become stated. How does the idea become folded into the event?

How do events become folded into ideas? An event already reflects the irresolution, the spontaneous rupture between the two “modes” of temporality (which are also the same.) An event lives only through a relational milieu it is born into and through which it intervenes onto an outside.

This exposure to multiplicity of the idea or the event is a receptivity towards structuration, the pre-individual field necessary for genesis. Diachrony is the metaphysical principle naming the structure of time, as a active dimension between two rates of developments, conjoining and disjoining at once without synthesis. Permanent imbalance: continuous development.

Every idea can be dramatized as a series of spatio-temporal dynamisms, but there are non-spatial, non-temporal ideas. The process of actualization is not inevitable, it is the most difficult thing there is. Forward progress. It’s as easy as falling down: behind the too-clear equilibrium, a mobile shift or varying imbalance which is real.

The flow of time is the anti-relation which grounds relations, pure abstract field in which events inter-individuate one another. Again– two inter-related faces of time:

1. Time is a decoding flow which extrudes buried formations (pre-individual field)… [memory, duration, depth]
2. Time is a coded division of a development into generic segments (pre-informational field)… [instant, sensation, event]

Time is produced, in short, by a creative flow of energy. The fall into error, irreversible transformation, the result of knowledge. The ontological schism itself.

Time is not inherently dualistic, only ontologically so: diachrony is the fundamental fact, one perceived indeed as a continuity across a break, so that the fracture in the subject is total, but pervaded in every piece by larval luminosities, new orders of temporality struggling to remember. The universe is trying hard to learn.

Phenomenological unity is the essence of the temporal; this can be amplified or obscured by the ontological consideration of division. Flow are only as primary as breaks, from which they are themselves produced. Does asymmetry precede relation?

The following is the first half of chapter 1 from Jean-Hugues Barthélémy’s book Penser l’individuation: Simondon et la philosophie de la nature. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. p. 37-48. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 10/22/07.

Chapter 1

The concept of object and the concept of subject, in the same virtue of their origin, are limits that philosophical thought must overcome. –Gilbert Simondon

1. Ontology and ontogenesis: from Bergson to Simondon

The philosophically fundamental watchword of all Simondian thought undoubtedly resides in the idea according to: the process of individuation cannot be ob-jectified by knowledge, since the former is produced by the latter if the knowledge of individuation is itself the individuation of knowledge. This is why the principal introduction of his thesis ends with these lines:

We cannot, in the usual sense of the term, know the individuation; we can only individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in ourselves; this seizure is thus, in the margin of knowledge properly stated, an analogy between two operations, which is a certain mode of communication. The individuation of the real exterior to the subject is seized by the subject thanks to the analogical individuation of knowledge in the subject; but it is through the individuation of knowledge and not by knowledge alone that the individuation of (non-subject) beings is seized. Beings can be known by the knowledge of the subject, but the individuation of beings can be seized only by the individuation of the knowledge of the subject.[1]

To know individuation is to individuate knowledge, and this is why there is “analogy” between the two “operations” which are here the object and the subject. The individuation is thus a “field” in which subject and object are no longer opposed. A field which is also not really one, if it is true that it includes the physical as well as the vital or the biological and the psychosocial or the transindividual, as so many regimes of individuation. But since with each one of these regimes corresponds a scientific regional ontology which solidifies the individuation of the beings in these same beings of which it disengages the generic structures, it is appropriate to add to these regional ontologies, to find the movement of individuation hidden by the same beings which result in it, a philosophical general ontogenesis which disentangles the genetic operation of these beings. This is an ontogenesis to which Simondon grants the statute of “first philosophy:”

According to this prospect, ontogenesis would become the starting point of philosophical thought; it would really be first philosophy, prior to the theory of knowledge and with an ontology that would follow the theory of knowledge. Ontogenesis would be the theory of the phases of being, prior to objective knowledge, which is a relation to be individuated in the milieu, after individuation.[2]

Simondon thus clearly distinguishes ontogenesis from an objectifying knowledge that follows scientific regional ontologies, reunited here under the total name of “ontology.” This term designates here the whole of scientific regional ontologies rather than traditional philosophical ontology, which comes from the fact that ontogenesis replaces traditional philosophical ontology as preceding what is however named “ontology.” It will have been understood, “ontogenesis,” in Simondon, designates the theory as well as the process of which it is the theory, and this process of ontogenesis which is identified with the individuation, is at the same time becoming of being in general. We will say in the next chapter what justifies the becoming of being in general, then what justifies that the theory, which is also the process itself, is ontogenesis. In this initial chapter we want only to specify a filiation which is revealed by the preceding elements, and whose setting in evidence will in the long run make it possible to better understand that which simultaneously comes from some of the virtues and some of the limits of Simondon’s thought. This filiation is of course that which has shown our author as an heir to Bergson, and for which two reasons at least can as of now and already be raised.

The first of these reasons is the assertion that becoming is not ob-jectifiable because it is that which precedes the subject itself. The general “ontology” which thinks this becoming is then a genetic “ontology” which makes it possible to refuse a classification of beings in kinds which does not correspond to their genesis, but with a knowledge taken after the genesis. Here Bergson is a source, he who, like the phenomenologists[3], first tried to subvert the traditional alternatives, but while allotting to philosophizing the task to think of becoming as that which constitutes, as “duration,” the essence of consciousness itself, and thus makes proceed all “essence” of an other, quite as relative. Initially indeed it is a question for Bergson of subverting the traditional alternatives, and notably that opposing mechanism and finalism[4], by subverting the opposition subject/object which makes their ground by the means of the intuition of the Whole conceived as becoming: “philosophy can only be an effort to be based again in the whole. The intelligence, being re-absorbent in its principle, will incorrectly revive its own genesis.” The “Bergsonism” of Simondon is all the more clear here that this last statement will give reason to Bergson against Husserl with regard to the means of carrying out the subversion of the traditional alternatives: this means it is “reduction” with becoming, and not with intentionality.

In a second time Bergson shows how this thought of becoming, this “true evolutionism,” proper to philosophy, is necessarily a thought of the continuous sub-jection to all apprehended discontinuity by scientific intelligence. The cutting of reality into genres and species reinstates an essentialism that spatializes duration. Simondon, even if he will complexify the question of the discontinuous—displaces towards microphysics in the view of a subversion of the alternative continuous/discontinuous–, with its manner the Bergsonian thesis will renew however, and it is through it that he condemned the scholastic views mentioned above. The result that is more surprising than every Bergsonian denunciation of the classification of beings according to their generic structures cut out from their genetic operation, or according to their separate being of becoming which founds it, is the assumption according to which the living would be an individuation which, understood either only as a phase or mode, is not based on an achieved physical individuation, but rather constitutes the perpetuation of an inchoate phase of physical individuation.

It is habitual to see in the vital processes a complexity larger than in the not-vital, physicochemical processes. However, to be faithful, even in the hypothetical conjectures, with the intention that animates this research, we should suppose that the vital individuation does not come after the physicochemical individuation, but during this individuation, before its completion, by suspending it at the moment when it has not yet reached its stable equilibrium, and while making it capable of intending and propagating itself[5].

As we will have the occasion to show, “the intention which animates this research” is however less in Simondon a will of elaborating a vitalist cosmogenesis than the requirement of a non-reductionist ontogenesis. Creative Evolution is said to subvert the alternative between mechanism and finalism only in favor of a different position which has renovated finalism. However any renovation is also, for its part, conservation. Bergson also acknowledged it as finalism and did not abandon its vitalist form. And when it sometimes happens that Bergson relativizes the expression “élan vital” by anchoring the physical and vital itself in a common source which is neither physical nor properly vital, it is not to qualify this source as simply pre-physical and pre-vital, but to call it spiritual: “it is the consciousness, or better the supra-consciousness, which is at the origin of life[6].” On the contrary Simondon does not renew these oppositions between the order of the modes of individuation and the order of the phases of any individuation, the vital individuation constituting the perpetuation of an inchoate phase of the physical individuation, which avoids the reductionism that threatens any radical ontogenesis as a thought of the superior starting from the inferior. And it is precisely because he thinks genesis in terms of individuation that Simondon veritably subverts the alternative between mechanism and finalism, the latter being simply too vitalist: the pre-physical and pre-vital is what is not individuated, and could not a fortiori be spiritual. But because we only want to treat here one filiation between Bergson and Simondon, we need to differentiate the development of such a divergence and to now devote ourselves to the second of the immediate reasons for the filiation that we announced.

This second immediate reason for a filiation between Bergson and Simondon is the repeated opposition to Kant through the assertion of the priority of ontogenesis, as “first philosophy,” over criticism. In a fundamental passage from Psychic and Collective Individuation, Simondon writes that “philosophical thought before posing the critical question prior to any ontology, must pose the problem of a complete reality, prior to the individuation from which the subject escapes the grasp of critical thought and ontology[7].” There still, Bergson is a source. We already pointed out that for him also “philosophy can only be an effort to be based again in the whole.” But what is important to notice here is that this fusion in the whole was already in Bergson as it is in Simondon: a return to becoming “from which the subject escapes the grasp of critical thought and of ontology.” This is why Bergsonian criticisms bearing on Kantian reflexivity could not be read as an abandonment of all reflexivity. Consider, for example, the first extraordinary synthesis of his thought that took place at the conference “Consciousness and Life.” The passage which interests us is the following here:

Where do we come from? What are we? Where do we go? Here are vital questions, in front of which we would place ourselves immediately if we philosophize without passing through systems. But, between these questions and us, a too systematic philosophy interposes other problems. ‘Before seeking the solution, they say, should we not know how we will seek it? Study the mechanism of your thought, discuss your knowledge and criticize your criticism: when you are ensured of the value of the instrument, you will see how it is useful to you.’ Alas! This moment will never come. I see only one means of knowing where we can still go: it is to get under way and to go. If the knowledge that we seek is really instructive, if it must expand our thought, any preliminary analysis of the mechanism of thought could only show us the impossibility to also go far, since we would have studied our thought before the expansion which it is a question of obtaining from it. A premature reflection of the spirit on itself will discourage it to advance, whereas while advancing purely and simply it had approached the goal and had realized, by surcroit, that the announced obstacles were for the majority of them effects of mirages[8]..

Looking more closely, it is not because it is reflexive that Kantian reflexivity is for Bergson an error, but only because such “preliminary analysis” is also for the same reason a “premature reflection.” True reflexivity can also be in this sense revindicated by Bergson, since Kantian reflexivity is marked as a seal of the illusion, which signifies that the course of knowledge to Bergson only guarantees an authentic knowledge of itself. What however distinguishes such a radical reflexivity from what one traditionally names “reflexivity,” is the “expansion” preached by Bergson and under the terms of which the knowing subject was recognized in its object: here the reflection does not renew the subject to itself, but at its origin. An origin whose question is posed by Bergson before the same criticism addressed to Kant and as what justifies this criticism: the first of the philosophical questions is the question “from where do we come?”An origin of which any reflection, which is Cartesian or “critical,” is only a mask since it produces the “mirage” of a subject out of becoming. The intuition alone, of which Simondon will renew the category but by specifying it and by removing from it what orders it with the Whole of which it shares in a profound nature that is duration. This last concept could certainly not be taken up again by Simondon, the reasons for which it is not yet time to expose. But if it is true that to understand a thought is also to reconsider its origins, it were necessary for us here to attach Simondonian ontogenesis to the Bergsonian thought of becoming[9].

2. Remarks on the specific contribution of Teilhard de Chardin.

Contrary to Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty[10], Bergson benefits Simondon from a living education and a human encounter as Simondon prefers them[11]. And this is here the contemporaneity of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, quoted by Simondon in his unedited work, which establishes the living link with Bergson, to whom Teilhard was so near. What is thus exactly the impossible relationship to circumvent between Teilhard the “priest” and Simondon the agnostic? Although the Simondonian exegesis is still only being born, we are amazed that these relasions have not been evoked by anyone, as they are narrow—with the double sense of located and forts. The Bergsonian ontogenetic prospect, of which we briefly pointed out the still metaphysical character, initially takes in Teilhard de Chardin a cosmogenetic sense suitable to make the transition to the anti-metaphysical character, because Bachelardian, of Simondonian ontogenesis. As one can note while reading the synthesis which is the work Man’s Place in Nature, the bond with Simondon certainly revives so many simple themes and terms of true theses. But on the one hand, these themes and terms are completely central at the same time in Teilhard and Simondon, and sufficiently rare in the philosophical tradition so that the heritage is undeniable. In addition to the shared theses, sometimes also central, exist at the interior of the framework, already common, of cosmogenetic ontogenesis

We thus begin with the themes and terms. Man’s Place in Nature thinks “Personalization” as being a “phase” which makes the “synthesis” of “Socialization” and of “Individuation:”

At the end of the ‘expansional’ phase of Socialization that comes to close itself, we had believed that it was in a gesture of insulation, i.e. by way of Individuation, that we were going to reach the end of ourselves. At this point (i.e. since Hominization is entered into its phase of convergence), it becomes manifest that it is on the contrary only by one effect of synthesis, i.e. by Personalization, that we can save what really hides the sacred at the bottom of our egoism.

In Simondon, “personalization” will enter within the framework of the regime of individuation which is the “transindividual” as indissociably psychosocial. Such is the displacement of the synthesis, “individuation” not being simply one “more phase”—another concept which will establish itself as central in Simondon also—but designing the ontogenetic process itself, and personalization coming after the physical individuation and the vital individuation—or “individualization”—,therefore constituting this mode whereby the individuation becomes “psychic and collective” in the same grasp. In Teilhard, Personalization is also unification of the individual and the collective, but Socialization, Individuation and Personalization are succeeded as in speculative dialectics or overcome, and they are only three times of the process of “Hominization,” still too essintialized, too cut out from the living through what Simondon will describe as “anthropological” thought. However these differences do not therefore veil the undeniable thematic and linguistic filiation.

The general framework of this filiation is, as we said, ontogenesis as a thought of being as becoming. It is also in the fact that Teilhard, to our knowledge, invents the theme—celebrated from now on—of what he names “Complexity[12],” for which Simondon seems to us to have placed in a position of mastery. At least this is what our study should leave apparent, on the one hand through the sources of inspiration of thermodynamic, microphysics, cybernetics, systemics, and into the definitive encylopedia of Simondon, on the other hand in virtue of the real complexity of his thought of individuation as a process of “complexification,” to speak with Teilhard. What the latter names the “combination,” characteristic of complexity in its difference from “aggregation” and “repetition,” will be named “composition” by Simondon, and will be distinguished from simple “transposition.” Crystallization will be, in Simondon as in Teilhard, a central paradigm for thinking the ontogenetic process of which this complexity-complexification consists.

Such a general, common ontogenetic framework then introduces us with the shared theses. In Man’s Place in Nature, Teilhard was known to want to subvert the opposition of “materialism” and “spiritualism,” and this intention, even if it is judged as non-realized, is not only Simondonian as it aims at subverting an opposition. It is also undoubtedly what led Simondon to name “materialism” and “spiritualism,” obviously rather well concerned in its matter, to which we will come soon, mechanism and vitalism. The “corpusculization” in which consists, in Teilhard, the complexification is then what must explain in the long run what Simondon himself will name the “quantum character of consciousness.”

We stop ourselves at this delicate expression. In the principal conclusion of his thesis, Simondon says “to suppose” that “individuation operates in a quantum way, by abrupt jumps, each stage of individuation can also be compared to the following as a pre-individual state of being.” However the quantum character of consciousness, supposed also in Chapter II of the first part of Psychic and Collective Individuation, does not amount to the quantum character of individuation in general: it takes its sense rather as the particularity of “psychic” individuation in question in the first part of this work. In addition to the psychic, we will explicitly reveal “transitory path” towards a “transindividual” individuation placed beyond the alternative between immanence and transcendence, and from this difficultly conceptualizable fact, it is possible to see in the “quantum character of consciousness” a resumption and a deepening of the Teilhardian “corpusculisation,” in the form of the following intuition: the transindividual “personality” would be a psychism whose cellular level almost manages to modify the quantum level, while the psychism of the living organism as a “transitory path” would remain entirely attached to a cellular level only able to modify the molecular level. The physical individual itself would be made up for him on the superior scales through the inferior scales, but without any reciprocity. The Simondonian thematic of the “orders of magnitude,” to which we will come, also encourages Simondon to favor this intuition.

What is then the principal difference, if it is necessary to give only one of them among so many others, between the Teilhardian cosmogenesis and Simondonian ontogenesis? In Teilhard the stress is laid on a finalized and residually anthropocentric process:

Man occupies a key position, a position of principal axis, a polar position in the world. So that it would be enough for us to understand Man to have understood the Universe,—as also the Universe remains incomplete if we will only arrive at integrating in a coherent fashion the entirety of Man, without deformation,–all of Man, I say, not only with its members, but with its thought.

In Simondon, this integration of human thought in the Universe is translated rather into a necessary relativity of any knowledge of individuation as the individuation of knowledge.

[1] IGPB, p. 34.

[2] IPC, p.163.

[3] As Francoise Dastur shows in her book Husserl. Des mathématiques à l’histoire, Husserl felt very close to the Bergsonian distinction between time and duration, which Ingarden, through his work, had exposed him to Bergson. Several affinities between Husserl and Bergson also explain the interest of Merleau-Ponty then of Simondon for Bergson, even if Simonon were, as for himself, returned to Bergson by this second way which represents “French epistemology” resulting from Bachelard. The priority of a subversion of the traditional alternatives is undoubtedly the common goal from which these affinities proceed. In “Bergson se faisant,” Merleau-Ponty writes: “The intuition of my duration is training oneself generally to see the principle of the fact of Bergsonian “reduction,” which reconsiders all things sub specie durationis, –both what is called subject, and what is called object.”

[4] Cf. Creative Evolution.

[5] IGPB, p. 150. For a reciprocally and audaciously Simondonian reading of Bergson, but also of Ravaisson, Tarde, and Nietzsche, see P. Montebello, L’autre metaphysique, Paris, Desclé de Brouwer, 2003.

[6] Creative Evolution.

[7] IPC, p. 137.

[8] In L’énergie spirituelle, Paris, P.U.F., 1966, p.2.

[9] In “L’individuation en biologie” (Gilbert Simondon, une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique), Anne Fagot-Largeault does not fail to say from the start that Simondon’s ”ontology of becoming” registers “in the line” of Bergson (p.19). It is this point that we come to develop and specify. She then insists for her part on certain oppositions, which we will also have to evoke but which takes place inside the simple framework provided by the reasons for the filiation presented here. As for the more
secret and implicit encounter” (ibid, p. 20) that she evokes between Simondon and Whitehead, it will greatly interest our examination of criticisms addressed to Simondon by Isabelle Stengers, who prefers Whitehead over him.

[10] On readings of Simondon in general, see our Introduction. Bergson, Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty are the three great names to which Simondon owes his more profound philosophical ambition: the subversion of classical alternatives. The fundamental relation of Simondon to Bachelard will be exposed in detail in the second volume of our study.

[11] Simondon, who has suffered from not being able to communicate in philosophical fraternity, has without doubt acquiesced to our conviction that the veritable philo-sophical profundity, those of the true “grand spirits” of which Bachelard speaks in the exergue to our Introduction, is always human as much as intellectual.

[12] On the actual scientific thoughts of “complexity,” cf. Réda Benkirane, La complexité, vertiges et promesses, Le Pommier, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991.

Bergson on several occassions compares the approach of philosophy to the procedure of infinitesimal calculus: When we have benefited in experience from a little light which shows us a line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience—just as mathematicians reconstitute, with the infinitely small elements that they perceive of the real curve, ‘the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.’ In any case, Bergson is not one of those philosophers who ascribes a properly human wisdom and equilibrium to philosophy. To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves (Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism pg 27-28).

Deleuze’s project in Bergsonism is to render a systematic understanding of Bergson’s concepts in their interrelations. Of course, this book is an experiment in philosophical buggery, and so there is a clear Deleuzian ring to it. There is much in here that is strictly related to Deleuze’s project, but in itself it still retains a lot of theoretical value and stands as a concise and intriguing reading of Bergson. The first chapter on intuition as method lays out clearly Bergson’s project in three moves: (1) state and create problems; (2) discover the genuine differences in kind; (3) apprehend time in its reality as duration. To construct this method in its rigor, we must set out some rules as we go along.

Rule #1: Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems (15).

Like Bachelard’s insights in The Formation of the Scientific Mind, Bergson argues that true and false are always unsuccessfully applied to solutions because it is the figure of the schoolmaster who gives the problems with presupposed answers. It is in this sense that true freedom lies in a power to decide and constitute problems themselves. Properly stating a speculative problem is the first step to solving it, in the same way that problems get the solutions they deserve based on how well they are formulated.

This line of argumentation is so fundamental to Bergson’s project that he will claim that the history of mankind revolves theoretically and practically around the construction of problems. Becoming conscious of this activity is the undertaking of a conquest of freedom. The goal is not to discover problems, for to discover something is the same as saying that it has always already been there in actuality. The truly creative aspect of thinking confronts the task of inventing new ways of posing the problem, for invention is an actualization of a reality that could have always remained only potential in nature.

Complementary Rule #1: There are two types of false problems: ‘nonexistent problems’ that arise from the confusion of the ‘more’ and the ‘less;’ and ‘badly stated’ questions, so defined because their terms represent badly analyzed composites (17).

To illustrate the first kind of problem Bergson cites the problems of nonbeing, of disorder or of the possible (the problems of knowledge and being)…His analyses…consist in showing that there is not less, but more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than in order, in the possible than in the real. In the idea of nonbeing there is in fact the idea of being, plus a logical operation of generalized negation, plus the particular psychological motive for that operation (such as when a being does not correspond to our expectation and we grasp it purely as the lack, the absence of what interests us) (17).

Bergson here critiques the common understanding of negation because it automatically assumes that nonbeing is quantitatively less than being or that disorder less than order, when in fact these questions are misdirected. He argues that this type of false problem involves a fundamental illusion wherein being, order, and the existent are thought to precede themselves and “project an image of themselves back into a possibility, a disorder, a nonbeing which are supposed to be primordial” (18). Therefore, questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” or “Why is there order rather than disorder?” or “Why is there this rather than that (when that was equally possible)?” are false problems because they assume that the negative types pre-exist the positive, as though nonbeing existed before being or the momentary void before the self-generation of God (which contradicts ‘Its’ perfection, theologically and non-anthropomorphically speaking).

The fallacy of the ‘more’ and ‘less’ plagues the simple binary opposition of order/disorder. The reason why this embroils the intellect in false problems is because two or more irreducible orders (mechanism/organism) have been reduced to a general idea of order. But there is no order-in-general just as there is no order-in-itself. This illusion emerges whenever a variety of general ideas are reduced to a general idea encompassing all general ideas. Put another way, the common error of science and metaphysics is to see nothing but differences in degree (quantity) where there are actually only differences in kind (quality). Thus the idea of disorder emerges from the idea of order as a badly analyzed composite, and so the first type of false problem of the ‘more’ and ‘less’ can be considered as a special example of the question of badly analyzed composites.

Like in Kantian critical philosophy, these illusions are due to reason’s own prejudice, so they can not in themselves be removed, only repressed (21). So if the intelligence is the faculty that states problems in general, and the instinct is the faculty that finds solutions, the role of intuition can be best described as a method that distinguishes between true and false problems, even if this means driving the intellect to turn against itself (21).

Rule #2: Struggle against illusion, rediscover true differences in kind or articulations of the real.

With the advent of the theories of relativity in physics, we are quick to mix space and time, constructing a four-dimensional[1] reality. But we find ourselves unable to separate duration from extensity or perception from memory. Intuition focuses on the condition of real (instead of possible) experiences, and this is why it has an obsession with the pure as it is constituted by differences in kind. One question of difference in kind arises in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. Bergson stresses that the body nor the brain are the generating cause behind the faculty of representation; instead, both are involved in a complication of the relationship between a received movement (excitation) and an executed movement (response) (24). Moreover, the brain is not responsible for our representations because it is just another image along with the stimuli in our nervous system and the external world (matter itself being the aggregate of images in their totality). There is no difference in kind between the brain and the body, both are images, and the perception of matter is not different in kind than matter itself (25).

The body’s responsiveness/affectivity gives the subject volume in space insofar as recollections form in memory and link instants together through a conservation of the past in the present. Through a selection of these recollections, memory takes on another form (contraction-memory) by contracting the matter or images that gives the body something other than an instantaneous point through duration and the conjunction of two types of memory (double articulation of memory: re-collecting or assembling fragments and contraction through stabilized reconnection.

Complementary Rule# 2: The real is not only that which is cut out according to natural articulations or differences in kind: it is also that which intersects again along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point (29).

This is because duration is not a psychological experience. It is the variable essence of things and is the theme of a complex ontology (34). This ontology is made of two halves: science and metaphysics. Science and metaphysics correspond to the divide between difference in degree and in kind.

Rule #3: State and solve problems in terms of time rather than space.

In its homogeneity, space is nothing but difference in degree, whereas duration takes on all differences in kind because it has the power to qualitatively vary with itself. Thus for Bergson, the qualitative differences are only on the side of time. In space, there is only the ability to diminish or enlarge things—in time, a thing differs from all other things, most of all itself. Alteration is the essence of the individual being in relation to duration (we must wait for sugar to dissolve, as Bergson says). We must wait for a change, because our impatience contrasts with other durations that form a rhythm with mine.

Intuition is not duration but the means by which we emerge from our duration and affirm other durations, above and below us. For inferior and superior durations are not simply quantitative, they are differences in kind. This means that the singular durations are themselves different in kind, and so another individual’s becoming impinges on my duration and a falling-in-and-out-of-step ensues.

Does this mean that humanity can be characterized by its polyphonic harmonies, its syncopated beats, its (war)drum solos? What sort of rhythm and conjunction of durations does it take to through the individual out-of-step with humanity (to either sub- or super-human ends)?

[1] Whitehead’s really quick to do this, especially in The Concept of Nature published in 1919. There are a number of criticisms that Whitehead levels against Bergson, as well as some positive remarks. However, by the mid-30s in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead warns us that Nietzsche and Bergson are the two primary negative forces of anti-intellectualism plaguing American philosophy (287). This reaction seems quite arbitrary but can readily be explained: Whitehead sees Bergson as a worthy adversary insofar as he represents the philosopher most capable of resonating systematically with the cosmological implications of the theory of relativity. On the other hand, I would wager that Russell influenced Whitehead’s conception of Nietzsche (Russell’s History of Western Philosophy levies a gross misrepresentation of Nietzsche and constitutes probably the most critical and bitter part of the whole book).

–Taylor Adkins

As contrary electricities attract each other and accumulate between the two plates of the condenser from which the spark will presently flash, so, by simply bringing people together, strong attractions and repulsions take place, followed by an utter loss of balance, in a word, by that electrification of the soul known as passion. Were man to give way to the impulse of his natural feelings, were there neither social nor moral law, these outbursts of violent feeling would be the ordinary rule in life. But utility demands that these outbursts should be foreseen and averted. Man must live in society, and consequently submit to rules. And what interest advises, reason commands: duty calls, and we have to obey the summons. Under this dual influence has perforce been formed an outward layer of feelings and ideas which make for permanence, aim at becoming common to all men, and cover, when they are not strong enough to extinguish it, the inner fire of individual passions. The slow progress of mankind in the direction of an increasingly peaceful social life has gradually consolidated this layer, just as the life of our planet itself has been one long effort to cover over with a cool and solid crust the fiery mass of seething metals. But volcanic eruptions occur. And if the earth were a living being, as mythology has feigned, most likely when in repose it would take delight in dreaming of these sudden explosions, whereby it suddenly resumes possession of its innermost nature. Such is just the kind of pleasure that is provided for us by drama.

Henri Bergson (Laughter)

“Collecting, organizing the totality of its experience in what we call its character, the mind causes it to converge upon actions in which we shall afterwards find, together with the action which is their matter, the unforeseen form which is stamped upon them by personality; but the action is not able to become real unless it succeeds in encasing itself in the actual situation, that is to say, in that particular assemblage of circumstances which is due to the particular position of the body in time and space… Our body, with the sensations which it recieves on the one hand and he movements which it is capable of executing on the other hand, is then, that which fixes our mind, and gives it balance and poise. The activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of accumulated memories, as this mass of memories itself is infinitely more than the sensations and movements of the present hour; but these sensations and these movements condition what we may call our attention to life, and that is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind, as in a pyramid which should stand on its apex.”
(Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory 172-3)

Why does the nervous system, like human societies and organizations, seems to beg for analysis and comprehension through the lens or cipher of a pyramidal geometry? The focal point of Bergson’s hierarchical schema of consciousness is focus itself, that is, attention or awareness; we have here a series of superimposed triangles (after Lacan’s schema) whose pinpoint alternates between polarized modalities: first, the ocular apparatus (itself a double tripartite structure whose apex is the surface of the cornea, with the visual field on one side and the inverted reflection on the other); then, sensation: the body’s inter-face with externality, the focal point again being focus itself; then, the spiritual-social: the subject’s inter-transposition with the void and the face on either side, an infinite and unterritorializable relation which cuts jagged gashes across and through the “stuff” and matter of subjectivity.

Indeed, Bergson is absolutely correct–everything depends on the cohesion of these jagged, irregular, mobile structures; their tripartite division (mind, body, soul; idea, image, word; object, eye, gaze) expresses the radical separation between any two layers within any structure, which reveals the radical interconnection between structures of awareness. Balance is inevitable, constantly resurging, self-correcting. We deconstruct the layers of awareness (physical, sensible, spiritual) only to discover their essential identity and contradiction in the same movement; it is this very rupture which is objectified in the cogito; this objectification is of course its downfall, as in fact it makes a much stronger case when inverted: we think because we are– i.e., pure materialism– but either way, the identity asserted between mind and body represses the fundamental rupture, the void point between or across both which awareness represents. But why does Bergson stand the pyramid upon its point?

The inversion which Bergson here intends is not between our body and its movements, nor between mind (thought, theory, memory, time) versus body (sensation, matter, movement, space); rather, there is a fundamental paradigm of balance and “poise” under which any awareness “decodes” itself through (e)motion, allows a crack in being so that its essence or “charater” may be exposed, and this rupture is rather the empty core of that helix around which body and mind are braided together–that is, the world is neither a stage upon which awareness and expression are performed are performed any more than awareness can give itself means, substance or inspiration to function.

By connecting awareness to balance, to the apex of an inverted pyramid, does Bergson not represent the weight, the burden of existence upon the singular “point” of the subject whose iceberg of unconsciousness is rather bearing down on his conscious attention rather than supporting? Our awareness is white hot and right here–is it not every engaged in an endless dissolution and triage of the mass of memories–which is itself a dissolution, displacement and metaphor for the mass of movements and sensations? Awareness is not thrown, but surges up from beneath a weight, constituted from the very courage to stand, as well as the steadiness to continue.

Yet, this balance is something like a logical rupture between “bodies” as independent, isolated, separate and mentally supervised “movement” as relationity, synchronicity interconnection. Poise is a kind of improvised synchronization with externality, as between “mind” as memories and “body” as pure sensation. This balance is not a solution; rather it is more like the generations, successive improvisations on similar themes; the uneasy balance of the family is structural (and is this still not the most repressed of Freud’s discoveries?) but constantly seeking cohesion of disparate personalities, both antagonism and resolution.

Therefore the balance of Bergson’s pyramid is as precarious as our attention span, for it is both (a) pure presentation and cautiously maintained, and (b) chronically absent and desperately sought after. Love, faith, understanding: are these are really enough to pacify and balance memory, to sanctify the present assembly, and transform emptiness into holiness? I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure the answer is “yes”–if only for the briefest of moments…