Exploring an archive will always take you on journeys that you had not anticipated. I first came across reference to Bergson in one document in Irene's archive: Proceedings of the
discussions on belief, Geneva Study Group, Winter 1937/8.
Henri-Louis Bergson? I had no idea who he was or what he propounded, but two of the participants in the discussions referred to how important his ideas were to them – they were fundamental as a way of framing their beliefs. That gave me little option but to hunt up who he was, what his ideas were, how they related to my subjects, to the period they were living in, and to their fascination with Jung.
It turned out that Bergson's ideas had considerable influence on Jung himself, so unpacking Bergson was going to be important.
Researching an archive is a bit like archaeology: you are presented with incomplete and scattered bits and pieces and have to try to fit them into place. But there is an additional problem – time investment. As soon as you start researching a side-shoot there is a danger of that area ballooning and becoming a major endeavour in its own right. The challenge is, can you come up with a synopsis of the side-shoot that will contribute to understanding the spine? Knowing when to stop is almost as important as knowing what is worth following up – something you cannot know until you have followed it up! It is so easy to spend huge amounts of time trying to comprehend something abstruse and near impenetrable, being sucked further and further out in an effort to extract something tangible which would contribute to the main flow of the study. Bergson was one such side-shoot.
Arriving at an adequate synopsis is always hazardous. It is a bit like taking a photograph of a landscape. The resultant postcard is a snapshot of how it appeared at one time, on one day, in one season, from one viewpoint, and that before some major feature was changed for ever. It can never do justice to the evolving complexity of the place, nor reflect the near infinity of view points from which it could be seen. It would be easy spending a lifetime studying Bergson and still to feel that you had not reached the bottom of what he was saying; but in terms of my study of Irene's archive, he warranted little more than a footnote. However, in getting to grips with Jung, he deserved far more.
Here is what I came up with in trying to explain the import of Bergson in the context of the document resulting from the 1937/8 discussion group on 'belief':
It is interesting to note that several of the participants refer either directly or indirectly to Bergson. Russell may well have become the dominant public face of English language philosophy between the wars, but it was Bergson who had caught the imagination of the French speaking world, especially after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Bergson's philosophy was important to Jung, who built on Bergson's notion of élan vital when constructing his own view of the psyche after his break with Freud, shifting Freud's notion of the libido from being essentially a sexual drive to being the basic vitality of life. He agreed with Bergson's notion of enduring – that our vitality is experienced as persisting through experienced time – so that we live dynamically in the tension between our past and our expectations of our future – and at a deeper level we also live in the dynamic tension between the greater communal past and the communal expectations of the future. Expectations which Jung thought of as being encoded in what he termed 'archetypes'. Jung also agrees with Bergson about the importance of intuition; that in many ways it is more powerful in helping us survive than intellect. Intellect for Bergson is derivative, a secondary factor: its function is to solve problems when we encounter them. Direction in life is given by our intuition, which is more fundamental. For Jung the process of individuation was very much one of letting intuitions – psychic forces – often carried by symbols – emerge from the unconscious.
Bergson is the very epitome of French language philosophy in contrast to the analytic tradition of English language philosophy. It is as much about feeling right as being right. It is about making sense of life as lived, as experienced; not about reductive analysis and pairing down to what can truthfully be said. It is abstract – very abstract – and fits the thinker like good couture: flattering them as much as serving them: creating an effect that is pure affect. It is fundamentally about what it is to be alive, to be in the human predicament.
Here are my notes on Bergson most influential work, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927:
Henri-Louis Bergson: Creative Evolution: concepts cannot capture the world – concepts fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things – intuition alone engages fully with reality. Neither rationalism nor empiricism grasp reality – the empiricist ultimately resolves reality into no more than a bundle of bits, the measurables which it can be reduced to; the rationalist keeps accreting more and more properties onto the substance that underlays things, such that "A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears" [see: substance theory] until it become infinitely saturated and is equivalent to God or the universe; "Thus they transform it into an unknowable container in which properties reside. Trying to obtain the unity of the object, they allow their substance to contain more and more properties, until eventually it can contain everything, including God and nature" [see: Intuition]. By contrast, true understanding comes from intuition, which Bergson defines as "a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed” [see: intuition (Bergson)]; Intuition is driven by the "élan vital" – the fundamental life energy, the vitality of all things.
(Does "boundless enumeration" prefigure Deridda's deconstructionism?)
Bergson's demotion of reason to the service role of problem solving, and his promotion of intuition to the primary role of direction-giving fitted well with Jung's observations of the human mind. Intuitions, Jung observed, arise from the operations of the unconscious and drive our intent: how we feel is more powerful than what we think. Rationalising is almost an epiphenomena, tidying up, enabling and justifying, even masking our drives. He found that those who became trapped by reasoning suffered. Those who connected more deeply with their intuition flowed through life better, unless that dominate instead. Either one-sidedness was a recipe for disaster!
Bergson was anti-determinism, anti-mechanicalism* in his thinking, emphasising the spontaneity and unpredictability of creation. A view starkly in contrast to the almost triumphant determinism of so many of his contemporaries, especially in the sciences and mathematics. David Hilbert, the outstanding mathematician of the age, contended that the completeness of mathematics would be accomplished; Einstein's contended that all of physics would eventually prove to be determinable, and, in consequence, so would human behaviour. Everything would be calculable and explainable. It would be the final triumph of the sciences.
It is interesting to note how that certainty has crumbled. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, Turing's Halting Problem, and, ultimately, the development of Chaos Theory, have eroded that world view. It seems Bergson had a point. The future cannot be predicted: chaos begets creativity and novelty.
Jung felt that the phantasmagoria of symbols – images – arising in our dreams, in our imagination, in our fantasies and fictions, are the creative font from which inspiration is derived. They are the true vehicles of human inventiveness and originality. To live a life fully is to live a life symbolically, to unleash those potentials. Bergson's philosophy underpinned Jung's psychology.
Disruption being creative – something of a mantra in Silicon Valley – is now taken almost as an axiom. Both Bergson and Jung would have been delighted. Both held that mystics and creative people show us that the static world may be comfortable, but it is not ultimately maintainable. It will decay, allowing chaotic interruptions to emerge full of creative potential. For Jung, that was the essence of the mid-life and other crises, and the harvests of personal growth and development – individuation in his terms – that might be reaped from them.
The arts and culture at a time of stability tend to be flaccid: those from times of crisis tend to be innovative. Religions and spirituality likewise. Bergson not only anticipated the modern view of the vitality of chaos, he also proposed a distinction between static and dynamic religion and their related ethics, those of closed and open systems, anticipating Karl Popper in the process. Dynamic religion and its related open system of morality were rooted, he thought, in mysticism. His book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion explored this at depth. Much like Jung, Bergson linked mysticism to intuition, to the creative non-rational, and to the symbolic and evocative.
Quakers understand how a time of chaos, the British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century (The Wars of the Three Kingdoms), provided the creative space for the genesis of Quakerism; and they understand being rooted in mysticism: the ministry that arise from the germinating silence of Meeting is so often inspirationally metaphoric, allegoric, poetic, symbolic rather than deductively rational – so much in accord with both Jung and Bergson. They also understand Bergson's open system of morality, being alert to continuing revelation.
* The character of being mechanical; mechanical action or procedure; specifically, in philosophy, the mechanical interpretation of the universe.
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