Bergson's Creation of the Possible
Rent from DeepDyve
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP"The Possible and the Real," Bergson insisted to Isaac Benrubi, is an important part of his philosophy (Benrubi, 306-307).1 Far from a mere, perhaps interesting adjunct to his thought, this essay (originally given at Oxford in 1920)2 both demarcates his fundamental ideas and brings out their meaning. It is therefore surprising that this essay has suffered from relative neglect. In The New Aspects of Space and Time, Milic Capek writes, "Space does not permit us to discuss here the precise meaning of the Bergsonian views on possibility which, in appearance were seemingly contradictory" (160). Unfortunately, Capek never responded to this challenge. In the text cited to above he refers the reader to the last chapter of Jankélévitch's Henri Bergson. But here Jankélévitch, besides reviewing Bergson's ideas on the possible, remarks only that besides our ordinary ideas of possibility, there is in Bergson a quite different concept of "organic" possibility – a concept which, however, Jankélévitch never worked out (Jankélévitch, 215-228).
If Capek and Jankélévitch did not tackle the problem of the possible and its implications in Bergson, then surprisingly, neither did many others: for example, Jacques Maritain or Maurice Merleau-Ponty or, among other Bergson scholars, Jacques Chevalier or James Wildon Carr. The proceedings of the Bergson Conference of 1959 (the centennial of Bergson's birth) contain at most only brief allusions to the possible.3 The Bergson bibliography of 1986 contains only four references (out of 5,926) to "The Possible and the Real," and none of these discusses in detail the conceptual problems raised by this essay.4 Of six recent English-language books on Bergson, only one, by John Mularkey, offers critical reflections on what Bergson might have meant by the term possible.5 Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism might be taken as concerted reflections on possibility and its alterity, the virtual. But Deleuze (if brilliantly) reconstructs Bergson's ideas to suit his own views (142).6
In what follows, I will first outline Bergson's critique of the idea of possibility, including his treatment of two closely allied concepts, disorder and non-being (i.e. nothingness). In the concluding section, I will point out some of the difficulties in Bergson's position as stated in "The Possible and the Real" and then show how, based on his earlier writings, Bergson believed that these problems could be overcome. The [End Page 33] result will be an analysis of Bergsonian virtuality as revealed in his concept of the vital impetus or élan vital. I hope that this analysis will shed new light on certain aspects of Bergson's élan vital.
1. Against Prior Possibility
Bergson's argument against preexistent possibilities is linked by him to two other dubious notions: that of substantive "nothing" and that of absolute disorder. All three ideas (possibility, nothingness, disorder) have the same behavioral source and lead to the same unexamined assumption. Any human project begins, he points out, from a felt lack. I do not have food, and must find some. I lack shelter, hence I must make or find it. Starting from a felt lack we find or fashion something that satisfies it. There is nothing wrong with this procedure. (Among other things, it has no practical alternative.) But just because we proceed in this way, it does not follow that nature or, more broadly, the universe does. In assuming (in line with our common behavior) that lack or emptiness proceeds being, or that the cosmos begins with a void or emptiness that must be filled, we unconsciously ally ourselves with anthropomorphism: an anthropomorphism of behavior. The same holds if we presume in the universe an initial disorder in the nature of things that must then be ordered.
We do not need to follow our natural inclination in such matters. As F.T.C. Moore puts it, we can "think backwards," moving away from engrained...
