The Face of Time between Haeckel and Bergson; or, Toward an Ethics of Impure Vision

Here as there, pure absolute Being cannot do without the organ of its visibility, the medium by means of which it not only exists but also grasps itself in itself.… The return to the pure immediacy of life [is] only possible by a particular act of "seeing," of the "intuition" of life. And this intuition can never go behind the world of forms per se because it is nothing other than a way of giving form.

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Introduction

This essay stages an encounter, a speculative tête-à-tête, between two of the more notorious figures from the history of modern evolutionary thought: the ever-controversial German zoologist Ernst Haeckel and the comparatively better-received French philosopher Henri Bergson. Though they hail from relatively distinct—however overlapping—national, intellectual, and historical milieus, Haeckel and Bergson shared many theoretical concerns and radicalized late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century evolutionism in surprisingly similar ways. Both were unsatisfied, for instance, with solely mechanistic explanations of evolutionary change, including Darwin's theory of natural selection, which privileged efficient causes between external phenomena in conceptualizing environs as evolutionary sieves. Neither Haeckel nor Bergson rejected the idea of natural selection, but each also sought an immanent cause for the history of life in the form of a generative temporality that would spur life's movements from within. Moreover, each grounded his idea in an explicitly non-teleological, non-deterministic understanding of repetition. Haeckel's divisive theory of "recapitulation" saw evolutionary repetition as generative in and for itself, whereas Bergson thought repetition a largely passive effect of the interplay between matter's finitude and the infinity of la durée pure, or "pure duration." Nonetheless, for both thinkers, repetition comprised a diversifying, cumulative movement that served as an autopoietic source for the radiating history of life Darwin described in On the Origin of Species (1859).

In addition to misgivings about efficient causalities and mechanical reductionism, Haeckel and Bergson also shared suspicions about purely intellectual methodologies, particularly when it came to treating life's teeming temporality. They developed kindred modes of inquiry that privileged the affective and felt dimensions of thinking. Bergson called his methodology "intuition." Haeckel, conversely, did not name his methodology: an unexpected lapse for an author so known for neologisms.¹ Still, the Greek term aesthesis, which Haeckel employed throughout his works, seems a likely candidate. For the Greeks, aesthesis meant simply "sensation" or "perception." In Haeckel's hands, however, aesthesis also refers to the intrinsic sensitivity of living things as well as the affectivity that constitutes their relations with environments.

Though both Haeckel and Bergson attempted to imagine evolution in ways that exceeded purely intellectual scientific methodologies, they did so through dissimilar means and media. What I am calling Haeckel's aesthesis entailed an overt pictorial practice, composed mostly of spectacular drawings rendered by the zoologist's own hand (fig. 1). Haeckel relished thinking evolution visually, and his pictures envisaged countless homologies among vast varieties of creaturely forms. Bergson's ontological commitments, meanwhile, were predicated upon a profound distrust of visualist epistemologies. Bergson was especially critical of earlier evolutionists, such as Herbert Spencer, who used spatialized schemas, including "trees," "ladders," and "lines," to describe the living creativity of time. In Bergson's view, such schemas were holdovers from an effectively static and hierarchical conception of nature that missed the vital ingenuity Bergson saw in Darwin's theory of descent. For this reason, he tended to eschew the manifestly visible, opting to intuit evolution through media that touched senses other than sight. Hence while Haeckel and Bergson converged in putting to use the affective and felt aspects of thinking, they diverged around the problematics engendered by sensuous vision.

This divergence awaits elaboration, since Haeckel and Bergson never met—neither in person nor in writing. On several occasions, Haeckel attacked the modern theories of vitalism to which Bergson's philosophy has often been mistakenly linked, but without ever citing Bergson. For his part, Bergson criticized the spatialized thinking of evolutionists like Spencer but remained silent on...