Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self, and Meaning

Two - Bergson and Time as Duration

67 Two Bergson andTime as Duration If a man were to inquire of Nature the reason of her creative activity, and if she were willing to give ear and answer, she would say — “Ask me not, but understand in silence, even as I am silent and am not wont to speak.” — Plotinus, Enneads INTRODUCTION A review of the history of Western philosophy finds the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) a curious anomaly. Almost 60 years after his death, Bergson’s works have yet to be definitively assimilated into one movement or school.1 Their originality and style have prevented them from being eclipsed and forgotten. And while his thought was initially criticized by many thinkers as being anti-intellectual , anti-scientific, irrational, and essentially vitalist, today his ideas remain relevant and are debated both in the sciences and the arts.2 The scientific community’s current appreciation of Bergson is typified by Ilya Prigogine when he remarks that Bergson was the first thinker to seriously challenge the scope of science and give an acceptable summation of what science cannot do, namely, deal properly with change and time. More specifically, Prigogine states that it was Bergson who very early on tried to convince us “that only an opening, a widening of science can end the dichotomy between science and philosophy. This widening of science is possible only if we revise our conception of time. 68 Tricks of Time To deny time — that is, to reduce it to a mere deployment of a reversible law — is to abandon the possibility of defining a conception of nature coherent with the hypothesis that nature produced living beings, particularly man. It dooms us to choosing between an antiscienti fic philosophy and an alienating science”.3 Despite his failed debate with Einstein early in the last century, there has been a gradual renaissance among science scholars evaluating Bergson’s importance. Some see Bergson’s ideas as the basis for contemporary complexity theory, which attempts to lessen science’s dependency on mathematical logic by acknowledging the unpredictable and unquantifiable qualities of time.4 The current revival of philosophical interest in Bergson can be dated from the mid-1960s. Prior to World War II, French thought had been dominated by a preoccupation with Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. In the wake of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the rise of “anti-Hegelianism” in France during the sixties, interest in German philosophy began to wane, and Bergson’s ideas found a new life in those thinkers who recalled his critique of negation in the Hegelian dialectic some 40 years previously in Creative Evolution. Moreover, there was the growing recognition among thinkers such as Levinas and MerleauPonty that Bergson’s ideas had been unjustly scapegoated and dismissed prematurely, having become more of a negative rallying theme for the generation of French thinkers that reached philosophical maturity in the 1930s and later.5 Yet, of all the names associated with a philosophical revitalization of Bergson, the most important may be Gilles Deleuze. In a work simply entitled Bergsonism, Deleuze uses Bergson’s notion of “difference-as-multiplicity” to overcome traditional representational and dialectical modes of thought. In tweaking out the consequences of classical Bergsonian notions such as “duration,” “difference,” and “tension,” Deleuze elaborates a revolutionary approach to film theory that goes beyond psychoanalytical and semiological interpretations, which tend to locate meaning below the surface level of signs.6 On the other hand, regardless of acknowledgments by such notables as Prigogine and Deleuze, Bergson’s name is hardly mentioned in poststructuralist, hermeneutical, and postmodern conversations today. The most striking feature of Bergson’s thought that would seem to exclude him from our present interest in these areas concerns his pronounced suspicion of language. On his own philosophical highway , Bergson never made the “linguistic turn” toward the “promised land” of hermeneutics. However, in the following discussion, I hope to uncover Bergson’s engagement with language as ambiguous to say the least, and to show that his suspicion of language and symbols is not airtight. The summary of Ricoeur’s aporetics of temporality has provided us with a sharp backdrop with which to investigate Bergson’s notion of time. Not only does Bergson run into the aporias delineated by Ricoeur, but, given his specific interest in the time of the self, Bergson recognizes, even inadvertently, the necessity of language and narrative in establishing...