Living Time: Response to Worms and Ansell Pearson

This is not a good time for mere being. It is instead the time for and of becoming. In their provocative papers, Frédéric Worms and Keith Ansell Pearson have offered interpretations of Bergson that remind us of the limitations of forms of philosophy such as mechanism, idealism, and teleology that have focused on fixed, solidified being rather than fluid becoming. These philosophies have used static understandings of space and time, whether they are conceived as properties of things or as a priori forms of the human faculty of sensibility in order to ossify and cut up "the moving continuity of the real" into objects for contemplation.¹ Or they deploy static absolute concepts such as spirit, substance, ego, or will and impose their totalizing grids onto reality. The knowledges that are produced are literally murderous. As Bergson points out, "the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects" and, therefore, our concepts have been formed on the model of solids.² Hence, both Worms and Ansell Pearson suggest that Bergson's contribution to thought is the challenge of a mode of thinking that is attuned to living reality and its time or duration because thinking and knowledge are themselves part of life. They are what life creates and generates. Ansell Pearson focuses on Bergson's attempt to reform philosophy through the insights of evolutionary thinking and Worms focuses on the possible reflection, embrace, and intrication of duration and thought: how "duration turns itself . . . into the very space of our thought; whereas our thought, which is a real act of intuition or creation, turns itself into the concepts of our intelligence."

The advantages of the Bergsonian challenge, therefore, seem to be at least two-fold. First, insofar as it situates being within the flow of becoming, indeed, understands being as a positioning or situating of becoming by the human intellect, which is itself generated by this vital flow, it calls for a more fluid and flexible thinking of the time of reality and life where reality is no longer petrified by rigid concepts. It calls for a thinking that permits or, better yet, admits unpredictability, newness, and innovation in living nature, of an incalculability that cannot be reduced into mathematical formulae. In other words, it admits that in our vital existence as thinking beings we are taken by surprise in our encounter with and study of nature.

Second, and more importantly, insofar as human intellectual activity is inscribed within a larger life force that has been divided and differentiated and followed divergent directions, Bergson proposes a non-anthropologistic understanding of life and organized matter as having a transformative force that is neither mechanical nor teleological, i.e., anthropomorphically reducible to forms of human intentional or purposive activity. This was Max Horkheimer's critique of Bergson, that his philosophy was a refined naturalism, where the concepts of life and duration functioned to reduce spirit to nature.³ Ansell Pearson suggestively links this non-human life force to the idea of the overhuman (Übermensch) in Nietzsche.

If this is a redemption of the philosophy of life as Ansell Pearson suggests, it is non-Hegelian in its orientation since it does not view life in terms of the vitality of the Concept or the work of the negative. Bergson's influence on Deleuze's non-organismic vitalism is well-known. Since the idea of life seems to have been a final preoccupation of Foucault as well as Derrida, it might be interesting to ask about the relation of their work to Bergson's, whose legacy to French philosophy has been obscured by the revival of Hegelianism in the late 1930s. Bergson's legacy has not necessarily been revived despite the anti-Hegelianism of the 1960s. In the case of Foucault, I have in mind here not only the work on bio-power and bio-politics but also the idea in one of his last essays, "Life: Experience and Science," that the radical feature of life is that it is "that which is capable of error."⁴ Here, one point of contact would be Canguilhem. In the case of Derrida...