The Virtual, the Symbolic, and the Actual in Bergsonian Philosophy and Durkheimian Sociology

Today, we have a problem with the symbolic. Psychoanalysts explain "abnormal" acts as violations of a symbolic order inscribed in the unconscious by culture, and cognitivists conceive "normal" minds as computational machines manipulating natural symbols through logical inference. Yet we still don't know what is a symbolic rule or a symbolic norm or symbolic efficacy, and we still need a word to understand how language affects our daily life at the most intimate level. Concepts are not just arbitrary constructions: they point toward a reality, which they can also obscure. They are like dresses on a body; they can become used and old-fashioned, they may have always been badly cut, but we need to use them, otherwise we would be naked and dumb. The concept of the symbolic has become so over-determined that it has uncovered a phenomenon that we have yet to see and describe.

Henri Bergson's philosophy, since it is a method for identifying problems and clarifying concepts, can be a useful tool that can recast the problem of the symbolic in new terms today. We need to understand the mode of existence of language, the way it affects the life of our body, the constraints it imposes on our freedom, the forms of inventions and repetitions it allows—all themes that are central in Bergson's philosophy. We can, therefore, find here lines of problematization of the symbolic which might be useful for today. Two lines of problematization can be drawn in Bergson's work. First, we can show how the symbolic appears in a field of virtualities around human action, which it tends to fix though intellectual schemas. We would then dissolve the rigid frames of the symbolic in a fluid and dynamic activity. Following this line, the symbol is not a representation of something, but rather an image, connected to other images in a field of movements and actions. It can thus be opposed to the virtual just as the concepts of intelligence are opposed to the images of intuition. This line is particularly enlightening if one reads Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience or Introduction à la métaphysique. Another line would problematize the symbolic not through the field of virtualities it schematizes, but rather through the actuality that it tends to produce, in the sense of the act of consciousness that constitutes itself through symbolic activity, or the actual object that the symbol refers to—the originality of Bergson's philosophy lies in the fact that object and subject constitute themselves together in the act of symbolization. Following this line, the symbolic could be opposed to the actual as a vague generality is opposed to a precise singularity. This line is particularly enlightening if one reads Matière et mémoire or L'évolution créatrice.¹

I want to argue that Bergson's philosophy holds these two lines that tend to be separated in contemporary philosophy in the same work, and that the great tension of this work is to think the symbolic between the virtual and the actual. Bergson proposes a new concept of the symbolic because he doesn't conceive it as the representation of an object, in a two-strata theory of knowledge, but as a way to express and mediate experience through language, in an image of thinking as a layered reality, composed of several strata or " plateaux." Therefore, I want to show that the virtual, the symbolic, and the actual are three degrees of experience that are intertwined in complex and productive ways, and that the symbolic is an intermediary level between the virtual and the actual, that allows their inter-expression.² Therefore, the symbolic is overwhelmed from beside and from below, and cannot be conceived as an autonomous production. Bergson teaches us that there is no experience outside of language, and...