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Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society Bergsonian Politics Paola Marrati In his 1920 Oxford lecture ‘‘The Possible and the Real’’ (published in 1934 in La Pensée et le mouvant, rather unhappily translated as The Creative Mind1 ), Bergson returns to a question of method: the importance of the position of problems in philosophy. Solutions, or answers to problems, are implied in the way in which problems are stated; they are their empirical results. It is critical, then, to avoid the danger of the confusion resulting from ‘‘badly put or badly analyzed problems.’’ Philosophy, or at least its significance, stands or falls with the problems it is capable of setting up. Among the examples of badly analyzed problems that Bergson provides , the one of the category of the possible is certainly one of the most striking. In the history of philosophy, as well as in everyday language, it is usually assumed that the category of the possible contains less than the category of reality. In other words, we have the habit of thinking that a possibility is necessarily and obviously something less than its corresponding reality, even though in fact, Bergson argues, the possible ‘‘contains more than the real.’’2 How is this mistake made? Where does its supposed evidence come from? And, more importantly, what is the ‘‘badly put problem’’ from which this mistake results? Let me cite the following passage: During the great war certain newspapers sometimes turned aside from the terrible worries of the day to think of what would have happened later once peace was restored. They were particularly preoccupied with the future of literature. Someone came one day to ask me my ideas on the subject. A little embarrassed, I declared I had none. ‘‘Do you not at least perceive,’’ I was asked, ‘‘certain possible directions?’’ I shall always remember my interlocutor’s 5 91 PA OLA MA RR AT I surprise when I answered, ‘‘If I knew what was to be the great dramatic work of the future, I should be writing it.’’ I saw distinctly that he conceived of the future work has being already stored up in some cupboard reserved for possibilities. . . . ‘‘But, I said, the work of which you speak is not yet possible.’’—‘‘But it must be, since it is to take place.’’—‘‘No, it is not. I grant you, at most, that it will have been possible.’’ . . . Thus in judging that the possible does not presuppose the real, one admits that the realization adds something to the simple possibility: the possible would have been there from all time, a phantom awaiting its hour; it would therefore have become reality by the addition of something, by some transfusion of blood or life. One does not see that the contrary is the case, that the possible implies the corresponding reality with, moreover, something added, since the possible is the combined effect of reality once it has appeared and of a condition which throws it back in time.3 Our understanding of future events is shaped by the pervasive belief that the possibility of things precedes their existence, like the ensemble of possible worlds Leibniz’s God contemplates, like the a priori structures that lay out in advance the form of all experience, or like a logical space in which all events are supposed to place themselves in preestablished compartments. Hence it becomes understandable that the concept of the possible is supposed to contain less than that of the real: one being the image of the other, existence would give a body to its own phantom, add to it the only thing it still is missing—a little bit of reality. The final consequence, as Gilles Deleuze points out in Difference and Repetition, is that existence becomes inexplicable: because it adds nothing to the concept of a possibility that precedes it, existence remains outside the domain of the conceptual, without reason and, paradoxically, without importance.4 According to Bergson, the opposite, rather, is the case. The possible is just the real with the addition of an act of the mind that throws its image back onto the past: ‘‘the possible is the mirage of the present in the past.’’ We are mistaken to assume that the possible is less than the real. There is more in the category of the possible than in that of the real because the former also contains the very act of the mind that projects a possible unto the past. The possible is constituted retrospectively...

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