‘A refractory planet’
Henri Bergson’s contribution to the philosophy of history
[T]ime is what hinders everything from being given at once.
It retards, or rather it is retardation. It must therefore, be elaboration.
Would it not then be a vehicle of creation and of choice?
Would not the existence of time prove that there is indetermination in things?
Would not time be that indetermination itself?
- H. Bergson: ‘The Possible and the Real’
1. Introduction: modern history and the ‘absent’ past
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) counts as one of the most original and important thinkers of time of
the twentieth century. Jorge Luis Borges even considered anything written on time after Bergson
to be anachronistic.1 It may therefore seems strange that the implications of Bergson’s
philosophy of duration for the philosophy of history have rarely been investigated. An important
reason for this lacuna is, undoubtedly, that Bergson himself seems never to have had a particular
interest in history. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks, “[i]t is hard to understand why Bergson
did not think about history from within as he had thought about life from within.”2
Another reason is that the dominant discourse within the philosophy of history has evaded
questions regarding the ontology of historical time. Since the 1970s, the focus of critical or
analytical philosophy of history has been mainly on historical epistemology, on the way in which
historical meaning is constructed by means of the narrative representation of the past. The
modern notion of time that is presupposed in historiography has remained unaccounted for.
1
John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Indiana 1999) 1.
Merleau-Ponty continues: “Why did he not also set about investigating in history the simple and undivided acts
which arrange fragmentary facts for each period or event? In maintaining that each period is all it can be, a
complete event existing wholly in act, and that pre-Romanticism for example is a post-Romantic illusion,
Bergson seems to reject this depth-history once and for all.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making’
in: Signs (Northwestern University Press 1964) 182-191: 187. According to MP the writings of Charles Péguy
can be seen as a Bergsonian approach of history.
2
1
As Reinhart Koselleck has showed in a number of essays, modern history is intimately bound
up with modern temporality, that implies a qualitative difference between past and present.3
Modern time is marked by the ‘arrow of time’, which expresses that we progress through time
towards the future and that the past is annihilated ‘behind us’.4 The timeline – the measuring
instrument in history par excellence – sanctions the absent status of the past by fixating the
‘distance’ between past and present. One of the epistemological problems that arise from the
modern concept of time is how to represent this absent past. Generally, narrativist philosophers
of history have assumed that, as Alun Munslow states, “the narrative logic of history is the only
means we have to engage with the now absent past.”5 In recent years, however, a number of
theorists have questioned the ontological absence of the past. Eelco Runia’s notion of presence, for
instance, points to “the unrepresented way the past is present in the here and now [emphasis
added]”6 and hereby defies historical chronology.
The relation between past and present has not only become a problem within the philosophy
of history. It has also been related to a broader cultural condition that François Hartog has
described as a ‘crisis of the modern regime of historicity’.7 Hartog maintains that since the fall of
the Berlin Wall, the ‘arrow of time’ no longer points towards the future, which has rendered the
past ‘unpredictable’. The category of the present has become more and more important, to the
extent that we currently find ourselves in a présent perpétuel, “pondering on a past that is not
passing.”8. The formation of a new, presentistic regime of history faces the challenge, as Hartog
puts it, to “restore some form of communication between present, past and future, without
allowing the tyranny of any of them”9.
To this task, so I will argue in this paper, an actualization of Bergsonism can make a
contribution. As Bergson’s most important contemporary interpreter, Gilles Deleuze, has pointed
out, such an actualization entails not so much a ‘return’ to Bergson as an ‘extension’ of Bergson’s
project today.10 In order to assess Bergson’s contribution to contemporary philosophy of history,
I will explain how Bergson’s ontology of time as duration provides a critique of the modern
concept of time that underlies modern history. I will conclude with an assessment of the
3
See, for instance, R. Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia University Press
2004).
4
See e.g. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge Mass. 1993; orig. in French 1991).
5
Alun Munslow, ‘Editorial’, Rethinking History (2010) 161-163, 161.
6
Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, History and Theory 45 (2006), 1-29: 1.
7
F. Hartog, Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et Expériences du Temps (Paris 2003).
8
F. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, Museum International 57 (2005) 7-18: 16.
9
F. Hartog, ‘Time, History and the Writing of History: the Order of Time’, KVHAA Konferenser 37 (1996) ?.
10
See A. Lefebvre and M. White, ‘Introduction’ in: Lefebvre and White ed., Bergson, Politics and Religion
(Duke University Press 2011) 4.
2
contribution of Bergson’s ontology of duration to the formation of a new, ‘presentistic’ regime of
historicity.
2. Bergson’s critique of modern time
One of the reasons why Bergson never thematized history as a discipline, is that, according to
Bergson, philosophy should first and foremost be about finding and positing problems.
Constituting problems is to Bergson more important than finding solutions, because speculative
problems “frequently resolve themselves of their own accord when correctly stated”11. Bergson
believed that “the great metaphysical problems are in general badly stated” 12. A problem is badly
stated when, as Deleuze explains, we think in terms of ‘more or less’, which is to say, in
‘differences in degree’, where in reality there are ‘differences in kind’ – or in other words, when
time is confused with space.13 Such a confusing, maintains to Bergson, takes place in the Kantian
concept of time.
The central problem with which Bergson’s philosophy deals, is how to understand temporal
change. In this Bergson was not alone. The nature of modern change was a widely debated topic
when Bergson first started to publish about time. The second half of the nineteenth century was
marked by what David Harvey has described as a ‘time-space compression’.14 Socio-economic,
technological and scientific innovations related to what is known as the Second Industrial
Revolution had brought about a radical transformation of the experience of time and space. The
experience of an accelerated time problematized the modern, Kantian notion of time and space
as empty, homogeneous containers devoid of empirical content. A broad spectrum of writers,
artists, critics, thinkers, politicians and scientists struggled to find alternative means of
representation and new cultural forms to account for a notion of time as a ‘transformative
force’.15
Bergson criticizes Kant for his adherence to the mechanistic worldview of the 17th century,
which was based on Newtonian physics and maintained that the universe could be compared to a
gigantic machinery that functioned according to mechanical laws. Mathematics was considered as
H. Bergson, ‘The Possible and the Real’ in: The Creative Mind. An Introduction to Metaphysics (Dover
Publications, inc., 2007) 73-86: 77-78.
12
Ibidem.
13
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York 1988) 21.
14
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford
1989).
15
See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (London 1983).
11
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the ultimate foundation for scientific knowledge and time had no real impact.16 Change was
merely considered as an ordering and reordering of pre-existing elements.
The Critique of Pure Reason [CPR] reflects this mathematical universalism.17 This reverberates in
Kant’s conception of time and space. These are presented as empty, homogeneous media that are
a priori forms that allow for sensuous experience. This implies that we can only know things to
the extent that they can be considered as discrete points on a timeline. Bergson points out that
mechanism might be able to account for physical processes, but not for the type of change that
was studied in the 19th century sciences of life, such as psychology and biology. Organical change
confronts us with a mode of temporality that cannot be adequately represented in terms of
mechanical changes.18
Bergson argues that Kant failed to take the evolutionary background of cognition into
account: “[i]t is not enough to determine, by careful analysis, the categories of thought; we must
engender them.”19 This will make us aware that the intellect has not been constituted to produce
‘truthful’ knowledge about reality, but to provide human beings with ‘useful’ knowledge. It has
allowed humans to act upon matter and to take control of their material environment.
Consciousness ‘fixates’ our surroundings and creates the illusion that we live in a stable world by
refracting time through space:20
Homogeneous space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of things nor essential
conditions of our faculty of knowing them: they express, in an abstract form, the double work of
solidification and of division which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in order to
obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation, in
short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the diagrammatic design of our eventual action
upon matter.21
As Bergson remarks about mechanistic models: “time cannot bite into it; and the instinctive, though vague,
belief of mankind in the conservation of a fixed quantity of matter, a fixed quantity of energy, perhaps has its
root in the very fact that inert matter does not seem to endure or to preserve any trace of past time.” H. Bergson,
Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Dover Publications, inc., 2001) 152153.
17
Bergson: “Kant took for a reality this dream of certain modern philosophers: much more, he thought that all
scientific knowledge was only a detached fragment, or rather a projecting stone of universal mathematics. The
main task of the Critique, therefore, was to lay the foundations of this mathematics, that is, to determine what the
intelligence should be and what should be the object in order that an unbroken mathematics might bind them
together.” Bergson, The Creative Mind, 166.
18
A.D. Lindsay, The Philosophy of Bergson (London 1911) 17.
19
H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (Dover Publications inc., 1998) 207.
20
In Creative Evolution, Bergson compares the workings of the human mind to the cinematograph: the ‘moving
real’ is transformed into a succession of ‘now points’ that are placed side by side like the photographic images
on a roll of film. These ‘moments’ are subsequently put into motion in order to suggest mobility where in reality
there is immobility. It is therefore completely natural and inevitable for us to privilege Being over Becoming and
to always start reasoning from ‘objects that move’ instead of the movement in itself which ‘endures’.
21
H. Bergson, Matter and Memory (Dover Publications, inc., 2004) 280.
16
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Because we have acquired our ‘spatializing’ habits in evolution, we can also ‘unlearn’ them.22
While Kant considered metaphysical reality, the noumenon, to lie beyond the phenomenal realm
of our experience, Bergson now argues that we can gain a direct intuition of metaphysical reality
by making an effort to ‘extend’ our experience of reality, by which we can transgress the pragmatic
framework into which our cognitive apparatus has evolved.23 This will reveal behind a stable
world of ‘beings’ that are placed in geometrical space, a reality of becoming, of duration. As
Bergson states:
There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no
need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves:
movement does not imply a mobile.24
Bergson’s empirical metaphysics implies that duration can be ‘intuited’ if we concentrate on the
lived experience of time. We will then notice that “time, conceived under the form of a
homogeneous medium, is some spurious concept, due to the trespassing of the idea of space
upon the field of pure consciousness.”25
In order to liberate ourselves from visual and spatial images, Bergson compares duration to
music. This brings out four aspects in which duration differs from modern homogeneous time.26
Duration is (1) a continuity, in the same way that the different notes of a piece of music melt into
one another and can not be isolated except by abstract thought. Duration consists of an
evolution “whose continuous phases penetrate one another by a kind of internal growth” 27. This
‘growth’ means that duration is (2) a concrete succession, which expresses that time is a concrete force,
that duration is real. If time were nothing but a homogeneous medium that can be represented by
a timeline the efficacy of time would be denied, because past, present and future would be given
all at once. That this is not the case is what we notice when it takes concrete and real time to, for
instance, dissolve sugar in hot water.
When we listen to music, we will also sense how each note brings about a qualitative change (3)
in the musical phrase as a whole. While spatial time implies that a new state is merely the reAs Pearson puts it: “Once the understanding is situated within the evolutionary conditions of life it is possible
to show how the frames of knowledge […] can be enlarged and gone beyond.”” (Pearson, 117)
23
Bergson: “in order to reach intuition it is not necessary to transport ourselves outside the domain of the senses
and of consciousness. Kant’s error was to believe that it was.” Bergson, The Creative Mind, 105.
24
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 122 [emphasis removed].
25
Bergson, Time and Free Will, 98.
26
These aspects are distinguished by M. Čapek in Bergson and Modern Physics: a Re-interpretation and Reevaluation (Springer 1971).
27
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 9.
22
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arrangement of a pre-existing reality, duration is a “continuous emergence of unforeseeable
novelty”28. This qualitative change critically depends upon (4) a survival of the past, which is the
most significant aspect of duration. Bergson maintains that in duration “both the past and the
present states form an organic whole”29. The survival of the past can be illustrated by the ticking
of a clock. An atomistic approach of temporality would envision this as a series of identical
moments that are interchangeable. But this would not explain why every tick makes us drowsier.
The survival of the past may seem contradictory to the continual emergence of novelty, but
according to Bergson the contrary is the case. Without the past, creative change (and, ultimately,
freedom, which is the power to change the ‘rhythm of duration’) would be an impossibility.
In summary, Bergson’s critique of modern homogeneous time consists of two parts. firstly,
while linear time implies that ‘change’ can only be brought about by a rupture with the past, the
ontology of duration is an immanent temporality that paradoxically ties the survival of the past to
creative change. Bergson even maintains that the more of the past is ‘actualized’, the more
innovation and creation is brought about. Secondly, Bergson maintains that a spatial conception
of time, such as the timeline in history, necessarily conceptualizes change in terms of a (re)arrangement of pre-existing parts, which denies true novelty and creative change.
In the remaining two parts of my paper I will address the implications of Bergson’s critique
for (the philosophy of) history. In paragraph three I will briefly discuss Bergson’s critique of
novelty. The conclusion will be dedicated to a Bergsonian critique of the contemporary status of
the past as an absence.
3. Historical duration
The ontology of duration is not limited to the psychological experience of time, but provides the
basis for a theory of Life which Bergson develops in his most popular work, Creative Evolution
[CE] (1907). Bergson argues here that the evolution of Life proceeds according to a mode of
creative time – an élan vital – that is analogous to the duration of consciousness.30 I will not
elaborate on Bergson’s complex philosophy of life. But it has to be noted that an important
reason why Bergson never dedicated a study to historical duration, like Merleau-Ponty lamented, is
28
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 73.
Bergson, Time and Free Will, 100.
30
By introducing a notion of creative time in the science of life, Bergson resists both mechanistic and finalistic
theories of evolution that had been developed since Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). Bergson rejects
mechanistic accounts of evolution and maintains that the evolution of a living being “implies a continual
recording of duration, a persistence of the past in the present, and so an appearance, at least, of organic
memory.” (CE, 19) Like conscious states, also the evolution of life has to be understood from ““all the past of
the organism […] its heredity – in fact the whole of a very long history.” (CE, 20)
29
6
probably that for Bergson historical time unfolds within the comprehensive dynamic of this
philosophy of life.
Scattered throughout Bergson’s oeuvre, however, there are a number of references which
confirm that the ontology of duration also relates to historical time. In one essay, for instance,
Bergson implies that also the course of history is durational:
History does not repeat itself. The battle of Austerlitz was fought once, and it will never be fought
again. It being impossible that the same historical conditions should ever be reproduced, the same
historical fact cannot be repeated; and as a law expresses necessarily that to certain causes, always
the same, there will correspond effects, also always the same, history, strictly speaking, has no
bearing on laws, but on particular facts and on the no less particular circumstances in which they
were brought to pass.31
The durational nature of history has implications for historical epistemology. In accordance with
the logic of duration, a conceptualization of the course of history as a timeline that diachronically
orders historical facts has to be considered as an instrumental way of dealing with history. It
suggests that history is an actualized ‘whole’ that is ‘given’, a fait accompli, and presents itself as
such as an ‘object of study’. This image, however, eliminates the creative aspect of history, history
as a process that brings about genuine novelty:
Precisely because it is always trying to reconstitute, and to reconstitute with what is given, the
intellect lets what is new in each moment of a history escape. It does not admit the unforeseeable.
It rejects all creation.32
Modern homogeneous time provokes anachronistic readings of history. It suggests that historical
events can be explained in terms of its historical antecedents. Bergson argues, however, that any
event can be explained “by an arbitrary choice of antecedent events”33. The mistake we make is
to assume that “the possibility of things precedes their existence”34 But this denies the extent to
which history is an ‘emergence of unforeseeable novelty’. It suggests that “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.”35. Instead, however,
H. Bergson, ‘Phantasms of the Living and False Recognition’ in: Mind-Energy (London 1920) 79.
H. Bergson, Creative Evolution,
33
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 82.
34
Ibidem.
35
Ibidem.
31
32
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the relation between the possible and the real is exactly reversed. There is not less but more in the
possible than in the real:
As reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it into the
indefinite past; thus it finds that it has from all time been possible, but it is at this precise moment
that it begins to have been always possible, and that is why I said that its possibility, which does
not precede its reality, will have preceded it once the reality has appeared.36
An unforeseeable and ‘new’ historical reality thus becomes ‘retroactively possible’, as
“[b]ackwards over the course of time a constant remodeling of the past by the present, of the
cause by the effect, is being carried out.”37
As an example Bergson points out how a historian might use the past as a mirror of the
present by explaining ‘humanity’s movement towards democracy’:
[T]he trend of that movement was at that time no more marked than any other, or rather it did
not yet exist, since it was created by the movement itself, - that is, by the forward march of the
men who have progressively conceived and realized democracy. The premonitory signs are
therefore, in our eyes, signs only because we now know the course, because the course has been
completed. [...] In other words then, the historical origins of the present in its most important
aspect, cannot be completely elucidated, for they would only be restored in their completeness if
it had been possible for the past to be expressed by its contemporaries in terms of an
indeterminate and therefore unforeseeable future.”38
Our understanding produces the illusion that if a judgment is true now, “it seems to us it must
always have been so.”39 Thinking in terms of duration, however, means that, similar to reality,
also truths are not eternal but ‘durational’, which also goes for ‘truths’ about the past.40 In this
respect we should take the ‘retrograde movement of the truth’ quite literally. Bergson does not
merely state that, like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, only afterwards the meaning of an era is unveiled,
or that every epoch holds its own unique interpretation of ‘the past’ – Bergson maintains that with
a new reality truly comes the creation of a truth about the past, which means that the historical past
is changeable instead of ‘given’.
36
Ibidem.
Ibidem, 84-85.
38
Ibidem, 13-14.
39
Ibidem, 11.
40
For the metaphilosophical aspects of Bergson’s immanent philosophy of duration see John Mullarkey’s
Bergson and Philosophy (Indiana, 1999).
37
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4. Conclusion: the absent past as pseudo-problem
I will conclude with some implications of Bergson’s critique of the modern ‘elimination’ of the
past.
In the introduction I pointed out how modern temporality produces the epistemological
problem of how to represent an ‘object of knowledge’ that is fundamentally an ‘absence’. By now
it has become clear that, according to Bergson’s ontology of duration, this is in fact a pseudoproblem. It results from the habit of our intelligence to imagine the undivided growth and
progressive invention of duration as an arrangement and rearrangement of pre-existing elements,
which denies true change.
Deleuze explains that for Bergson the reality of change implies that the past has an ontological
existence. According to our common sense notion of past and present, the present becomes past
(and part of memory) when it is replaced by a new present. But in order for the new present to
come about, the old present would already have to ‘become past’ at the same time as it is present.
A present can therefore only ‘pass’ because it is past at the same time as present. As Deleuze states:
“There is here, as it were, a fundamental position of time and also the most profound paradox of
memory: The past is ‘contemporaneous’ with the present that it has been.”41 The past is not
constituted after the present, but past and present are two elements that coexist: “One is the
present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but
through which all presents pass.”42 Deleuze sees the past as the ‘pure condition’ without which
the present would not pass. And because this pure past preserves itself in itself, it is the integral
past, all of our past, that coexists with each present.
The coexistence of past and present once again shows how the spatial inclination of our mind
distorts our grasp of temporal relations, as this coexistence can only be thought in a nonspatial
sense, that is sub specie durationis. In consequence, we must resist the question ‘where’ memories
are stored.43 The nonspatial concept Bergson uses to characterize the pure past is the ‘virtual’.
41
Deleuze, Bergsonism, 59.
Ibidem.
43
Bergson: “But only then did I become aware of the fact that inward experience in the pure state, in giving us a
‘substance’ whose very essence is to endure and consequently continually to prolong into the present an
indestructible past, would have relieved me from seeking, and would even have forbidden me to seek, where
memories are preserved. They preserve themselves, as we admit, for example, when we pronounce a word. In
order to pronounce it we have to remember the first half of it while we are articulating the second […] But if that
is the case for the first half of the word, it will be the same for the preceding word…” (CM, 58)
42
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The integral past that is preserved in a ‘pure memory’, consists of virtual images that seek
actualization in the present.44
If we constitute the problem of the absence of the past in terms of duration, what we have to
account for is not how the ‘eliminated’ past can be made present by means of re-presentation or
re-membering. What we have to account for is forgetting: how is it possible that we remain
unaware of the survival of the past. For Bergson, the explanation lies in the structure of the brain,
which regulates our ‘attention to life’ by directing our gaze away from the past straight towards
the future, in the direction we have to go. We are only aware of the past in the form of memories,
that ‘complete’ our present experience. The brain is thus not a ‘storehouse of memories’, but an
inhibitory device that facilitates the selection of images.
The significant fact is here, however, that ‘change’ does not bring about a radical destruction
of the past. Forgetting entails that we lose sight of the past. This implies that the past continues to
exist, but in an unperceived form, removed from the vigilance of consciousness, and that there
exists the possibility that the past can return in the present.45
The ontology of duration reframes the task of a ‘presentistic’ regime of historicity, that should,
as Hartog puts it, restore the communication between past, present and future. To Bergson, the
past is not relevant in so far as she lies ‘behind’ us, but to the extent she has significance to
practical life. A metaphysics of duration implies a dynamic between past and present and sees our
relation with the past as a vehicle for the transformation of the present. Instead of a purely
contemplative attitude, a theory of history according to Bergsonian principles means gaining a
perspective on the significance of history for practical life.
Now that we are facing a series of global problems that seem to indicate the limitations of
‘old’ processes of modernization that are based on a model of ‘creative destruction’ (Harvey,
Berman), an alternative, Bergsonian regime of creative change might be of significance. This
regime gives a critical importance to the past as a vehicle for change. An ‘enduring’ change
requires that we find new ways of (re-)connecting with the past, within an environment in which
this connection is no longer obvious. A new, presentistic regime of historicity could provide this:
an alternative model of creative change rooted in history.
Bergson compares the existence of these ontological, virtual memories to unperceived objects: “Beyond the
walls of your room, which you perceive at this moment, there are the adjoining rooms, then the rest of the house,
finally the street and the town in which you live.” In a similar way the past ‘exists’ without us being conscious of
it.
45
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (London and Chicago 2004) 440.
44
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