Lilti contra Gordon

I want to tackle the next two pieces in RMEIH as a pair. They are, in order, Peter Gordon on “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas” and Antoine Lilti’s “Does Intellectual History Exist in France?” At the end of Lilti’s text, he responds to Gordon’s essay. (I am, incidentally, curious about how this sort of exchange is managed practically speaking). Gordon, Lilti writes,

defends the idea of approaching philosophical texts of the past with present-day preoccupations in mind, and he cautions against he danger of excessive contextualization. By contrast, the whole tradition of cultural history in France was built upon the premise...that an insurmountable distance separates the present of the historian from the past found in sources...This commitment to contextualization is what distinguishes the historian’s approach, and it cannot be abandoned without sacrificing the specific contributions that historians make to our understanding of cultural objects. (69)

Now, Lilti agrees with Gordon that “attentiveness to the temporality of knowledge is especially important for intellectual history,” and certainly also agrees that when confronting a given object, the intellectual historian must bear in mind what has become of this object between its initial creation and the historian’s engagement with it. Lilti’s example is Lucien Febvre’s classic account of Rabelais. Febvre’s work there is a pradigmatic insistence on the alterity of the past. But it was also premised on the continual presence of Rabelais in French cultural life between his 16^th century and Febvre’s 20^th. But, at least this is my reading, Lilti will not follow Gordon onto what looks to Lilti like philosophical, rather than historical terrain.

           

The two essays contrast in many ways. Lilti, although of course he generalizes and makes conceptual points, is basically concerned to synthesize historiography. He answers the question posed by his title in the affirmative, but explains why and how this is only relatively recently true. Gordon, in contrast, cites very few works of historiography. The essay is ostensibly primed by Skinner’s 1969 “Meaning and Understanding,” but the real interlocutor is German critical theory.

I may be projecting, but my sense is that Lilti is somewhat taken about by Gordon. The latter maintains, in his own words, that “intellectual historians should not endorse contextualism as a global and exhaustive theory of meaning, that is, the view that a specific context can fully account for all the potentialities of an idea” (33). Gordon insists that what he is against is contextualism understood as “the epistemological and normative (and implicitly metaphysical) premise that ideas are properly understood only if they are studied within the context of their initial articulation. This idea has for some time enjoyed a default status that quite often passes without argument or defense, since it is presumed to be merely the common sense of the profession at large” (36). Gordon proceeds to destroy this idea. And I entirely agree with him that it is debilitating in a number of ways, limiting and simply bad practice, to make such assumptions. I agree that the original temporally and geographically proximal context of articulation is not the exclusive or exhaustive bearer of meaning for an idea. On the other hand, I am not convinced that historians have ever seriously maintained that it was, or—and here Gordon agrees—acted like it was. Indeed I vividly retain the impression (if not exactly the memory) of reading Dominic LaCapra’s classic (anticontextualist?) extended list of possible contextualizations for a given text. That was written 30 years ago. And I am puzzled by Gordon’s use of the term “idea.” His essay is after all about the history of ideas, but it seems to me straightfowardly the case that intellectual historians work with many objects that they would not describe as “ideas,” a term that many, although of course not all, would regard with suspicion. In short, it seems to me that Gordon waves his hand over the gathered masses of intellectual historians to abstract from their practice a disavowed appalling metaphysics, but then, having dismantled this metaphysics, he admits that actually historians also do not act as though they believe it: “the irony is that, whenever they venture into a more critical style of analysis, intellectual historians typically violate the principles of exhaustive contextualism to which they claim allegiance” (51). No evidence is ever offered for such allegiance—unless the mere reference to Skinner’s programmatic essay. Perhaps if I went back and re-read Skinner, the objections would seem more just. As it is, I am somewhat at a loss. I am perhaps missing something. 

There is nonetheless much that is interesting in the way Gordon stages his argument. Particularly the issue of temporality. For Gordon, the strong contextualist (bad) position amounts to a containment and a slowing down. It finds its ultimate model in a Hegelian system, a closed system of Geist with its own logic, the spirit of the age. There may be events, but the flow of time itself is not disruptive. The critical perspective that Gordon wants to endorse is eruptive. It is a differential time, as opposed to a punctual one (the reference here is to Benjamin). I tend toward skepticism of temporality-talk. And yet reading Gordon made me want to go back and pick up the work of a philosopher radically at odds with the tradition on which Gordon relies: Herni Bergson. Bergson, after all, in a much more sustained way than Benjamin, attempted to think about a mode of temporality—la durée—that would be different from the regularized, essentially spatialized, time of the natural sciences. Indeed one might—I won’t here—juxtapose Gordon’s Benjaminian distinction between punctual and differential time to a Bergsonian one between duration and extension.

This brings us back to Lilti. He explains, in the broadest terms, why there isn’t anything like ‘intellectual history’ among the French academic disciplines. Startlingly for me—but sensibly—Lilti begins by pointing out that there was nothing comparable to the Italian and the German traditions of philology in France. So that “In France, the theory and practice of history has not been guided by a science of texts so much as by the tension between narrative and knowledge, and between literature and social science” (57). Parenthetically, I’ll point out that here we have Lilti speaking of texts, lamenting the epochal failure of French historians to attend to them as such, where Gordon spoke of ideas, drawing on an absolutely philosophical German tradition—not the philological one. However that may be, Lilti goes on to point out that, in France, the history of philosophy belonged fully to the philosophers, and so was carried out in a radically non-historical way (that is, decontextualized). It is not entirely wrong, although also not entirely fair, to lay all the blame at the feet of the Annales—Febvre, mentioned above, is an example of the potential openness of this tradition. In any case, most of what looks and feels like intellectual history in French has been written not by historians tout court, but by historians of literature. Standouts here include Daniel Mornet and Paul Hazard.

Far be it from me to argue with Antoine Lilti, but. I think it is telling that Foucault turns out to be unavoidable for Gordon as well as Lilti. Was Foucault merely an intellectual historian? I would suggest that it is more interesting to ask what traditions Foucault was drawing on to do whatever it was he was doing. At least part of this is the French tradition of philosophical engagement with science. This might be said to have begun in the later 19^th century (and Bergson was an enemy for this tendency). In order to take the claims of science seriously, philosophers found that they had also to take seriously the historically variable nature of scientific truth. Variable according to what? At least sometimes, the rest of society. And in fact, even outside this subdiscipline, there were scholars trained as philosophers writings things that are very like intellectual history around 1900—I’m thinking of Élie Halévy on English Radicalism and Henry Michel’s L’Idée de l’État.  

Needless to say, I’m leaving aside much that is valuable here from both Gordon and Lilti. That Gordon has encouraged me to go back and read Bergson again (which actually I’m going to have to do for other reasons) is, according to some people, a terrible condemnation—but it pleases me. And Lilti’s essay—which, as all good historiographical/methodological essays should, has in its final footnote a citation for Lilti’s own brilliant reading of Rousseau—is one I would have liked to read perhaps before setting my prelim lists.

Echoes of Bergson

Biopolitics, in contrast to biopower, has the character of an event first of all in the sense that the “intransigence of freedom” disrupts the normative system. The biopolitical event comes from the outside insofar as it ruptures the continuity of history and the existing order, but it should be understood not only negatively, as rupture, but also as innovation, which emerges, so to speak, from the inside. Foucault grasps the creative character of the event in his earlier work on linguistics: la parole intervenes in and disrupts la langue as an event that also extends beyond it as a moment of linguistic invention. For the biopolitical context, though, we need to understand the event on not only the linguistic and epistemological but also the anthropological and ontological terrain, as an act of freedom. In this context the event marked by the innovative disruption of la parole beyond la langue translates to an intervention in the field of subjectivity, with its accumulation of norms and modes of life, by a force of subjectification, a new production of subjectivity. This irrpution of the biopolitical event is the source of innovation and also the criterion of truth. A materialist teleology, that is, a conception of history that emerges from below guided by the desires of those who make it and their search for freedom, connects here, paradoxically, with a Nietzschean idea of eternal return. The singularity of the event, driven by the will to power, demonstrates the truth of the eternal; the event, and the subjectivity that animates it, constructs and gives meaning to history, displacing any notion of history as a linear progression defined by determinate causes. Grasping this relation between the event and truth allows us to cast aside the accusation of relativism that is too often lodged against Foucault’s biopolitics. And recognizing biopolitics as an event allows us both to understand life as a fabric woven by constitutive actions and to comprehend time in terms of strategy.

Foucault’s notion of the event is at this point easily distinguishable from the one proposed by Alain Badiou. Badiou has done a great service by posing the event as the central question of contemporary philosophy, proposing it as the locus of truth. The event, with its irreducible multiplicity, that is, its “equivocal” nature subtracts, according to Badiou, the examination of truths from the mere form of judgment. The difference between Badiou and Foucault in this respect is most clearly revealed by looking at where, temporally, each author focuses attention with respect to the event. In Badiou an event—such as Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the French Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to cite his most frequent examples—acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it. Foucault, in contrast, emphasizes the production and productivity of the event, which requires a forward- rather than backward-looking gaze. The event is, so to speak, inside existence and the strategies that traverse it. What Badiou’s approach to the event fails to grasp, in other words, is the link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event. A retrospective approach to the event in fact does not give us access to the rationality of insurrectional activity, which must strive within the historical process to create revolutionary events and break from the dominant political subjectivities. Without the internal logic of making events, one can only affirm them from the outside as a matter of faith repeating the paradox commonly attributed to Tertullian, credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth [2009], pgs 59-61.

These are two paragraphs, about a one and a half pages, from Hardt and Negri’s new book. I read Empire a few months ago, and have just run through Multitude, and begun on this. This particular passage is from the “concluding discussion” of the first part of the book. The section generally is concerned to elaborate the authors’ reading of Foucault, in particular the distinction between biopower and biopolitics that they believe Foucault ultimately makes, even if his usage doesn’t reflect it. Biopower is the power to ‘make live’ that Foucault spent much of the 1970s discussing. Biopolitics is the resistance to this power. But, as this passage makes plain, it is more than that. I wonder to what purpose the authors have decided to enter into a discussion of the event. Although one would need more textual support (and perhaps this will be clearer when I have read the next 300 pages of the book), it seems to me that this is a turn back to Bergson. Biopolitics is the counter to biopower in the same way that the élan vital is a counter to simple matière. The first is innovation and freedom (literally) incarnate, while the second is predictability and fatality. I paused over this because they criticize Badiou for what I found the single most compelling schema presented in Being and Event. Subjectivity as fidelity to an event is interesting only because the event is past, and the conflict—and for Badiou this conflict is legitimate—is over what it means to practice fidelity to this event. This conflict is what constitutes the event as an event. It is wrong to say, as Hardt and Negri do, that meaning is given to the event retrospectively. It seems to me that the event exists only retrospectively. Hardt and Negri seek to avoid relativism. I applaud Badiou most for what is in fact a courageous head-on admission of a certain kind of relativism. Oddly for an engagé (but perhaps not for a Sartrean engagé), Badiou’s relativism is political—ontic—while his metaphysics, his ontology, are not relativistic. Hardt and Negri base their politics in the same way, it seems to me, that Marx did. They have performed an empirical analysis of the world, guided by a certain critical-philosophical perspective, and made a judgment about what the past and contemporary world means will happen in the future. There is great value in this. But it is not what Badiou is about. Certainly Badiou does not grasp the link between freedom and power, but Badiou at no point, as far as I know, even attempts such an analysis. In my no doubt partial and impoverished reading, Badiou has provided us with a way to think about the nature of the subjectivities to which some people still aspire, although they often are not able to explain why.

Again, it seems to me that Hardt and Negri have reproduced here (and perhaps more broadly) the conceptual scheme Bergson presents in which, in a sense, freedom is the force that rises against the falling force of material. The forms of life, constantly diversifying, are like the spray of a fountain, always reaching up. Except that Hardt and Negri do not see a contradiction, as Bergson so clearly did, between the radical freedom of the élan vital (the biopolitics of the multitude) and any kind of rationality. Perhaps, for Hardt and Negri, the material against which life moves is already cracked and grooved in ways that make it possible to predict to some extent the form that new subjectivities will take as they break it apart. It might be that this cracking-apart constitutes a biopolitical event; and certainly their perspective on it differs from Badiou’s. I would, myself, call Hardt and Negri’s approach historical and objectivist in a way that Badiou’s is not. But I do not see the contradiction suggested by these paragraphs between the two ways of thinking. This is perhaps because of how broadly Hardt and Negri are using the term ‘event,’ and how muddled may be my recollections of Badiou. I will end recklessly: Hardt and Negri must accuse Badiou’s event of constituting a credo quia absurdum because their perspective of immanence does not allow what seems to me one of Badiou’s basic principles: we are always outside ourselves.

end the book

"L’esprit emprunte à la matière les perceptions d’où il tire sa nourriture, et les lui rend sous forme de mouvement, où il a imprimé sa liberté."

this is the last sentence of Matière et mémoire. Lapidary.

Durkheim and analogy

Durkheim begins “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives” by defending the use of analogy as a tool of scientific analysis. Those who attempt to understand society through analogy with biology are not wrong because they employ analogy, but because they employ it badly. Similarly, those sociologists who look first of all to psychology, that is to the individual, are not necessarily wrong to do so. Durkheim says,

La vie collective, comme la vie mentale de l’individu, est faite de représentations; il est donc présumable ue représentations individuelles et représentations sociales sont, en quelque manière, comparables. Nous allons, en effet, essayet de montrer que les unes et les autres soutiennent la même relation avec leur substrat respectif. Mais ce rapprochement, loin de justifier la conception qui réduit la sociologie à n’être qu’un corollaire de la psychologie individuelle, mettre, au contraire, en reflief l’indépendance relative de ces deux mondes et de ces deux sciences (2).

This somewhat enigmatic explanation given, Durkheim turns to discuss the various materialist theories of psychology that attempt to reduce mental activity to a physical substratum—in the words of the period, to reduce the spiritual to the material. There follows a lengthy discussion of the various logical contradictions and metaphysical traps into which a rigorously materialist psychology must fall. Memory, perception, and the possibility of an unconscious mind are all discussed. William James figures prominently in this discussion, although Bergson (whose Matière et mémoire had appeared in 1896) is not explicitly mentioned. Durkheim concludes that it is impossible to reduce mental activity either to a physical substratum or to pure consciousness. This goes on for 30 pages, until one has nearly forgotten the point of the entire exercise.

The point is, of course, that there is an analogy to be made between psychology and sociology. (It should be said that for Durkheim ‘collective psychology’ is simply sociology—or rather the other way around—so ‘psychology’ can be used simply on its own, because it only ever refers to the individual. This leaves aside, I suppose, the whole range of groups that do not constitute ‘societies’ and must fall under ‘social psychology.’) Durkheim says: “Le rapport qui, dans la conception, unit le substrat social à la vie sociale est de tous points analogue à celui qu’on doit admettre entre le substrat physiologique et la vie psychique des individus” (34). That is, as brains are to minds, so individuals are to society. The analogy, then, is not between phenomena, but in the way that each science is delimited. The two ‘classic’ forms of explanation, called here materialist and idealist, are often (for instance, by Ravaisson in his survey) differentiated as, for the first, explaining the complex by the simple, and the second, the simple by the complex. Put otherwise, materialists explain the whole by its parts, and idealists the part by its whole. Debates in this period often organized themselves around physiology and morphology: does the function determine the organ, or the other way around?

Durkheim’s point here is that, as he says, to explain “le complex par le complex, les faits sociaux par la société” (41). Elements of one kind, to which one set of rules apply when in isolation, when combined give rise to phenomena that cannot be understood according to these rules. Durkheim says, “à mesure que l’association [for instance, of cells in a living being, or individuals into a society] se constitue, elle donne naissance à des phénomènes qui ne dérivent pas directement de la nature des éléments associés” (41-2). The potentially major problem of constituting these levels or systems of rules will be solved empirically. Suggesting, I suppose, that what will later be called ‘epistemological gaps’ in some sense ‘naturally’ occurring.

I mentioned already Bergson’s absence from this essay. It would be interesting to know more about Durkheim’s opinions of Bergson’s earlier writings—Les données immédiates...(1889) and Matiere et memoire (1896)—specifically in regard to the limits and meaning of materialist psychology. Later on, they come to represent two very different aspects of French philosophical/scientific culture, this is why I’d like to know more about the earlier period. Unexpectedly, this essay gives me yet more of a reason to read Emile Boutroux’s famous 1874 De la contingence des lois de la nature (reprinted 1895) supposedly grounding human freedom in these gaps between epistemological levels of determination. For striking contrast, and in order to have a hyper-modern perspective on these questions of materialist psychology, I would want to go back and look through my notes on Zizek’s Parallax View.

De l'Habitude

In a book store yesterday, looking for something else, I ran across Félix Ravaisson’s De l’Habitude. There were two editions, a PUF edition that also included a much later essay (De l’Habitude was first published in 1838), and a colorful and glossy little Rivages edition that was a few euros cheaper. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was thinking to have bought the Rivages. I think it’s the same house that put out a similar-looking edition of a few Bergson essays on politesse that I also bought on impulse, and with which I was not especially impressed (probably because they were not serious essays at all, but discourses given on the distribution of prizes at lycées—fascinating documents, but not for their deep thoughts on politesse). All evidence suggests that their strategy—slim volumes in attractive packaging—is successful.

In this particular case, I don’t mind. The essay is perhaps best described, despite the anachronism, as a phenomenology of habit. On one level, Ravaisson means by habit just what is meant by common usage: one becomes ‘used to’ doing certain things in certain ways. In order to explain what habit is more deeply, however, Ravaisson is obliged to explain the nature of being. The text begins and ends, circling back on itself, with a consideration of being, “la loi universelle, le caractère fondamental de l’être, est la tendance à persister dans sa manière d’être” (32). The last sentence of the essay summarizes the connection of being to habit, and is a nice example of Ravaisson’s prose: “La disposition dans laquelle consiste l’habitude et le principe qui l’engendre ne sont qu’une seule et même chose: c’est la loi primordiale et la forme la plus générale de l’être, la tendance à persévérer dans l’acte même qui constitue l’être.” (111-2).

The generative principle of habit is the same as that of being, but habit is available to us in as much as we live, and therefore move and change. Ravaisson says, “l’habitude n’implique pas seulement la mutabilité; elle n’implique pas seulement la mutabilité en quelque chose qui dure sans changer, elle suppose un changement dans la disposition, dans la puissance, dans la vertu intérieure de ce en quoi le changement se passe, et qui ne change point” (31). So habit cannot be discussed without setting out a whole doctrine of being in the world, a whole anthropology. This Ravaisson does in wonderful apperçus, and in a few lucid assertions, drawn from the medical science of his day, some of which we might no longer accept—but this doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

I cannot reproduce the remarkable analyses and assertions at which Ravaisson arrives. Habit is what develops when, through the repetition of action, the resistance and effort required to overcome it, decrease, and the action becomes dissociated from the will (volonté). The will, rather than intelligence, is the seat of the individual personality, so habit is really the dissolution of this personality, and the distribution of the intelligence that carries out action into the parts of the body that act. An example much less poetic than those that Ravaisson suggests would be tying one’s shoes. At first you had to think hard to do it, but eventually the active thought gets in the way, you let your hands take over—we’d call that muscle memory today, though habit implies a great deal more than muscle memory.

Because habit is the dissolution of the individual will into the organs of the body, it can become the principle of living being which allows us, or our understanding (entendement), to get a glimpse of that which is otherwise far below it. One’s instincts, Ravaisson says, were never habits, but our habits can become so like instincts as to be nearly indistinguishable from them (82, 95). Habit, then, is access to nature, “l’habitude peut être considérée comme une méthode, comme la seule méthode réelle, par une suite convergente infinie, pour l’approximation du rapport, réel en soi, mais incommensurable dans l’entendement, de la Nature et de la Volonté” (83). It is Ravaisson’s philosophical heritage, I think, to be concerned about effort and resistance (how are we to know we are, if there is not resistance to our will?) and to therefore place the individual with the will. What requires, for me, a real intellectual leap, is the radical separation between will and nature. By the end of the 19^th century, and I think still today, resistance and will is equal not to understanding, but to life itself. When, I wonder, did the change take place?

In the paragraph following the above quote, there is a passage that I suspect, if I really understood what Ravaisson means by ‘Nature,’ I would understand. He says, “L’habitude...C’est une nature acquise, une seconde nature, qui a sa raison dernière dans la nature primitive, mais qui seule l’explique à l’entendement. C’est enfin une nature naturée, oeuvre et révélation successive de la nature naturante” (83). What are all these verbal forms doing ? I understand the force of the passage, I think, but not what he is doing with the concept of nature.

The cosmology that emerges from this is something like the great chain of being. The spectrum of being is united by a single principle of life, “La limite inférieure est la nécessité, le Destin si l’on veut, mais dans la spontanéité de la Nature; la limite supérieure, la Liberté de l’entendement. L’habitude descend de ‘une à l’autre ; elle rapproche ces contraires, et en les rapprochant elle en dévoile l’essence intime et la nécessaire connexion” (97). What I find fascinating about this is the suggestion, made here and there, that this chain of being, united in principle, is in fact united only by habit. It is united in appearance; the nature of our access to it guarantees its unity.

In a bold move that is perhaps in keeping with certain tropes of Cousinian philosophy as I recall it (effort and resistance and will), Ravaisson makes the mindlessness to which habit reduces us the condition of distinct thought. Ravaisson rejects the possibility for pure thought to generate change:

Avant l’idée distincte que cherche la réflexion, avant la réflexion, il faut quelque idée irréfléchie et indistincte, qui en soit l’occasion et la matière, d’où l’on parte, où on s’appuie. La réflexion se replierait vainement sur elle-même, se poursuivant et se fuyant à l’infini. La pensée réfléchie implique donc l’immédiation antécédente de quelque intuition confuse où l’idée n’est pas distinguée du sujet qui la pense, non plus que de la pensée. C’est dans le courant non interrompu de la spontanéité involontaire, coulant sans bruit au fond de l’âme, que la volonté arrête des limites et détermine des formes (107).

My impulse is of course to historicize this. I want to know what other people were saying, and the degree to which this was a creative distortion and unlawful extension of the ideas current at the time (which is, I think, a possible description of what Bergson accomplished in his Essai). I know relatively little about this period in French philosophy (now I know more), and I read this little essay only yesterday and today. So I am in no position to accomplish that historicization—perhaps it has already been done.

I think my next steps will be to read the essay Bergson wrote on the occasion of Ravaisson’s death, and perhaps parts of Ravaisson’s 1867 book on 19^th century French philosophy. Since I went with Rivages rather than PUF (never again!), I don’t have real notes or bibliographic material, but the avant-propos (not dated, but I assume written recently) does mention these texts. It is otherwise intent on establishing a Ravaisson-Bergson-Heidegger lineage, which, I must say, I hope I would have arrived at without its help. Certainly one could go through and match passages in this essay to similarly worded ones in the Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience--they'd mean different things, but sound the same. Similarly, the author of the avant-propos (Frédéric de Towarnicki, who I suppose was one of the French delegation to Heidegger after the war, along with Jean Beaufret) mentions that Proust met Ravaisson in 1899, and gives us a pretty line from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Proust must certainly have known this essay. I am surprised, actually, that I hadn’t heard of it in connection with him, but perhaps I have and just don’t remember.

Bergson, Izenberg, Proust

Why is it that I thought of Bergson as troubling the narrative Gerald Izenberg sets up in the aforementioned essay? At the outset, not that I disagree, exactly, with Izenberg (I am in no position to do so), but rather that I think pieces of the story are missing, and that from the perspective of my own interests, things are importantly more complicated than he makes them out to be. My own knowledge and interest are focused on France, which Izenberg doesn’t treat: he discusses authors from Britain, Italy, Germany and Austrian (or rather, Austro-Hungary)—at the most I can say that he has left France out because, perhaps, it causes problems.

It is certainly the case that Bergson’s basic framework is dualism, inasmuch as his goal is to show the falsity of certain dualisms. Bergson’s first book, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, establishes the reality and necessity of liberté by demolishing the binary of materialist mechanism and idealist will. Mind-body dualism is the explicit target of Matière et mémoire. So he fits Izenberg’s story, because after the war, the problem to overcome isn’t simple dualism, but a much more complex fragmentation.

Now, I have just finished reading Bergson’s 1903 essay “Introduction à la métaphysique.” Incidentally, this is available online in its original publication through Gallica, at the very front of volume 11 of the Revue de métaphysique et morale—which journal, together with the philosophy of the history of science presented at the end of the essay, I find extremely significant and, given Bergson’s current reputation, somewhat surprising; the new critical Worms edition of the volume containing the “Introduction” comes out in 2009—I wouldn’t wait for Matière et mémoire, but I’ll wait for this.

There is much to discuss about this justly famous essay. Suffice it to say that after reading it, both the structuralist ‘revolution’ and Deleuze’s general tone make a great deal more sense to me.

Characteristically, Bergson says that the empiricists (which is to say those philosophers who stand behind experimental psychology) and the rationalists (which is to say, I think, Hegel and the various German idealists of the first part of the 19^th century), are not so far apart. As usual, the accusation is a little too clean, rather too much in conformity with Bergson’s own ideas, for it to be taken so very seriously. None the less, I think the description he gives of the empiricists, and here he mentions John Stuart Mill and Hippolyte Taine, is significant for placing him in terms of Izenberg’s argument. These philosphers, Bergson says, juxtapose psychological states with one another, and hope that a self will emerge from a sufficient number of so-juxtaposed states. This, he says, is like seeking the meaning of the Iliad between the letters of which it is composed—“le moi leur échappe toujours, si bien qu’ils finissent par n’y plus voir qu’un vain fantôme”[13]—the target here is materialist accounts of psychology that reduce the self to, at best, an epiphenomenon. And yet the mindset that Bergson ascribes to these empiricists maps neatly onto Mansfield’s metaphor of the faceless hotel clerk that Izenberg quotes.

Bergson very often proceeds by setting up poles of extreme possibility, and claiming the territory between the two for his own method. Certainly the ‘climax’ of the “Introduction” does this. In Matière et mémoire, Bergson describes two extreme personality types, defined by their relation to memory—one which is always action oriented, and which is incapable of self-reflection, and another which is lost entirely in the shifting currents of its own memory, given over entirely to the dream life. We have here transparently tropes of what I am tempted to call a Balzacian capitalism—the man of action, always oriented towards a profit of whatever sort (so many shallow and forgotten characters), and then the dreamer (also shallow, but beloved), at the mercy of the winds of sentiment and sensation—Lucien from Illusions Perdus. Surely the example Izenberg cites from Virginia Woolf, of speed and enforced, fragmentary experience, is best read as pathological that makes no sense without the Bergsonian frame?

So this is what I mean: Izenberg’s narrative makes sense to me—at least in parts—if we start with Bergson, but not if we start with what came before Bergson.

There are lots of reasons why an intellectual historian trying to make the sort of argument that Izenberg wants to make would stay away from Proust. He is complicated and very much out of step with his time. I think, however, that Proust might be an especially useful author for Izenberg. According to Antoine Compagnon (and I think a simple reading of Contre Sainte-Beuve bears this out), the ‘programmatic’ end of the novel was planned already when Proust started writing. So it is perhaps not totally unreasonable to take the first and the last volumes as being, in an important sense, pre-war, while the intervening volumes were written during and after the war. For myself, and I agree with Compagnon here, Sodome et Gomorrhe is the best—if that even means anything—and Temps retrouvé is to be taken with a substantial amount of salt. Why, long before I read Izenberg’s article, did I think this? Because in the middle volumes more than anywhere, we and the narrator see the extent to which a person’s self is constituted by all those around them, and how the essence of an individual can change radically (since Proust, I believe, is radically perspectival—maybe this is a condition of the novel as form?) depending on what one knows about this person. I think, although this is something to be demonstrated rather than crassly suggested, that all this has to do with Leibniz. Everyone was reading Leibniz in the 1880s, there are essays about him regularly in the Revue philosophique, and the monad is, after all, a lastingly powerful metaphysical construction. So perhaps a historical reading of the sort that Compagnon’s book on Proust gives us could, in fact, show how the Proustian moi changed even against Proust’s own professed will, because of the war.

The burden of such a demonstration would be to show how something like ‘the war’ could change something like ‘the idea of the self.’ Although I find Izenberg’s argument in many ways persuasive, it seems to me that there is a sort of causal gap in it, which can only be filled or bridged by much more detailed and contextually sensitive research than, of course, his essay has any intention of providing.

War and (Cultured) Selfhood

Gerald Izenberg’s “Identity Becomes an Issue: European Literature in the 1920s,” in a recent issue of Modern Intellectual History, is a useful and erudite framing of a certain facet of European literary culture. The essentials of his argument are simple. Before the First World War, when these writers spoke about split selves, they generally did so in dualist terms (rational/sensual, spiritual/material, ect...) After the war, the self becomes fractured along multiple complex lines, the center, indeed, is empty.

I am a little uncomfortable with the way Izenberg makes the reality of the war do so much intellectual work. I want to know more about what pre-existing conditions interacted with what, exactly, about the war, to produce the phenomena he is documenting. Was it the massive and long-term propaganda effort (at every level of society) hammering home certain ideals, which were then suddenly given the lie by the generalization of bureaucracy and death on a never-before-seen scale? I guess what I don’t like about this is that it fails to take account of the many people who did not react to the war in this way. And if many people did not have such a reaction, then we need either to look to different war-time experiences (this, I think, makes no sense), or more plausibly, to different pre-war positions. Or we could throw our hands up in the air and admit that the same cause does not always lead to the same result.

Which brings me to a more substantive question. One of Henri Bergson’s little tricks to get around the various metaphysical problems (especially having to do with free will) created by experimental psychology in the 1880s speaks to this last option. Bergson says that the question is poorly posed because there can be no too exactly identical causes. Either they are distinct in space (in different places) or in time (happen at different moments in the durée).

Izenberg ends his essay by pointing to Heidegger, and Being in time. Bergson is certainly not Heidegger, but he did think famously and explicitly about selfhood and time. Gide and Woolf, at least, would have read Bergson—I don’t know about the Germans, but probably they had as well. Is it perhaps a Bergsonian—modernist—self that was exploded into little bits by the coming of the war, and the encounter with irrationality originating from outside the individual durée?

Of course it would be foolish to ask Izenberg to treat more authors--an impressive diversity of writers are discussed already--yet I wonder if he would have been able to avoid Bergson if he had looked more closely at Proust. The aside we do get on Proust does not, I think, entirely do justice to the complexity of the Proustian self, which is hardly guaranteed by recovered memory. At any rate, this article has had the effect of renewing my resolution to read both Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, and then Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self.

Le choc Bergson

Henri Bergson is not a philosopher who, like Agamben, I have consciously avoided. None the less, it is the case that I have often heard his name come from the mouth of someone who was, I am certain, interested in this philosopher only because Deleuze wrote about him. Yet for a variety of reasons, I have started to read Bergson. I began at what is more or less the beginning, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. I can say with honesty that I experienced what I imagine the publishers must have had in mind when they printed, on the front of the otherwise quietly ugly standard PUF design, “LE CHOC BERGSON.” Bergson is a remarkable writer, but also one that I am concerned I may have trapped in my person web of reference.

What do I mean by this? I mean that reading the Essai, I thought of Proust and Sartre. I thought a little of William James (who, since he is cited, cannot be avoided). And then, in what is probably the most historically useful association, springing less from conscious thought than what might be called aesthetic association, I thought of George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty. This last seems to me somehow similar in its tone and its construction. There are, I think, reasons for this on several levels. First, the two books were written only about a decade apart (1886-96, give or take some months), and were both ‘first’ books. That is, both were written for presentation to a jury of senior academics, and in what was essentially the same intellectual field. After all, Santayan was writing for James, and James and Bergson were already, by this point, in communication. On a higher level of abstraction, but books are attempts to maintain what I would, quite un-technically, call transcendental reasoning in the face of a respected, powerful, and aggressive materialist science. James is in something of the same boat. The next generation of philosophers, Sartre and Heidegger, say, seem to have felt no need at all to engage with ‘psychophysique’ and the like.

The Essai is rich and complex—though I would not say, exactly, that it is ‘difficult.’ Part way through the book I began to think about memory, and how a philosopher of durée would deal with this. Of course the next book is Matière et mémoire, so I image I’ll find out. It was hard to read the example of the musical phrase, which turns up several times, without thinking of Proust and Vinteuil. Yet it seems to me that Vinteuil means something quite different for Swann, and even for Proust, than the musical phrase does in the Essai. I want to know a great deal more, for instance, about what Bergson does with language in his later work. No doubt much has been written here, and I will soon know. Suffice it to say for the moment that after reading the Essai with Proust and Sartre in my head, both as ‘readers’ of Bergson, Proust seems, oddly enough, more (philosophically???) interesting than Sartre. Perhaps this is because I know more about him than I do about Sartre.

I am going to continue to avoid saying anything substantive about Bergson’s ideas. I have never been able to be interested in the philosophical ‘problem’ of human freedom—perhaps Bergson more or less tabled the issue, except for the odd twist of the postwar existentialists? Rather than discuss the issues, I’ll finish by saying only that I am sorry it is not yet possible to buy Frédéric Worms’ critical edition of Matière et mémoire (it apparently comes out in 2009)—the notes in the Essai are helpful and, despite the somewhat didactic tone, not obtrusive.

Last of all, I admit that I bought Deleuze's little 1966 manual on Bergson. It was only 5 Euros from the box outside of the librarie Vrin. Maybe after MandM I will read it.