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On "An Introduction to Metaphysics" (1903)
How does metaphysics differ from science? While Kant had dismissed metaphysics as groundless speculation about things beyond human knowledge, Bergson sees it as a matter of grasping things "from the inside." He calls this "intuition": the kind of understanding we have of our own inner lives. If you try to describe this with concepts or images, you falsify it, you freeze it into position. That's necessarily what science does, and is very useful, but doesn't get at what's metaphysically fundamental for Bergson, which is the unbroken flow of duration.
The regular foursome are joined by Matt Teichman to try to figure out how this proto-phenomenology is supposed to actually amount to metaphysics, like how you can sympathetically have an intuition about anything besides your own experience.
Listen to Matt's introduction. Read more about the topic and get the text.
End song: "I Recall" by Mark Lint & the Simulacra (recorded mostly in 2000, completed just now).
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Awesome!!! I’m going to have to listen to this again.
much respect to all
this was one of the better shows, helpful guest when things got sticky, and the group workings to get a grip on the text very useful in fleshing out the concepts at hand, bravo.
http://monoskop.org/images/2/2d/Deleuze_Gilles_Bergsonism.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lan_vital
Classic PEL episode… One for the books. Deserves multiple listenings. You mofos rock!
Excellent episode. This more than makes up for episode 90. This is what PEL is about to me: very intriguing philosophical discussion from all participants dealing with an interesting philosophical text/topic, not some scientistic single man lecture by someone with an inflated ego who talks a shitload, but says so little.
Thank you gents, I have a bit of knowledge on Bergson, but this discussion has convinced me to definitely give some more time to him (at least his earlier/mid works). This discussion was lively and raised thought provoking points on the topic (from everyone, I especially enjoyed that…that everyone had some unique very interesting philosophical perspective on the text/topic). Definitely one of the best PEL episodes (even close to episode 79 for me, and that is saying allot) so far for me; it also helps that all involved were quite pleased with the text and enjoyed it. And thanks to Matt; great guest; you guys should have him on again.
These types of episodes is what makes me more than happy to donate ad-hoc to you (which I have done various times, but under different email and nick than what I use here) as well as be a PEL citizen. I understand of course that we cannot always expect this level of quality episode for various reasons (not all involved enjoying/really engaging the text, topic, moods, etc.), but still just wanted to especially express my gratitude for this particular episode. This is one I will definitely be listening to multiple times.
Thanks, Phil! We will keep the central mission in mind even as I inevitably push us into trying more dumb stuff. 🙂
One of the best. What Dylan said of Feynman’s approach to understanding by becoming the experient of study (particles, in this case) is a great example of why we need a good metaphysics. This is what I was talking about in another combox – that we must be mindful that all of creation is a sea of emotion experienced in finite durations (Dylan might see a Feynman diagram as a visual analog). No more sole focus on the human consciousness for a serious metaphysics.
On Relativity, remember that ANW knew the ins and outs – the limits – of the mathematics; whereas, Einstein was more just using a tool. What is the fabric of aetherless space that the math says is curved by mass? (This is akin to the mind-body question raised in another bad metaphysics.) Einstein never liked being told to dismiss the aether. Dark energy is the new aether, perhaps.
Intuitive understanding came suddenly on the second listen. Duration, and the slap that is still happening. My old concept of linear time, and what ‘now’ means was suddenly blown away. If nothing is, but is only becoming, then the past is bleeding into the future, everything that has ever happened is still happening, in the same way that the universe is still being bathed in the background radiation left over from the big bang. The paradoxes of how things could ever come into or go out of existence are seen entirely differently now. We are already beginning to die, even before we are fully formed. Cosmic, dude.
“If nothing is, but is only becoming, then the past is bleeding into the future, everything that has ever happened is still happening, in the same way that the universe is still being bathed in the background radiation left over from the big bang.
I was bowled over by your flourish of prose, seeing Bergson, Buddha, and Whitehead all unified with a theory of everything. I read it to my wife, who patiently suffers through my verbal grappling w/ process thought, and she said, “If nothing is, then there is no past.” Busted.
The objectified past is, and it’s no longer becoming. Every bit of it at one present-time subjectively experienced its own duration of becoming a determinate thing out of the possibilities it felt its past presented to it. How such a past determinate acted thus becomes a datum to influence future occasions of becoming.
But it seems that the objective past cannot act, but be the ground for action in present experience. A long traffic jam is the present effect of a distinctly different past accident event. The sunlight striking us now has an 8 minuite history of photon experiences since its genesis on ole’ Sol. In a similar way, the person drinking morning coffee is not identical w/ the one who set up the Mr. Coffee the night before.
As always, I absolutely love the show and the dynamic of the group. Additionally, though (full disclosure) I rarely read the text in advance, utilizing the show as a sort of window into these various philosophical worlds enabling me to then pick out texts and thinkers that I might find interesting, I had read this essay and a number of others by Bergson before in my own philosophical explorations. I have to say, doing so greatly enriched my listening experience, and enabled me to “participate” from the sidelines and evaluate the way you guys were talking about the essay and Bergson’s thought in general. One thing I wanted to add: there were a number of times where you guys questioned the practicality of this mode of thought. I do think there may be space for intuitionist, inductive, holistic modes of thought in a phronetic type of ethics (drawing here from the term as used by Aristotle and Hans-Georg Gadamer). There is more to say about that, but I just wanted to throw it out there as food for thought. Also, would love if you did a Gadamer episode… Anyway, keep being awesome!
Burl, not one person has ever before described anything I’ve said as “a flourish of prose”. Least of all my wife.
You, sir, just made my year.
I missed your reply because I have since been spending all my free time with PEL’s Facebook group. It is much more open and free there for average schmoes like me to say all the things that always just get “that look” from family and friends.
Why don’t you stop by later and join us?
Thanks for the invite, Donald
In general, I am not as interesting as a first glooss of my thoughts might suggest. I have avocationally been interested in things philosophic for most of my nearly 60 yrs of life. I was very impressed w/ Pirsig, and upon retiring from a civil engineering (mostly) teaching career, I got deeper into phil via the internet.
My interest in phil is, I am coming to understand, out of sync w/ what those now engaged in its pursuit want from it. I am not interested in surveying the structure and points of interest in the philosophical canon; rather, as in engineering and science work, I seek the most profound, coherent, and robust theories of the nature of things. I look to philosophy more for sound speculation/answers than enduring questions.
Until someone can show otherwise, I am of strong opinion – though not so well versed in methodological means of conviction – that there has been no greater metaphysician than Whitehead. But I am totally open to being swayed by sound reasoning and argument to the contrary.
One simple upshot of a good metaphysics would be to explain how matter can bend space. What is this space ‘fabric” being bent? And unless this Einsteinian fabric is made from something of a same stuff as matter (mass/energy), how the hell can they interact.
Anyway, I look forward to PEL’s metaphysics work in future episodes.
I’m going to take a tentative stab here, of one or two of the reasons that I’m critical of Bergson’s view on the self. This is why I think it is really an absurd position.
In short, Bergson doesn’t offer enough in the way of showing how to manage the kind of situation which might occur when someone using Bergson’s method of inward introspection towards an awareness of the self, the whole intuition process thing, comes to self-correct himself on his own self-identity. Starting with an extreme example, let us draw up a case in which someone with a psychosis, perhaps, someone who thinks that they are Elvis Presley. This person goes about place to place proclaiming to be the king of rock and roll. We should surely believe otherwise –right; yet, this person believes his identity to be valid. Now, in this case, someone like Bergson is fine with and secured by his notion of intuitive self, that is our deluded Elvis is simply the one and only one self, nothing more and nothing less. However, naturally I find this at odds in many respects. One wants to say that this imposture lacks something, namely, knowing correctly who he is or not knowing that he does not know who he is, a sense of reflection.
The crux of the issue here, following Bergson’s deficit line, is that nothing in the way of any discursive measures could serve as the defeater for such cases. Since for Bergson it is merely The Intelligentsia misleading us, nor might the offerings of a-posterior facts be sufficient either. Even more troublesome is this, had somehow managed to disabuse the Elvis dude of his false identity, it would not have mattered much on Bergson account in the slightest as he might reply “—well, he really knew who he had been all this duration, I meant –time.”
It’s a wacky case but on the other end of the continuum typically on occasion, there are individuals who express themselves by saying: “I don’t usually act this way,” or “I don’t feel like myself today.” What is being said should in some sense be significant in that a person recognizes the changes in their behavior, “under a description” to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein/Anscombe, as not being true to themselves, one in whereby the producer and the hearer usually can pick up on the intention of the speech act. How should we understand this in Bergson terms that its somehow their neither correct or incorrect. Well, it’s just these kinds of observations that matter the most, yet taken by and large for Bergson as they are secondary.
On other fronts, Bergson utilized rather contentious notions still to this day, in his analysis of what he called duration. Doing so meaningfully nevertheless relies upon a good conceptualization of time and extension. Burdened by his own criticism of descriptive powers and its scope, his choice of method is metaphor. That murky area of explanation at best. paraphrasing here, he thinks we are to look within, to the inner, look deeply, you see yourself there don’t you? —It’s like a coil. But, If the self, as he puts it, is similar to the uncoiling of a spring. One might go so far as to inquire about said analogy, something akin to, “–so what is the cause here for its release of pressure?” or “How is it moving expanding?” This is a way of misinterpreting the picture as a representation referencing not the self but conscious thinking.
Cue:
I think you are mistaking intuition as subjectivism, which Bergson is not claiming as the way of knowing. He denies both rationalism and empiricism (experience alone, subjectivism) as valid epistemology.
Schroeder,
Well, my understanding of Bergon’s epistemic distinction between “analysis” and “intuition” is pretty clear to me. He believes that knowledge by description is the trouble maker. Analysis for him is an attempt to capture a thing by framing it into static, discrete elements; which, for him does not do justice to the absolute thing. To illustrate the problem seemingly he used a photographic analogy to show by it that we ought not to mistake pictures taken of thing for the thing itself. However, for him the way one pulls off the trick of the absolute object is via intuition, vis-a-vis, being aware of one’s doing, turning inward, seeing the action itself. (e.g., in accord, my Elvis imposture sees his own hand in motion doing a karate chop.)
Now what I had said above was ABOUT the possible implications of Bergson’s notion of intuition. The examples above where meant to reveal and demonstrate several things, inter-alia, but just to name two here, given “intuition” as defined by Bergson, if, taken seriously, it results I think into an absurdity, where we are painted into a corner. And, secondly to show what might happen if Bergon’s metaphor is carried to far. I think it results in a categorical mix-ups and a very bad way of understanding things at all.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it all becomes subjective.
So in continuing, I’m not simply satisfied here with Bergson’s view on the core self and neither have been others, unlike the process philosophers who nod in agreement.
I’m wrestling with his fundamental notion of intuition, testing via thought experiment, troubleshooting the foundation. Maybe it’s not so concrete. Anyway this is just my initial first approximations.
there are real and unresolved tensions in the work but what could it mean in these days of neuro-phenomenology/physiology to speak of a “core” self?
“Consider . . . a character whose adventures are related to me in a novel. The author may multiply the traits of his hero’s character, may make him speak and act as much as he pleases, but all this can never be equivalent to the simple and indivisible feeling which I should experience if I were able for an instant to identify myself with the person of the hero himself. Out of that indivisible feeling, as from a
spring, all the words, gestures, and actions of the man would appear to me to flow naturally. They would no longer be accidents which, added to the idea I had already formed of the character, continually enriched that idea, without ever completing it. The character would be given to me all at once, in its entirety, and the thousand incidents which manifest it, instead of adding themselves to the idea and so enriching it, would seem to me, on the contrary, to detach themselves from it, without,
however, exhausting it or impoverishing its essence. All the things I am told about the man provide me with so many points of view from which I can observe him. All the traits which describe him and which
can make him known to me only by so many comparisons with persons or things I know already, are signs by which he is expressed more or less symbolically. Symbols and points of view, therefore, place
me outside him; they give me only what he has in common with others, and not what belongs to him and to him alone. But that which is properly himself, that which constitutes his essence, cannot be
perceived from without, being internal by definition, nor be expressed by symbols, being incommensurable with everything else. Description, history, and analysis leave me here in the relative. Coincidence with the person himself would alone give me the absolute. ” Intro to Metaphysics by Bergson
Cue:
From: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/
The normal way our intelligence works is guided by needs and thus the knowledge it gathers is not disinterested; it is relative knowledge.
Comprehensive analytic knowledge then consists in reconstruction or re-composition of a thing by means of synthesizing the perspectives (satisfying our needs), never giving us the thing itself, only a general concept.
See Difference and Repetition by Deleuze for the final working out of Bergson’s position.
For Bergson, intuition (always of duration) is a kind of experience, the sympathy of putting ourselves in the place of: entering into ourselves, others, and things. The intuition of duration (if I enter into the color orange, as a metaphor) puts me in contact with a whole continuity of durations (between red and yellow)–sensing what is other, different.
While the color orange is a real part of the color spectrum, my own duration is a real part of the duration itself, from which I can dilate or enlarge and move into other durations. However, unacknowledged by Bergson, intuition therefore never gives us absolute knowledge of the whole of the duration, all the component parts of the duration.
Nevertheless, this experience is an integral one, in the sense of integrating an infinity of durations [integral experience]. And thus, even though we cannot know all durations, every single one that comes into existence must be related, as a part, to the others. The duration is that to which everything is related and in this sense it is absolute.
As an integral experience, intuition is a method, a leap (vs. analysis): 1 )become present to the duration, 2) dilate the duration into continuous heterogeneity, 3) differentiate extremes of heterogeneity–the dialectic of collection and division.
Within the mixture, one makes a division or “cut” into differences in kind: into matter and spirit, for instance. Then one shows how the duality is actually a monism, how the two extremes are “sewn” together, through memory, in the continuous heterogeneity of duration. Indeed, for Bergson, intuition is memory; it is not perception.
See Difference and Repetition by Deleuze for a final working out of Bergson’s position.
Science is not one nor single, does not present unilinear simplicity preformed (even in nature), nor does metaphysics present irreducible oppositions. Science does not proceed by an orderly interconnection of perfectly fitting concepts, but by divergent, obscure and even absurd paths, while eventually settling down together. Science is not so precise that it can establish inrreducible oppositions, the thesis and antithesis of (Kantian) antinomies, black and white.
Intuition interpenetrates the black and white to arrive at the gray, going to the bottom of the sea to bring up materials which only secondarily become analyzed by the master (intuition).
Intuition, like literary composition (compare, contrast, combine) collects all the materials and then places itself directly at the heart of the subject, by an impulse, a rediscovery of all the materials and more, establishes an ability to enumerate responses indefinitely. That impulse is not a thing to be grasped, but a direction, of movement, infinitely simple. Intuition first goes under the well experienced superficiality, and only then finds intellectual sympathy with the most intimate part of reality. Intuition does not just assimilate, but also neutralizes all aspects to the bare materiality of the facts. Intuition of the self requires combining, comparing multiple psychological analyses, not merely a summary or synthesis of knowledge, an integral experience. –summary of last lines of Intro to Metaphysics.
To you all:
I’ll address your set of replies one by one. Though I would like to start firstly with your last set of remarks. Your thought is that in general scientific language **purports** to embody a comprehensive set of true propositions about the nature of stuff. On the contrary you believe its obscurities and lacunae really attest to how imprecise it is. Is that correct?
Indeed, in someways I am in agreement with this assessment. Science isn’t apodeictic; certainty is hard to come by. How could inductive knowledge be otherwise? That is new empirical discoveries, the jettison of defunct model theories and fresh interpretations foster its indeterminacy. Yet ultimately the store of scientific knowledge accumulates, offering us better tools to live by, and so it should go without saying that the results of science engender tremendous explanatory powers which help us navigate our plain of existence. So far it has been useful and invaluable to us in relative proportions.
Next, I’m going to address Bergson’s method. I find your summery to be rehashing the claims which Bergson had already mentioned in his text. Since Bergson doesn’t offer us any logical argumentation I’m going to enumerate and delineate the following direction he takes us below.
HOW TO FIND THE ABSOLUTE.
A) Identify with/to an object (self to self) or (self to object)
B) If A then empathetic state (The putting yourself in their shoes state)
C) If B then awareness of a simple, flowing duration (lower-case ‘d’)
D) If C then a move to surmise of an infinite standing of durations
E) If D then final assumption that this infinite set is The Duration (Capital ‘D’ kind) getting us to the absolute thing in nature that is immutable and present.
My philosophical worries with Bergson’s picture is; starting with (A), it is virtually impossible to have two individuals experience exactly the same set of events in exactly the same way that the other experienced. That is even if one were to mimick the others every move. One doesn’t simply gain access your subjective thoughts. The consequence is that Bergson cannot validly identify with anyone. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a kind of touchy pathos toward others, yes, one can have surely that.
Now, supposing we grant steps A to C, it doesn’t say how after returning our attention back to a duration, say, after a long sleep, whether its the same duration? We couldn’t prove or disprove that it was the same duration prior to resting.
Secondly, taking into consideration, E and D, the consequence moves seem relentlessly ineluctable, one might wonder why it must move in this narrow direction and when their willing participation ends up in all this. Bergson commits a sweeping generalization of this pathology for everyone.
Then lastly there is an issue with the misapplication of certain everyday words, words like ‘relation,’ ‘inner’ and ‘direction’ to name few which were used by Bergson in describing these foreign items of duration. This is why I think he is really confused and preoccupied with thinking and how thoughts seem to have parenthetical items. In dealing with this we should not play that game in this way because these are ideas are nothing like external objects for which the terms typically used for.
I’m not denying that there is no self, if that crossed your mind.
My conclusion is that his doctrine doesn’t even get off the ground. My really good philosophers have been swept away by a vision.
Part One:
Cue, Well done. It is great to see logic at work. However it is this very logic/reasoning which Bergson is challenging by his vision. He did not flesh it out in the areas you are accurately picking up, so we will have to borrow from the inheritor of his vision, Deleuze (Difference and Repetition) to address your concerns.
In establishing his view of ontology, Deleuze is not thereby denying what is cognitively valid about science, math or the application of Kant’s reasoning in the the world of Actuality where laws and rules do apply. He is adding the hidden, previously invisible story that difference reveals: the world of the Virtual. Kant’s Schematism goes on to make some nicely phenomenological observations about time and space, e.g. if you look at an object on one side of your room right now, then look at an object on the other side of the room, they are observed sequentially but experienced as simultaneous, thus representations undergo a cognitive temporal reconstitution according to Kant, but Merleau Ponty would attribute it to the phenomenal field.
Similar to Aristotle’s phronesis, you cannot be a rationalist all the way down. You cannot have an algorithm for everything, you cannot have a rule for everything (Kant’s COPR, A133, there cannot be a rule for the application of rules). Just as meaning is use (Wittgenstein), concepts are also about use.
The meaning of a concept is its use. It is a rule, but a rule that—and this is the very problem of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein is going to want to say that a rule does not project itself infinitely into the future, to determine all future cases. The belief that rules determine all future cases is just what generates skepticism. That is how you generate skepticism about meaning. Meaning [rational] is impossible because you cannot predict whether a rule will apply to some future case. (See Bernstein’s B Deduction Lecture, part 2; Difference and Repetition, p. 30.)
Part Two:
Bergson is refuting the “for-us” Kantian transcendental ego apparatus based on Kantian categories. Bergson spoke of synthesis, movements which we can think of as both active (cognitive) and passive (experiential) syntheses of time.
1) Habit (first synthesis of time): Hume argues that from past instances of the AB sequence (event A followed by event B) which are contracted (combined into AB) together to form generalities. Habit systematizes this synthesis of time as a horizon of anticipation of the future.
Taking Bergson’s lead, Deleuze wants to establish how active syntheses are possible on the basis of passive syntheses. For Deleuze, “Habit [as experiential passive synthesis, not cognitive representation] is the constitutive root of the subject, and the subject, at its root, is the synthesis of time—the synthesis of the present and the past in the light of the future.” (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92-3 Difference and Repetion). The subject that is constituted through the process of the contraction (AB) of habit is just the organization of impressions themselves, and a node of expectation: or Contemplation.
Contemplation: Where contemplation is, the self will also be, a synthesis of time into an organized structure, as well as constitutive of the material world, i.e. the heartbeat (a sensation and sense), and the irony as if the heart keeps the world going. “Selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self . . . the system of a dissolved self” (p. 78)
2) Memory (second synthesis of time): “In fact we perceive the resemblance before we perceive the individuals which resemble one another; and in an aggregate of contiguous parts, we perceive the whole before the parts” (Bergson, 1991, p. 165)—which is in line with Merleau-Ponty, the Gestalt of the foreground against the background. So, active-synthesis (of the parts) is based on a prior passive (non-conscious) synthesis of the whole.
Part III:
3) The third synthesis of time: Deleuze focuses on time as the determiner of how things are given and grounded. The Deleuzian Cogito requires that the “I that thinks” and expects be placed in time as the passive “I.” He rejects the Kantian Cogito which grounds determinability not only on time but on thinking, which is secondary and illusory.
Deleluze exposes the I that is fractured based on the passive receptivity of the self, rather than covering it up as Kant does with the synthetic activity of the transcendental unity of apperception. Deleuze now searches for the condition of this wider existence—what makes the undetermined ground (the fractured I, the passive self) of a well-determined given (time) determinable.
There is a dialectic (interplay) between the condition (of a passive self with sensations and concepts) and the given (objects in time) which Kant tries to cut off by appeal to the pure apriori given, separated from concepts and sensations.
Deleuze includes sensations and concepts in his Cogito for which he must find the necessary conditions for particular sensations or concepts, i.e., the third synthesis of time. (See Difference and Repetition, pp. 84-96) I can expand on this if desired.
I am moderating a discussion of Zorba the Greek in a few weeks. From the back of the Scribner Edition:
Later he (Kazantzakis) studied in Paris under the philosopher Henri Bergson.
Zorba is an existential character. As I re-read Zorba, I’ll be looking for ties to Bergson. Anyone care to join me?
“Life is trouble, take off your belt and look for it.” Zorba
This was a brilliant episode. It would be interesting to follow it up with an episode on Deleuze’s Difference and Repitition. Deleuze was very much influenced by Bergson and in my view clarifies (and builds upon) many of the points of contention in Bergson’s work; particularly Bergson’s approach to metaphysics, time and becoming.
Thanks! Deleuze is very often suggested still, and I’m sure we’ll get back to him eventually, but I think there are likely a dozen other contemporary continental figures in front of him in line at this point.
Not familiar with Bergson I was wondering if the analytic / symbolic vs intuitive / sympathetic understanding relates to a broader theme of structure vs event and all that it entails. My gut reaction is to be suspicious of generalizing intuitive understanding (it seems obvious to me people from different cultures would have different intuitive understandings of things, which would mean that intuition too is mediated by particular lifeworlds). To me understanding is located in the constant juncture of the symbolic type and the thing-in-itself token, with both being greater and smaller than each other.
Claude Levi-Strauss has an interesting discussion about aesthetics and models in the Savage Mind where he talks about art being about comprehending the whole before the parts, which seems to me have a certain affinity with Bergsonian intuition.
http://popups.ulg.ac.be/1782-2041/index.php?id=628
“The Way of the Reduction via Anthropology: Husserl and Lévy-Bruhl, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss”
Harri—
Bergson is using intuition as distinct from any representational process such as the analytic or symbolic, as well as distinct from scientific or empirical description of reality. He thus does not mean intuition in the common sense of the word. He defines intuition in terms of duration, movement, and time (metaphysical) rather than perception (phenomenological) . Phenomenology does use Gestalt, background/foreground, whole greater than the sum of the parts but not including time and memory as Bergson defines reality:
” ‘If you abolish my consciousness … matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers. In short, try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these qualities into vibrations, which are moving in place; finally, attach yourself to these movements, by freeing yourself from the divisible space that underlies them in order to consider only their mobility – this undivided act that your consciousness grasps in the movement that you yourself execute. You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception. Reestablish now my consciousness, and with it, the requirements of life: farther and farther, and by crossing over each time enormous periods of the internal history of things, quasi-instantaneous views are going to be taken, views this time pictorial, of which the most vivid colors condense an infinity of repetitions and elementary changes. In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs’ (Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp.208–209).”
Like the descriptions of intuition, this passage describes how we can resolve the images of matter into mobile vibrations. In this way, we overcome the inadequacy of all images of duration. We would have to call the experience described here not a perception of matter, but a memory of matter because of its richness. Bergsonian intuition is memory [not perception].
Thank you for this. I guess at a minimal level structuralism and Bergson both are concerned with initial continuity, with the difference that structuralism places meaning in the articulation of discontinuity which allows for relationships between things.
I know Levi-Strauss was quite familiar with Bergson, though the two are sometimes characterized as antithetical.
Indeed I was pointing to continuities in structuralism and a kind of phenomenology, or just the irreducible properties of contingent perception, without fully realizing how Bergson differs from the latter.
What I still fail to get is how Bergson can claim that we can have intuitive understanding of any particular “thing” (orange, mathematical equation, a particular movement, a person). Aren’t these things defined by discontinuity that could be otherwise articulated (in another culture). Otherwise we are simply naturalizing specific cultural categories. For example orange would not only be continuous with a whole spectrum of light but also wetness and dryness or smoothness and roughness ad infinitum.
Perhaps I fail to appreciate the metaphysician or the mystic in Bergson.
ps. I think symbols often suffer from a bit of a straw man generalization that reduces them to representationalism; a critique that is often not applicable in anthropology.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo5950119.html
With Bergson there is only one culture: human, and we all see reality as human primarily, not as cultural, not as discontinuation, but as differentiation based on human: intuition. Orange is differentiated by red on one side and yellow on the other (this, of course, is metaphorical of the differentiation of any entity from alternative other entities), not in discontinuation with wetness, smoothness, etc. Bergson is only a mystic in misunderstanding of Bergson as metaphysician. For Bergson, symbols can be used as metaphors, but misused as representations.
Thanks for clarifying. This would make Bergson antithetical to an anthropological project that saw culture as fundamental to human “seeing” or meaning.
“Adoption of la duree [Bergson’s duration, modified by Deleuze] produces a re-evaluation of the anthropology of time. For on the one hand, one can still address varied notions and experiences of ‘time’, ‘history’, ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘future’, ‘tempo’, ‘time reckoning’ –those enduring topics of the sub-discipline now underwritten by the ‘structure’ of la dure–as they emerge in different historical contexts.” –Matt Hodges http://kodu.ut.ee/~cect/teoreetilised%20seminarid_2009%20s%C3%BCgis/4_seminar_AEGRUUM_08.12.2009/5.Hodges-Anthropology_of_time-2008.pdf
Thanks for the link. I haven’t read it yet, though I’m sure Bergson has been very influential, along with Deleuze, in certain anthropological circles. Of the two theorists outlined in the beginning I’m much more aligned with Munn, though I find Gell fun to disagree with (haven’t read his time book though, just Metamorphoses of Cassowaries, Wrapping in Images, Art of Anthropology, and Art and Agency).
Nevertheless I find your characterization of Bergson’s perspective fundamentally anti-anthropological (if I understood it correctly).
One clarification. When I talked about color orange and textures I meant to assert that color orange may not be a universally legitimate experiential category and that some cultures may experience a natural continuity between the domain of color that we take for granted and texture or moisture for example. Thus orange may be differentiated not simply from red and yellow on the spectrum but through reference to coarse or smooth etc.This has to do with debates of how conceptual frameworks (linguistic or other kinds) shape human experience and how infinitely malleable that experience is. My point was to avoid naturalizing and universalizing categories like orange.
Interesting. I think Bergson is first doing metaphysics, and trying to understand his meaning of intuition via perception is disorienting.
Which is exactly why I found talk of intuition about particular things problematic, since those things tend to be intrinsically bound up with particular cultural perspectives are not be universal. This goes for for orange as well as something as relationally complex as an individual person.
Yes, the common meaning of intuition is not what Bergson intends, but he hijacks it for his own metaphysics as based in memory rather than particular things or perception. I understand you have a much wider view of the anthropological/cultural perspectives of perception than Bergson reflected. Where it all comes together is your connection with perception of orange as parallel with perception of person. First comes memory as perception, i.e. how I perceive orange, how I perceive person. Both break down into perception as infinite possible differentiations (orange only being defined by natural, physiological, language, culture, usage; person only being defined by natural, physiological, language culture, usage, etc.). In other words, different cultures, different individuals can experience orange differently, person differently, of course. So only then begins Bergson’s position, having integrated all these aspects through memory, we have intuition.
Now if you say that through intuition those culturally relative distinctions and differentiations dissolve in the flux or that standing outside the conceptual that is what becomes the object of your intuition (the intersubjective concept of orange not orange as some kind of primary immanent thing), that’s another matter altogether. Which is what I guess I was getting at when referring to Bergson as a potential mystic.
I do not think “dissolve” accurately reflects what happens with the “culturally relative distinctions and differentiations, ” nor that there is even a conceptual to “stand outside” of, or that there is any reference to “object of your intuition” (sounds Kantian), nor intersubjective concept (also sounds Kantian, one of the few to talk about intersubjective objectivity), and therefore not mystical.
In contradistinction, I would say the the culturally relative distinctions and differentiations are part of the process where “matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers”; that there is neither “conceptual” nor “object” but that “freeing yourself from the divisible space that underlies them in order to consider only their mobility – this undivided act that your consciousness grasps in the movement that you yourself execute.”
Thanks for your patience, its much appreciated. I think I’m exhausting my ability to play the Bergsonian language game which is unfamiliar to me.
By object of intuition I meant things like orange, person, math equation etc. examples that have been used to talk about intuition (instead of intuition in general of continuous vibrations and energies, motion and flux, unsullied by abstract conceptual reifications).
By standing outside the conceptual I meant using intuition or sympathy or whatever Bergson advocates instead of abstracted concepts to grasp whatever one is grasping.
I guess I’m unclear on how the “aspects” are integrated in memory to produce intuition or whether or in what way this is supposed to go beyond the partial, positional, and interested grasping of any “thing.” I guess the anthropological way to avoid the question is to claim that it is exactly the partial, positional, and interested engagement with the word that’s interesting; the play of concepts and practices is what makes us human.
I know Bergson’s idea of undivided flux and constant movement was influential to Levi-Strauss who elaborated on the concept quite a bit in his discussion of mythical cosmologies.
http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0301.htm
I also understand why the Bergsonian emphasis on the above makes it appealing to certain post-structuralist critique of reified abstractions and monolithic wholes.
I just have to add that I think anthropologists have always been to a great extent aware of the metaphorical nature of the concepts by which they tackle the object of their study; that there is no neat overlap, nor can there be, of the signifier and the signified. I am referring here to the heremeneutic or interpretational tradition of cultural anthropology (other traditions have been more reductionist).
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/132-AAA-CHICAGO-PHIl-ANTH-2013.pdf
dmf:
This is getting off topic, but I’ll just say that I’m not a big fan of Latour and his broad strokes characterization of social theory, nor the ontological turn in anthropology he is tangentially associated with, and which seems to me like a dead end theoretically (apparently that particular AAA session was lackluster).
The ANT stuff specifically tends to produce very flat (purposefully so) and uninteresting ethnographies as its unable/unwilling to deal with context. I feel it tends to be mechanical, atomistic, and bring back a kind of transactionalism I dislike. It probably works better for some stuff, like modern bureaucratic structures. Also, the notion of realist pluralism seems to smuggle in a weird form of hard scientism that I’ve yet to quite get a handle on (though I admit I’m not that familiar with STS stuff).
Bruce Kapferer has contrasted Latour and DeLanda with Louis Dumont speculating what Dumont would make of them (and it more or less reflects my sentiments):
“Dumont, I imagine, would be deeply critical of them, conceiving of their approaches as subverting the anthropological contribution born of comparison. But more than anything else, he would see in much of their work a demonstration of the faults of a Western modernism and, morover, an extreme individualism that can only lead to distortion and a systematic failure to comprehend differentiating processes, indeed the creative capacity of humankind to generate forms of life subject to distinct as well as changing relations within wholes that themselves are continually transforming”
http://books.google.fi/books/about/Experiments_in_Holism.html?id=sgnZujaek64C&redir_esc=y
I acknowledge that Latour is tackling a real problem in a original way, but to me the result is often the impoverishment of anthropological analysis.I’m not quite ready to swap culture for a network, but to each their metaphors.
H.S.
Your position is much more clear as you reflect Dumont’s position, and explains your our interaction regarding Bergson as language games rather than about his metaphysics. There is now a great need for interdisciplinary integration, and respect of the methods and theories of each discipline (anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychiatry, etc.). From the point of view of philosophy, there is a very strong emphasis on the language/meaning/significance of both ontology and epistemology from the philosophic tradition.
Dumont is in the structuralist tradition of Levi-Strauss (according to Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology, muokkaaja Ton Otto,Nils Bubandt, Kapferer, p. 202), . . . “an alternative within modernism” . . . “but there are intimations of poststructuralism in his approach.”
These positions of Dumont which you embrace put you in direct contradiction with the philosophical position of poststructuralists, postmoderns and the continental tradition in general–although that is just a statement about the zeitgeist of philosophy. Anthropology has its own zeitgeist and must be equally respected.
In conclusion, you are arguing against Bergson, Deleuze and Latour, as they are both in the zeitgest of poststructuralism, postmodern and continental philosophical tradition–not that you should not. I appreciate the added value of your position.
In interdisciplinary discussions one is often trying to figure out the perspective of the other discussant and often ends up speaking to an imagined version of what the other represents (at least in this kind of disembodied informal commenting).
I guess I would locate myself within a French-American cultural anthropology tradition, perhaps broadly structuralist though I hesitate to use the word. Most clearly I would ally with structural history approach as advocated by Marshall Sahlins in his later work (who Latour has acknowledged favourably). What I’ve tended to emphasize in my comments here, perhaps to the point of tedium, is cultural variability and distrust of various forms of ethnocentrism, reductionism, and essentialism (functionalist, power, biological, economic, cognitive etc.) The creative tension in anthropology lies to a great extent between ethnographic particularism and the comparative perspective.
http://www.ugr.es/~aalvarez/observadorcultural/Documentos/Sahlins_2002.pdf
http://books.google.fi/books/about/Culture_in_practice.html?id=Q2rbAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
http://books.google.fi/books?id=KD4QAQAAIAAJ&source=gbs_book_similarbooks
Am I in direct contradiction with postmodernism and continental philosophy? Perhaps with some of it. I certainly feel more affinity to Heidegger than to the analytic school (British anthropologists also tended to have a poor understanding of culture preferring the more “empirical,” and to them more foundational, society).American anthropology has many roots in Neo-Kantianism and counter-enlightenment romantic thought. And anthropologists certainly took to heart the post-structuralist critique in the eighties. This was natural since self-reflexivity and self-doubt is central to the discipline which tries to constantly uproot its presuppositions.
When it comes to structures, wholes, cultures, and societies, things which a certain postmodern tradition would like to do away with, the matter is quite complex. Indeed I’m also wary of sneaking in various forms of individualism or atomism. Praxis theory was an attempt to get away from abstract structural models by including strategizing individuals, but Bourdieu ended up arguably replicating a certain ethnocentric perspective (which is why methodological individualists and evolutionary materialists have been able to co-opt him).
p.s. reference to “language game” and Wittgenstein Mk.2 was more of a jest, though I do like many of Wittgenstein’s later insights.
In regards to Dumont holism and modernism the issue is again complex. I do not unreservedly swallow an orthodox Dumontian paradigm. On one hand he can be seen as continuing a modernist project, on the other he can be seen as a grand counter-intuitive critic of modernism. On one hand some would supplement him with a more open notion of holism, on the other some claim that such openness is already inherent in Dumont’s work. As indicated Dumont would likely perceive Latour critically as modern, while Latour claims no one has ever been modern to begin with…
To put it still more plainly, the anthropological perspective I advocate resembles certain critical stances of postmodernism in that it seeks to destabilize and relativize naturalized cultural categories and to expose their limited ethnocentrism. On the other hand it has been accused of essentialism by a poststructuralist and postmodern turn that is critical of notions like structure, culture, society, or the social. Thus anthropologist like Sahlins can be attacked by materialists for being a social constructivist and a relativist and by postmodernists for being an old-fashioned essentializing modernist for insisting on some kind of symbolic coherence of people’s lifeworlds. My response to the latter is that the postmodern critique often involves straw men and that it jeopardizes anthropology’s critical potential and ability to take into consideration the social nature of human existence and cultural variability.
Well done, you have clearly spent some time in the anthropological forrest and I appreciate what you have found there.–Wayne
Wayne:
Thanks. I realize that constant anthropological objections to ethnocentric generalizations can become wearing and pointless “Bongo-Bongoism” (as in A does not apply to the Bongo Bongo, or A is not a relevant category for the Bongo Bongo).
http://books.google.fi/books?id=wDGfAXR5NzMC&pg=PR35&lpg=PR35&dq=%22bongo+bongoism%22&source=bl&ots=XPJu8KA1vj&sig=m1nrf_6DpoaZzHEYgMMBop8iXqM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OiBlU4_YMMaT4ASxtYCgCQ&ved=0CFwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=%22bongo%20bongoism%22&f=false
My aim was less to slam Bergson than to inquire about the nature and content of intuition.
dmf:
In case you can access this, here’s an article that examines the affinities between Sahlins’s culturalist perspective and Latour.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1469-8676.12043/abstract
I’m outside of the paywall these days but thanks for the link. Latour’s move into philosophy isn’t ideal as he moves further and further away from the “rough” ground of the field but I think that ANT (as practiced by folks like Annmarie Mol and co) when combined with some of the recent work on enactivism (see Dan Hutto et al) gives us ways of handling what we find at hand without the kind of Romantic longing for some mythical Oneness/Flow/Way that all of the neo-vitalist/Process types idol-ize, see: http://www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/modes-of-syncretism-notes-on-non-coherence
That article is planted firmly in anthropology with very little philosophy, but it is precisely the rough ground of ethnographic analysis were I find Latour’s perspective problematic.
Thanks for these references. I admit that you are referring to paradigms that I am mostly ignorant of. What I think I’m seeing is a mix of anthropology, STS, philosophy, and cognitive / neuroscience, but these are theoretical discourses that are mostly well outside my focus and I’m unable to determine how they relate to the classical anthropology that I’m more familiar with (Durkheim, Mauss, Boas, Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Turner, Douglas, Leach, Bourdieu, Dumont, Sahlins, Wagner, Munn, Clifford, Strathern, Keane, Graeber etc.),or to the old fashioned culture paradigm. This may be because I am somewhat allergic to evolutionary psychology, innatism, and reductionist aspects of cognitive sciences, as well as the broadly “anti-meaning” turn in anthropology.
yeah that a pretty classical list I’m, with Paul Rabinow on these matters that what we need instead is an anthropology of the contemporary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rabinow
if the PEL folks get back to philo of science and or the neo-pragmatist revival maybe we can try this again in that context, cheers.
Of course all those people were doing the anthropology of the “contemporary” (unless you mean “modernity”) and some still are, and I see no value in ignoring the disciplines history (theoretical amnesia that Strathern has often critiqued), but, yeah, I see where the schism here lies.
dmf:
http://savageminds.org/2013/09/08/gabriel-tarde-been-there-done-that/
I see you used “contemporary” in the specific sense given by Rabinow, never mind…
If I perceive it correctly the conundrum here is between a pomo critique of static bounded social wholes, systems, or structures and an emphasis on processual, heterogeneous, and contingent multiplicities (rhizomes, networks?) which obviate the nature/culture dichotomy on one hand, and a more traditional anthropological insistence on some kind of coherence and continuity within symbolically constituted practices and lifeworlds (which is attacked as essentialism, cultural determinism, pseudoscientific romanticism etc). Such debates are familiar to me from within cultural anthropology, but the neuroscientific angle is pretty new to me, and initially struck me as a strange bedfellow to the pomo-like criticism.
it all comes together these days, see:
Brains/Practices/Relativism Social Theory after Cognitive Science by Stephen Turner
“presents the first major rethinking of social theory in light of cognitive science.. Stephen P. Turner focuses especially on connectionism, which views learning as a process of adaptation to input that, in turn, leads to patterns of response distinct to each individual. This means that there is no common “server” from which people download shared frameworks that enable them to cooperate or communicate. Therefore, argues Turner, “practices”—in the sense that the term is widely used in the social sciences and widely used in the social sciences and humanities—is a myth, and so are the “cultures” that are central to anthropological and sociological thought.
In a series of tightly argued essays, Turner traces out the implications that discarding the notion of shared frameworks has for relativism, social constructionism, normativity, and a number of other concepts. He suggests ways in which these ideas might be reformulated more productively, in part through extended critiques of the work of scholars such as Ian Hacking, Andrew Pickering, Pierre Bourdieu, Quentin Skinner, Robert Brandom, Clifford Geertz, and Edward Shils.”
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo3613287.html
Thanks for that…
The partially coterminous arguments from within cultural anthropology with less brain stuff but plenty of Deleuze, Latour et al.
http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/viewFile/95/116