§81. Bergson’s Radical Empiricism
Jacques Maritain won his first reputation as a critic of Bergson. He criticized him for empiricism, a “wild experimentalism,” “the very soul of empiricism,” “an integral empiricism.” The epithets were not intended to be complimentary.
Bergson unambiguously evinces an empirical orientation in philosophy. “Existence can be given only in an experience,” and philosophy should “continually remodel itself on observation and experience.” With Democritus he holds that “no matter how abstract a conception may be it always has its starting point in a perception,” percepts that are affects, not copies. It could be Epicurus or Gassendi (though it is Bergson) who writes, “The intellect combines and separates; it arranges, disarranges, and coordinates; it does not create. It must have a matter, and this matter can only reach it through the senses or the consciousness.”28Bergson criticizes modern empiricism empirically, for not being empirical enough. Like James, he derides mental atomism and intellectualism, two legacies of nominalism. His criticism of spatialized time and the connection he finds between duration and consciousness are more original contributions to philosophy, as are his ideas of memory and perception. Every empiricism since Aristotle regards memory as a function of imagination, an image that is present yet somehow about the past. The problem few see and none have solved is how present images are about the past. The mistake is to think that a memory is something present, an archived trace of perception.
Bergson's more consistently empirical empiricism acknowledges the virtual existence of the past as well as an intuitive inner experience of duration without analogy in the perception of bodies. This is intuitive experience with the phenomena of duration—the experience of melody, movement, memory, passage, development, and sensible quality.
Of course inner and outer experience are not two kinds of generic experience. Inner, intuitive experience is experience absolutely, and external experience is an adaptive specialization (a spatialization) of this more original consciousness, which is identical with time understood as duration. The philosophical value of experience is properly the value of inner experience, which is the value of duration, of consciousness, and life—all ultimately coextensive terms for Bergson. It is with this experience that we achieve what Bergson called for in an empiricism worthy of the name. We attain experience at its source, in advance of that turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes merely human experience.29Bergson's empiricism goes beyond usual empiricisms because experience goes beyond the utilitarianism in which empiricism confined it ever since Epicurus admitted that the only reason for natural philosophy is to avoid tranquility-disrupting surprises. What Bergson called the error of empiricism was to be satisfied with experience mutilated by anthropomorphism and riddled with cliches. A more consistent empiricism eliminates the defects of nominalism, as James did, but also brackets the pragmatism that limits experience to the virtual rehearsal of action. That may have been further than James wanted to follow. His radical empiricism eliminates nominalism from empiricism, while Bergson's eliminates James's pragmatism, in which he perhaps correctly detected residual nominalism. In a bold move, Ockham allows artisanal experience to cover the same ground as scientific knowledge. Ars and scientia become practically indistinguishable ways of enrolling experience in the knowledge of nature. Nature cannot be known with certainty because phenomena could be produced by multiple naturally possible lines of causation. We can make sagacious conjectures, but “it is impossible to demonstrate that anything is a cause.” Eventually, the sagacious conjectures of nominalism displace the infeasible demonstration of causes and become the pragmatic meaning of truth.30
It seems to me that James never got his relation to Bergson fully sorted.
He may not have appreciated that his theory of truth in Pragmatism—the book he inscribed to Bergson after reading L’Evolution creatice—is an expression of the very intellectualism he lauds Bergson for refuting. Writing to F. C. S. Schiller in Oxford, he says of Bergson, “It seems to me that nothing is important in comparison with that divine apparition. All our positions, real time, a growing world, asserted magisterially, and the beast intellectualism killed absolutely dead!” That would be the end of pragmatism too, certainly the end of the “pragmatic meaning of truth,” as James had explained it. “The possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of valuable instruments of action.” “Any idea that helps us deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn't entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will hold true of that reality.”31Utility, efficient means to ends, is the intellectual value par excellence, intelligence grasping nothing so avidly as an efficient means to an avowed end. The pursuit of this efficiency is the adaptive value of intelligence. What pragmatism calls knowledge is adaptive; it is common sense and practical rationality. Just don't call it true. External experience, the experience of bodies in space, is an evolved adaptation, and eminently practical. Its value is staying alive. This is not knowledge, however, because the images of external perception, while adaptive for ancestors, and still mostly so for us, correspond to nothing as it is in itself. External experience is all about us, our virtual action, not the true identity of the real. To explain the value of knowledge and truth through the pragmatic value of intelligent practice therefore entrenches the anthropocentrism Bergson challenges philosophers to surmount.
In perceiving images we are not acquiring knowledge, because there is no truth in the images we perceive.
The office of perception is adaptive response, not knowledge of truth. The contribution of neurology is to introduce indeterminacy, a virtual zone of competing tendency around everything we perceive. Neurology introduces indeterminacy into nature where before there was only necessity. Copious neocortex, nimble fingers, and a clever tongue opened many new choices in human evolution. Alternatives expanded, creating the need to be good at preferring, good at adaptive over suicidal choice. Perception begins at a distance. With distance comes time to select among potential responses, an opportunity available only to an organism with experience of alternatives, which requires memory. Perception has no adaptive value without the memory that makes us learn from it.32Perception is the verge of action, not the finality of knowledge. Bergson might agree with Nietzsche that only something with no history can be defined, and knowledge is a history. It is an organ, a faculty, an evolved power of cognition-for-action. Bergson admonishes philosophers not to isolate the theory of knowledge from the theory of life. “In the labyrinth of acts, states, and faculties of the mind, the thread which one must never lose is the one furnished by biology.” He means evolutionary biology, Darwinism, it being his express principle never to overlook the utilitarian character of mental functions, their adaptation to survival, and with that their evolved corporeal perspectivism. This is a good principle. On our side of Darwin, the logos loses luster, becoming no more than the evolved cognitive preference of a single form of life, a naturally selected, adaptive function with no vocation for the absolute.33
Cognition is an adaptation, and that explains the existence of cognitive powers in the first place, but it is more than an adaptation because evolved cognitive powers prove capable of more than the function naturally selected by preferential survival. To reveal potential action on distant things, vision must be able to reveal things (like stars) that we cannot act on.
Given our evolution we can do things that contribute nothing to species survival, and are unconditioned by the compulsion to be useful. This is the common ground of art, science, and philosophy. The cognition set into action by inquiry, experiment, and observation evinces natural powers with adaptive functions, especially for talkative, tool-making primates, but these powers also admit a higher exercise, which Bergson, like Nietzsche, calls on philosophers to make their metier. For both thinkers, adaptive utility is the normal function of average, everyday herd-cognition. Pragmatists say practical knowledge and practical truth are good, and there they rest. Nietzsche and Bergson urge philosophers to something artfully autonomous of the values that rule common sense. Nietzsche called it froliche Wissenschaft, while Bergson retained the traditional name of philosophy.34I would not say Bergson is the least radical of the radical empiricists. He unfolds an empiricism that transcends the limitations that make experience adaptive and constrain perception to the virtual rehearsal of action. However, Bergson may be the most Socratic of the radical empiricists, vesting most in a Socratic idea of philosophy and its value as self-knowledge, in accord with the Delphic admonition as Socrates interpreted it. If we are philosophers, we must know ourselves. External perception is animal life, while attending to inner experience lifts us higher, teaches us truer, teaching, for instance, that time is the only given. The value of experience is the value of consciousness and life, which are less values than the existential presupposition of valuation.