BERGSON’S METHOD OF PROBLEMATISATION AND THE PURSUIT OF METAPHYSICAL PRECISION

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to excavate and analyse Henri Bergson’s “problematic” thinking. This task will be prosecuted through a close reading of his two-part introduction to The Creative Mind – the text in which Bergson most concisely and conclusively articulates the “problematic” character of his work. As I will attempt to show in this paper, Bergson’s work is “problematic” in two respects, one to do with methodology and the other metaphysics. These two, furthermore, are intimately entwined: on the one hand, Bergson’s method of problematisation emerges from the findings of his metaphysical inquiries, while on the other, it is through the application of his problematising method that the findings of his metaphysical inquiries can be deemed as reliably accurate. In exploring this “problematic” intersection of Bergson’s methodology and metaphysics, I will first discuss what Bergson takes to be one of the biggest problems for philosophy: the lack of adequate “precision.” As we will see, many of the major themes and concepts of Bergson’s work, such as duration and intuition, both spring from and converge on his efforts to address this problem. The pursuit of precision also calls for a “problematic approach” that is appropriate for the metaphysical reality it seeks to handle – an approach I will outline in the second part of this paper. This will be followed by a discussion of how Bergson’s problematic method/metaphysics involves a critique of what he refers to as “fictitious,” “phantom” or “pseudo-problems.” This “negative” aspect of Bergsonian problematisation will then be reconsidered in the final part of the paper alongside its “positive” dimension – posing problems in terms of time.

Keywords:

• Bergson
• problem
• methodology
• metaphysics

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Notes

1 Patrice Maniglier claims that Gaston Bachelard, and to be more specific his text Le Rationalisme appliqué (1949), is the origin for twentieth-century and contemporary interest in France for problematisation (21). While there is no denying that Bachelard plays an important part in the history of the problematic in French thought, I am of the view that this reading of the situation overlooks the contribution of Bergson. At the very least, I cannot follow Maniglier in his tracing of Deleuze’s problematic philosophy back to Bachelard (21–22), since Bergson is quite clearly the more accurate source. As an examination of Deleuze’s early work on Bergson reveals, it is through his engagement with Bergson that Deleuze first starts to develop his own problematic philosophy. One might also note that in a letter written by Deleuze to Althusser in February 1966 – the same year Bergsonism would be published – Deleuze remarked that he was in the process of reading Althusser’s books and wanted to say that he too had been working on “the concept of the ‘problem’” (see Dosse 227). As this suggests, the influence of the “French epistemological tradition” on Deleuze’s “problematic” thinking is ancillary at best.

2 This paper by During provides an excellent response to Osborne’s “What is a Problem?,” which seeks to separate the “problematology” of Canguilhem and Foucault from Bergson and Deleuze. For instance, while Osborne’s account draws on and reinforces Foucault’s infamous delineation of two traditions of French thought – one of experience, meaning and the subject, and another of knowledge, rationality and the concept – placing Bergson on the former line and Canguilhem on the latter, During attempts to “problematize” this distinction in order to effect a détente of sorts. This debate about traditions of problematisation in French philosophy is tangential to the aims of the present paper, though for my part I would hazard to say in passing that Osborne’s description of Bergson as the author of a “normative” and “legislative” problematic philosophy – a description upon which his Bergson vs. Canguilhem distinction depends – is in need of further justification to be convincingly maintained.

3 The reader should note that Bergson’s discussion of problematics and false problems is progressively developed through the course of his career (see Matter and Memory xvii, 241; Creative Evolution 178, 220–36, 274–77, 296–99; Creative Mind 147). The focus of this paper will be, however, on Bergson’s final position on the matter.

4 See also Bergson, Creative Mind 35: “[A] word can have a definite meaning when it designates a thing; it loses that meaning as soon as you apply it to all things.”

5 See also Bergson, Creative Mind 71–72; idem, Matter and Memory 241: “This method [of intuition] presents, in its application, difficulties which are considerable and ever recurrent, because it demands for the solution of each new problem an entirely new effort.”

6 As an aside, and in further response to his critics, Bergson argues that this confusion over clarity/obscurity explains why intuition might initially appear as philosophically inferior to intelligence. Describing a scene that will be familiar to most students of philosophy, Bergson says:

Listen to the discussion between any two philosophers one of whom upholds determinism, and the other liberty: it is always the determinist who seems to be in the right. He may be a beginner and his adversary a seasoned philosopher. He can plead his cause nonchalantly, while the other sweats blood for his. It will always be said of him that he is simple, clear and right. He is easily and naturally so, having only to collect thought ready to hand and phrases ready-made: science, language, common sense, the whole of intelligence is at his disposal. Criticism of an intuitive philosophy is so easy and so certain to be well received that it will always tempt the beginner. Regret may come later [ … ]. (Creative Mind 24)

7 See also the closing of Bergson’s introduction to Matter and Memory, where he states that the second of the book’s two guiding principles is “that the habits formed in action find their way up to the sphere of speculation, where they create fictitious problems, and that metaphysics must begin by dispersing this artificial obscurity” (xvii).

8 “Backwards over the course of time a constant remodelling of the past by the present, of the cause by the effect, is being carried out” (Creative Mind 84–85).

9 For a more detailed examination of Bergson’s “the possible and the real,” see Gunter.

10 When applied to the example of the possible and the real, Bergson says:

The idea immanent in most philosophies and natural to the human mind, of possibles which would be realised by an acquisition of existence, is therefore pure illusion. One might as well claim that the man in flesh and blood comes from the materialization of his image seen in the mirror, because in that real man is everything found in this virtual image with, in addition, the solidity which makes it possible to touch it. But the truth is that more is needed here to obtain the virtual than is necessary for the real, more for the image of the man than for the man himself, for the image of the man will not be portrayed if the man is not first produced, and in addition one has to have the mirror. (Creative Mind 83)

11 For more on Bergson’s critique of dialectics, see Creative Mind 63.

12 See also Deleuze, Desert Islands 36:

It will come as no surprise, then, that a kind of principle of sufficient reason, as well as indiscernibles, can be found in Bergson’s work. What he rejects is a distribution that locates cause or reason in the genus and the category and abandons the individual to contingency, stranding him in space. Reason must reach all the way to the individual, the genuine concept all the way to the thing, and comprehension all the way to “this”. Bergson always asks of difference: why “this” rather than “that”?

13 As the quote continues: “It cuts for the object a concept appropriate to the object alone, a concept one can barely say is still a concept, since it applies only to that one thing” (Creative Mind 147).

14 In his work on Bergson, Deleuze will refer to this empiricism as a “superior empiricism” (see Bergsonism 30; see also Desert Islands 36). Subsequently he will lean heavily on this for his own notion of “transcendental empiricism,” which at times will be described as “superior” (see Difference and Repetition 57, 143).

15 See also Deleuze, Desert Islands 22.