INSTINCT, CONSCIOUSNESS, LIFE

Abstract

The question of Ruyer’s relationship to Bergson remains under-theorized. This article attempts to address that problem by introducing a little-known essay written by Ruyer on the topic of Bergson’s theory of vital sympathy, “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile,” which appeared in 1959, one year after the publication of La Genèse des formes vivantes and the completion of Ruyer’s systematic philosophy of biology. An English translation of the essay appears below. In order to introduce it, we begin by presenting a brief account of Ruyer’s philosophy of biology. Then we reconstruct Ruyer’s early critical engagement with Bergson, and finally we investigate some occluded points of overlap between the two. We suggest that Ruyer’s early critique of Bergson’s theory of perception may have made it difficult for him to appreciate what the two had in common. Their commonalities and differences form part of the subject matter of the translated essay.

Keywords:

• Ruyer
• Bergson
• philosophy of biology
• instinct
• consciousness
• perception

Notes

Raymond Ruyer’s “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” was first published in French in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 64.2 (1959): 163–79. The article is reproduced here in English by kind permission of Presses Universitaires de France, the publisher of the original article.

1 Although this isolation continues to this day – the first volume to appear on Ruyer’s thought in any language was the publication of conference proceedings (Vax and Wunenberger) – the ice appears to be thawing. Two studies of Ruyer’s work as a whole have appeared recently. See Colonna, Ruyer; Louis and Louis. In the world of French philosophy, scholars are beginning to appreciate the extent to which Ruyer influenced better known figures such as Simondon and Deleuze as well. The influence is clearest in Simondon’s case, as he explicitly responded to some of Ruyer’s work and incorporated revised versions of its themes into his own thinking (cf. Gagnon; Bardin). Ruyer’s influence on Deleuze, although apparently profound, was somewhat subterranean, and is still in the process of being excavated and explained (cf. Bogue; Roffe).

2 These details are recounted by Ruyer himself in the first and only volume of his Souvenirs.

3 On the distinction between primary and secondary consciousness in Ruyer, and the problems that it appears to court, see the incisive analysis in Barbaras.

4 Cf. ibid. 18–19.

5 This connection remains largely overlooked in the secondary literature. Kerslake is an important exception, as it includes what is perhaps the only mention in English scholarship of Ruyer’s defence of Bergson’s theory of instinct – with reference to the article translated below (62–65). Bremondy is a notable exception as well, though its focus is on Ruyer’s critique of Bergson’s theory of perception and thus does not explore the possibility of positive overlap between the two thinkers. Ansell-Pearson refers to Bremondy’s article and its relevance for an understanding of the significance of Ruyer and Bergson for Deleuze. Colonna refers to some of Ruyer’s attempts to position himself vis-à-vis Bergson (Ruyer 20). Finally, Alliez makes brief mention of the two together (236 ff.). The literature remains incomplete. We offer this article in large part as a contribution to beginning to fill this gap. Beyond the commonalities between Bergson and Ruyer catalogued above, there are a number that still remain to be explored as well. These include, for instance, the location of freedom internal to the activity of nature as an immanent expression of all self-constituting forms (Ruyer) or self-organizing centres of action (Bergson), as well as the complex relationship between naturalized freedom and naturalized consciousness, such that both thinkers appear in their way to be endorsing a kind of panpsychism. This last point, however, is one on which Ruyer will distinguish himself from Bergson by insisting on a distinction between two forms of consciousness. We return to this consideration below.

6 The catalogue of Ruyer’s other invocations of Bergson is, as we have indicated above, brief. All mention of Bergson in Neofinalism is critical and insubstantial (8, 12, 38, 128, 137, 208). There are only two mentions of Bergson in La Genèse, and, again, neither is very significant (66, 122). One of few positive mentions of Bergson appears in “The Vital Domain of Animals and the Religious World of Man,” which was translated into English in 1957, two years before the publication of “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile.” In this article, Ruyer refers to Bergson’s discussion of the instincts of the Sphex wasp in order to deny the contention that animals are world-less automatons merely mechanically reacting to stimuli (40). Ruyer suggests that Bergson’s discussion of wasps shows that instinct is a means of access to another creature, a kind of supple knowledge, not the deployment of a blind mechanism triggered by the right cues. “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” appears to return to, expand upon, and complete this appreciation for the role played by parasitism in Bergson’s thought. Finally, a last brief engagement with Bergson appears in an English article from 1988 excerpted from what was at the time a still unpublished work, entitled Au Dieu inconnu, Source de toute vie. This work was since published in 2013 under the new title L’Embryogenèse du monde et le Dieu silencieux. The excerpted translation, “There is No Subconscious: Embryogenesis and Memory,” recalls some of the argumentation of “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” on the topic of memory (“No Subconscious” 35–36). Ruyer argues, contra Bergson, that habitual memory is delocalized and thematic, continuous with embryonic developmental and therefore virtual, while image memory is abstracted from it. He thus inverts the priority of Bergson’s distinction between the two, and concludes that Bergson’s conception is “not only false, but the very antipode of the truth” (ibid.). It is worth noting that Ruyer’s discussion of the topic in “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” is far less critical.

7 Trans. Tano S. Posteraro. This article originally appeared in French in 1959, as “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile,” in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 64.2, 163–79. The title is somewhat confusing. Ammophila is the name of a genus in the thread-waisted wasp family; Sphex is the name of another.

8 Fabre, Nouveaux souvenirs 114 qtd in Bergson, Creative Evolution 172.

9 Peckham and Peckham 28.

10 Bergson, Creative Evolution 168–69.

11 Ruyer seems to run together the following two passages from Bergson, Creative Evolution 171. (1) “In other words, instinct is everywhere complete, but it is more or less simplified, and, above all, simplified differently”; (2) “We seem rather to be before a musical theme, which had first been transposed, the theme as a whole, into a certain number of tones and on which, still the whole theme, different variations had been played […]” [Translator’s note.]

12 Cf. Tinbergen, L’Étude 280.

13 Bergson, Matter 37–38. Note that by rejecting Bergson’s theory we do not return to the theory of “projection.” Our thesis is that the visual sensation is in our head, and that it stays there. It has no more to be projected than to be straightened since it is the whole of our visual consciousness.

14 Cf. especially Tinbergen, L’Étude; Social Behaviour.

15 Ruyer is referring again to Bergson, Creative Evolution 171 (see n. 9). [Translator’s note.]

16 Ruyer is referring to ibid. 265. [Translator’s note.]