Plotinus, Bergson and Cubism: Part Two

In his philosophy, Bergson sought to bring the flow of reality to consciousness as opposed to a succession of changing states. He thought that it is only by an effort that we can overcome our natural practice of taking ‘views’ of reality and apprehending a succession of changing states. Antliff suggests that these multiple views can be interpreted as a Kantian attempt to grasp the thing-in-itself. Bergson however referred to Kant’s thing-in-itself and stated we can know part of reality - ourselves - in our ‘natural purity.’ Even when they are successive, states of consciousness permeate one another ‘and in the simplest of them the whole soul can be reflected’. 

For Bergson, ‘planes of consciousness’ move between the plane of ‘pure’ memory and the plane of action. He believed that between them are thousands of different planes of consciousness. The plane of ‘pure’ memory is the place of dreaming. The plane of action is the plane of ‘motor habits’. He referred to these planes of consciousness as an infinite number of planes of memory. Further, ‘These planes ... exist virtually, with that existence which is proper to things of the spirit’ - ‘pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are, in truth, in the domain of spirit.’ 

He thought that there could be a possible interpenetration of human consciousnesses, that two consciousnesses can be united in a single experience, into a single duration, and that intuition possibly opens the way into consciousness in general. Again, he thought that an impersonal consciousness linked our conscious ‘minds’ with all nature. The more conscious we become of our progress in pure duration, the more we press against the future and know freedom.

Bergson referred to duration lifting the soul above the Idea and to a double movement of memory between its two extreme limits, with motor habits ascending to seek similar images, in order to extract resemblances from them, and similar images coming down toward motor habits, to fuse themselves, for instance, in the automatic utterance of the word which makes them one.

His central thesis is that ‘reality’ must be grasped by intuition. Intuition is the immediate non-intellectual knowledge not of discontinuous moments but of the indivisible flow of ‘real’ time, comprising a plurality of multiple aspects and meanings. It is the ability to immediately discern our own inner being as well as the thoughts of others. In apprehending reality in its true duration, we enter into the experience or thing itself. Intuition unites science and metaphysics in ‘the absolute’. It deals with mobility and as I have stated earlier, this mobility applies also to the motionless. Duration, then, is the intuitive apprehension of the passage of spiritual reality.

Intuition enables us to grasp reality directly, not superficially but in depth, unmediated by intellectual apprehension. Through intuition we can probe the meaning and nature of life and of evolution itself. Bergson’s intuition amounts to the same non-discursive contemplation of perfection in ‘mind’ as that advocated by Plotinus. The philosophies of both depend on ‘mind’ being more real than and distinct from,  the senses. 

Bergson believed that such intuitive knowledge could nourish and illuminate everyday life, since the world of our senses is no more than a shadow and is as cold as death. He wrote that a philosophy of intuition will be swept away by the ‘positive’ sciences ‘if it does not resolve to see the life of the body just where it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit.’ Intuition or ‘mind’ introduces us to the unity of spiritual life. Bergson’s intuition amounts to knowledge of the soul in its eternal movement. 

There are two ways to apprehend reality - by the analysis and understanding of partial notations (the way of science) or by the metaphysical intuition of real parts (the way of creation and art). Analysis breaks up duration into static fragmentary concepts and is compelled to move around the object it desires to embrace. Intuition or ‘intellectual sympathy’ probes the flow of duration in its concreteness, by placing one within an object and giving an absolute. Analysis always deals with the immobile and cannot be reconstituted, intuition places itself in mobility and can be reconstituted in consciousness. It is a simple act.

The intellect is bound to misunderstand motion and change, reducing such phenomena to points and instants. It is spatially orientated and unavoidably tends to separate states of ‘mind’. In duration, states of ‘mind’ flow into and interpenetrate each other. Bergson believed that we have almost completely sacrificed intuition to intellect and wanted to develop a philosophy in which intuition subsumed intellect. ‘Intellect leaves us in the darkness of night.’ 

For him, there are two levels of conscious life - ‘a superficial level composed of discrete sensations and separate states and a deeper level where there is no separation but a pure continuity.’ Since mental reality does not exist in space, the intellect, which does and deals with spatiality, cannot grasp it. Mental reality can only be intuited because it lies beyond spatial explanation. Although the intellect can give an increasingly complete account of the material world, it can only offer a reduction of life into terms of mechanics. 

Intuition is the faculty of grasping the pure flow of consciousness before the intellect fragments it into separate states and parts. The space of consciousness is real motion and therefore doesn’t exist between things but in the relations between things and as such is part of duration and the absolute. The intuition of space and direction requires the same geometrisation of nature as the intuition of bodies 

Bergson used the achievements of science to refute the ‘positive sciences’ and to justify his theories. Not only are all atoms interpenetrating, with each atom occupying the whole of gravitational space, the materiality of the atom dissolves further, with the advance of knowledge, to a point where objective matter no longer exists, but force becomes ‘materialised’. This force returns continuity to the universe. He stressed the interpenetration of all things. Although the material world can be extended in space and the mental cannot, they form an absolute interpenetration with no independent parts.

The importance of Bergson’s philosophy to an understanding of the development of abstraction and early twentieth century Modernism cannot be overstated. The similarity in the treatment of form woven into pictorial space in the art of Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Cubo-Futurism and Rayonnism (Rayism) in particular, find their connection here. 

Creativity was a key concept for Bergson. In his his major work, Creative Evolution,  he discussed his notion of artistic intuition and claimed that the creative urge is at the heart of evolution. He began Time and Free Will with writing on aesthetic feeling. 

While the inner life cannot be represented by either concepts or images, an intuition of duration can be evoked by an image. For this to happen the work of art must not be constructed analytically (since one can only pass from intuition to analysis but not vice versa) but must induce an alogical state of ‘mind’ in the viewer. 

True art is revelation and the artist is ‘this revealing agent.’ The great souls are those of artists and mystics. This is because these people are in  harmony with the inner life of things and can draw us into their experience through their practice.

Every work of art is the result of a process whereby the inner self in its duration is made accessible to others through intuition. Artistic intuition embodies nature’s spiritual essence. Bergson argued for creative action rather than contemplation, yet in his philosophy the two are indistinguishable. The creative product of intuition hopefully persuades the viewer or reader to transcend their daily mental habits and also experience intuition, and these two intuitions co-mingle in inter-subjectivity. While an image cannot replace the intuition of duration, a mix of distinct but balanced elements can work together to stimulate a viewer to make the necessary effort to achieve an intuition.

Artistic practice ‘aims at impressing feelings on us rather than expressing them, it suggests them to us, and willingly dispenses with the imitation of nature when it finds some more efficacious means.’ The artist aims at sharing his emotion with the viewer. Bergson regarded emotion as transcendent. As Deleuze wrote, it ‘is like the God in us.’ This creative emotion is precisely a cosmic Memory that liberates people from ‘mere’ duration in order to make them creators, through whom flow the whole movement of creation.  

The object of art is to put to sleep the resistance of the viewer’s personality (a spiritualised hypnosis), to bring the viewer ‘into a state of perfect responsiveness, in which we realise the idea that is suggested to us and sympathise with the feeling that is expressed.’ To provoke an intuitive response, the elements of the canvas must first arouse the viewer’s emotions and sensitivity to the flow of true duration. This can be achieved in a number of ways. 

Devices include the rhythmical arrangement and effect of line and words. He also gave the example of lettering which are parts of a poem which one knows, but randomly mixed. Because one knows the poem, one can immediately reconstitute the poem as a whole. This is an example of the reconstitution of the real parts of intuition (and metaphysics), distinct from the partial notations of analysis and the positive sciences, which cannot be reconstituted. Negation also affirms and suggests aspects of an object. Another device is the conveyance of the notion of passage. The technique of passage derives from Cézanne, but its philosophical inspiration may well lie in Bergson’s ideas. Again, music speaks to our spirit.

Bergson wrote of flexibility, mobility, ‘almost fluid representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition.’ Evocative of the refined and far more relaxed methods of so-called Synthetic Cubism are Bergson’s words ‘Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty.’ 

But if the philosophy of Bergson had any energy to its élan vital, or any flow to its durée, it did so because it was a pale image and a shadow of a vast structure created by a man of far greater integrity to his purpose and of far greater historical and cultural significance - Plotinus.

In his system set out in the Enneads, a system ‘teeming’, ‘boiling’ and ‘seething’ with creative energy and life (which differs extremely from the general awareness of Platonism and Neoplatonism), are all of the concepts central to the philosophy of Bergson - particularly the relationship between contemplation, movement or flow (Bergson’s durée) and the ultimate goal of oneness achieved through that process of activity in stillness. In that system, set out in the third century A.D., exists the source of Bergson’s multiplicity-in-unity, the same function for intuition, the same aspiration of soul to the Absolute, the same stance on time and space, on extension or absence of extension, the same regard for the creative power of the artist (which Michelangelo responded so powerfully to), the same philosophical desire to reject the material world and to orient his audience to their true, perhaps unconsciously remembered, spiritual purpose.

A study of Plotinus’ work, though difficult, due to Porphyry’s arbitrary editing of his mystical and contradictory writing, sheds much light (as Plotinus might have said) on the philosophy of Bergson. It also has more to offer to an understanding of Cubism. As the Good to all that came after and from it, it is the source.  

Plotinus’ system is built around the three hypostases of the Good, Intellect (or the realm of contemplative thought) and Soul. From the Good, which is absolute unity and which has infinite power, comes an outpouring of creative energy to its Idea - the universe of Intellect (in which exist the Platonic Forms as multiplicity-in-unity), which in turn spawns Soul which has as its purpose the conveyance of the Forms into this universe of invisible matter. In this system, there is a constant duality of movement in contemplation. Each hypostasis produces ‘downwards’ as it strives upwards, longing for its ultimate source. This longing is informed by recollection. 

Everything which is in our universe is in the universe of Intellect, including matter. But whereas the matter here tends to evil and is fragmented in ever changing forms, the matter there exists as multiplicity-in-unity. Plotinus’ world of Forms is an organic living community of interpenetrating beings which are both Forms and intelligences. Everything in the universe of Intellect is not only far more real,  but far more alive than here - the air, the water, the fire. Plotinus emphasised the life and the vital and dynamic nature of spiritual being. Perfection for him is a fullness of living and productive power. The One is an infinite spring of power, an unbounded life, and therefore necessarily productive.

Soul brought Time as ‘the image of eternity’ to this universe (as Plotinus quoted Plato on this point, so Bergson quoted both). It also brought spatial extension to facilitate the division of form. All the souls of this world derive from Intellect where they exist as a unity. Our souls can aspire and move upwards to re-experience this unity. Bergson drew on this notion.

Central to Plotinus’ philosophy, and another distinction between this universe and that which exits beyond it is the notion of sight. The sight which we depend on in this universe becomes another beyond it. It is the inward-looking vision of contemplation of the god within us all. As the contemplation deepens beyond physical activity, the seer becomes the seen.  

Plotinus regarded discursive reasoning (what Bergson called ‘analytic’ reasoning) as belonging to this spatialised universe, and therefore dealing only with parts. He developed Plato’s concept of anamnesis into a central and highly active process in his philosophy. Whilst recognising the importance of the soul’s recollection of its origin, he argued for intuition because he thought that it by-passed self-consciousness and was more effective than memory in the soul’s movement to and through duration. 

Towards this arousal of unconscious memory (distinguishing between ‘memory of’ and ‘reminder of’), Plotinus emphasised the importance of a lover’s desire (the opposite of the lust of this universe) and like Bergson, pointed to partial notation and the role of music in arousing the emotions and a sense of beauty which in turn would recall the source of that beauty in Intellect and ultimately in the Good. Plotinus wrote of the Egyptians’ use of ideogrammatic symbols on temple walls to avoid the use of lettering in evoking the non-discursive reality of the intelligible world. Both Plotinus and Bergson suggested methods of dematerialising our contemplation of the visible cosmos so that we see the intelligible. 

Further, the soul’s ‘image-making power’ shows the intellectual act as if in a mirror, and this is how  there is apprehension of the intellectual act. Even though the soul is always moved to intelligent activity, it is when it comes to be in the image-making power that we apprehend it. Memory belongs to the image-making power.  

On the place of art and the role of the artist, Plotinus was, as elsewhere, contradictory. On the one hand he argued (as did Plato in the Republic) that the work of art was at third remove from its source. On the other, he not only accorded the artist a place as creator, but by implication equated him with the Good and therefore, god. The more successful the artist, the more the viewer of the art object, through contemplation, would be drawn to union with the artist’s creative power.

By writing that Intellect is more intensely active in the gods, Plotinus implied that the more active Intellect is, the closer to the Good. Hence, the more the artist can stimulate activity of soul in the viewer, the closer the viewer will attain to the Good (the artist’s emotional life).

I wish to complete this aspect of my presentation with two quotations - one from Plotinus and one from Bergson. The first quotation is from Ennead III 6 7 (together with Picasso’s Mandolin Player, (n.d.)

Matter, then, is incorporeal ... it is a ghostly image of bulk, a tendency towards substantial existence; it is static without being stable; it is invisible in itself and escapes any attempt to see it, and occurs when one is not looking, but even if you look closely you cannot see it. It always presents opposite appearances on its surface, small and great, less and more, deficient and superabundant, a phantom which does not remain and cannot get away either, for it has no strength for this, since it has not received strength from intellect but is lacking in all being. Whatever announcement it makes, therefore, is a lie, and if it appears great, it is small, if more, it is less; its apparent being is not real, but a sort of fleeting frivolity ... it seems to be filled, and holds nothing; it is all seeming. ‘Imitations of real beings pass into and out of it,’ (Timaeus 50C 4-5) ghosts into a formless ghost, visible because of its formlessness. They seem to act on it, but do nothing, for they are wraith-like and feeble and have no thrust; nor does matter thrust against them, but they go through without making a cut, as if through water, or as if someone in a way projected shapes in the void people talk about ... (Matter is) like things in a dream or water on a mirror ...

The second is from Bergson’s Matter and Memory  

That there is a close connection between a state of consciousness and the brain we do no dispute. But there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung onto a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological.

It is my contention that it was very likely to this most fundamental of philosophical issues than a mere play on illusion that the nail in Braque’s Pitcher and Violin 1909-10, referred. As Bergson and Braque would have been aware - a lot hangs on it.

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