The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Henri Bergson and Cubism: Part Two

Bergson held that because the brain is a ‘biological instrument’ its capacity for intelligence is restricted to the taking of ‘snapshots’. Modern science likewise substitutes signs for the objects themselves. These signs or Ideas are the moments of becoming and are plucked from eternity - ‘we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the analysis of the real’.1

The above may appear to contradict my thesis that Bergsonism was an adaptation of Platonism and Neoplatonism. However, not only did Bergson use Platonic terminology and do so in often contradictory ways as I have shown, his maintenance of the relationship between eternal truth (as duration) and appearance (as snapshots of that truth), and of the way by which that truth can be attained (through unreasoning intuition) derives from a Platonic and Neoplatonic heritage.2

Bergson argued that an accumulation of points of view place one outside the subject and that the only way of attaining the subject’s essence (the absolute, perfection) would be by coinciding internally with the subject, by placing oneself within it. By entering it we attain absolute knowledge, by moving around it and remaining on its exterior we can acquire only relative knowledge.

Were all the photographs of a town, taken from all possible points of view, to go on indefinitely completing one another, they would never be equivalent to the solid town in which we walk about.3

Through entering and identifying with the original, we become it. Bergson’s distinction between an accumulation of points revealing a subject and its perfect essence is the same as Plato made between the art of representation and truth. The former is a long way removed.4

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.5 Bergson however referred to Kant’s thing-in-itself and stated we can know part of reality - ourselves, in our ‘natural purity.’ The taking of ‘snapshots’ is a function of the brain and is necessary for mere existence. Duration, which is entirely different, is a function of consciousness which in turn is distinct from the brain. Although Bergson acknowledged objective reality, ‘true’ reality lay only in conscious duration.6

In Creative Evolution, Bergson addressed the difficulty of portraying the marching past of a regiment. He wrote that we could take a series of snapshots and throw them on a screen so they very rapidly replace each other. But photography is not animation and from this we could never get movement. Even the motion in film can’t bring us to the full duration of this event. To do so, we must attach the images to an invisible becoming ‘situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself’.7

Even when they are successive, states of consciousness permeate one another ‘and in the simplest of them the whole soul can be reflected’.8 Memory, which is the progression from past to present, enables us to place ourselves immediately in the past.

We start from a “virtual state” which we lead onwards, step-by-step, through a series of different planes of consciousness, up to the goal where it is materialised in an actual perception; that is to say, up to the point where it becomes a present, active state - up to that extreme plane of our consciousness against which our body stands out. In this virtual state, pure memory consists.9

For Bergson, these planes of consciousness move between the plane of ‘pure’ memory and the plane of action. He believed that between these two planes 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’. Bergson referred to these planes of consciousness as an infinite number of planes of memory.10 Further, ‘These planes ... exist virtually, with that existence which is proper to things of the spirit’.11 

Bergson thought that there could be a possible interpenetration of human consciousnesses, that two consciousnesses can be united in a single experience, into a single duration12 and that intuition possibly opens the way into consciousness in general.13 Again, he thought that an impersonal  consciousness  linked  our conscious minds with all nature.

Such a consciousness would grasp, in a single, instantaneous perception, multiple events lying at different points in space; simultaneity would be precisely the possibility of two or more events entering within a single, instantaneous perception. What is true and what illusory, in this way of seeing things?14

The more conscious we become of our progress in pure duration, the more we press against the future and know freedom.

For Bergson, memory is not a function of the brain but is independent of matter and ‘there is not merely a difference of degree, but of kind, between perception and recollection.’15 The brain is only an intermediary between sensation and duration - ‘in no case can the brain  store up recollections or images’.16

Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration and thus by a twofold operation compels us, de facto, to perceive matter in ourselves, whereas we, de jure, perceive matter within matter.17 

Memory gives us access to pure duration which is spirit - ‘pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are, in truth, in the domain of spirit.’18

In reference to Platonism Bergson wrote

an invisible current (duration) makes modern philosophy tend to lift the Soul above the Idea. In this as in modern science and even more so, it tends to move in the opposite direction from ancient thought.19

Not only is his terminology Neoplatonic, his philosophical heritage is clear

And this double movement of memory between its two extreme limits ... sketches out ... the first general ideas - 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. 20

Bergson’s 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. Bergson defined intuition as ‘the metaphysical investigation of what is essential and unique in  the  object’21 and as the ability to immediately discern our own inner being as well as the thoughts of others.22 In apprehending  reality in its true duration, we enter into the experience or thing itself.

Bergson referred to Schelling’s and Schopenhauer’s use of the concept ‘intuition’ in their search for the eternal whereas for him, it was a question of finding true duration. Not only is his work informed by Neoplatonism and peppered with concepts such as ‘essence’, ‘absolute’, ‘truth’, ‘perfection’ and ‘God’, for example

Coincidence with the person or object can alone give one the absolute. It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that absolute is synonymous with perfection.23

Consider the final sentence in two of his most influential books

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom24

The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and time,is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.25 

Intuition unites science and metaphysics in ‘the absolute’. It deals with mobility, and as I have shown earlier, this mobility applies also to the motionless.

To grasp the essence of a thing is to intuit it in its becoming, its movement. We must place ourselves within this evolution. This amounts to the coincidence of consciousness with ‘the living principle’ from which it derives. So duration is the intuitive apprehension of the passage of time. Intuition is extremely difficult, since it requires us to use our minds in a direction and manner the opposite of which our brains are used to function in, to reach ‘the   inward  life  of  things’.26 It  therefore  requires  not  only the act of seeing (the already-made) but that this be combined with the act of willing (the being-made). 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.

While Bergson’s claim that ‘reality’ can be perceived by non-intellectual intuition appears to directly contradict the philosophy of Plato in which knowledge of Ideas is attained through ‘reason’, the issue depends on what exactly constitutes ‘intuition’ and ‘reason’. They amount to the same non-reasoning contemplation of perfection in mind. Both are dependent on the reality of mind being more real than and distinct from that of the senses. Plato, like Bergson, did not argue that the world perceived by the senses is unreal, but that it has a lower status than the realm of truth; the relationship Bergson and Plato drew between knowledge and the emotions is the same.27

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.28 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.’29 Intuition or mind introduces us to the unity of spiritual life (intuition and intellect).30 Bergson’s intuition amounts to knowledge of the soul in its eternal movement. 

According to Bergson 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).31 Analysis breaks up duration into static fragmentary concepts and is compelled to move around the object it desires to embrace.32 Intuition or ‘intellectual sympathy’33 probes  the  flow of duration in its concreteness, by placing one within an object and giving an absolute. 

Analysis reduces an object to elements common to it and other objects, intuition allows one to experience its inexpressible uniqueness. 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, whereas

analysis multiplies without end the number of its points of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation; and ceaselessly varies its symbols that it may perfect the always imperfect translation. It goes on therefore to infinity34

Part Two/To be continued ...

Notes.

1. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 315. This  quotation appears to contradict my thesis, but the contradiction is Bergson’s.

2. Numerous connections can be argued between Plato, Plotinus and Bergson. Some more will be argued by myself and quoted from Bergson in this essay. Also, for example ‘ “And what about life? Is not that a function of mind?” “Very much so”, he said’, Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee, London, 1984, 100. This essay is primarily a setting out of Bergson’s philosophy.

3. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 22

4. ‘The art of representation is therefore a long way removed from truth and it is able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp of anything, and that little is of a mere phenomenal appearance. For example, a painter can paint a portrait of a shoemaker or a carpenter or any other craftsman without understanding any of their crafts.’ The Republic, op. cit., 426. Also, the well-known example of the painter of a bed being at third remove from God’s creation.

5. R. Antliff, ‘Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment’, op. cit., 342

6. The Creative Mind, op. cit., 30

7. In A. Papanicolaou, P. Gunter, eds., Bergson and Modern Thought, Towards A Unified Science, London, 1987, 220

8. Time and Free Will, op. cit., 98

9. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 239

10. Ibid., 170 

11. Ibid., 242

12. Duration and Simultaneity, op. cit., 46-47

13. The Creative Mind, op. cit., 36

14. Duration and Simultaneity, op. cit., 45

15. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 236

16. Ibid., 225

17. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 49

18. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 240

19. The Creative Mind, op. cit., 229

20. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 243

21.  An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 28

22. Inventing Bergson, op. cit., 40 

23. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 3

24. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 249

25. From Creative Evolution in  Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 105

26. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 51

27. For example Plato on the imagination and divine inspiration of a poet (‘Ion’), on the love of beauty and sexual love (Phaedrus). Plotinus developed this relation between inspiration, Form as focus for the emotions and truth. Deleuze noted that Bergson’s intuition is Platonic in inspiration, in Bergsonism, op. cit., 22.

28. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 111. Compare with the simile of the cave in The Republic, op. cit., 316-325

29. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 269

30. Ibid., 268

31. Carr suggests that perception is the revelation of matter and memory is the revelation of spirit, each being  the awareness of a different reality. H. Carr, The Philosophy of Change, London 1914, 90.

32. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 24. Representations taken from successive points of view belong to analysis which can never go beyond the surface of an object. A major point in my thesis will be that the application and retention of the misnomer ‘Analytic’ to the early development of Cubism by Picasso and Braque shows both how little understood is both Bergson’s philosophy and its enormous impact on Cubism and the origins of Modernism. The Cubists rejected the art of illusional appearance and I believe what they most directly built upon is expressed in Bergson’s philosophy.

33. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 4

34. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 24