Abstract

This article analyzes the conceptions of anticipation and invention in the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilbert Simondon. In doing so, I analyze the questions how futures are anticipated and what role technologies play in the anticipation and invention of the future. Technologies are increasingly used to predict, prescribe and control behavior. These technologies are based upon the ontological belief that reality is computable and predictable. With Bergson and Simondon, I aim to show that this ontology does not take the temporal structure and the anticipatory faculty of living beings into account. Anticipation is an essential activity of a living being in its milieu. In order to survive, living beings structure their milieu to make their future actions reliable. Images are central to this process. They are constantly evoked by and with practices. They are transformed and used to anticipate and imagine the future. Yet, these images are affectively charged and can be an expression of what Bergson calls “myth-making function” (fonction fabulatrice). While Bergson describes this function as a positive force, one can ask whether this force turns against itself in face of our contemporary climate crisis, digital technologies and the crisis of open democracies. An alternative is to understand and to construct technical objects as essentially open in analogy to the living being. This implies a conception of the human not as a fixed conception, but as an “open adventure” (Simondon 2016: 121)that constantly re-invents itself in relation with nature and technology.

Highlights

  • This article analyzes the conceptions of anticipation and invention in the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilbert Simondon

  • I will investigate these questions along the lines of the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilbert Simondon

  • I will address this aspect of the imaginary in a third step in going back to Bergson’s notion of the myth-making function

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Summary

Possibility and Reality

In his article The Possible and the Real, Bergson discusses whether or not a future situation can be foreseen or completely anticipated. The article opens with a thesis that runs through his whole philosophy: “The continuous creation of novelty, which seems to be going on in the universe” (Bergson 2007: 73) This discussion relates the epistemological problem of the experience of time to the ontological problem of the evolution of life (Bergson 2009: 381). Ideas and scientific theories are products of the homo faber, who’s intelligence “is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture” (Bergson 1998: 139) These tools, be they hammer, platonic idea or algorithm, are extracted in a material engagement with the world, are stable over time and allow to structure the world. The changing circumstances are a sign of the transformative character of reality, and the process of actualization of past experiences

Anticipation and Invention
Bergson’s Myth-Making Function a Technology of Anticipation?
Conclusion
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