Thinking in time: Henri Bergson (an interdisciplinary conference)

Abstract

Introduction "A 'return to Bergson'," Gilles Deleuze wrote in 1988, "does not only mean a renewed admiration for a great philosopher but a renewal or an extension of his project today, in relation to the transformations of life and society, in parallel with the transformations of science."1 The vigorous renewal of interest in Bergson's thought today is in large part due to Deleuze who championed the work of Bergson when Bergson remained, as Deleuze put it, an "object of so many hatreds."2 For this interest in Bergson to open onto something new today, however, it is essential to turn back to Bergson, in order to delimit the thought of Bergson from that of Deleuze—it is essential to read Bergson's texts. This double gesture—one that looks back to Bergson's texts and forward toward a "renewal and extension of Bergson's project today"—is what I have attempted to perform with a book, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Cornell UP, 2006), that painstakingly traces the philosopher's arguments in two of his major works (Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory) and a conference held at the University of California at Berkeley last spring: "Thinking in time: Henri Bergson (an interdisciplinary conference)."3 If the papers collected here appear disparate, it is because they were solicited for the conference at Berkeley in order to take up Deleuze's challenge concerning the extension and renewal of Bergson's thought "in relation to the transformations of life and [End Page 1091] society, in parallel with the transformations of science." The conference was intended to explore the interdisciplinary reach of Bergson's thought today.4 The goal of the conference was to introduce Bergson's thought into intellectual discussions at Berkeley (and beyond) from which it was conspicuously absent, and to which it has so much to contribute. The aim of the conference was to explore the potential that the interdisciplinary richness of Bergson's thought might have for re-channeling intellectual discussion, first of all in the humanities (bogged down in old habits) but also across the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences. Few thinkers have the reach we find in Bergson's work, which dialogued with contemporary research in physics, biology, the theory of evolution, psychology, and sociology that was cutting edge at the time (and, to a remarkable extent, structured key fields of knowledge in ways that still largely hold today), contributed a modern notion of alienation to thinkers such as Lukàcs and Gramsci, and critically influenced modernist aesthetic movements (in literature and the visual arts) in France, Great Britain, and the United States. . Upon first reading Bergson's Matter and Memory, William James remarked with admiration upon Bergson's capacity "simply to break away from old categories, deny old worn-out beliefs, and to restate things ab initio, making the lines of division fall into new places!"5 We feel that Bergson's thought can still have this impact today. * * * Bergson is known as a philosopher of life. In her essay, "The Concept of the Living", Paola Marrati (The Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University) focuses on Bergson's two most celebrated works, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, to elaborate the specific force of Bergson's concept of the living in an analysis that emphasizes the pragmatic dimension of Bergson's thought. Through a careful mapping of Bergson's philosophical project, Marrati distinguishes Bergson's thought from phenomenology, arguing that for Bergson, "a philosophy of experience does not coincide . . . with a philosophy of subjectivity." Marrati's essay underscores the single most important idea in Bergson, namely that, as the philosopher himself put it, "If time does nothing it is nothing;" she explains how in Bergson, "living" means an openness to time, such that the virtual and the real are "different modalities of reality." In "The Reality of the Virtual: Bergson and Deleuze", Keith Ansell Pearson (Department of Philosophy, University of...