In The Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard addresses the nature of time in response to the writings of his great contemporary, Henri Bergson. The work is motivated by a refutation of Bergson’s notion of duration – ‘lived time’, experienced as continuous. For Bachelard, experienced time is irreducibly fractured and interrupted, as indeed are material events. At stake is an entire conception of the physical world, an entire approach to the philosophy of science. It was in this work that Bachelard first marshalled all the components of his visionary philosophy of science, with its steady insistence on the human context and subtle encompassing of the irrational within the rational. The Dialectic of Duration reaches far beyond local arguments over the nature of the physical world to gesture toward the building of an entirely new form of philosophy.
Ongoing publication made possible through the generous support of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.
In The Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard addresses the nature of time in response to the writings of his great contemporary, Henri Bergson. The work is motivated by a refutation of Bergson’s notion of duration – ‘lived time’, experienced as continuous. For Bachelard, experienced time is irreducibly fractured and interrupted, as indeed are material events. At stake is an entire conception of the physical world, an entire approach to the philosophy of science. It was in this work that Bachelard first marshalled all the components of his visionary philosophy of science, with its steady insistence on the human context and subtle encompassing of the irrational within the rational. The Dialectic of Duration reaches far beyond local arguments over the nature of the physical world to gesture toward the building of an entirely new form of philosophy.
Ongoing publication made possible through the generous support of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.
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Overview
In The Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard addresses the nature of time in response to the writings of his great contemporary, Henri Bergson. The work is motivated by a refutation of Bergson’s notion of duration – ‘lived time’, experienced as continuous. For Bachelard, experienced time is irreducibly fractured and interrupted, as indeed are material events. At stake is an entire conception of the physical world, an entire approach to the philosophy of science. It was in this work that Bachelard first marshalled all the components of his visionary philosophy of science, with its steady insistence on the human context and subtle encompassing of the irrational within the rational. The Dialectic of Duration reaches far beyond local arguments over the nature of the physical world to gesture toward the building of an entirely new form of philosophy.
Ongoing publication made possible through the generous support of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786600608 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/26/2016 |
| Series: | Groundworks |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 162 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Translated by Mary McAllester Jones, with an introduction by Cristina Chimisso.
Read an Excerpt
The Dialectic of Duration
By Gaston Bachelard, Mary McAllester Jones
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Cristina ChimissoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78660-060-8
CHAPTER 1
Relaxation and Nothingness1
'Who will tell me how, all through existence, my whole person has been preserved? What was it that carried me, inert, full of life and spirit, from one end of nothingness to the other?'
Paul Valéry, A.B.C.
I
1
Bergson's philosophy is a philosophy of fullness and his psychology is a psychology of plenitude. This psychology is so rich, so multifarious and mobile that it cannot be contradicted; it makes repose active and functions permanent; it can always draw on so many things that the psychological scene will never be empty and success also will be ensured. In these conditions, life cannot go in fear of some total failure. If intellect dims then instinct awakens. Indeed human beings — who in dedicating themselves to intellect have put so much at risk — have at least held on to sufficient instincts to keep themselves in ignorance and error. They will take decisions, clearly and rationally, but in between these they move with all the confidence of a sleepwalker. They move even faster when they do not know where they are going, when they entrust themselves to the life force that carries humankind along, when they turn away from personal solitude. Thus, our life is so full that it is active when we do nothing. In a way, there is always something behind us, Life behind our life, the life force beneath our impulses. Our whole past is also waiting there behind our present, and it is because the self is old and deep, rich and full that it can truly act. Its originality stems from its origin, not a matter of some chance discovery but of memory. We are bound to ourselves, our present action neither disconnected nor gratuitous but always of necessity expressing our self, just as a quality expresses a substance. In this respect, Bergsonism has the facility of all substantialism and the ease and charm of all doctrines of interiority.
2
While Bergson would doubtless refrain from inscribing the past in matter, he does in fact inscribe the present in the past. Thus, the soul is seen to be a thing behind the flux of its phenomena; it is not really contemporary with its own fluidity. And the Bergsonism that has been accused of a predilection for mobility has not however set itself within duration's very fluidity. It has maintained the solidarity of past and future and also the viscosity of duration, with the result that the past remains the substance of the present or to put in another way, that the present instant is never anything other than the phenomenon of the past. And thus it is that in Bergsonian psychology, duration that is full and deep, continuous and rich serves as the spirit's substance. In no circumstances can the soul separate itself from time; like all that are happy in this world, it is always possessed by what it possesses. Ceasing to flow would mean ceasing to subsist; were we to leave this world's ways we would leave life. When we come to a standstill we die. Thus, while we think we have broken with the idea of the soul as substance, we are in fact shaping our innermost being from the stuff of an indestructible duration. Panpsychism is now nothing other than a panchronism, and the continuity of thinking substance nothing other than that of temporal substance. Time is alive and life is temporal. Before Bergson, the equation of being and becoming had never been so well established.
3
However, as we shall see at greater length in due course, for Bergsonism the creative value of becoming is limited by the very fact of fundamental continuity. Time has to be left to take its course if it is to do its work. In particular, the present can do nothing. Since the present carries out the past just as a pupil carries out a task the teacher has set, the present can create nothing. It cannot add being to being. Here again, Bergsonism has developed by following the intuition of fullness. For this school of thinkers, the dialectic always goes directly from being to being without nothingness being brought in between them. Jankélévitch has in fact suggested that the famous disquisition on nothingness be regarded as the basis of Bergson's philosophy. We know that for Bergson the idea of nothingness is in the end richer than that of being, simply because this idea would only be brought in and only become clear if an additional function of annihilation were added to the different functions by which being is established and described. In Bergson's view therefore, the idea of nothingness is functionally richer than the idea of being. Thus, with regard to the knowledge we have of them, no substance could have any void and no melody be broken by an absolute silence. The substance we know must always express itself. In a way, all the possibilities of human thought and action inevitably become attributes of the substance under consideration if we bear in mind an ingenious theory of negative attribution. May we in fact subsequently come to deny a quality we once attributed to substance? If so, we are expressing an error we have made rather than a deficiency of substance. Thus conceived as a sum of possibilities, substance is inexhaustible. The possible as a possible can never fall because it remains possible; in the same way, the probable that has been clearly seen to be such will always keep its precise value. The possible and the probable therefore have perfect continuity and it is for this reason that they are very precisely the spiritual attributes of substance as it presents itself to our analysis in the problem of knowledge. The significance of Bergson's subtle critique can only be understood if we carefully take up position on idealist ground where knowledge of being is concerned, and avoid descending too quickly to the ontological domain. We shall then see the full importance of problematic judgement. From this point of view, the possible is a memory and a hope. It is what we once knew and hope to find again. It is thus well suited to filling in at least the discontinuities in knowledge of being, though maybe not the gaps in being. In this way is the unending dialogue of mind and things prepared, and the continuous fabric woven that lets us feel substance within us, at the level of our innermost intuition, despite the contradictions of external experience. When I do not recognise reality it is because I am absorbed by memories that reality itself has imprinted in me, because I have returned to myself. For Bergson, there is no wavering, no interplay, and no interruption in the alternative we have between knowledge of our innermost self and of the external world. I act or I think; I am a thing or a philosopher. And through this very contradiction, I am continuous.
4
The same comments would be made, Bergson argues, about the psychology of a decrease in psychological intensity as about the psychology of annihilation, since in his view the impression that an intensity decreases while still remaining comparable to itself is as artificial and misleading as the idea one might have of absolute nothingness. For Bergson, when there is a decrease there is a change in nature. Spiritual substance is thus enfolded in endless, prodigiously diverse attributes, and all the degrees of attribution have an equal force of attribution. The subtleties of psychological analysis have a charm that can immediately be ranked among the soul's riches. Bergson ascribes the emotion generated by his subtle psychological analysis to the fundamental value of our feelings. For him, nuance is a colour. The impression is given then that the Bergsonian soul cannot stop feeling and thinking, that feelings and ideas are endlessly renewed on its surface, glinting in the flow of duration like a river's water in sunshine.
5
The impression of plenitude given by Bergsonian psychology can indeed be increased by the perfectly complementary character of some opposition. Not only is the absence of a form automatically the presence of a different form, but the lack of a function is sure to activate a function that is the very opposite of what was done initially and failed. It would seem that without this immediate rectification of one function by another, being is no longer of use to itself. An essential failure would shatter being, breaking up the becoming that is totally inseparable from being. Failure must thus remain partial, superficial, and rectifiable. It must not prevent the continuous and deep success of being. This in fact metaphysical success is so certain that failure in one respect is more than compensated by success in another. In the general theory of the life force, there is an entire argument for ontological compensations that justifies, for the individual and above all for the species, the most unfortunate initiatives. There is nothing more Bergsonian than this idea of the plurality of different means to reach the same goal, a plurality that gives all curiosity, all testing and seeking out, an undisputed positive value. Life is never absolutely and unconditionally at risk. Indeed Bergson, with his subtle analysis of the risk which gave rise to intellect, always maintained that this risk was active under the pressure of circumstance, in the struggle for life, as it kept hold of the past as something stable and sure, desiring repose, security and peace, in the secret ambition of being to acquire more duration. He always maintained that behind intellect, instinct stood guard. Should instinct fail, torpor would be there to keep watch, so to speak, as a positive function of the psyche that can oblige being to wait without destroying it. Coming back to the life force and its bold innovations, Bergson has no doubt shown very clearly that the greatest success is to be found where risk is the highest, but once again risk, in his view, has an aim and a function, in other words it has a history, a development, a logic, a myriad empirical and rational guarantees that found the continuity of the most adventurous of lives.
6
All these arguments do not however deal with the metaphysical essence of risk and Bergson has written nothing on and for risk, nothing on absolute and total risk, risk that has no aim and no reason; he has not written about the strange emotional game that leads us to destroy our security, our happiness and our love, nor about the sense of exaltation that draws us to danger, newness, death, and nothingness. As a result of this, the philosophy of the life force has been unable to give full meaning to what we shall call the purely ontological success of being, that is to say to the constant re-creation of being by itself, in the spiritual act of consciousness in its purely gratuitous form, as resistance to the call of suicide and triumph over the charms of nothingness. Bergsonism positioned itself systematically in relation to the evolution of species; the individual's free act, whose meaning and place it had however better shown than any other school of philosophy, was somehow eliminated in the whole evolution of the species. Lastly, in Bergsonism the free act seems to lack that purely intellectual causality that binds but does not constrain: it remains an accident. The theory of creative evolution, based on purely biological evolution, on evolution that is long, obscure and tenacious, thus discounted anything corresponding to the will to destroy or struggle just for the sake of struggle. It first and foremost attributed to being a continuum of growth, to the species continual life through seeds, and to living destiny a force that of necessity would never end, since any interruption breaks up a force even more surely than it does a thing. Bergson's thought is therefore always and everywhere guided by the same fundamental idea: being, movement, space, and duration cannot receive lacunae; they cannot be denied by nothingness, by repose, by points, by instants; or at least such negations are condemned to remain indirect and verbal, superficial and ephemeral.
7
To sum up, whether it be in our intuition of duration, our conceptions of being, or even in the service of our functions, according to Bergsonism we are given over to an immediate, deep continuity which can only superficially be broken by what lies outside, by appearance, and by language that claims to describe it. Discontinuities, fragmentation, and negation only appear to be devices which help exposition; psychologically, they are in the expression of thought and not in any way within the psyche. Bergson did not attempt to activate dialectic at the level of existence nor even at that of intuitive, deep knowledge; he considered that dialectic did not go beyond the dialogue of the soul with reality, and that the experience that goes from things to the self was an interplay of images which kept a fundamental homogeneity.
8
This then, in our view, is how the metaphysical connection between non-being and being can briefly be characterised in Bergsonism. We shall now go on to criticise this school of thought on one specific point. Since any critique is clarified by its end-point, let us say straightaway that of Bergsonism we accept everything but continuity. Indeed to be even more precise, let us say that from our point of view also continuity — or continuities — can be presented as characteristics of the psyche, characteristics that cannot however be regarded as complete, solid, or constant. They have to be constructed. They have to be maintained. Consequently, we do not in the end see the continuity of duration as an immediate datum but as a problem. We wish therefore to develop a discontinuous Bergsonism, showing the need to arithmetise Bergsonian duration so as to give it more fluidity, more numbers, and also more accuracy in the correspondence the phenomena of thought exhibit between themselves and the quantum characteristics of reality.
II
9
There is no doubt that our critique must first be brought to bear on the order of discourse and with reference in fact to Bergsonian proof. After this, we can proceed to positive psychological investigations; we shall then enquire whether Bergsonism has given their rightful place to psychological negativism, coercion, and inhibition. Once we have made this detailed study of the psychology of annihilation, we shall attempt to establish that annihilation implies nothingness as its limit, in exactly the same way that qualification implies substance as its support. From the functional standpoint that we shall adopt, it will be seen that there is nothing more normal or more necessary than going to the limit and establishing the relaxation of function, the repose of function, the non-functioning of function, since function must obviously often stop functioning. It is at this point that we shall see the interest of taking the principle of negation back to its source in temporal reality itself. We shall see that there is a fundamental heterogeneity at the very heart of lived, active, creative duration, and that in order to know or use time well, we must activate the rhythm of creation and destruction, of work and repose. Only idleness is homogeneous; we retain only what we reconquer; we maintain only what we resume. Moreover, simply from the methodological point of view, it will always be in our interests to establish a connection between the dialectic of different entities and the fundamental dialectic of being and non-being. We shall therefore bring philosophy back to this dialectic of being and nothingness, convinced moreover that it was not by some accident of history that the first Greek philosophers were led to this problem. Pure thought must begin by refusing life. The first clear thought is the thought of nothingness.
10
Where discourse is concerned, Bergson's argument in L'Evolution créatrice comes down to saying that there are no truly negative actions and that, as a result, negative words only have meaning in terms of the positive words they negate, all action and all experience being unfailingly first expressed positively. Now it seems to us that the priority thus given to the positive misrepresents the perfect correlation between words when they are, as they have to be, translated into the language of action. A concept is formed by experience and analysed by actions. It is for this reason that, for example, the word empty, taking its meaning from the verb to empty, can be said to correspond to a positive action. A well-trained intuition would thus conclude that emptiness is simply the disappearance, whether imagined or real, of a particular substance without it ever being possible to speak of a direct intuition of emptiness. All absence would thus be consciousness of departure. Such, in the end, is Bergson's argument. Now, while it is very true that you can only empty what you first found full, it is just as accurate to say that you can only fill what you first found empty. If the study of fullness is to be clear and rich, it must always be a more or less detailed account of filling something. In short, there seems to us to be a perfect correlation between emptiness and fullness. One is not clear without the other and in particular, one idea is not clarified without the other. If the intuition of emptiness is refused us, then we have the right to refuse that of fullness.
(Continues...)
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