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Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10848770.2011.626183

1470-1316

Giuseppe Bianco,

Historical and Scientific Studies

Abstract In one of his last writings, Life: Experience and Science, Michel Foucault argued that twentieth-century French philosophy could be read as dividing itself into two divergent lines: on the one hand, we have a philosophical stream which takes individual experience as its point of departure, conceiving it as irreducible to science. On the other hand, we have an analysis of knowledge which takes into account the concrete productions of the mind, as are found in science and human practices. In order to account for this division, Foucault opposed epistemologists such as Cavaillès and Canguilhem to phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but, also, and more particularly, he opposed Poincaré to Bergson. The latter was presented by Foucault as being the key-figure of the "philosophy of experience" at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fifteen years later, in his Deleuze and in the Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou again uses this dual structure in his interpretation of the past hundred years of French thought. He employs a series of oppositional couples: himself and Deleuze, Lautmann and Sartre, and, finally, Brunschvicg and Bergson. On the one hand a "mathematical Platonism" and on the other a "philosophy of vital interiority." This Manichean reading of philosophy, and the strategic use of the figure of Bergson has, itself, a long tradition. It was also proposed by Althusser who, following Bachelard, opposed his standpoint to any form of "empiricism." Althusser developed his thought from a tradition of Marxist thinkers and ideologists, which included Politzer's and Nizan's critique of bourgeois philosophy and, even before that, neo-Kantians such as the philosophers of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. The aim of this essay is to deconstruct and to put into its precise context of production this series of genealogies which entails the mobilization of Bergsonism and of the name 'Bergson.' By doing so, I hope to weight the importance of Bergsonism in twentieth-century French philosophy, in both its "positive" and its "negative" aspect. The essay will proceed regressively, taking into account figures such as Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze, Foucault, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, but also Polizer, Brunschvicg and Alain. The conclusion of the essay is an attempt at reading the "Bergson renaissance" in the light of new discoveries in genetics and the cognitive sciences and to tie it to the renewal of studies in the history of French philosophy. Notes 1. Michel Foucault, "Life: Experience and Science" (1985), in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley, et al., in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), vol. 2, 466, 467, 466. 2. In a 1983 interview, Foucault opposed Canguilhem's and Cavaillès' "concrete" resistance to "existentialists'" inactivity during the war. See Michel Foucault, "Politics and Ethics: An Interview," trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1991), 373–80. 3. See Alain Badiou, "The Adventure of French Philosophy," New Left Review 35 (September–October 2005): 67–77. 4. See the only reconstruction of Derrida's intellectual itinerary which is worthy of mention, Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009). 5. See Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule, "Lire Bergson," review of Bergsonism, by Gilles Deleuze, Études bergsoniennes 8 (1969): 85–120, which stresses Deleuze's structuralist approach. 6. Michel Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 165–96. 7. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1980. 8. Badiou published a review of Deleuze's Le Pli [The Fold] in 1989 in the Annuaire philosophique, but was already quoting him in his 1982's Theory of the Subject. 9. See the French transcription of his 1993 seminar "Théorie des categories," http://www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/seminaire.htm (accessed 1 August 2011). 10. François Wahl, "Le soustractive," foreword to Alain Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 9–54. "The parallel could seem bizarre," Wahl writes, "Deleuze saves Bergson thanks to Nietzsche, Badiou saves Plato through Cantor" (10). 11. Éric Alliez, "Virtual Philosophy," in The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004); Éric Alliez, "Deleuze's Bergsonism," in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001), 394–41. These essays were originally published in French by the Synthélabo publishing house, which in 1997 also published the proceedings of a conference on Bergson, Bergson et les neurosciences, ed. Philippe Galois and Gerard Fortzy. 12. Éric Alliez, De l'impossibilité de la phénoménologie. Sur la philosophie française contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 1995). 13. Alliez is referring to Dominique Janicaud's book, Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: l'Éclat, 1991). 14. Alliez, De l'impossibilité de la phénoménologie, 48. 15. Alain Badiou, "One, Multiple, Multiplicity," in Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Politis, 2008); originally published as "Un, multiple, multiplicité(s)," in Multiptudes 1.1 (2000): 195–211. 16. Regarding agrégation's importance for French philosophy, see Alan D. Schrift, "The Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy," Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.3 (2008): 449–74. 17. Georges Canguilhem, "The Death of Man, or, Exhaustion of the Cogito?," in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 18. See Foucault's 1966's interviews with Claude Bonnefoy and Marie Chapsal published in the first volume of his Dits et écrits. 19. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Jean-Paul Sartre répond. Entretien avec Bernard Pingaud," L'Arc 30 (1966): 87. 20. Canguilhem, "The Death of Man, or, Exhaustion of the Cogito?," 617. 21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), 256. 22. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism Today, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin Press, 1964). 23. See: Georges Politzer's articles published in La Pensée and later published in the first volume of the Écrits (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1973), such as "Dans la cave de l'aveugle – Chroniques de l'obscurantisme contemporain"; Paul Nizan, Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order (1932), trans. Paul Fittingoff (New York: Monthly Review Presses, 1971); Jean Kanapa, L'Existentialisme n'est pas un humanisme (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1947); Henri Maugin, La Sainte famille existentialiste (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1947), and the articles published in the war's immediate aftermath, in La Pensée ("L'esprit encyclopédique et la tradition philosophique française," in La Pensée, October 1945 and April 1946) ; "Du bergsonisme à l'existentialisme," in L'activité philosophique contemporaine en France et aux Etats-Unis, ed. Marvin Farber (Paris: Puf, 1950), vol. 2 ; the articles published in the Nouvelle critique during the 1950s and later published in Lucien Sève, La Philosophie française contemporaine et sa genèse de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1962); Georges Politzer's articles published in La Pensée and later published in the first volume of Écrits (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1973), such as "Dans la cave de l'aveugle – Chroniques de l'obscurantisme contemporain." 24. Louis Althusser, "The Return to Hegel," in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. Francois Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997). 25. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 25. 26. Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–67), ed. François Matheron, trans. Georges M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 5. 27. According to Althusser's (mis)interpretation of Lévi-Strauss, the ethnologist had argued that "savage" thought was superior to "civilized" thought, because of its ability to think secondary qualities, singularity, and thus concreteness. ("On Lévi-Strauss," in The Humanist Controversy, 30). 28. See Althusser's "Texte sur la lutte idéologique" [Text on the ideological fight], of 1954 or 1955, text read at a PCF meeting (Fonds Louis Althusser, Archives of the IMEC, Institut de la mémoire de l'édition contemporaine, ALT2 A42–02.11) and the manuscript, probably of 1958 (Fonds Louis Althusser, IMEC, ALT2. A58–04.04), entitled "Note sur les courants de la philosophie contemporaine." Here, Althusser names "the famous 'existentialist' current (Merleau, Sartre, Aron, Canguilhem etc.)" and denounces Canguilhem for proposing a "subjective theory of the normal and the pathological." 29. See the first forthcoming volume of Georges Canguilhem's Œuvres complètes (Paris: Vrin, 2012) and my forthcoming essay "Origins of Canguilhem's 'Vitalism,'" in Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010, ed. C. Wolfe and S. Normandin (London: Springer, 2012). 30. See my introduction to Georges Canguilhem's Commentaire au IIIe chapitre de l'évolution créatrice, Annales bergsoniennes, tome 3, Bergson et la science, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: PUF, 2007). 31. Georges Canguilhem, "Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 3–4 (juillet–octobre 1947): 322–32. 32. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 137. 33. See the last essay published in the second edition of The Normal and the Pathological, entitled "A New Concept in Pathology: The Error." In this essay, Canguilhem shows the limits of his theory when faced with the new pathologies tied to DNA mutations: apparently those pathologies have nothing to do with the diminished normative power of an organism placed in a new environment; on the contrary, they depend on an "objective" error linked to the transmission of the genetic code. 34. Georges Canguilhem, "Le concept et la vie," in Études d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Vrin, 1983), 348, 341, 339. 35. Some authors have worked, from very different perspectives and in very different contexts, on the hypothesis of the relative compatibility of Bergsonism and structuralism. See, for instance, Maria De Palo, "Bréal, Bergson et la question de l'arbitraire du signe," in Henri Bergson: esprit et langage, ed. Claudia Stancati, Dom. Chiricò, and F. Vercillo (Liège-Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga, 2001); and Patrice Maniglier, "Bergson Structuralist? Beyond the Foucauldian Opposition between Life and Concept" (paper presented at the conference "Bergson and Bergsonism," Centre français de culture, London, 5 April 2008). 36. I am not interested in developing this remark in this context, but a scarlet thread clearly runs from the lectures given at the École Normale in 1954 and 1955, entitled "Problèmes de l'anthropologie," to his Ph.D. dissertation on Kant's pragmatic anthropology and Words and Things. 37. Jacques Lautman, Canguilhem's student during the 1960s writes that his professor was "teaching the lack of confidence in the philosophies of existence" and "criticizing the interpretations of Bergson as an existentialist manqué" (see Jacques Lautman, "Un stoïcien chaleureux," Revue d'histoire des sciences 53.1 [2000]: 38). But this antipathy for existentialist phenomenology was not followed by the structuralist dogmatism: "concept's necessity" was always tied to the "fundamental reference to the subject who suffers and creates the norm." Thus, Canguilhem's "philosophy of the concept is prior to that of existence, but it refuses structuralism and it is tied to an anthropology" (41). Lautman concludes that, very strangely, in the 1960s "Althusserians and Structuralists who wanted to get rid of any thought linked to subjectivism and hermeneutics, turned towards him . . . : the misunderstandings were huge on several topics and the dogmatism of those new encyclopedists made the master smile" (41–42). 38. Lévi-Strauss's intellectual trajectory was not rectilinear. In A World on the Wane he recounts that, during his philosophical apprenticeship, he hated the dogmatisms of Bergsonism and used to counterattack it the Politzerian category of "sense." 39. Jacques Lacan, La psychose paranoïaque et ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 40. The influence of Politzer on Lacan's theory before "Rome's speech" (namely, before his fifties' "Structuralist turn") is well known. The disappearance of Politzer's name from psychoanalytical theory and, from political theory, thanks to Althusser, was caused by an essay that the Lacanians Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire published in the July 1961 issue of the Les Temps Modernes, "The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study," trans. Patrick Coleman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 118–78). Here, following Lacan, they attack Politzer's "concrete psychology's" model of sense and its criticism of the notion of the unconscious. 41. In Jean Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Puf, 1991), 1003–28. 42. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963); Martial Gueroult, Leçon inaugurale, Collège de France, 1951. 43. Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique, 1028. 44. See, for instance, Ferdinand Alquié, "Bergson et la Revue de métaphysique et de morale," Revue de métaphysique et de morale 48.4 (1941): 315–28. 45. Foucault, "Jean Hyppolite. 1907–1968," in Dits et écrits, I. 46. As Vincent de Coerebyter has shown, Sartre begun his philosophical career inspired by Bergson. See his excellent Sartre avant la phenomenologie (Bruxelles: Ousia, 2005). 47. Bergson was still enjoying some success in "non-conformist" Catholic milieus, such as that of Emmanuel Mounier's journal Esprit. His texts were also still used and praised by thinkers of the generation in between that of Bergson and of Sartre, like Jean Wahl, Gabriel Marcel, Louis Lavelle, and René Le Senne. 48. Florence Cayemaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson. Les phénoménologie existentialistes et leur héritage bergsonien (Hildsheim: Olms, 2005). 49. See, for example, Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 50. François Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson (Paris: Puf, 2007); Renzo Ragghianti, Dalla fisiologia della sensazione all'etica dell'effort. Ricerche sull'apprendistato filosofico di Alain (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993). 51. Xavier Léon to Elie Halévy, 3–6 April 1902, in Lettere di Henri Bergson, ed. Renzo Ragghianti (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992), 34.