Matter and Light in Bergson's Creative Evolution

Pierre Montebello, Roxanne Lapidus

SubStance, Issue 114 (Volume 36, Number 3), 2007, pp. 91-99 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: 10.1353/sub.2007.0047

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v036/36.3montebello.html

Access provided by Yeditepe Universitesi (3 Feb 2014 07:24 GMT)

Matter and Light in Creative Evolution

91

Matter and Light in Bergsons Creative Evolution

Pierre Montebello
Bergsonism is characterized by its quest for a living unity that would link life, consciousness and the material universe. Clearly, for a philosopher who takes as his starting point the experience of conscious life, and whose line of inquiry concerns what our experience registers, the most difficult aspect is to connect this psycho-vital experience to matter. This difficulty is not unique to Bergsonism; most of the philosophies of nature at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that consider the question of cosmological unity (especially those of Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Tarde) find that matter poses a problem. The concept of matter seems heavily saturated with intellectual representations that prevent its being included in the living unity of the cosmos. Therefore it is not surprising that Bergson considered one of the most important stakes of Creative Evolution to be the comprehension of the material universe as being of the same nature as the self. Thus he told the Socit Franaise de la Philosophie in 1908 that One of the objects of Creative Evolution is to show that All is [...] of the same nature as the I, and that one grasps it by a more and more complete immersion in oneself (Mlanges, 774). This renewal of the concept of matter began for Bergson in Matter and Memory (1896). As we know, this book established a connection between the universe and the living subjecta participation of living duration in the duration of the universe, at every level of life. It shows that the brain, when isolated, produces nothing, neither interiority nor thought. Only the relationship between the living body and the material universe produces an effect of consciousness, which, being transmitted by memory and personal history, enables a more and more intense participation in the universe. Thus the first chapter of Matter and Memory establishes that we can deduce from our perception that the universe is a form of duration connected to our own, although independent from our own. The material universe endures, as does our consciousness, and it is presented to us in such a way that we apprehend it as an appearance in itself, larger that the self, through which life opens itself to its own structure as appearance/ perception. I cannot linger here on this paradox of appearance in itself;
Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2007

91

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

92

Pierre Montebello

suffice it to say that to perceive images is always also to perceive that these images escape toward a level of the universe where they exist as themselves. This appearance in itself of the universe is deduced via our perception; it is that onto which our perception opens; our perception does not create it, for there already is openingwithout this opening our perception would be blind. In Creative Evolution, Bergson proposes to pursue this meditation. This, in sum, is what he tells the philosophical society on that same August 8, 1908, when he compares Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution:
In the first of these two book, it is shown that the objectivity of the material thing is immanent to the perception that we have of it, provided that one takes this perception at its raw state and in its immediate form. In the second, it is established that immediate intuition seizes the essence of life as well as that of matter. (Mlanges, 773)

At this same meeting, Bergson would defend the idea of a knowledge where the act of knowing coincides with the act generating reality (ibid.). To grasp the essence of matter is in fact to grasp it through the generative act that produces it. Now, at the level of methodology, we can only proceed by starting from the intuition we have of our experience of conscious life. The only path open to knowledge is to follow the irrevocable witness of our consciousness. Already in following this path in Matter and Memory, what Bergson encounters is a universe constantly in transformation, made up of images in themselvesa universe of energy, which bursts forth. Creative Evolution does not change its methodology: starting with ourselves, with our existence, we can only arrive at a duration immanent to the whole of the universe (CE, 11). In these two books, it is not simply our consciousness that attests to this; it is also a tendency that can be seen in science. Matter and Memory was inspired by electromagnetism, and draws upon the works of Thompson and Faraday:
... the nearer we draw to the ultimate elements of matter the better we note the vanishing of that discontinuity which our senses perceived on the surface. Psychological analysis has already revealed to us that this discontinuity is relative to our needs : every philosophy of nature ends by finding it incompatible with the general properties of matter. (MM, 266)

Thus science itself incites us to see in matter only modifications, perturbations, changes of tension or of energy, and nothing else (ibid.). Matter and Memory does not fail to cite Maxwell, who, as early as 1864, showed that light is a form of electromagnetic wave.1 Although it wasnt until 1924 that particles of matter such as electrons were also considered as possessing wave-like properties, and people began to speak of waves

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

Matter and Light in Creative Evolution

93

of matter, as early as the 1860s, atomic matter was considered to dissolve into immaterial fields of force.2 Thus we must acknowledge that in Creative Evolution, electromagnetic science is present, as indicated in references to Faradays atomic penetration, to the discovery that each atom fills the worldin other words, references to the idea of fields of force. Bergson reiterates this when he affirms that science as well as consciousness makes us understand that a material point is a simple view of the mind (MM, 204). Electromagnetic physics confirms that solid bodies are not primary, that matter is first waves and light, indivisible energy and continuous flow. Consequently, there is no hiatus between what consciousness reveals to us and what science tends to show: Science and consciousness basically agree, says Bergson in Matter and Memory (221). The more physics advances, the more it effaces the individuality of bodies and even of the particles into which the scientific imagination began by decomposing them: bodies and corpuscles tend to dissolve into a universal interaction (CE, 88). Bergson would say it again later in the introductory essays of The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (La Pense et le mouvant, written in 1922, published in1934), showing that it is indeed science that served as vector for this movement, even if it does not follow the movement all the way to the end, because of its conventions:
Sooner or later, I thought, physics will be brought around to the point of seeing in the fixity of the element a form of mobility. When that day came, it is true, science would probably give up looking for an imaged representation of it, the image of a movement being that of a moving point (that is to say, always of a minute solid). (CM, 85)

Creative Evolution will explain this limit on the part of science by saying that the cutting out of matter and the constitution of closed systems are the essential work of physics. Bergson writes that sciences claim that matter is decomposable into isolated systems, as well as sciences regarding matter as decomposable into isolated systems, in attributing to it quite distinct elements which change in relation to each other without changing in themselves (which are displaced, shall we say, without being altered), in short, in conferring on matter the properties of pure space (CE, 203), science also necessarily accentuates the spatiality of matter even when matter already is a tendency toward spatialization, as will be shown.3 Unlike science, philosophy will go to the limits of this dematerialization, by withdrawing matter from spatializing and representationalist intelligence and making it a kind of duration. Creative Evolution contributes something specific on this point, not present in

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

94

Pierre Montebello

Matter and Memory: a reflection on the living genesis of the various areas of knowledge, and thus on the reciprocal genesis of intellectuality and materiality. This reciprocal genesis of materiality and intellectuality makes clear that it is always in our intellectual (hence scientific) representation that matter materializes and solidifies. According to Bergson, matter inevitably accentuates its materiality, when viewed by the mind (CE, 202). To say that materiality derives from intellectuality is to confirm Kants thesis of the ideality of space. Our intelligence is admittedly quite infused with spatiality, but for vital reasons that Kant did not grasp. With Kant, space is given as a readymade form of our perceptive faculty a veritable deus ex machina (CE, 205). To set in motion the living genesis of intelligence is thus also to situate that which goes beyond intelligence, which does not arise from it; it is to proceed in a dematerialization of matter that is better founded than that of science. Science works in the direction of materiality, but not in the direction of duration. Now, even matter is not in itself as completely extended in space as our senses and intellect represent it (CE, 202). Bergson repeats this point several times in Creative Evolution: although matter stretches itself out in the direction of space, it does not completely attain it (CE, 207). Our psychovital experience attests that matter is not reducible to the spatialization that intellectuality proposes, that the material universe endures. On the contrary, a matter that is entirely intellectualized is a spatialized, geometrized matter, without act or movementimmobile and without energy. It is a matter that is spread out, unfolded, deployed to fit exactly into the representation that intelligence makes of it. Thus all its parts are divisible and can be separated, ad infinitum. No transformations take place in it; it has only relative movements (following cartesian and galilean mechanism) movements of transport. Such intellectualized matter is continuous, but in a mathematical continuum that only represents the abstract possibility of a division ad infinitum, and with the caveat that division is not the only choice possible. In reality, this abstract continuity is not a continuity of movementit underlies precisely the discontinuity of intellectual divisions, and the fact is that for our own needs we always invoke discontinuity, and thus atoms, points, grains, particles, bodies and things. When one retraces the intellectual genesis of matter, it is pointless to contrast atomism with geometry, continuity with discontinuity, for intellectual analysis is mathematically continuous and physically discontinuous. Hence Bergsons well-known thesis: Intelligence only represents the discontinuous (CE, 155), but upon a background of

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

Matter and Light in Creative Evolution

95

idealized and mathematical continuity. For us as living and conscious beings, the opposition is not between atomism and geometrism, but between radiance and substance, energy and space, matter that spreads and matter that is spread, the absolute movement of transformation and the relative movement of transport, intellectuality and intuition. What does it mean that matter radiates; what is the significance of a universe of light, if it is not a universe that endures and spreads, a universe of energy, to which we are linked? Why is this important for a theory of nature? Because this matter is connected to us, and the material universe does not change without our perceiving it change, and without our perceiving ourselves transformed. A second important reference of Bergson to physics concerns the second principle of thermodynamics. As we know, this principle shows how an isolated system progressively and irreversibly transforms its potential energy into an equipotential structure. According to Bergson, this second principle of thermodynamics confirms the material universes tendency toward spatializationthe passage from a potential energy to a spatial structure. If one considers the universe/energy as closed, it transforms energetically toward entropy. Thus this second law of thermodynamics is for Bergson the most metaphysical of the laws of physics (CE, 243) because it indicates absolutely the direction in which the universe is headedthat is, the uniform repartitioning of energy: our solar system is seen to be ever exhausting something of the mutability it contains (CE, 243). In a word, physics is forced to go beyond the relativity of movement. But how can one account for this tendency? This information has no sense if one does not link it to our experience. Once again the witness of our experience of conscious life plays an essential role. The scientist who relies on matter does not aim to explain how consciousness, life, and the universe communicate and relate among themselves. Lets not forget that Creative Evolution concludes on this very point:
The philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making a clean sweep of everything that is only an imaginative symbol, he will see the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he will thus be prepared to discover real duration there where it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life and of consciousness. For, so far as inert matter is concerned, we may neglect the flowing without committing a serious error: matter, we have said, is weighted with geometry; and matter, the reality which descends, endures only by its connection with that which ascends. But life and consciousness are this very ascension. When once we have grasped them in their essence by adopting their movement,

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

96

Pierre Montebello

we understand how the rest of reality is derived from them. Evolution appears and, within this evolution, the progressive determination of materiality and intellectuality by the gradual consolidation of the one and of the other. But, then, it is within the evolutionary movement that we place ourselves, in order to follow it to its present results, instead of recomposing these results, artificially with fragments of themselves. Such seems to us to be the true function of philosophy. So understood, philosophy is not only the turning of the mind homeward, the coincidence of human consciousness with the living principle whence it emanates, a contact with the creative effort: it is the study of becoming in general, it is true evolutionism... (CE, 369370)

Thus what the philosopher contributes, in comparison to the scientist, is the intuition that the essential mutability of the world cannot arise from matter itself. If matter is tendency toward spatialization, how could it create energy? Now, we can only interpret this entropic lapse by comparing it to our psychovital experience, by comparing it to our existence, to our experience of duration. We can understand it only because we see clearly that the universe does not endure in the same way as do our life and our consciousness. The scientist cannot see this, having cut himself off from a part of experience. For him, the direction of initial mutability toward stability can be explained physically, while the burst of energy that conditions this mutability can never be explained. Try as he may to posit an infinite universe from the beginning, the scientist will never be able to conjure up the energy for this infinite universe, since such a universe would be, precisely (according to the definition of matter), a universe that is totally deployed, with material elements absolutely exterior from one another, without tension, without relation, without potential. the problem remains insoluble as long as we keep on the ground of physics (CE, 244). In fact, in order to explain the presence of energy, the physicist will not seek an extra-spatial energy of which he has no idea, unlike the philosopher, who sees it at work in the lan vital and in consciousness. Thus the physicist has no idea that there could exist an extra-material energy; he will remain within the definition of matter that he has given: the decline toward the uniform and stable. On the contrary, for the philosopher who starts from a different series of facts that confirm one another in his experience of conscious life, there will be every reason to oppose material conservation with extra-material creation, to oppose closed with open, to oppose science with philosophy. But how can we establish this separation if we make our experience into an abstraction, if we do likewise with the durations that intersect in our existence?

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

Matter and Light in Creative Evolution

97

Let me stress this point of methodology: the fact that the universe radiates and falls toward entropy can only be understood in terms of our duration and the way it implies the duration of the universe. That is, Bergson does not consider the universe as an objective, all-encompassing realm that precedes us, fixed and immutable. Rather, it is deduced from our perception, from what is transformed and felt in our experience of conscious life. We cannot change without things changing; the world is not transformed without our being aware of it, because life, matter and consciousness are durations, and there is communication among these durations, since our perception itself is simply a relationship of durations:
We perceive the physical world and this perception appears, rightly or wrongly, to be inside and outside us at one and the same time; in one way, it is a state of consciousness; in another, a surface film of matter in which perceiver and perceived coincide. To each moment of our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body and of all environing matter that is simultaneous with it; this matter then seems to participate in our conscious duration. (DS, 45)

In The Creative Mind, Bergson has recourse to the example of colors, which are wave lengths. Everywhere his vocabulary translates the opposition between body and color, between geometric figure and figure of light, solid reality and supple inter-relatedness.
But just as a consciousness of color, which would harmonize inwardly with orange instead of perceiving it outwardly, would feel itself caught between red and yellow, would perhaps even have, beneath the latter color, a presentiment of a whole spectrum in which is naturally prolonged the continuity which goes from red to yellow, so the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as pure analysis would do, puts us in contact with a whole continuity of durations. (CM, 221)

Creative Evolution, which starts with our existence in order to deduce a totality that endures, seems to follow this methodology. Rather than positing a single universal time, Creative Evolution, like the Creative Mind, expands the thesis of durations that are intertwined. Our experience of conscious life implies relationship to a duration of the universe. But our experience also bears witness to a more contracted duration, more intense, freer, which at the limit would be eternitypure creativitywhere our own duration would find itself like the vibrations in light (ibid.). A light more luminous that the visible universe, being a true source. This omnipresence of the theme of light, of radiating, of color and of waves in Bergsons philosophy translates something of an era: the passage from a world of images to a world where one must perceive the imperceptible light that animates things. Creative Evolution is inscribed in a larger movement of dematerialization of matter, a movement of

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

98

Pierre Montebello

going beyond the image and the object, toward their source, toward the intimate and secret movement of things. In 1913, eight years after the publication of Creative Evolution, the Rayonnist Manifesto was signed by a dozen artists, including Mikhail Larionov. It affirmed that :
The style of Rayonnist painting that we advance signifies spatial forms which are obtained arising from the intersection of the reflected rays of various objects, and forms chosen by the artists will. The ray is depicted provisionally on the surface by a colored line.[....]. The objects that we see in life play no role here, but that which is the essence of painting itself can be shown here best of allthe combination of color, its saturation, the relation of colored masses, depth, texture. 3

The words Bergson used about the Michelson-Morley experiment are applicable to this aesthetic:
It is the light-figure that imposes its conditions upon the rigid figure. In other words, the rigid-figure is not reality itself but only a mental construct; and for this construct it is the light-figure, the sole datum, which must supply the rules. (DS, 116)

In concluding, I would like to make this point: science dematerializes matter when it reduces it to lines of light. For its part, philosophy manifests in the perceiving image its part of light, its articulation with a universe/matter that is universe/light, and it also manifests in our action our vibrant participation in an even more luminous but invisible presence. Likewise, the art of this era rejects objective images in order to focus on the light that underlies them. The Rayonnist Manifesto is not unique in this respect. Kazimir Malevitch (1878-1935) preaches the total eclipse of the world of objects, of the light of intellectual understanding, of the figurative, in order to move toward an absolute-without-object. It is a movement of surpassing the image, moving toward the icon that does not imitate anything, of surpassing the figural in favor of color that is pure, monochromatic, immaterial and spiritualan infinite abyss. This experience of a plenitude that can be neither expressed nor represented is much broader than Bergsonism. During this era, many artistic currents were influenced by a kind of illuminative theognosis that opposed the invisible light or light-shadowmore luminous than lightto the light of the world. Transcending forms, painting attempted to capture what makes forms become visiblethe source of the visibility of the visible, which is also its dark opposite. In La lumire et la couleur, Malevitch wrote:
Man makes authentic attempts to reveal authenticity. He wants to unmask the actions of the world, in order to catch a glimpse of the authentic Face. This actor of the world hides himself as though he

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007

Matter and Light in Creative Evolution

99

were afreaid to show his face [....] We only see the shadows that are inaccessible to any light whatsoeverneither to the sun nor to the light of knowldge. Our spectacle ends in the darkness. (Ecrits, IV)4

Compared to this theognosis, Bergsonism seems more positive and much more moderate. The light revealed by philosophy is not the shadowy light of the mystics nor the light of revelation. It is simply what one may think about nature by following our experience of conscious life. In other words, it is simply the evidence of our participation in an eternity of life and of a creation in which we are like vibrations in the light. The light revealed by Bergsonism also bears witness to an era enamoured with the discovery of a reality more luminous than that of our everyday needs. Universit de Toulouse III translated by Roxanne Lapidus

CE CM DS MM

Abbreviations Used Creative Evolution The Creative Mind Duration and Simultaneity Matter and Memory

Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution [Lvolution cratrice, 1907]. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911 [CE]. . The Creative Mind : an Introduction to Metaphysics. [La Pense et le mouvant, 1934]. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Society, 1946 [CM]. . Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einsteins Theory. Trans. Leon Jacobson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. . Matter and Memory. [Matire et mmoire, 1896]. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911 [MM]. . Mlanges. Paris : PUF, 1972. Malevitch, Kazimir. La Lumire et la couleur, trans. Jean-Claude Marcad and Sylviane Siger, in Ecrits, Vol. IV. Lausanne: Lge dhomme, coll. Slavica , 1993.

Notes
1. P. Davies, Les forces de la nature (Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1988 p. 34). 2. Ibid., p. 67. See also L. Nottale, Lunivers et la lumire (Paris: Champs Flammarion, p. 34). 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayonnism 4. On this point, see Bruno Duborgels Malevitch, la question de licne (Publications de lUniversit de Saint-Etienne, 1997).

SubStance #114, Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007