A review of Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy

 

By Andreas Vrahimis

Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

402 pp., $139.99

Reviewed by Christopher C. Faille

In the late years of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity on the strength of three books, known in English as Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution.  

Bergson’s philosophy holds that time, novelty, and free will are all closely intertwined realities: The future contains surprises that cannot even in principle have been determined by calculation from the facts that exist today, and future human decisions are among those surprises. 

Bergson ties this case to a dichotomous view of cognition. He sees a sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition. Intelligence is very useful; it is a survival mechanism for humans, but it cannot grasp the essence of reality: the movement of time. Intelligence geometricizes, reducing time to space and eliminating free will in the process. Intuition, though, understands. 

As to the philosophy of biology, as you might imagine from the foregoing, Bergsonism asserts that something about life escapes mechanistic formulae, since those formulae are the products of mere intelligence. Life and its evolution can never be explained as so much chemistry. In this line of thinking, Bergson popularized the expression “élan vital,” or vital force.  

Andreas Vrahimis, (pictured above) who is affiliated with the University of Cyprus, has now made an important contribution to our understanding of Bergsonism and its consequences. Reactions to Bergson, he tells us, helped create the now-common view of a sharp distinction between “continental” philosophy on the one hand, and “analytic” (mostly Anglophone) philosophy on the other. To those on the analytical side of that divide, Bergson became the paradigm of the continental philosopher, someone who emitted alleged profundities that are not profound at all when examined critically -- that is, analytically. No less a figure than Bertrand Russell cast Bergson in that role. 

Elevating Karin Costelloe-Stephen

While making this historical point, Vrahimis seeks to elevate Russell’s niece within the history of philosophy. For a time, Russell considered Karin Costelloe-Stephen to be his philosophical protégée, though eventually Ludwig Wittgenstein usurped that role. Costelloe-Stephen understood the analytical philosophy that Russell, Whitehead, and Moore were busy creating. 

On Vrahimis’ account, Costelloe-Stephen (who was through marriage the sister-in-law of Virginia Woolf) also understood Bergson quite well. She was “in a … position … to instigate a critical debate between the Russellian and Bergsonian standpoints,” Vrahimis suggests. Alas, her philosophical writings, which sought mediation and respected each side of that divide, were largely ignored, perhaps in part out of sexist indifference. So a proper debate never happened and an unnecessary gulf opened between the two sides of the Channel. That is the heart of Vrahimis’ book.

Vrahimis also apparently believes that Costelloe-Stephen’s rebellion against Russell’s facile rejection of Bergson, along with the rise of Wittgenstein’s influence, led to the decline of the once close Russell/Costelloe-Stephens relationship. In the 1920s Costelloe-Stephen drifted out of philosophy into psychoanalysis.  

Vrahimis’ account deserves careful consideration and is an important contribution to the literature on the development of philosophy, on both sides of the channel, in the early 20th century.

Development of the Eye

I propose now to take up one of many specific threads in this tapestry. This thread involves the mechanisms for evolution, as (perhaps) exemplified by the development of the eye.  

In October 1911, Bergson visited England, largely at the instigation of Herbert Wildon Carr, a successful businessman and amateur philosopher. A dinner on October 28 brought together at a single table Bergson, Russell, and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw enthusiastically propounded what he took to be Bergson’s philosophy, especially as it relates to biology. Bergson objected to Shaw’s reworking of his views.     

Shaw responded, with typical Shavian confidence, “oh my dear fellow, I understand your philosophy much better than you do." Russell later expressed amusement at the way "Bergson clenched his fists and nearly exploded with rage." 

What more can we say at the distance of more than a century about the subject of this rage? Vrahimis suggests that it may have involved the issue of how the eye evolved. This was at the time a critical nexus for distinct takes on evolution and its Darwinian conceptualization. 

The Darwinian idea that evolution proceeds by small random variations and by the selection of such variations as further survival and procreation of the species, seemed to Bergson (and in fact seemed to Shaw) too mechanistic to properly explain the development of such an intricate organ as the eye. 

The Bergsonian response to this problem was that two quite distinct factors are both at work in evolution. There is “the resistance life meets from inert matter,” and there is “the explosive force … which life bears within itself.” Bergson thought the Darwinian account treated the first of these principles as sufficient to explain evolution. But evolution is a creative force precisely because of the second principle. And we need the second principle as well as the first to get us to the eye.   

Lamarck, Shaw, and the Eye

Shaw also found Darwinism inadequate as an explanation of such mysteries as how the mammalian eye came to be. Shaw, like others in his time, reached back behind Darwin to revive the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. 

Lamarck saw evolution as an active process, one shaped by the efforts of organisms. Species change over time not because they are molded by the environment and the way it selects some of them over others: Species change, rather, because they master that environment. So far there is a proto-Bergsonian sound to this.

But there is an important difference: Lamarck’s proposed mechanism for evolution postulates the inheritance of acquired characteristics. 

Darwinism was coming to be very closely identified, even at the time of that gathering in October 1911, with the denial of the proposition that acquired characteristics can be inherited, with the exaltation instead of the idea of the “continuity of the germ plasm.” 

So Shaw as a neo-Lamarckian and Bergson as … Bergson … each had a quarrel with the Darwinian account of how the eye came to be. But they weren't in the same quarrel. Indeed, Bergson in Creative Evolution is rather clear about this. Amidst discussion of the eye and other puzzles, Bergson writes, “The neo-Darwinians are probably right, we believe, when they teach that the essential causes of variation are the differences inherent in the germ borne by the individual, and not the experiences or behavior of the individual in the course of his career.”

It is a good guess, though it is going further than Vrahimis does, to postulate that the reason Bergson had to “clench his fists” at the table in 1911 was that Shaw was trying to enlist him as a soldier in the war for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as part of his (Shaw’s) conception of how the eye could come about. That is a war in which Bergson declined to enlist. That was simply not what he meant by the “explosive force … which life bears within itself.” 

More About that Explosive Force

Bergson wrote in Creative Evolution that the various theories of the mechanism of evolution then extant all erred in trying to make evolution out to be a gradual process, where every change is a slow movement across a spectrum of possibles. In Bergson’s view, it wasn’t gradual. It involved key dichotomous choices. 

In particular, as Adam Riggio paraphrased Bergson in a 2016 article: “Matter splits into inert and self-moving, living matter splits into torpor and locomotion, locomotive animals split into instinctual and intelligent, and we reach today. Each of these bifurcations are divergences as the creatures develop different qualities in their tendencies to motion.” And so we end up with rocks, plants, instinct-driven animals, and self-conscious reasoning animals. All may fairly be regarded, in Bergson's view, as the experiments that a creative vital force, working throughout the history of life, has devised.

Each bifurcation on the road to “today” was, one might say, a display of explosive force. “There is radical contingency in progress, incommensurability between what goes before and what follows,” Bergson wrote. The improbable eye came about among complicated mobile creatures because of the improbable interaction of this force with the material world.  

Bacteriology since Bergson’s Day

In his 2016 article Riggio cited that view in order to quarrel with it. He found it a grave difficulty that Bergson never employed the word “bacteria” in his published work. Riggio believes that the development of bacteriology since his day has been fatal to a Bergsonian view of evolution. Plants and animals in particular no longer seem so radically incommensurable once we understand their common bacterial background. Further, when one understands the significance of bacteria in the ecosystem, one can see a fundamental stability in the world that overrides the appearance of mammoth jumps by bifurcation on which Bergson relies.   

Riggio’s argument may not persuade everyone, indeed, Vrahimis’ brief discussion in a chapter endnote indicates that he thinks the story of post-Bergsonian work on evolution is more complicated, and more ambivalent for Bergsonism, than Riggio does. 

Relatedly: it isn’t entirely clear that bacteria (which do have some sensitivity to light) tell us much about the evolution of the structure of the mammalian eye, which concerned Shaw and other Lamarckians, and which may have led to Bergson’s display of anger and Russell’s amusement at a dinner table in 1911. .  

A Deepening But Not an Origin

I suspect there may be much truth to the proposition that the split between analytical and continental philosophy owes much to the way the Bergsonian sun rose and eventually set, on the philosophical world on both sides of the Channel and, indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic. 

But it is important to see that this was not the origin of the split, although it was a deepening. Even as far back as the 17th century, a heated exchange between Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes indicated how far apart they were -- how far not merely from agreeing with one another, but even from comprehending one another.  The two fine minds just could not find a way to grapple directly with one another’s contentions.  It is not much of a stretch to say that this chasm existed because the two men lived and worked within two very different intellectual ecosystems.             

There was already a difference between one side of the channel and the other.