Bergson on Substance (in the Creative Mind)

hi (hji) — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Bergson is criticising Metaphysics thus far for thinking “they are telling us something about the absolute by giving it a name.” (Bergson 2007a 49)

The name varies between Philosophers and traditions but in the end all these different names “become synonyms of “being” and consequently synonyms of each other.” (Bergson 2007a 49)

Now we need to understand why Bergson thinks this is a problem, so let’s look at this bit:

no matter what name you give to the “thing itself,” whether you make of it the Substance of Spinoza, the Ego of Fichte, the Absolute of Schelling, the Idea of Hegel, or the Will of Schopenhauer, it will be useless for the word to present itself with its well-defined signification: it will lose it; it will be emptied of all meaning from the moment it is applied to the totality of things. (Bergson 2007a 49)

Here we get a bit more: by simply giving a name to being and tying everything back to it they eliminate difference, which in turn eliminates the signification of the concept they’re trying to get at

But the concept thus arrived at with its undetermined content, or rather lack of content, the concept which is no longer anything at all, we insist that it be everything. (Bergson 2007a 50)

This is the crucial point: 1. The concept of being is empty 2. precisely because it’s aim is to eliminate difference, the heterogeneity of things.

So against the proposition of being Bergson proposes that

The truth is that an existence can be given only in an experience. This experience will be called vision or contact, exterior perception in general, if it is a question of a material object; it will take the name of intuition when it has to do with the mind.

Note that here he is talking not about existence in general but an existence, the existance of a thing. When he first brings up the critique of “Substance, Ego, Idea, Will” as singular unifying concepts he follows it up with saying that

[Philosophy] would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one? Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. (Bergson 2007a 30)

Now we have the starting point for Bergsons philosophy, not an assumption of systematic unity of the world, but empirical heterogeneity. It is through experience that we get to change, since Bergsons analysis of experience insists that first intuition, then perception are fundamentally constituted by movement or change. States or things become secondary to change, they’re cuts, practical abstractions, through the analysis of the indivisibility of change (in MMch3 and CM:*The Perception of Change*) he comes to the conclusion that

There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile. (Bergson 2007b 157) […] But the whole mechanism of our perception of things, like the mechanism of our action upon things has been regulated in such a way as to bring about, between the external and the internal mobility, a situation comparable to that of our two trains,—more complicated, perhaps, but of the same kind: when the two changes, that of the object and that of the subject, take place under particular conditions, they produce the particular appearance that we call a “state.” (Bergson 2007b 157)

This notion of change as substance, resolves in Bergsons view a lot, if not all problems he sees with the notions of substance of the “Moderns” (Bergson 2007b 167) he criticized before. Notably substance no longer receeds “little by little to the regions of the unknowable” since it is present in experience, since we found it in experience. Substance being unknowable is for Bergson an effect of the privileging of being we started with. Because by starting with the assumption of the existence of things, metaphysics has a hard time to deal with change, it has to conceive it as “multiplicity of states replacing other states” the idea of things-in-itself, by whatever name it goes, serves the purpose of connecting these states, providing an immobile substratum. But because all we find in experience is change, this immobile substratum, existence given a name, eludes us.

Let us, on the contrary, endeavor to perceive change as it is in its natural indivisibility: we see that it is the very substance of things, and neither does movement appear to us any longer under the vanishing form which rendered it elusive to thought, nor substance with the immutability which made it inaccessible to our experience. Radical instability and absolute immutability are therefore mere abstract views taken from outside of the continuity of real change, abstractions which the mind then hypostasizes into multiple states on the one hand, into thing or substance on the other. (Bergson 2007b 167)

So the difference between Bergsons metaphysics and the metaphysics he criticizes is that he does not start with the idea of being, eliminating difference, but starts with the experience of change, which is difference.

References

Bergson, Henri. 2007a. “Stating the Problems.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.

———. 2007b. “The Perception of Change.” In The Creative Mind, translated by Mabelle L. Andison. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.

Erfahrung on repetitions

Bergson on Substance (in the Creative Mind)

References