Philosophy on repetitions

The Existential Dread of Being a Dog

hi (hji) — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200

We can make a perhaps surprising Sartrean contribution to this problem, which is especially interesting due to its links with Lacan; this time, instead of Lacan following Sartre, the situation is more the reverse. I am referring to a relatively unknown passage from The Family Idiot. It concerns the life of a pet dog.

“Pure ennui de vivre” is a pearl of culture. It seems clear that household animals are bored; they are homunculae, the dismal reflections of their masters. Culture has penetrated them, destroying nature in them without replacing it. Language is their major frustration: they have a crude understanding of its function but cannot use it; it is enough for them to be the objects of speech – they are spoken to, they are spoken about, they know it. This manifest verbal power which is denied to them cuts through them, settles within them as the limit of their powers, it is a disturbing privation which they forget in solitude and which deprecates their very natures when they are with men. I have seen fear and rage grow in a dog. We were talking about him, he knew it instantly because our faces were turned toward him as he lay dozing on the carpet and because the sounds struck him with full force as if we were addressing him. Nevertheless we were speaking to each other. He felt it; our words seemed to designate him as our interlocutor and yet reached him blocked. He did not quite understand either the act itself or this exchange of speech, which concerned him far more than the usual hum of our voices – that lively and meaningless noise with which men surround themselves – and far less than an order given by his master or a call supported by a look or gesture. Or rather – for the intelligence of these humanized beasts is always beyond itself, lost in the imbroglio of its presence and its impossibilities – he was bewildered at not understanding what he understood. He began by waking up, bounding toward us, but stopped short, then whined with an uncoordinated agitation and finished by barking angrily. This dog passed from discomfort to rage, feeling at his expense the strange reciprocal mystification which is the relationship between man and animal. (Sartre, The Family Idiot, vol. 1, trans. Carol Cosman, p. 137-138)

As Lacan would say, Sartre’s dog is the object of the discourse of the Other, caught inside of yet excluded from the symbolic order. And it is as if the beast were frozen there, stuck in that object-position, unable to do anything but growl and whimper. While the human has a mastery of language that the dog can never possess, it too bears within itself the echo of this same existential malaise. There is no fully cultural being, no human that is not a “humanized beast”: the gap between nature and culture is never completely bridged, the human remains a creature of this unstable transition, always in a process of becoming. And to connect this idea of a gap with our previous discussion: in Lacanian terms, Sartre’s pet dog is confronted by the Thing, a zone of confusion and disorientation which is covered neither by nature (the compass of pleasure and unpleasure) nor by culture (institutional laws and norms). The dog is caught in the empty transition or caesura between instincts and institutions, and it is this gap that is the cause of the “reciprocal mystification” between humans and animals – a mystification that the human animal has internalized, and which constitutes its blurry and unstable difference.

[…] For Deleuze, the dog’s bow-wow is the stupidest cry of the animal kingdom. But maybe its dumb cries are not simply those of training and obedience, but express a more uncanny becoming that got stuck halfway. “Thus childhood is no longer an age but an animal category: there are monkeys, there are dogs, there are children. Perhaps, if carefully inspected, the child is merely a dog who is unaware of itself.” (Sartre, The Family Idiot, vol. 1, 346.)

Schuster, Aaron. 2016. The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. Short Circuits. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 148 ff.

Figure 1: Deleuze, Barking. (source)

On the Publication History of Durée et Simultanéité

hi (hji) — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In the German translation of Deleuze’s Bergsonism there’s a translators note, pointing out that Bergson supposedly did not want Durée et Simultanéité republished and even put that restriction into his will:

Einem späteren Nachdruck von Durée et Simultanéité (1922) hat Bergson nicht zugestimmt und diesen auch testamentarisch untersagt; der Text wurde erst 30 Jahre nach Bergsons Tod wieder zugänglich gemacht. Vgl. Henri Bergson, Mélanges, hg. von A. Robinet, Paris 1972. (Deleuze 2007, 56)

Bergson did not agree to a later reprint of Durée et Simultanéité (1922) and prohibted it in his will as well; only 30 years after Bergsons death the text was made available again. See Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. A. Robinet, Paris 1972. (my Translation)

The note is attached to a passage in which Deleuze himself comments on Bergson supposedly renouncing the book. But unlike Deleuze Weinmann gives us a concrete reference.

Weinmann refers to the 1972 Collection Mélanges (Bergson 1972), which collected besides Duration and Simultaneity, Bergsons latin dissertation on Aristotles’ concept of place and Écrits et Paroles. In his Avant-Propos¹ Henri Gouhier writes that Duration and Simultaneity was excluded from an earlier collection of Bergsons works published in 1959 (probably Bergson 1959b). The reason given then was a letter from Édouard Le Roy to Rose-Marie Mossé-Bastide, who published this letter as a preface to Écrits et Paroles (Bergson 1957, 1959a). In it, Le Roy claimed that Bergson had forbidden to republish Durée et Simultanéité. Yet, Gouhier notes, this claim could not be substantiated by any evidence. Bergson had indeed left detailed instructions, banning previously unpublished manuscripts and letters from being published posthumously but left no such instructions for Duration and Simultaneity and so its seventh edition had already been published in 1968 with an avertissement signed by Jean Wahl, Henri Gouhier, Jean Guitton and Vladimir Jankélévitch, which is also reproduced as part of the preface to Mélanges.

Weinmann’s note is not only unsubstantiated, it also cites a source that says the opposite of what he claims. Though it’s worth noting that the 1959 Édition du Centenaire was, like Mélanges in 1972, edited by André Robinet and provided with a preface by Henri Gouhier. It’s not unlikely that Weinmann either mixed up his references or wanted to cite the newer collection that actually included Duration and Simulataneity without actually reading the preface with the justification of the publication.

As for Deleuze’s own comment to which Weinmann’s note is attached, it’s clear that Deleuze too is referencing Le Roy’s letter:

Bergson’s renunciation and condemnation of this book is perhaps due to the fact that he did not feel able to pursue the mathematical implications of a theory of multiplicities. (Deleuze 1991, 39)

though as Le Bergsonisme was published in 1968, written before the 7th edition of Durée et Simultanéité 1968 was published, Deleuze didn’t have reason to doubt Le Roy.

On a related note, Jimena Canales comments on Le Roy’s claim in her excellent Book The Physicist and the Philosopher, though she claims on her part that it was Le Roy himself who published Bergsons Work in the 1950s:

In the 1950s Le Roy compiled Bergson’s collected works. He decided not to include Duration and Simultaneity in the collection, leaving the impression in the eyes of many that Bergson himself did not endorse the book. But that was hardly the case. Bergson never recanted a single word he had written or said about Einstein’s theory of relativity. (Canales 2015, 61)

I’m not sure which collection she refers to here, Le Roy died in 1954 and the Collections I’m aware of were published after his death in 1957 and 1959 (Bergson 1959a, 1959b), he might have been involved with the editorial of those before his death but I was not able to verify that beyond his letter to Mossé-Bastide. From Gouhiers account, it also seems to me that Le Roy had a much more active interest in preventing the republication of the Book than Canales implies here.

In any case it might be interesting to follow up on Le Roys reasons for trying to bury Duration and Simultaneity with Bergson.

References

Bergson, Henri. 1957. Écrits et Paroles. Edited by Rose-Marie Mossé-Bastide. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Paris: Alcan.

———. 1959a. Écrits et Paroles. Edited by Rose-Marie Mossé-Bastide. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Paris: Alcan.

———. 1959b. Œuvres. Edited by André Robinet. Édition du centenaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

———. 1968. Durée et Simultanéité. À Propos de La Théorie d’Einstein. 7ᵉ édition. Bibliothèque de Philosophie Contemporaine. Paris: PUF.

———. 1972. Mélanges. Edited by André Robinet. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Canales, Jimena. 2015. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton Oxford: Princeton Univers. Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Reissue Edition. New York: Zone Books.

———. 2007. Henri Bergson Zur Einführung. Translated by Martin Weinmann. 4th ed. Hamburg: Junius.

Here is the entire relevant section of Gouhiers Preface (in French):

Dans le recueil publié en 1959, on lisait,p. 1574, àpropos de Durée et Simultanéité: «Cet ouvrage de Bergson ne figure pas dans les presentes Œuvres pour les raisons indiquées par E. Le Roy, Lettre-Préface à Écrits et Paroles, t. I, p. VII-VIII.» Or, toutes les recherches entreprises pour connaitre l’origine de ces raisons ont abomeme dans le tèmoignage d’Edouard Le Roy, rien n’incline à supposer qu’il renonçait définitivement à toute publication future. C’est pourquoi, en 1968, l’ouvrage a été réimprimé avec cet Avertissement pour la septième édition:

Dans la lettre du 29 septembre 1953 à Mme Rose-Marie Mossé-Bastide, qui sert de préface au recueil Ecrits et paroles, Edouard Le Roy écrivait : « Il est clair que nous devons respecter l’interdiction de Bergson quant à la publication d’inédits; mais ne rentrent pas dans ce cas les textes qu’il a publiés lui-même. A cet régard, la question de la relativité soulève une difficulté: je pense toujours que la solution s’en trouve dans les remarques concernant la double notion du réel. Je répondrais volontiers à Einstein que lui-même ne comprend pas bien la position de Bergson. Mais il faut connaitre entièrement celle-ci; j’en ai longuement causé avec Bergson, il n’a pas fait d’objection à ma remarque, mais il a ajouté avec insistance que le défaut de ses connaissances mathématiques ne lui permettait pas de suivre avec le détail nécessaire le développement de la relativité généralisée et qu’en conséquence il estimait plus sage, pour sa part, de laisser tomber la question. De là son refus de laisser réimprimet Durée et simultanéité.»

Rappelons les faits. En 1922, Bergson publie à la Librairie Félix Alcan Durée et simultanéité (A propos de la théorie d’Einstein). Le 6 avril 1922, Bergson rencontre Einstein à la séance de la Société française de Philosophie (Bull. Soc.fr. Phil., juillet 1922, Ecrits et Paroles, III, pp. 497 et sq.). L’annee suivante parait une deuxième édition du livre avec un nouvel Avant-Propos et trois Appendices; l’un de ces Appendices était une réponse à des observations du physicien Jean Becquerel parues dans le Bulletin scientifique des Étudiants de Paris de mars 1923 et dans son introduction à l’ouvrage d’André Metz sur Ea Relativité. En 1924, Bergson envoie à la Revue de philosophie une Eettre sur les temps fictifs et les temps réels, en réponse à un article d’André Metz; une Réplique de M. André Metz provoque une seconde lettre du philosophe. Ces discussions n’empechent pas ce dernier de réimprimer son livre sans changement: une sixième édition parait en 1931. La décision de «laisser tomber la question» serait donc postérieure à cette date.

Ceci dit, quelle est la portée exacte du «refus» dont parlait Edouard Le Roy? Préférer, dans certaines circonstances, ne pas réimprimer un livre est une chose; interdite sa réimpression en est une autre: rien ne permet de penser que Bergson ait même envisagé la seconde.

Dans son testament du 8 février 1937, Bergson formule de façon très précise les interdictions concernant ses manuscrits et ses lettres: s’il avait eu l’intention d’interdire la réédition de Durée et simultanéité, comment ne l’aurait-il pas dit? Or on ne trouve aucune allusion à cet ouvrage ni dans le texte du testament, ni dans les codicilles. Bien plus, dans La Pensée et le Mouvant, une très longue note expose, une fois encore, la pensée de Bergson sur la relativité; elle appartient aux pages ajoutées par l’auteur au texte de 1922, sans doute en 1933, et publiées l’année suivante. Or, sans le moindre embarras, le philosophe écrit: « Nous avons jadis consacré un livre à la démonstration de ces différents points. Nous ne pouvons le résumer dans une simple note. Mais, comme le livre a souvent été mal compris, nous croyons devoir reproduire ici le passage essentiel d’un article où nous donnions la raison de cette incompréhension… » Suit une explication tirée de la réponse à M. André Metz (Edition du Centenaire, p. 1280, n. 1). Dans ces conditions, on ne voit pas pourquoi le public resterait plus longtemps privé d’un texte aussi important, dont l’intérêt philosophique et historique est tout à fait indépendant des discussions proprement scientifiques et techniques qu’il a pu provoquer¹.

¹: Avertissement signé : Jean Wahl, Henri Gouhier, Jean Guitton, Vladimir Jankélévitch.

Bergson 1972 X-XII.

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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.