The Test of Time: Human and Cosmic Time

Abstract

The ultimate project of Bergsonism is to find a ‘living unity’ that welcomes life, consciousness, and the material universe. But it proves difficult for this philosophy, which starts from the experience of conscious life and takes the immediate data of consciousness as its guiding principle, to connect our subjective and private psycho-vital experience to the ‘objective’ and common reality of the universe. In fact, the very concept of the material universe is heavily saturated with intellectual representations that leave no room for a ‘living unit’. It is precisely at this level that the debate between Einstein and Bergson gains importance. From Bergson’s point of view, there is no way to grasp the real nature of time but by living it; we can only start from the intuition we have of our own conscious, lived experience. In this paper we want to show how Bergson constructs a ‘plane’ of nature – that is a plane of light – that connects the duration of the universe to the duration of the self. A plane in which nature is understood as the univocal feuilletage of durations that we experience: nothing more nor less than the unity of spirit, life, and matter 1 Science and Philosophy: Two Different Methods For Bergson, the relationship between science and philosophy is essential. Science is not second or secondary. It has its own method, different from that of metaphysics, and its own kind of precision. In The Creative Mind, Bergson says that science touches the absolute and then, the real. But this was not a new thesis. Bergson had already expressed it in Creative Evolution: Positive science, indeed, may pride itself on the uniform value attributed to its affirmations in the whole field of experience. But, if they are all placed on the same footing, they are all tainted with the same relativity. It is not so, if we begin by making the distinction which, in our view, is forced upon us. The understanding is at home in the domain of unorganised matter. On this matter human action is naturally exercised; and action, as we said above, cannot be set in motion in the unreal. Thus, of physics, – so long as we are considering only its general form and not the particular cutting out of matter in which it is manifested – we may say that it touches the absolute. On the contrary, it is by accident – chance OpenAccess. © 2022 Pierre Montebello, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753707-011 or convention, as you please – that science obtains a hold on the living analogous to the hold it has on matter. Here the use of conceptual frames is no longer natural. I do not wish to say that it is not legitimate, in the scientific meaning of the term. If science is to extend our action on things, and if we can act only with inert matter for instrument, science can and must continue to treat the living as it has treated the inert... But, in doing so, it must be understood that the further it penetrates the depths of life, the more symbolic, the more relative to the contingencies of action, the knowledge. On this new ground philosophy ought then to follow science, in order to superpose one scientific truth a knowledge of another kind which may be called metaphysical [Thus combined, all our knowledge both scientific and metaphysical, is heightened]. In the absolute we live and move and have our being. The knowledge we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external or relative. It is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the word, that we reach by the combined and progressive development of science and of philosophy (Bergson 1922, 209–210). Let us take up Bergson’s arguments again: what is interesting about science is not its uniform approach to both physical matter and other kinds of objects (life, living beings, consciousness, and spirit).What is usually seen as an advantage (science’s generality) becomes, for Bergson, a defect. Science does not really grasp life or spirit starting from matter and therefore its knowledge is merely relative. Science treats objects as unreal phenomena. Yet it succeeds in one area: that of action on matter. At this level, science even touches reality, grappling with it even if through mathematical and geometrical formulas. In fact, intelligence – science’s organum/instrument – cannot be unreal since, for Bergson, it is, properly speaking, action on the real. So, in its general form, science ‘touches the absolute’, although in its detailed form it forgets time – real time, which is duration – considering only space. Intelligence, then, is not only symbolic or artificial: it has access to the real. Intelligence only become symbolic when it leaves the sphere of action on matter and tries to understand life, living beings, consciousness and spirit, all of which it considers to be inert. Symbolic, for Bergson, means conventional and relative. But if intelligence is symbolic it is because it is weighed down by the need to act. Intelligence has to organise our action in the world and, therefore, it cannot take change and duration into account. One can act only by leaning on what is fixed, motionless, and not on what is continuously becoming. Nevertheless, Bergson does not consider science and philosophy to be in opposition; instead, he assigns philosophy the task of grasping that absolute which science can only touch symbolically. Philosophy, in fact, can touch the absoluteness of non-material objects (life, consciousness, God), building true metaphysical knowledge. And this is why Bergson makes Saint Paul’s famous assertion from the Act of the Apostles, ‘In God we live and move and have our being’ the key concept of his philosophy – on condition, of course, that ‘we replace “God” with the “Absolute”’ (Bergson 1911, 210). Indeed, from the point of view of the Absolute wherever we are, we are 166 Pierre Montebello