Bergson - Part 2 : Olivia Hatalsky

1. This second section of Bergson's "Modern Science" is concerned with the evolution of scientific though between ancient and modern methods. The primary example used here is the emergence of taxonomies. From as early as the first paragraph strong ties were made to a Foucauldian way of thinking. Bergson stated “signs substitute for the objects themselves”(329) which relates, in my mind, to Foucault’s theory that with out current modes of seeing, the word and “sign”, as Bergson referred to it, have come to be more valuable than the actual three-dimensional objects they represent. The way in which our mind simplifies and categorizes, what Bergson calls “laws of genera” (330), referring the scientific toxonimization of our world has caused both scientists and humans alike to overlook to gaps between both different objects as well as the relationship between symbols and the objects that they represent. Yes Bergson emphasizes that cinematographical vision is wrong, but why are the “intervals between moments” that are overlooked with this type of vision so valuable to him? In a sense, modern man has tried to conquer time through science by breaking it into smaller pieces dissecting each moment for more study, but what Bergson seems to comprehend is that man’s current mode of seeing does replicated the real it only distorts it. Although the title of the piece is “Creative Evolution”, which seems to condone new attempts at understanding and representing time, Platonic and Aristotelian Ideas are lacking, while to current modes do too much and alter the real.

2. It is easy to think that Bergson is just a senile old man who doesn’t like the technological changes caused by film occurring around him. But is there something more? Is it more that just a pure invalidation of technological advances? I actually believe that he has taking a page from the works of Walter Benjamin who believed that with capturing a moment through any reproductive mean detracts from the original “aura”. Yet Bergson takes this argument a step further. Even the discussion of a moment through language detracts from the “total definition or description of a period.” (110) This occurs because instead of describing one single fact, several distinguishable phases are noted. With the sentence “none of them has the right to set itself as a moment that represents or dominates the others” Bergson virtually invalidates the idea of the pregnant moment. This is almost to say that the sum of all of the cinematographically created moments do not add up to the actual real period. In essence, the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. And although the view from a camera is far more precise than that of an eye, this still doesn’t seem to compensate for the intervals of time missed between moments recorded.

3. There are two types of knowledge that Bergson introduces. The first is cinematographical and the second states that “we should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what shape a system will take… it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow.”(342) This second kind of knowledge which displaces cinematographical vision almost calls humans to appreciate the current moment—smell the flowers. But this isn’t a fortune cookie instructing its reader to focus on today and deal with tomorrow when it comes. Furthermore Bergson describes this second knowledge as “practically useless”(343) because it will not extend mans domain over the real. So why is it here? It only exposes that the first type of knowledge (cinematographical), which allows people to foresee the future, is again, a fraud. This vision is just a representation of the real which is actually going on currently. Bergson seemingly want to have his cake and eat it too. He want to pure vision of reality, but at the same time he craves a “empire over nature”(343). How is this possible? Man is still a slave to time no matter that he can break a day into 24 hours or re-watch a moment that happened in the past. Scientific knowledge has tried to give man a greater understanding of time and nature by forming hierarchies and taxonomies of information. This mosaic of information is incomplete, as Bergson discusses. Yes, like the lapses of time missed by cinematographical time, scientific knowledge is not a real portrayal of the world, but it is an attempt for further understanding. Vision through this mode is incomplete, but does Bergson have a better suggestion for understanding the world?

-Olivia Hatalsky

Bergson's Creative Evolution Pt. 2 - Jamal Hunt

1. In the “Modern Science” section of the reading, Bergson first compares the goals of ancient and modern science. Ancient science was essentially concerned with the pregnant moment: the “ideas of Plato or of Aristotle correspond to privileged or salient moments. They…characterize a period of which they express the quintessence” (110). Modern science, on the other hand, strives to describe something at every possible point in time. That is to say, it tries to break up time into an infinite number of pieces and be able to describe each one through empirical laws. Bergson relates this shift in scientific thought to the invention of photography and film. Instead of painting a horse galloping as our eye sees it, we photograph it many times and treat all instances as equal. Instead of thinking about the falling of an object, scientists ignore any specific fall and try to develop an equation to predict the position of any falling object at any time (110). Modern science works toward a functional end, and to do so it depends completely on discrete units of time on which to calculate. This first section is almost entirely intuitive and does not challenge our normal view of time. Bergson takes a relatively long while to prove something we all know: science is interested in quantitative results and it relies on strict calculation to get those results. By doing so, he lays the groundwork for his real argument that follows.

2. Objections to Bergson’s case for time being an indivisible flow are almost all related to science somehow. Any non-scientific objection can easily be chalked up to a natural resistance to a change in our conditioned view of the world. In addition to being counterintuitive, indivisible time seems to make any scientific question impossible to answer. It seeks to destroy the functional division of time that governs our lives. By binding science so strongly to the interval measurement of time, Bergson can reconcile science and fluctual time and remove science as an opponent to it. He first explains that fluctual time has no meaning to science. Modern science “always considers moments, always virtual stopping-places, always, in short, immobilities. Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as a flux…escapes the hold of scientific knowledge” (113). Science cannot exist without points in time to calculate on. Here, just when any scientist is apt to be at their most extreme opposition to a continuous view of time, Bergson quite brilliantly explains that in fact, his view of the world and science can coexist. Precisely because of the modern scientist’s inattention to specific instances, science and fluctual time are not mutually exclusive. In his words, what “is important to the physicist is the number of units of duration the process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves and that is why the successive states of the world might be spread out all at once in space without his having change anything in his science or to cease talking about time. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that matter” (114). Correct proportions are the only things that matter in calculations, so science can continue unchecked even if everyone embraces the true nature of time. Bergson seems to be making a sort of covert compromise by indicating that it is acceptable for the functionally useful façade of divisible time to continue as long as we all realize that it is only a construction and that in reality time never stops. Suddenly his ideas do not seem quite so difficult to consider.

3. Bergson’s most interesting idea in this section involves a reversal of the usual view of the constancy of time. It is easy to imagine that although time fluctuates quite a bit based on our experience—time flying during fun or slowing to a crawl during a boring activity—there is some external clock that ticks away at a constant pace. He begins with the example of waiting for a sugar cube to melt: “While the duration of the phenomenon is relative for the physicist,…this duration is an absolute for my consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience which is rigorously determined” (114). Certainly this makes sense; a person looking at the amount of time over which the event took later sees only a number. Their experience of it takes only as long as their eyes are on the page or their mind is on the matter. Bergson dwells on his complete lack of power to influence the period of the melting. His experience of that time (the “psychical duration” as he calls it) is absolutely forced upon him. Though this makes little sense looking from a scientific perspective, it has a kind of undeniable visceral truth. To me, to everyone, the only absolute time is the time each person experiences. Every other time is only imagined and can be purposefully distorted to any amount, whereas our experienced time is out of our direct control.

4. Bergson goes further with this idea and relates it to art. Considering a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a painting, he posits that because the child will get better at finishing the puzzle after multiple experiences, its completion time will move toward instantaneous. The time taken is variable and not absolute. On the other hand, an artist making a painting is creating something. The act of creation “is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered” (115). The puzzle will never change no matter how long it takes to put it together, but the real painting must take a certain amount of time or it would not be the same painting. That is to say, the act of creation in itself creates absolute time. “Time is invention or it is nothing at all” (115). This theory values art and creation highly and is perhaps a criticism of our abandonment of genuine art for a manufactured third-person timescale. Bergson seems fed up with the fake construction of an interval-based existence. His ultimate point is simple: It “will appear the necessity of a continual growth of the universe, I should say of a life of the real” (116). Almost paradoxically, this call for a life of the real harkens to the original quest of science for absolute truth. According to Bergson, our quest has sadly led us farther away from truth rather than closer to it.

Bergson's Creative Evolution - Ethan Makhluf

1. In the selection from Bergson’s work “Creative Evolution”, he theorizes on the function and basis of human intellect. “The function of the intellect is to preside over actions. Now, in action, it is the result that interests us; the means matter little provided the end is attained” (99). Bergson gets his idea across by using the analogy of a person lifting their arm. This action requires several steps to complete, yet the human mind does not consider all the muscles contractions and tensions required – it just envisions the end result. The rest – the steps involved to produce the action – “elude our consciousness or reach it only confusedly” (99). Bergson finds that human perception is based on distinguishing qualities such as color and sound from different persons, objects, and motions. What does it say about human intellect if the main function of it is simply presiding over actions? What then drives the actions themselves, and do we have control over this seemingly arbitrary force? This, combined with his idea that the steps involved in an action either completely elude our conscience or confuse us, and we could assume that, while not outright faulting humans, Bergson does not think as highly of the human mind as others would have you believe. Further, if the human intellect is only concerned with the end result for such frivolous actions as raising an arm, does this apply to more serious concerns and actions? For some, if not many, this would seem true.

2. It seems as though Bergson is criticizing the way the human mind perceives things. With the human arm analogy, Bergson notes that the mind only thinks of the end result. It is as if nothing happens from when the arm leaves point A and arrives at point B. Bergson, though, states “the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition” (101). He finds reality to be fluid and continuous, and since our perception chops up this reality into different forms and re-presents it, our mind is essentially tricking us. Bergson’s main idea is his comparison of this way of perception to a cinematograph. Our mind works much the same way as a cinematograph, which for instance could take several pictures of soldiers in formation and then animate it to suggest or recreate the action of marching. “We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of reality, we have only to string them on a becoming…situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself”(103). With that said, maybe Bergson isn’t criticizing the way the human mind perceives things – after all, how could this be helped? It simply is. Rather, perhaps Bergson is criticizing cinema/film.

3. Bergson also talks about the motion of an arrow, specifically the break down or “spatializing” of its path (the same diagram we saw in class). He says that you cannot break up the movements of the arrow mathematically, that it is one constant motion, never stopping. There is only a starting point, point A, and an ending point, point B. This is related to the idea of a human being progressing through life. Bergson notes that we imagine stops on the evolution of life – infancy, adolescence, maturity, old age. Like the arrow though, Bergson feels life travels along a path, never stopping along the way, but constantly changing: “The reality, which is the transition from childhood to manhood, has slipped between our fingers…[becoming] is the reality itself” (106). To see – for lack of a better word – correctly, Bergson says we must “escape from the cinematographical mechanism of thought” (106). Bergson believes that in life there are no distinguishable stops - or check points, in a sense - that can be applied from birth to death. Life is a constant state of transition. From this we could perhaps extract his own opinion about evolution itself: the human of today is not the end point of the evolution process, we are still in a state of transition/evolution (however slow and indiscernible it may be) and will undoubtedly look, act, and think different down the line.

Ethan Makhluf