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    Matter and Light in Bergson's Creative Evolution

    Pierre Montebello, Roxanne Lapidus

    SubStance, Issue 114 (Volume 36, Number 3), 2007, pp. 91-99 (Article)

    Published by University of Wisconsin Press

    DOI: 10.1353/sub.2007.0047

    For additional information about this article

    Access provided by Yeditepe Universitesi (3 Feb 2014 07:24 GMT)

    http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v036/36.3montebello.html

    http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v036/36.3montebello.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v036/36.3montebello.html
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    Matter and Light

    in Bergsons Creative EvolutionPierre Montebello

    Bergsonism is characterized by its quest for a living unity thatwould link life, consciousness and the material universe. Clearly, for aphilosopher who takes as his starting point the experience of conscious

    life, and whose line of inquiry concerns what our experience registers,the most difficult aspect is to connect this psycho-vital experience tomatter. This difficulty is not unique to Bergsonism; most of thephilosophies of nature at the end of the nineteenth century and thebeginning of the twentieth century that consider the question ofcosmological unity (especially those of Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Tarde)find that matter poses a problem. The concept of matter seems heavilysaturated with intellectual representations that prevent its beingincluded in the living unity of the cosmos. Therefore it is not surprising

    that Bergson considered one of the most important stakes of CreativeEvolutionto be the comprehension of the material universe as being of thesame nature as the self. Thus he told the Socit Franaise de la Philosophiein1908 that One of the objects of Creative Evolutionis to show that All is [...]of the same nature as the I, and that one grasps it by a more and morecomplete immersion in oneself (Mlanges, 774).

    This renewal of the concept of matter began for Bergson inMatter andMemory(1896). As we know, this book established a connection betweenthe universe and the living subjecta participation of living duration in

    the duration of the universe, at every level of life. It shows that the brain,when isolated, produces nothing, neither interiority nor thought. Onlythe relationship between the living body and the material universeproduces an effect of consciousness, which, being transmitted by memoryand personal history, enables a more and more intense participation inthe universe. Thus the first chapter ofMatter and Memoryestablishes thatwe can deduce from our perception that the universe is a form of durationconnected to our own, although independent from our own. The material

    universe endures, as does our consciousness, and it is presented to us insuch a way that we apprehend it as an appearance in itself, larger that theself, through which life opens itself to its own structure as appearance/perception. I cannot linger here on this paradox of appearance in itself;

    Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2007 91

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    suffice it to say that to perceive images is always also to perceive thatthese images escape toward a level of the universe where they exist as

    themselves. This appearance in itself of the universe is deduced via ourperception; it is that onto which our perception opens; our perceptiondoes not create it, for there already is openingwithout this openingour perception would be blind.

    InCreative Evolution, Bergson proposes to pursue this meditation. This,in sum, is what he tells the philosophical society on that same August 8,1908, when he comparesMatter and Memoryand Creative Evolution:

    In the first of these two book, it is shown that the objectivity of thematerial thing is immanent to the perception that we have of it, provided

    that one takes this perception at its raw state and in its immediateform. In the second, it is established that immediate intuition seizesthe essence of life as well as that of matter. (Mlanges, 773)

    At this same meeting, Bergson would defend the idea of a knowledgewhere the act of knowing coincides with the act generating reality (ibid.).

    To grasp the essence of matter is in fact to grasp it through thegenerative act that produces it. Now, at the level of methodology, we canonly proceed by starting from the intuition we have of our experience ofconscious life. The only path open to knowledge is to follow the irrevocable

    witness of our consciousness. Already in following this path in Matterand Memory, what Bergson encounters is a universe constantly in trans-formation, made up of images in themselvesa universe of energy, whichbursts forth. Creative Evolutiondoes not change itsmethodology: startingwith ourselves, with our existence, we can only arrive at a durationimmanent to the whole of the universe (CE, 11). In these two books, it isnot simply our consciousness that attests to this; it is also a tendencythat can be seen in science. Matter and Memory was inspired byelectromagnetism, and draws upon the works ofThompson and Faraday:

    ... the nearer we draw to the ultimate elements of matter the better wenote the vanishing of that discontinuity which our senses perceivedon the surface. Psychological analysis has already revealed to usthat this discontinuity is relative to our needs : every philosophy ofnature ends by finding it incompatible with the general properties ofmatter. (MM, 266)

    Thus science itself incites us to see in matter only modifications,perturbations, changes of tension or of energy, and nothing else (ibid.).Matter and Memorydoes not fail to cite Maxwell, who, as early as 1864,

    showed that light is a form of electromagnetic wave.1Although it wasntuntil 1924 that particles of matter such as electrons were also consideredas possessing wave-like properties, and people began to speak of waves

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    of matter, as early as the 1860s, atomic matter was considered to dissolveinto immaterial fields of force.2 Thus we must acknowledge that in Creative

    Evolution, electromagnetic science is present, as indicated in references toFaradays atomic penetration, to the discovery that each atom fills theworldin other words, references to the idea of fields of force. Bergsonreiterates this when he affirms that science as well as consciousnessmakes us understand that a material point is a simple view of the mind(MM, 204). Electromagnetic physics confirms that solid bodies are notprimary, that matter is first waves and light, indivisible energy andcontinuous flow. Consequently, there is no hiatus between whatconsciousness reveals to us and what science tends to show: Science

    and consciousness basically agree, says Bergson inMatter and Memory(221).The more physics advances, the more it effaces the individualityof bodies and even of the particles into which the scientific imaginationbegan by decomposing them: bodies and corpuscles tend to dissolve intoa universal interaction (CE, 88). Bergson would say it again later in theintroductory essays of The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics(LaPense et le mouvant, written in 1922, published in1934), showing that it isindeed science that served as vector for this movement, even if it doesnot follow the movement all the way to the end, because of itsconventions:

    Sooner or later, I thought, physics will be brought around to thepoint of seeing in the fixity of the element a form of mobility. Whenthat day came, it is true, science would probably give up looking foran imaged representation of it, the image of a movement being thatof a moving point (that is to say, always of a minute solid). (CM, 85)

    Creative Evolution will explain this limit on the part of science bysaying that the cutting out of matter and the constitution of closedsystems are the essential work of physics. Bergson writes that sciences

    claim that matter isdecomposable into isolated systems,as well assciences regarding matter as decomposable into isolated systems, inattributing to it quite distinct elements which change in relation to eachother without changing in themselves (which are displaced, shall wesay, without being altered), in short, in conferring on matter theproperties of pure space (CE, 203), science also necessarily accentuatesthe spatiality of matter even when matter already is a tendency towardspatialization, as will be shown.3

    Unlike science, philosophy will go to the limits of this

    dematerialization, by withdrawing matter from spatializing andrepresentationalistintelligence and making it a kind of duration. CreativeEvolutioncontributes something specific on this point, not present in

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    Matter and Memory: a reflection on the living genesis of the various areas ofknowledge, and thus on the reciprocal genesis of intellectuality and

    materiality. This reciprocal genesis of materiality and intellectualitymakes clear that it is always in our intellectual (hence scientific)representation that matter materializes and solidifies. According toBergson, matter inevitably accentuates its materiality, when viewedby the mind (CE, 202). To say that materiality derives fromintellectuality is to confirm Kants thesis of the ideality of space. Ourintelligence is admittedly quite infused with spatiality, but for vitalreasons that Kant did not grasp. With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of our perceptive faculty a veritable deus ex machina (CE,

    205). To set in motion the living genesis of intelligence is thus also tosituate that which goes beyond intelligence, which does not arise fromit; it is to proceed in a dematerialization of matter that is better foundedthan that of science. Science works in the direction of materiality, but notin the direction of duration. Now, even matter is not in itself ascompletely extended in space as our senses and intellect represent it(CE, 202). Bergson repeats this point several times in Creative Evolution:although matter stretches itself out in the direction of space, it does notcompletely attain it (CE, 207). Our psychovital experience attests thatmatter is not reducible to the spatialization that intellectuality proposes,that the material universe endures. On the contrary, a matter that isentirely intellectualized is a spatialized, geometrized matter, withoutact or movementimmobile and without energy. It is a matter that isspread out, unfolded, deployed to fit exactly into the representation thatintelligence makes of it. Thus all its parts are divisible and can beseparated, ad infinitum. No transformations take place in it; it has onlyrelative movements (following cartesian and galilean mechanism)

    movements of transport. Such intellectualized matter is continuous, butin a mathematical continuum that only represents the abstract possibilityof a division ad infinitum, and with the caveat that division is not the onlychoice possible. In reality, this abstract continuity is not a continuity ofmovementit underlies precisely the discontinuity of intellectualdivisions, and the fact is that for our own needs we always invokediscontinuity, and thus atoms, points, grains, particles, bodies and things.When one retraces the intellectual genesis of matter, it is pointless tocontrast atomism with geometry, continuity with discontinuity, for

    intellectual analysis is mathematically continuous and physicallydiscontinuous. Hence Bergsons well-known thesis: Intelligence onlyrepresents the discontinuous (CE, 155), but upon a background of

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    idealized and mathematical continuity. For us as living and consciousbeings, the opposition is not between atomism and geometrism, but

    between radiance and substance, energy and space, matter that spreadsand matter that is spread, the absolute movement of transformationand the relative movement of transport, intellectuality and intuition.What does it mean that matter radiates; what is the significance of auniverse of light, if it is not a universe that endures and spreads, a universeof energy, to which we are linked? Why is this important for a theory ofnature? Because this matter is connected to us, and the material universedoes not change without our perceiving it change, and without ourperceiving ourselves transformed.

    A second important reference of Bergson to physics concerns thesecond principle of thermodynamics. As we know, this principle showshow an isolated system progressively and irreversibly transforms itspotential energy into an equipotential structure. According to Bergson,this second principle of thermodynamics confirms the material universestendency toward spatializationthe passage from a potential energy toa spatial structure. If one considers the universe/energy as closed, ittransforms energetically toward entropy. Thus this second law ofthermodynamics is for Bergson the most metaphysical of the laws ofphysics (CE, 243) because it indicates absolutely the direction in whichthe universe is headedthat is, the uniform repartitioning of energy:our solar system is seen to be ever exhausting something of the mutabilityit contains (CE, 243). In a word, physics is forced to go beyond therelativity of movement. But how can one account for this tendency? Thisinformation has no sense if one does not link it to our experience. Onceagain the witness of our experience of conscious life plays an essentialrole. The scientist who relies on matter does not aim to explain how

    consciousness, life, and the universe communicate and relate amongthemselves. Lets not forget that Creative Evolutionconcludes on this verypoint:

    The philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making a cleansweep of everything that is only an imaginative symbol, he will seethe material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing,a becoming. And he will thus be prepared to discover real durationthere where it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life and ofconsciousness. For, so far as inert matter is concerned, we mayneglect the flowing without committing a serious error: matter, wehave said, is weighted with geometry; and matter, the reality whichdescends, endures only by its connection with that which ascends.But life and consciousness are this very ascension. When once wehave grasped them in their essence by adopting their movement,

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    we understand how the rest of reality is derived from them. Evolutionappears and, within this evolution, the progressive determination ofmateriality and intellectuality by the gradual consolidation of the

    one and of the other. But, then, it is within the evolutionary movementthat we place ourselves, in order to follow it to its present results,instead of recomposing these results, artificially with fragments ofthemselves. Such seems to us to be the true function of philosophy.So understood, philosophy is not only the turning of the mindhomeward, the coincidence of human consciousness with the livingprinciple whence it emanates, a contact with the creative effort: it isthe study of becoming in general, it is true evolutionism... (CE, 369-370)

    Thus what the philosopher contributes, in comparison to thescientist, is the intuition that the essential mutability of the world cannotarise from matter itself. If matter is tendency toward spatialization, howcould it create energy? Now, we can only interpret this entropic lapse bycomparing it to our psychovital experience, by comparing it to ourexistence, to our experience of duration. We can understand it only becausewe see clearly that the universe does not endure in the same way as doour life and our consciousness. The scientist cannot see this, having cuthimself off from a part of experience. For him, the direction of initialmutability toward stability can be explained physically, while the burst

    of energy that conditions this mutability can never be explained. Try ashe may to posit an infinite universe from the beginning, the scientist willnever be able to conjure up the energy for this infinite universe, sincesuch a universe would be, precisely (according to the definition of matter),a universe that is totally deployed, with material elements absolutelyexterior from one another, without tension, without relation, withoutpotential. the problem remains insoluble as long as we keep on theground of physics (CE, 244). In fact, in order to explain the presence ofenergy, the physicist will not seek an extra-spatial energy of which he

    has no idea, unlike the philosopher, who sees it at work in the lan vitaland in consciousness. Thus the physicist has no idea that there couldexist an extra-material energy; he will remain within the definition ofmatter that he has given: the decline toward the uniform and stable. Onthe contrary, for the philosopher who starts from a different series offacts that confirm one another in his experience of conscious life, therewill be every reason to oppose material conservation with extra-materialcreation, to oppose closed with open, to oppose science with

    philosophy. But how can we establish this separation if we make ourexperience into an abstraction, if we do likewise with the durations thatintersect in our existence?

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    Let me stress this point of methodology: the fact that the universeradiates and falls toward entropy can only be understood in terms of

    our duration and the way it implies the duration of the universe. That is,Bergson does not consider the universe as an objective, all-encompassingrealm that precedes us, fixed and immutable. Rather, it is deduced fromour perception, from what is transformed and felt in our experience ofconscious life. We cannot change without things changing; the world isnot transformed without our being aware of it, because life, matter andconsciousness are durations, and there is communication among thesedurations, since our perception itself is simply a relationship of durations:

    We perceive the physical world and this perception appears, rightly

    or wrongly, to be inside and outside us at one and the same time; inone way, it is a state of consciousness; in another, a surface film ofmatter in which perceiver and perceived coincide. To each momentof our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body and ofall environing matter that is simultaneous with it; this matter thenseems to participate in our conscious duration. (DS, 45)

    In The Creative Mind, Bergson has recourse to the example of colors, whichare wave lengths. Everywhere his vocabulary translates the oppositionbetween body and color, between geometric figure and figure of light,solid reality and supple inter-relatedness.

    But just as a consciousness of color, which would harmonizeinwardly with orange instead of perceiving it outwardly, would feelitself caught between red and yellow, would perhaps even have,beneath the latter color, a presentiment of a whole spectrum in whichis naturally prolonged the continuity which goes from red to yellow,so the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in thevoid as pure analysis would do, puts us in contact with a wholecontinuity of durations. (CM, 221)

    Creative Evolution, which starts with our existence in order to deduce atotality that endures, seems to follow this methodology. Rather than

    positing a single universal time, Creative Evolution, like the Creative Mind,expands the thesis of durations that are intertwined. Our experience ofconscious life implies relationship to a duration of the universe. But ourexperience also bears witness to a more contracted duration, more intense,freer, which at the limit would be eternitypure creativitywhereour own duration would find itself like the vibrations in light (ibid.).Alight more luminous that the visible universe, being a true source.

    This omnipresence of the theme of light, of radiating, of color and ofwaves in Bergsons philosophy translates something of an era: the passagefrom a world of images to a world where one must perceive theimperceptible light that animates things. Creative Evolutionis inscribedin a larger movement of dematerialization of matter, a movement of

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    going beyond the image and the object, toward their source, toward theintimate and secret movement of things. In 1913, eight years after the

    publication of Creative Evolution, the Rayonnist Manifesto was signed bya dozen artists, including Mikhail Larionov. It affirmed that :The style of Rayonnist painting that we advance signifies spatialforms which are obtained arising from the intersection of the reflectedrays of various objects, and forms chosen by the artists will. The rayis depicted provisionally on the surface by a colored line.[....]. Theobjects that we see in life play no role here, but that which is theessence of painting itself can be shown here best of allthecombination of color, its saturation, the relation of colored masses,depth, texture. 3

    The words Bergson used about the Michelson-Morley experiment areapplicable to this aesthetic:

    It is the light-figure that imposes its conditions upon the rigid figure.In other words, the rigid-figure is not reality itself but only a mentalconstruct; and for this construct it is the light-figure, the sole datum,which must supply the rules. (DS, 116)

    In concluding, I would like to make this point: science dematerializesmatter when it reduces it to lines of light. For its part, philosophymanifests in the perceiving image its part of light, its articulation with a

    universe/matter that is universe/light, and it also manifests in our actionour vibrant participation in an even more luminous but invisiblepresence. Likewise, the art of this era rejects objective images in order tofocus on the light that underlies them. The Rayonnist Manifesto is notunique in this respect. Kazimir Malevitch (1878-1935) preaches the totaleclipse of the world of objects, of the light of intellectual understanding,of the figurative, in order to move toward an absolute-without-object. Itis a movement of surpassing the image, moving toward the icon that

    does not imitate anything, of surpassing the figural in favor of color thatis pure, monochromatic, immaterial and spiritualan infinite abyss.This experience of a plenitude that can be neither expressed norrepresented is much broader than Bergsonism. During this era, manyartistic currents were influenced by a kind of illuminative theognosisthat opposed the invisible light or light-shadowmore luminous thanlightto the light of the world. Transcending forms, painting attemptedto capture what makes forms become visiblethe source of the visibilityof the visible, which is also its dark opposite. In La lumire et la couleur,

    Malevitch wrote:Man makes authentic attempts to reveal authenticity. He wants tounmask the actions of the world, in order to catch a glimpse of theauthentic Face. This actor of the world hides himself as though he

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    were afreaid to show his face [....] We only see the shadows that areinaccessible to any light whatsoeverneither to the sun nor to thelight of knowldge. Our spectacle ends in the darkness. (Ecrits, IV)4

    Compared to this theognosis, Bergsonism seems more positive andmuch more moderate. The light revealed by philosophy is not theshadowy light of the mystics nor the light of revelation. It is simplywhat one may think about nature by following our experience of consciouslife. In other words, it is simply the evidence of our participation in aneternity of life and of a creation in which we are like vibrations in thelight. The light revealed by Bergsonism also bears witness to an eraenamoured with the discovery of a reality more luminous than that ofour everyday needs.

    Universit de Toulouse IIItranslated by Roxanne Lapidus

    Abbreviations UsedC E Creative Evolution

    C M The Creative MindD S Duration and SimultaneityM M Matter and Memory

    Works CitedBergson, Henri. Creative Evolution [Lvolution cratrice, 1907]. Trans. Arthur Mitchell.

    New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911 [CE].. The Creative Mind : an Introduction to Metaphysics. [La Pense et le mouvant, 1934].

    Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Society, 1946 [CM].. Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einsteins Theory. Trans. Leon Jacobson.

    New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.. Matter and Memory.[Matire et mmoire, 1896]. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.

    Scott Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911 [MM].. Mlanges. Paris : PUF, 1972.Malevitch, Kazimir. La Lumire et la couleur, trans. Jean-Claude Marcad and Sylviane

    Siger, in Ecrits, Vol. IV. Lausanne: Lge dhomme, coll. Slavica , 1993.

    Notes1. P. Davies, Les forces de la nature (Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1988 p. 34).

    2. Ibid., p. 67. See also L. Nottale, Lunivers et la lumire (Paris: Champs Flammarion, p.34).3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayonnism4. On this point, see Bruno Duborgels Malevitch, la question de licne (Publications de

    lUniversit de Saint-Etienne, 1997).