70. Bergson

AS SEPTEMBER TURNED into October, James took up teaching again, although he felt, he said, “outside the game.” It took him most of the fall to reacclimate. He told one old friend that “absence and half time work alienate one from one’s environment in a way that is especially appalling.” To do anything, he concluded, “one must have too much to do.”¹

After his return from England, he hungered for a particular kind of work. He wanted to do something “serious, systematic, and syllogistic.” He gave a new course this fall, Philosophy 3: The Philosophy of Nature, in which, as he told Schiller, “I am for the first time in my teaching life, trying to construct a universe before the eyes of my students in systematic lectures with no text.”² The syllabus shows a new scope and reach, a move away from the popular lectures at which he was becoming so adept, an ambition to write something systematic, rigorous, and comprehensive for professionals.

He begins by asking how we may account for such order and harmony as we see in nature. He considers theism (“God’s design”) and transcendentalism (“Eternal Reason evolving”), then turns to tychism—that is, to “Peirce’s suggestion [that] order results from chance-coming, and survival of the more coherent.”³ The syllabus proposes “Pragmatism as our method” and spends much time on a “description of the world as a multitude of moments of experience,” and on the idea of “pure experience,” before coming to rest in the claim that “tychism is essentially pluralistic, goes with empiricism, personalism, democracy, and freedom. It believes that unity is in process of being genuinely won.” The syllabus ends by urging panpsychic idealism as the “most satisfactory theory.” Panpsychism is “the theory that all matter, or all nature is itself psychical or has a psychical aspect; that atoms and molecules, as well as plants and animals, have a rudimentary life of sensation, feeling and impulse.”⁴

This fall, 1902, James read Pierre Janet’s Les Obsessions et la Psychasthénie, which he described as “a wonderful mass of observation.” The book described many of his own symptoms, but without, alas, any “radical explanation” of them.⁵ In October he read his brother’s Wings of the Dove, about which he wrote Henry with his usual mixture of baffled admiration and disapproval (“very distingué in its way... in its way the book is most beautiful”), but also bluntly objecting to his increasingly clotted prose. “What shall I say of a book constructed on a method which so belies everything that I acknowledge as law?” William wrote. It is highhanded, it did not help Henry, but it speaks for a number of readers, then and now. “You’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean) and all with unflagging curiosity to know what the upshot might become.”⁶

James was beginning to angle toward retiring from teaching. “What my wife said about resignation at the end of academic year ’04 is probable,” he wrote Eliot, “but not certain.” He felt, quite reasonably, that he could “produce more by a given effort in writing than in lecturing.”⁷ His books were selling well; just how well was revealed by a flare-up in James’s relations this fall with Henry Holt. Noting a discrepancy in Holt’s accounts for Talks to Teachers, James discovered that his publisher owed him two thousand dollars. James unaccountably took the discrepancy as evidence of systematic cheating. (This was absurd. No more honorable publisher existed than Henry Holt, who had gone into the trade because he had heard Daniel Coit Gilman—then librarian at Yale, but soon to be president of Johns Hopkins—say that if a book bore the imprint of Ticknor and Fields, you could be pretty sure it was a good book. Holt, a writer of books himself, thought such a reputation a fine thing.)

Holt replied to James, apologizing for the error but pointing out that James’s unconventional arrangement with the house made bookkeeping hard, and he explained how the bookkeeping worked. The explanation must have caught James at a bad moment. Instead of being mollified, he exploded. “Am I a baby six years old that you should write me such rubbish?” Holt persevered; eventually James calmed down and even apologized—abjectly—when he came to understand how the error had occurred. But the accusation of bad faith clouded what had been, for James and for Holt, a very satisfactory working relationship. Talks to Teachers made James a lot of money. The Principles of Psychology and the Briefer Course, which were also published by Holt and were widely known by students as “James” and “Jimmy,” had also made a lot of money for Holt, having sold, by 1902, 8,144 copies and 51,658 copies, respectively.⁸

Overshadowing everything at this time was James’s excited rereading of Henri Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire, which he had looked at without much attention when it first came out in 1896. When James, who had been reading the work of some of Bergson’s students, went back for a second look, he was bowled over, writing Bergson to congratulate him on having produced “a work of exquisite genius. It makes,” he said, “a sort of Copernican revolution... and will probably... open a new era of philosophical discussion.”⁹

James had not yet met Bergson, but Bergson’s name was now well known. He was a hugely popular lecturer; photographs show people craning their necks, standing on tiptoe, and using scaling ladders to climb to the window ledges where they stood to listen outside his lecture hall at the Collège de France.¹⁰ Bergson was seventeen years younger than James. He would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 and live to see Vichy France, where, shortly before his death in 1941, he stood in line to register as a Jew, having refused the exemption offered him by the authorities.

Bergson’s life-changing moment of insight came in 1884. While he was taking a walk one day at Clermont-Ferrand, it came to him that the Platonic assumption that the immutable is higher than the mutable or temporal was wrong. “The whole of the philosophy which begins with Plato and culminates in Plotinus is the development of a principle which maybe formulated thus: ‘There is more in the immutable than in the moving, and we pass from the stable to the unstable by mere diminution.’ Now it is the contrary which is true.”¹¹

Valuing the moving over the immovable, the actual stream over the idea of a stream, led Bergson to his notion of the importance of time as duration, not as stackable chips of a specific size. As he explained in a letter to James, “It was the analysis of the notion of time, as that enters into mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw, to my great astonishment, that scientific time does not endure... that positive science consists essentially in the elimination of duration.” This concept James had already met, under the name “the specious present.” “This was the point of departure,” Bergson went on, “of a series of reflections which brought me by painful steps to reject almost all of what I had hitherto accepted and to change my point of view completely.”¹²

Central to everything in Bergson’s thought was this idea of duration. James’s excited notes and underlinings in his copies of Bergson’s books showed how he grasped the idea of duration as life, process, change, and growth, as opposed to stasis, forms, and measurements. “Durer = changer, croître, devenir” (To endure means to change, to grow, to become), he wrote on the endpaper of his copy of Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience. In Matière et Mémoire Bergson expands the idea of duration into that of memory: “Memory in action is not a dead deposit, it is a living and functional focusing of energies. It is life at the acme of attention, creation, and decision. Memory is life cumulated and brought to bear on alternatives of action... Matter is the deposit of life, the static residues of actions done, choices made in the past. Living memory is the past felt in the actualities of realities, of change.”¹³ One is not entirely surprised to learn that in 1889 Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, who was then eighteen and an attendant at the wedding. Proust’s conception of memory has more than a passing resemblance to Bergson’s.

Bergson has been called the first “process philosopher,” preceding Whitehead in this still vibrant line of thought. Bergson’s thought reminded Claude Lévi-Strauss “irresistibly” of “that of the Sioux Indians.”¹⁴ Writing a few years after this initial encounter, James recorded the effect Bergson had on him:

 

For me, a magician. Whereas, when I open most philosophical books, I get nothing but a sort of marking time, champing of the jaws, pawing the ground, and resettling into the same attitude like a weary horse in his stall, turning over the same few threadbare categories, applying the same solutions and the same objections, here on every page new horizons open. It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. And to me it tells of reality itself and not merely of what previous dusty-minded professors have written about what other still more previous professors have thought about reality. Nothing in Bergson is shop-worn or second-hand.¹⁵

 

In February 1903 James read Bergson’s just published Introduction to Metaphysics. Here Bergson denounces concepts themselves—that is, he rejects conceptual thinking as such, with a boldness and panache comparable to James’s rejection of consciousness as an entity. All that concepts can do, Bergson argues, is imprison “the whole of reality in a network prepared in advance.” What is really needed is what Bergson variously calls “metaphysical intuition,” “that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition,” or “a kind of intellectual auscultation.”¹⁶ It is a direct way of knowing, which works by “placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition,” which avoids symbols and is an alternative to conceptual thought. It is a mode of knowing that would soon be called Einfühlung, or empathy, a process for which words were first found in the opening decade of the twentieth century.¹⁷

Bergson went further, claiming that “what is relative is the symbolic knowledge of pre-existing concepts... and not the intuitive knowledge which installs itself in that which is moving and adopts the very life of things. This intuition,” he concludes grandly, “attains the absolute.”¹⁸ What James had seen in Bergson’s work in December 1902 was “a conclusive demolition of the dualism of object and subject in perception.” What he recognized in Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics in February 1903 was “a philosophy of pure experience,” which strongly resembled what he himself was just then struggling to think through.