If we wish to understand the meaning of life then a good place to start would surely be with life itself, the biological phenomenon. A human being is an organism, albeit a highly complex one, and therefore subject to an organism’s possibilities and limitations. William James studied physiology before turning to philosophy and believed that any speculation on human beings should begin by understanding them as basically reactive organisms:
The concrete facts in which a biologist’s responsibilities lie form a fixed basis from which to aspire as much as he pleases to the mastery of universal questions.
(Diary entry quoted in William James by Robert D. Richardson, 2006)
Bergson agreed:
Everything is obscure if we confine ourselves to mere manifestations, whether they are described as social or features of individual intelligence. But all becomes clear if we start by a quest beyond these manifestations for Life itself. Let us then give to the word biology the very wide meaning it should have, and perhaps will have one day.
(Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932)
Before reading Bergson and James I had an instinctive dislike of biology, a rationalist repugnance which Bergson explained as the human intellect’s preference for the static over the moving: ‘The intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living.’ The intellect prefers to understand life by rendering it lifeless – by killing the frog to dissect it.
There is also the intellectual problem that, in a complex organism, the whole is never merely the sum of the parts and the parts are never entirely independent of the whole.
Thus it is that the complexity of functioning of the higher organisms goes on to infinity. The study of one of these organisms therefore takes us round in a circle, as if everything was a means to everything else.
(L’Évolution créatrice, 1907)
The intellect, accustomed to linear reasoning, finds this kind of merry circular dance a nightmare.
But for those of a rational and/or fastidious temperament, inclined to the odourless abstract and remote, the way back to smelly life is to remember that every living thing, the sensitive thinker included, is an organism. For me this organismic view of life has been as illuminating as the process view – and is indeed only a special case of this view. An organism is a hectic, almost frenetic, process, operating far from equilibrium in a ceaseless metabolism that seeks out and draws in nutrients, converts them to energy, expels waste, and uses the energy to reproduce, and to regulate and renew its parts, so that its make-up is constantly changing though its structure is relatively stable. When it has reproduced, the organism wears out and dies – and the organismic view reinforces the process view of transience. If the purpose of philosophy is to teach us to die, as has often been claimed, then a philosophy of the organism must be the best teacher. One of Bergson’s most striking passages is this biblical vision of living beings arising from the dust and returning to it, though not before creating and nurturing the next generation:
Like eddies of dust raised by the wind in its passing, the living turn upon themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. Therefore they are relatively stable, and fake immutability so well that we treat each as a thing rather than a process, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that sustains them materializes before our eyes. We have this sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal love, so striking, and in most animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly give us the secret of life. It shows us each generation leaning over the next and allows us to see that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted.
(L’Évolution créatrice, 1907)
Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return – but in between it will be all go. Throughout its life the organism learns constantly from the environment, adapting its behaviour to optimize its situation – and every now and then the adaptations produce a structural change. And the higher organisms are networks of organs, themselves networks of cells, themselves networks of microscopic components – while the organism’s network is closely coupled to its environmental network. One organism’s waste is another’s meat and two veg.
So there are no independent, isolated, finished organisms. The human version, comprised of cells, is itself a cell in the organism of society:
The members of a civic community are connected together like the cells of an organism. Habit, supported by intelligence and imagination, introduces among them a discipline resembling, in the interdependence it establishes between separate individuals, the unity of an organism of cells.
(Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932)
As Bergson repeated many times, ‘each of us belongs as much to society as to himself’. What society obliges us to do will always change – but never the fact of this obligation:
It is society that prepares for the individual the programme of the daily routine. It is impossible to live a family life, work in a profession, attend to the thousand and one cares of the day, do the shopping, go for a stroll, or even stay at home, without submitting to obligations. At every moment we have to choose, and we naturally decide on what accords with the rules. We are hardly conscious of this; there is no effort. Society has marked out a road; before us it lies open and we follow; it would take more initiative to cut across country.
(Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932)
Nevertheless Bergson was always careful to avoid any suggestion of biological determinism. Intelligence may always overrule instinct:
An intelligent being bears within itself the means to transcend its own nature.
(L’Évolution créatrice, 1907)
The social demands are inescapable but the individual may become aware of these and occasionally depart from the road. And, far from being determined, Life, driven by a force Bergson defined as élan vital, ceaselessly invents and creates.
The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.
(L’Évolution créatrice, 1907)
This idea, that Life is its own creator and that creativity is not a late aesthetic refinement but the very principle of existence, was Bergson’s most radical and inspiring insight. Rejoice in the revelation that Life is not a dreary conformist but an exuberant Picasso.
What is admirable in itself, what really deserves to inspire wonder, is the ever-renewed creation which reality, whole and undivided, accomplishes in its advance.
(L’Évolution créatrice, 1907)
For a long time science dismissed this notion as mystical claptrap. But recently it has validated Bergson’s insight with a theory of emergence, or self-organization, which explains how life may develop from inanimate matter, complexity from simplicity and order from chaos. For living systems, powered by chemical reactions far from equilibrium, the constant adaptations to the environment may at certain critical points produce something entirely new and unpredictable. Here is the molecular biologist, Stuart A. Kauffman, sounding exactly like Bergson: ‘In the new scientific worldview I’m describing, we live in an emergent universe of ceaseless creativity in which life, agency, meaning, consciousness and ethics . . . have emerged. Our entire historical development as a species . . . has been self-consistent, co-constructing, evolving, emergent, and unpredictable. Our histories, inventions, ideas, and actions are also parts of the creative universe.’
So emergence does not just apply to biology. Political systems, economies and cities are examples of emergence – complex, self-organizing, unpredictably creative networks where everything is involved in a constant and complex interplay with everything else.
Science has only just begun to acknowledge such complexity of process but it is perfectly understandable by the Buddhist concept of pratītya-samutpāda, or interdependent co-arising, which claims that every occurrence has multiple causes and multiple effects, with the effects often acting as causes, and that things derive their nature from mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves. Many scientists now take a similar view, seeing reality as a vast force field in which every part influences every other part, with unpredictable consequences. For instance the physicist Henry Stapp in a 1971 report to the US Atomic Energy Commission: ‘An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.’ Again, Bergson was far ahead, writing in 1907 of ‘the universal interaction which, without doubt, is reality itself’ and regarding even the inanimate world as a kind of giant organism:
So matter resolves itself into countless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all influencing each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.
(Matière et mémoire, 1896)
All this has implications for everyday behaviour. If organisms are mutually dependent then it is wiser to cooperate than to dominate, and if life requires constant adaptation then nimble ingenuity is more effective than brute strength. If everything is connected to everything else then every action propagates its effects for ever, and if feedback loops are the method of propagation then every action also modifies the character of the actor. Many of these nano-modifications are below the level of perception but they eventually add up to a cumulative change that is all too perceptible. One day you may wake up and realize you have become a shithead – or, more likely, your partner wakes up and informs you of this, in a loud, outraged tone, en route to the door.
William James was good on this death by a thousand derelictions:
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ‘I won’t count this time!’ Well! He may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
(Psychology: The Briefer Course, 1892)
But we can also spin our fates in a positive direction. We can choose to be Picasso rather than Rip Van Winkle. Bergson:
Artisans of our lives, even artists when we so desire, we work continually, with the material provided by the past and present, by heredity and opportunity, to mould a figure, unique, new, original, and as unforeseeable as the form given by the sculptor to clay.
(La Pensée et le mouvant, 1934)
The crucial word here is ‘work’. No one can slump back on a sofa and expect to emerge. It is necessary to earn a living spiritually as well as materially. ‘I value effort above everything,’ Bergson said. And here is James, in The Principles of Psychology, written before becoming aware of Bergson:
Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth . . . He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.
(The Principles of Psychology, 1890)
For James, the truly heroic effort was not in rejection but in acceptance of circumstances often ‘sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for-things’, in being able not merely to ‘stand this universe’ but ‘still find a zest in it, not by ostrich-like forgetfulness, but by a pure inward willingness to take the world with those deterrent objects there’.
This effort is not only difficult but never-ending. To give life a specific goal is to render it lifeless. Bergson:
It would be futile to try to assign to life a goal, in the human sense of the word. To speak of a goal is to think of a pre-existing model which need only be realized. It is to believe that all is given, that the future may be read in the present, and that life, in its entirety and movement, goes to work like our intellect, which takes merely a fragmentary and motionless view, and which naturally positions itself outside time.
(L’Évolution créatrice, 1907)
William James described, with characteristic eloquence, the lack of satisfaction in attaining even the most desirable of goals:
Everyone must at some time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that, though the pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings? . . . We look upon them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms our present state, and tedium vitae is the only sentiment they awaken in our breasts . . . Regarded as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to the flesh.
(The Dilemma of Determinism, 1884)
The lesson of the organism is that there is no respite from striving. And if constant striving is the meaning of life, then what we need most is energy. This is hardly surprising. As Bergson frequently reminded us, an organism has to work ceaselessly to find nutrients and convert them to energy:
Where does the energy come from? Ingested food, which is a kind of explosive, needing only the spark to discharge the energy it stores . . . So all life, animal and vegetable, seems to be in essence an effort to accumulate energy and let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in nature, to accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work.
(L’Évolution créatrice, 1907)
Similarly, the life of an intelligent being requires mental energy. Buddha said, ‘It is our own mind that should be made vigorous by energy’, one of Bergson’s books is called Mind Energy – and James delivered to the American Philosophical Association an inspirational and appropriately energetic lecture on the subject, The Energies of Men:
I wish to spend this hour on one conception of functional psychology, a conception never once mentioned or heard of in laboratory circles, but used perhaps more than any other by common, practical men – I mean the conception of the amount of energy available for running one’s mental and moral operations by. Practically everyone knows in his own person the difference between the days when the tide of this energy is high in him and those when it is low, though no one knows exactly what reality the term energy covers when used here, or what its tides, tensions and levels are in themselves . . . To have its level raised is the most important thing that can happen to a man, yet in all my reading I know of no single page or paragraph of a scientific psychology book in which it receives mention.
(The Energies of Men, 1907)
This passage made me realize that one of the qualities I look for in literature is energy, that this quality is rare, and that, as James found with his psychologists, no literary critics or readers seem to value it – or even mention it. This must be because the twentieth century came to prize irony, obliquity and allusiveness and so regarded any form of passionate directness as naive. Any displays of gusto and exuberance would be especially embarrassing. So the richest energy sources I know are nineteenth-century writers such as Whitman and Browning, both unfashionable now but, in another exciting connection, both favourites of William James:
Dramatic unities; laws of versification; ecclesiastical systems; scholastic doctrines. Bah! Give me Walt Whitman and Browning ten times over.
(The Letters of William James, 1920)
Free, clean and renewable energy! Whitman and Browning are fuel!
‘No end to learning,’ Browning said in A Grammarian’s Funeral, one of James’s favourite poems. (‘It always strengthens my backbone to read it.’) Another lesson of the organism is that its necessary striving is always in order to learn. In the lower forms this learning is entirely utilitarian – and so is most human learning. Youth learns in order to have a career, middle age learns in order to advance this career, old age learns in order to avoid going gaga, and all stages like to display the fruits of learning as a mark of distinction. But the human organism has the sophistication to learn that if learning itself is the meaning of life, then it ought to learn to learn for the sake of the learning process itself. Another way to appreciate this is to remember that refusing to learn anything new is a major cause of petrifaction.
Expertise is another dangerously attractive end state. But both Bergson and James were lifelong novices, indefatigable learners, understanding that learning is endless and that, since everything is inseparably connected, learning must not be confined to any particular discipline (an example increasingly useful to counter the growing tyranny of the specialism). ‘Life,’ said William James, ‘is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.’ Bergson’s version:
The philosopher is, first and foremost, someone who is always ready, at whatever age, to become a student once more.
(Mélanges, 1972)
We are born to learn, as every child knows but most adults forget.
And the final lesson of the organism is that while life has no mission statement, no plan, no end state, and is entirely unpredictable, with no discernible unity ahead, it does have a unity behind. Every living thing has a history, which for lower organisms is embodied in the structure and for the human organism is character. This history influences but does not determine behaviour. Even simple organisms have choice, albeit limited, and the more sophisticated the organism, the wider the range of choice. For Bergson, the development of consciousness was essentially an expansion of choice. And while what is chosen is not determined, the choice determines character. ‘We are what we do,’ Bergson declared bluntly, prefiguring the existentialists.
Bergson himself did not develop this insight but James drew the obvious conclusion that it is possible to change character by changing behaviour. Only what we do matters and if we do things differently for long enough then eventually what has been artificial, willed and arduous will become genuine, instinctive and easy. It is not what we feel and think that guides what we do but what we do that guides what we feel and think, an insight known to psychology as self-conception theory and to self-help literature as, ‘fake it till you make it’. James:
There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward motions of those contrary dispositions we prefer to cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye . . . and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw!
(What is an Emotion? 1884)
James exemplified this in his own life. His writing makes him sound like a born affirmer but the books came late in life (he was forty-eight when his first major work, The Principles of Psychology, was published). In his youth he suffered from severe depression and was even suicidal. The affirmation in his mature work was acquired, not innate, and it was only by prolonged thought and effort that he could finally experience a unique sense of joy at immersing in the oneness and flowing with the process.
When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an integral part of the same richness – why, then it seems a grudging and sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink away from any of its facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is eternally thinking out and representing to itself.
(The Dilemma of Determinism, 1884)