All Bergson’s work was inspired by a conviction that life is petrified and diminished by theories, categories and conventions, and that it is the purpose of philosophy not to add yet more abstract reasoning but to restore awareness of lived life – to renew, revitalize and enrich direct contact with the world. Theory is useful only as a way back to experience.
So he practised philosophy to escape philosophy, thought rationally in order to question rationalism and wrote in order to subvert language. Always he strove to recover the experiencing self that is constantly being suppressed, often to the point of extinction, by a trio of powerful bullies – the categorizing, utilitarian and social selves. And always he sought to protect the evolving self from finality, rigidity and circumscription, privileging the dynamic over the static, the holistic over the compartmentalized, the organic over the mechanical, the qualitative over the quantitative, the intuitive over the analytic, the continuing over the completed, the open over the closed and, above all, the free over the determined. And what greater gift could a philosopher offer than to restore us to ourselves and the world, and then to send us forth once more, re-energized and renewed, with a vital sense of freedom and even of creativity and joy?
Philosophy gains by finding some absolute in the moving world of phenomena. But we too shall gain in our feeling of greater joy and strength. Greater joy because the reality invented before our eyes will give each of us, unceasingly, some of the satisfactions which art gives at rare intervals to the privileged; it will reveal to us, beyond the fixity and monotony which our senses, hypnotized by constant need, at first perceived in it, ever-recurring novelty, the moving originality of things. But above all we shall have greater strength, for we shall feel that we are participating, creators of ourselves, in the great work of creation . . . By getting hold of itself, our ability to act will become intensified. Until now humbled in an attitude of obedience, slaves of vaguely-felt natural necessities, we shall stand once more erect.
(La Pensée et le mouvant, 1934)
Appreciating the universal work of creation demands the use of every means available. So Bergson reunited the three ways of seeking understanding of life, increasingly separate and often mutually hostile – religion, science and the humanities – or, rather, he behaved as though these had never gone their separate ways. Within science he embraced physics, chemistry and biology. Within the humanities he embraced psychology, sociology and politics and, within the arts, literature, painting and music. Within philosophy itself he embraced many ideas that have since developed into separate specialisms. He was a processist celebrating fluidity, a pantheist celebrating oneness, an emergentist celebrating creativity, a phenomenologist celebrating pure being and an existentialist celebrating personal freedom and choice. Buy one philosopher and get at least four free.
And, unknown to himself, he provides another kind of historical unity by linking the very old ideas of oriental religion with the very new theories of Western science. Separated by thousands of years and miles, and immersed in utterly different branches of utterly different cultures, the scientist in the white coat turns out to be the monk in orange robes.
Bergson’s ideas, once so radical and controversial, are now everywhere – and how ironic that the man who rejected the very possibility of prediction should have accidently made so many accurate predictions.
Bergson also rejected eternal truth but, while his concepts of unity and process may not be eternal, their power to encourage and console has remained undiminished over millennia. There is no more thrilling inspiration than the creativity of process (‘Life transcends finality’) and no greater comfort than enfoldment in unity (‘The philosopher neither obeys nor commands but seeks only to be at one with nature’).
These two concepts of unity and process offer the apparently contradictory desiderata of security and adventure, showing us how to be at home in the world while remaining independent and free. They restore to us both immanence and imminence and teach us not just to be, but to belong and become.