About the Work
Bergsonism is a short philosophical study by Gilles Deleuze, published in French as Le Bergsonisme and appearing in English in a translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. It belongs to a series of brief introductory monographs, and its compact form is part of its character: it is not a survey of Bergson’s life and times, nor a leisurely commentary that walks the reader through each book in turn. It is an attempt to isolate what Deleuze takes to be the inner engine of Bergson’s thought and to present it as a working method. The book’s table of contents announces its central concerns directly: intuition as method, duration as immediate datum, memory as virtual coexistence, the question of whether there is one duration or many, and the élan vital as a movement of differentiation. A closing essay, “A Return to Bergson,” frames the whole, and the volume includes notes, an index, and a set of references to Bergson’s works with standardized abbreviations.
“The present is only the most contracted degree of the past, matter the most relaxed (dctendu) degree of the present (mens momenta nea).”
The translation is a careful piece of work, and its choices are worth noting because they shape how the argument reads in English. The translators deliberately depart from the authorized translations of Bergson in three respects. They leave élan vital untranslated, since the standard rendering “vital impetus” narrows a French word whose range runs from momentum through surge to vigor. They preserve the distinction between “recollection” and “memory,” which the authorized translations tend to blur, so that souvenir and mémoire remain visibly different things. And they refuse the neologism “detention” for détente, preferring “relaxation” or “expansion” according to context, with the French given in parentheses, because détente carries active senses of release and expansion that “detention” obscures. They follow the authorized translations in rendering durée as “duration” and in adopting “extensity” and “extension.” Deleuze’s frequent recourse to the Kantian distinction between questions of fact and questions of principle is rendered as “in fact” and “in principle.” These are not pedantic matters. The whole argument of the book turns on distinctions that ordinary translation tends to flatten, and the translators’ decisions are an attempt to keep those distinctions visible.
The book is addressed to a reader who is willing to think alongside a difficult argument. It assumes some familiarity with the history of philosophy and with Bergson’s major works, but it does not assume that the reader already agrees with Deleuze’s reading. What it offers is a reconstruction: a claim about what Bergson was really doing, and about why that doing still matters.
Context
The circumstances in which Bergsonism appeared are inseparable from what it argues. In the translators’ account, Henri Bergson was widely read in the early twentieth century and then fell into something close to oblivion. By the middle of the century, philosophers were almost entirely indifferent to his legacy; Bergsonism survived as a footnote in histories of philosophy, surfacing briefly in discussions of “vitalism” or “irrationalism.” This is the situation Deleuze was writing into, and his book is in part a wager that the neglect is undeserved.
The translators place Deleuze’s interest in Bergson within a larger strategy. For Deleuze, Bergson belongs to a “counter-history” of philosophy, alongside figures like Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche—writers who appear to belong to the history of philosophy but who escape it, either in one respect or altogether. Writing about such philosophers in the 1950s and 1960s was, for Deleuze, a way of escaping the scholasticism of post-war French academic philosophy. His stated method is deliberately provocative: he describes the history of philosophy as a kind of “buggery” or “immaculate conception,” in which one gets onto the back of an author and gives him a child that is both his and a monster. The author must be made to say everything Deleuze makes him say, yet the result must be a monster, produced through “decenterings, slips, break-ins, secret emissions.” Deleuze calls his book on Bergson a classic case of this procedure.
But Bergson was not merely an exemplary target. The translators stress that Bergson’s work supplied materials for Deleuze’s own conceptual toolbox—concepts and “war machines” that he would deploy in his own campaigns. Deleuze told Claire Parnet that although Bergson was caught up in the French-style history of philosophy, something in him could not be assimilated, and this residue allowed him to provide a shock and to become a rallying point for opposition. The point of attraction was not so much the theme of duration as the theory and practice of becomings of all kinds, of coexistent multiplicities. Deleuze took up and transformed these Bergsonian notions in his advocacy of a constructive pluralism, describing himself as an empiricist tracing the becomings of which multiplicities are made up. Gillian Rose called Deleuze’s work “the new Bergsonism,” but the translators caution that this may mislead, since Deleuze’s work is characterized not by fidelity to a master but by transformations of concepts borrowed from many writers. What Deleuze and Bergson share are problems: Deleuze’s preoccupation with movement and time, and his isolation of the cinematographic concepts of the “movement-image” and “time-image,” grow out of four commentaries on Bergson’s notions of movement, image, recognition, and time.
The intellectual context of the book is therefore double. It is a reading of Bergson, and it is a stage in the development of Deleuze’s own philosophy. The translators’ introduction, signed in London in December 1987, makes clear that the book should be read with both of these in view.
Structure of the Book
The book moves through a sequence of tightly linked chapters, each of which takes up a distinct problem while preparing the ground for the next. The opening chapter, “Intuition as Method,” is the methodological heart of the whole. It argues that intuition in Bergson is not a vague sympathy or a mystical faculty but a rigorous method with rules. The chapter develops the distinction between true and false problems, the two types of false problem, the theory of illusion, and the rules of division, intersection, and thinking in terms of time rather than space. It is here that the concept of multiplicity is introduced, and with it the distinction between the two types of multiplicity that will govern everything that follows.
The second chapter, “Duration as Immediate Datum,” takes up the immediate data of consciousness and the difference between the qualitative multiplicity of duration and the quantitative multiplicity of space. The third chapter, “Memory as Virtual Coexistence,” turns to the analysis of memory, drawing heavily on Matter and Memory. It distinguishes recollection-memory from contraction-memory, works through the five aspects of subjectivity, and develops the paradoxes of the past: the leap, Being, coexistence, and psychic repetition. It also distinguishes the appeal to recollection from the evocation of the image, and translation from rotation, and it separates the psychological unconscious from the ontological unconscious.
The fourth chapter, “One or Many Durations?”, confronts the apparent tension between the dualism of differences in kind and the monism of contraction and relaxation. It asks whether duration is one or many, and it works through the plurality of rhythms of duration, the extension of the idea of virtual coexistence to the whole universe, and the confrontation with the theory of Relativity. The chapter argues that Bergson’s texts are reconcilable: there is only one time, although there is an infinity of actual fluxes that participate in the same virtual whole. The fifth chapter, “Élan Vital as Movement of Differentiation,” turns to Creative Evolution and to the philosophy of life. It distinguishes two types of division, reflexive and genetic dualism, develops the difference between the virtual and the possible, and argues that evolution is actualization, and actualization is creation. The chapter culminates in the claim that man is the point at which the élan vital succeeds in getting through, the being in whom the actual becomes adequate to the virtual.
The book closes with “A Return to Bergson,” a short essay that gathers the threads and states what is at stake in reading Bergson now. The notes and index that follow are scholarly apparatus, and the references to Bergson’s works provide the abbreviations used throughout.
Inside the Book
The Translators’ Introduction: Bergson’s Counter-History
The book opens with its publication data: Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam and published by Zone Books in New York, originally appeared as Le Bergsonisme in 1966 in the Presses Universitaires de France series “Initiation Philosophique.” The translators’ introduction begins by noting that although Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was widely read in the early twentieth century, he has since fallen into near-oblivion; Kolakowski is quoted observing that contemporary philosophers are almost entirely indifferent to his legacy, and that Bergsonism survives mainly as a footnote in histories of philosophy, surfacing briefly in studies of “vitalism” or “irrationalism.” The translators insist this impression is misleading. For Deleuze, Bergson belongs to a “counter-history” of philosophy alongside Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche—thinkers who seemed to belong to the history of philosophy yet escaped it in one respect or altogether. Writing about such figures in the 1950s and 1960s allowed Deleuze to escape the scholasticism of postwar French academic philosophy. Deleuze describes his method as treating the history of philosophy as a kind of “buggery” or “immaculate conception”: getting onto an author’s back and giving him a child that is both his and a monster—the author had to say everything Deleuze made him say, yet it had to be a monster produced through “decenterings, slips, break-ins, secret emissions.” Deleuze calls his book on Bergson a classic case of this.
Bergson, the introduction continues, is not merely an exemplary target for Deleuze’s philosophical perversion; his work supplied materials for Deleuze’s own toolbox, concepts, and war machines. Deleuze told Claire Parnet that Bergson was caught up in French-style history of philosophy, yet something in him could not be assimilated, enabling him to provide a shock and become a rallying point for opposition and hatred—not so much because of the theme of duration as because of the theory and practice of becomings of all kinds, of coexistent multiplicities. Deleuze took up and transformed these Bergsonian notions in his own campaigns for constructive pluralism, describing himself as an empiricist tracing the becomings of which multiplicities are made up. Gillian Rose called Deleuze’s work “the new Bergsonism,” but this may mislead, since Deleuze’s work is characterized not by fidelity to any master but by transformations of concepts borrowed from many writers. Deleuze and Bergson share important “problems”: Deleuze’s work became preoccupied with “movement” and “time,” and his isolation of the cinematographic concepts of the “movement-image” and “time-image” grows out of four “commentaries” on Bergson’s notions of movement, image, recognition, and time.
The translators then discuss difficulties in rendering Bergsonian terms. Bergson’s mother was from the north of England and he spoke the language from childhood; many major works were translated during his lifetime and personally revised by him. The translators depart from the authorized translations in three respects. First, authorized translations render “élan vital” as “vital impetus,” which is unhappy and criticized; the French word has a broader range than “impetus,” from “momentum” through “surge” to “vigor,” so they leave “élan vital” in French. Second, authorized translations do not systematically distinguish “recollection” and “memory”; they render “souvenir” as “recollection” and “mémoire” as “memory,” altering extracts accordingly. Third, authorized translations use the neologism “detention” for “détente,” which suggests only “relaxation” in contrast to “contraction,” not the more active senses of “spring” or “expansion,” used technically in thermodynamics for the expansion of a gas previously subject to pressure; they render “détente” by “relaxation” or “expansion” depending on context, with the original in parentheses. They follow authorized translations in translating “durée” as “duration” and adopting “extensity” and “extension” for “étendue” and “extension.” They translate both “écart” and “intervalle” as “interval,” with the French in parentheses. Deleuze often uses Kant’s distinction between “quaestio quid juris” and “quaestio quid facti,” between “question de droit” and “question de fait”; they translate “en fait” and “en droit” by “in fact” and “in principle.” They thank Urzone, Inc. and Ramona Naddaff for suggesting the translation, and friends including Caroline Davidson, Robert Galeta, Martin Joughin, and Richard Williams. The introduction is signed Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London, December 1987. A list of “References to Bergson’s Works” follows, giving abbreviations such as TF for Time and Free Will, translated by F. L. Pogson and published in London by George Allen & Unwin.
Badly Stated Problems and the Fundamental Illusion
The first chapter, “Intuition as Method,” turns to the second type of false problem: badly analyzed composites that arbitrarily group things differing in kind. The example is whether happiness is reducible to pleasure. The term “pleasure” may subsume very varied irreducible states, just as the idea of happiness does. If terms do not correspond to “natural articulations,” the problem is false, for it does not affect “the very nature of things.” Bergson’s famous analyses condemn intensity as just such a composite. Whether the quality of a sensation is confused with the muscular space corresponding to it, or with the quality of the physical cause producing it, the notion of intensity involves an impure mixture between determinations that differ in kind. Thus the question “by how much does the sensation grow?” always goes back to a badly stated problem. Likewise the problem of freedom, in which two types of multiplicity are confused: that of terms juxtaposed in space and that of states merging together in duration.
Returning to the first type of false problem, Bergson says the more is mistaken for the less—but sometimes he says the less is mistaken for the more. Doubt about an action only apparently adds to the action, when in reality it indicates a half-willing; negation is not added to what it denies but only indicates a weakness in the person who denies. A divinely created will or thought is too full of itself to have any idea of a lack of order or being. To imagine absolute disorder or nothingness would be to say it might not have existed—a weakness incompatible with its nature, which is force. Nothingness is not something more but something less, a deficit of the will. There is no contradiction here: nonbeing is sometimes presented as a more in relation to being, sometimes as a less. What Bergson condemns in nonexistent problems is the obsession with thinking in terms of more and less. The idea of disorder appears when, instead of seeing two or more irreducible orders—life and mechanism, each present when the other is absent—we retain only a general idea of order opposed to disorder. The idea of nonbeing appears when, instead of grasping different realities indefinitely substituted for one another, we muddle them in the homogeneity of a Being in general opposed to nothingness. The idea of the possible appears when, instead of grasping each existent in its novelty, the whole of existence is related to a preformed element from which everything emerges by simple “realization.”
The general error is that each time we think in terms of more or less, we have already disregarded differences in kind between orders, beings, existents. The first type of false problem rests, in the final analysis, on the second: the idea of disorder emerges from a general idea of order as a badly analyzed composite. Conceiving everything in terms of more and less—seeing only differences in degree or intensity where there are differences in kind—is perhaps the most general error of thought, common to science and metaphysics. We are victims of a fundamental illusion corresponding to the two aspects of the false problem. The notion of the false problem implies we struggle not against simple mistakes but against something more profound: an illusion that carries us along, inseparable from our condition. A mirage, as Bergson describes the projection backward of the possible. Bergson borrows an idea from Kant although he completely transforms it: Kant showed that reason engenders not mistakes but inevitable illusions, only the effect of which could be warded off. Although Bergson determines the nature of false problems differently, and although the Kantian critique seems to him a collection of badly stated problems, he treats illusion similarly to Kant. The illusion is based in the deepest part of the intelligence: it is not strictly dispelled or dispellable, rather it can only be repressed. We tend to think in terms of more and less—to see differences in degree where there are differences in kind. We can only react against this intellectual tendency by bringing to life, again in the intelligence, another tendency, which is critical. But where does this second tendency come from? Only intuition can produce and activate it, because it rediscovers differences in kind beneath differences in degree, and conveys to the intelligence the criteria enabling it to distinguish between true and false problems. Bergson shows clearly that the intelligence is the faculty that states problems in general (instinct is rather a faculty for finding solutions). But only intuition decides between the true and the false in the problems that are stated, even if this means driving the intelligence to turn back against itself.
The Second Rule and Bergsonian Dualism
The second rule follows: struggle against illusion, rediscover the true differences in kind or articulations of the real. Bergson’s famous dualisms—duration and space, quality and quantity, heterogeneous and homogeneous, continuous and discontinuous, the two multiplicities, memory and matter, recollection and perception, contraction and relaxation, instinct and intelligence, the two sources—even the running heads at the top of each page of his books indicate his taste for dualisms, which do not, however, have the last word in his philosophy. According to Bergson, a composite must always be divided according to its natural articulations, that is, into elements which differ in kind. Intuition as method is a method of division, Platonic in inspiration. Bergson is aware that things are mixed together in reality; experience itself offers us nothing but composites. But that is not where the difficulty lies. For example, we make time into a representation imbued with space. The awkward thing is that we no longer know how to distinguish in that representation the two component elements which differ in kind, the two pure presences of duration and extensity. We mix extensity and duration together.
Turn and Return: The Complementary Rule
Broadening or going beyond experience does not mean moving toward concepts in the Kantian sense, since concepts only define the conditions of all possible experience in general. Here, by contrast, the concern is real experience in all its peculiarities. If experience must be broadened or exceeded, it is only to find the articulations on which these peculiarities depend. The conditions of experience are therefore less determined in concepts than in pure percepts. Although these percepts are united in a concept, that concept is modeled on the thing itself, suits only that thing, and is no broader than what it must account for. After following each “line” beyond the turn in experience, one must rediscover the point where the lines intersect again, where directions cross and where tendencies differing in kind link together to give rise to the thing as we know it. This intersection does not occur at the original starting point but at a virtual point, a virtual image of the point of departure, located beyond the turn in experience. This virtual point gives the sufficient reason of the thing, of the composite, and of the point of departure.
The expression “beyond the decisive turn” thus has two meanings: first, the moment when lines diverge increasingly according to differences in kind from an uncertain common point given in experience; second, the moment when these lines converge again to give the virtual image or distinct reason of the common point. This is “Turn and return.” Dualism is therefore only a moment leading to the re-formation of a monism. After broadening out comes a final narrowing, just as integration follows differentiation. A quotation states that lines of fact indicate only the direction of truth because they do not go far enough, but truth itself is reached if two lines are prolonged to their intersection; this method of intersection is said to be the only one capable of bringing a decisive advance in metaphysics. There are thus two successive turns in experience, in reverse directions, constituting what Bergson calls precision in philosophy.
A complementary rule to the second rule is then stated: the real is not only what is cut out according to natural articulations or differences in kind; it is also what intersects again along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point. This rule shows how a properly stated problem tends to be solved of its own accord. The example is the first chapter of Matter and Memory: the problem of memory is correctly stated by starting from the perception-recollection composite, dividing it into two divergent and expanded directions corresponding to a true difference in kind between soul and body, spirit and matter. The solution is reached by narrowing—attaining the original point where the two directions converge again, where recollection inserts itself into perception, the virtual point that is the reflection and reason of the departure point. Thus the problem of soul and body, matter and spirit, is solved only by an extreme narrowing in which the lines of objectivity and subjectivity, external observation and internal experience, converge at the end of their processes, all the way to the case of aphasia. Similarly, Bergson shows the problem of the immortality of the soul tends to be solved by the convergence of two very different lines: an experience of memory and a quite different, mystical, experience. Problems unraveled at the point where three lines of facts converge are even more complex—such as the nature of consciousness in the first chapter of Mind-Energy. This method of intersection forms a genuine probabilism: each line defines a probability, but a qualitative probabilism, since lines of fact are qualitatively distinct. In their divergence, they constituted a superior empiricism capable of stating problems and going beyond experience toward concrete conditions. In their convergence, they define a superior probabilism capable of solving problems and bringing the condition back to the conditioned so that no distance remains between them.
The Third Rule: Time and Multiplicity
The third rule is stated: “State problems and solve them in terms of time rather than of space.” This rule gives the fundamental meaning of intuition: intuition presupposes duration; it consists in thinking in terms of duration. This is understood by returning to the movement of division determining differences in kind. At first sight, a difference in kind seems established between two things or two tendencies. This is true only superficially. Consider the principal Bergsonian division: that between duration and space. All other divisions and dualisms involve it, derive from it, or result in it.
Memory as Virtual Coexistence
Duration, Deleuze insists, is essentially memory, consciousness, and freedom—consciousness and freedom precisely because it is first of all memory. Bergson presents this identity in two ways: the past is conserved and preserved in the present, or the present carries the ever-growing image of the past, attesting through its continual changes of quality to the increasingly heavy burden it drags behind it as it grows older. Memory in these two forms both cloaks a core of immediate perception with recollections and contracts a number of external moments. Two manners express how duration differs from a discontinuous series of identical instants: each following moment contains, over and above the preceding one, the memory the latter has left it; and the two moments contract or condense into each other, since one has not yet disappeared when the other appears. There are thus two memories, or two indissolubly linked aspects of memory—recollection-memory and contraction-memory—grounded in a movement by which the enduring present divides at each instant into two directions, one dilated toward the past, the other contracted toward the future.
Pure duration is itself the result of a division operative only in principle. Memory is identical to duration and coextensive with it, but this holds in principle more than in fact. The special problem of memory is therefore: how, by what mechanism, does duration become memory in fact? How does what exists in principle actualize itself? The same question governs consciousness, which Bergson shows to be in principle coextensive with life, yet which becomes self-consciousness only under determinate conditions.
Resuming the first chapter of Matter and Memory, Deleuze distinguishes five senses of subjectivity. Need-subjectivity is the moment of negation: need makes a hole in the continuity of things, holding back what interests it and letting the rest be. Brain-subjectivity is the moment of interval or indetermination: the brain lets us choose what corresponds to our needs, introducing an interval between received and executed movement, dividing excitation infinitely through its network of nerves and leaving us to choose among possible reactions. Affection-subjectivity is the moment of pain, the price paid by the brain or conscious perception, since perception does not merely reflect possible action and the brain cannot bring about the interval without certain organic parts being committed to a purely receptive immobility that surrenders them to pain. Recollection-subjectivity is the primary aspect of memory: recollection fills the interval, becoming embodied in the properly cerebral interval. Contraction-subjectivity is the second aspect: the body is no more a punctiform instant in time than a mathematical point in space, and it brings about a contraction of experienced excitations from which quality is born.
These five aspects are not simply ordered by increasing depth; they are distributed along two very different lines of fact. The first chapter of Matter and Memory decomposes a composite—Representation—into two divergent directions: matter and memory, perception and recollection, objective and subjective, echoing the two multiplicities of Time and Free Will. The first two aspects belong to the objective line, since the first abstracts from the object and the second establishes a zone of indetermination. Affection, the third, is more complex, depending on the intersection of the two lines; its positivity is not yet the presence of a pure subjectivity opposed to pure objectivity but rather the impurity that disturbs the latter. The province of the pure line of subjectivity is the fourth and then the fifth sense. Only the two aspects of memory strictly signify subjectivity; the others make way for or bring about the insertion of one line into the other.
The question “Where are recollections preserved?” is therefore a false problem, a badly analyzed composite. It is as though recollections had to be stored somewhere, as though the brain could preserve them. But the brain lies wholly on the line of objectivity: there can be no difference in kind between the brain and other states of matter, for in it everything is movement, as in the pure perception it determines—movement understood not as enduring movement but as an instantaneous section. Recollection, by contrast, belongs to the line of subjectivity. It is absurd to mix the two lines by conceiving the brain as the reservoir of recollections. Recollections need be preserved nowhere other than “in” duration.
The Paradoxes of the Past and the Problem of Actualization
Memory, Deleuze now argues, is a virtual coexistence of the whole past with each present, and recollection becomes psychological only through actualization. Four interconnected paradoxes summarize the position. The paradox of the leap: we place ourselves at once, in a single leap, in the ontological element of the past. The paradox of Being: there is a difference in kind between present and past. The paradox of coexistence: the past does not follow the present it has been but coexists with it. The paradox of psychic repetition: what coexists with each present is the whole of the past, integrally, on various levels of contraction and relaxation. Each paradox depends on the others. Ordinary theories of memory, by contrast, form a group characterized by a single illusion about the essence of Time, a single badly analyzed composite, making us believe that we can reconstruct the past with the present, that we pass gradually from one to the other, that they are distinguished by before and after, and that the mind’s work proceeds by addition of elements rather than by changes of level, genuine jumps, and reworking of systems.
How, then, can pure recollection take on a psychological existence, how can this pure virtual be actualized? The present makes an appeal according to the needs of the present situation. We leap not merely into the past in general but into a particular region, a particular level assumed to correspond to our actual needs. Each level contains the totality of our past in a more or less contracted state, and Bergson adds that there are dominant recollections, like remarkable points, varying from level to level. When a foreign word is spoken, depending on the case I do not leap into the same region, do not place myself on the same level, do not appeal to the same essential characteristics. I may fail, placing myself on a level too contracted, too narrow, or too broad and expanded, and must start again to find the correct leap. This analysis concerns our affinity with Being, our relationship with Being; psychological consciousness has not yet been born but will be born because it has found its ontological conditions here.
The commentator must multiply distinctions. We must not confuse the appeal to recollection with the recall of the image, or evocation. The appeal is the jump by which I place myself in the virtual, in the past, at a particular level of contraction; it expresses the properly ontological dimension of man, or rather of memory. Evocation is different: once we are on a level where recollections lie, they tend to be actualized, becoming recollection-images capable of being recalled, actualized, or embodied. This actualization has distinct aspects, stages, and degrees; through them it alone constitutes psychological consciousness. Here lies the Bergsonian revolution: we do not move from present to past, from perception to recollection, but from past to present, from recollection to perception.
Memory, laden with the whole past, responds to the present by two simultaneous movements: translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, contracting more or less without dividing, with a view to action; and rotation upon itself, turning toward the situation of the moment and presenting the side most useful. Thus two aspects of actualization: translation-contraction and rotation-orientation. Can translation-contraction be identical with the variable contraction of regions and levels? Bergson’s context suggests it, since he invokes translation-contraction regarding sections of the cone. But many considerations lead to the conclusion that the two contractions, though related, are not identical. Levels of the past are no less virtual than the past in general; each contains the whole past in a more or less contracted state around variable dominant recollections, and the extent of contraction expresses the difference between levels. Translation involves a movement necessary in actualizing a recollection taken from a particular level; contraction no longer expresses the ontological difference between two virtual levels but the movement by which a recollection is psychologically actualized together with its level.
It would be a mistake to think a recollection must pass through more and more contracted levels to approach the present as the supreme point of contraction or summit of the cone. In the cone metaphor, even a very contracted level close to the summit, so long as it is not actualized, displays a genuine difference in kind from the summit, the present. To actualize a recollection we do not have to change levels; if we did, memory would be impossible. Each recollection has its own proper level; it is too dismembered or dispersed in broader regions, too confined and muddled in narrower ones. If we had to pass from level to level, each recollection would lose its individuality. The movement of translation actualizes the recollection at the same time as its level; there is contraction because recollection-becoming-image enters into coalescence with the present. It passes through planes of consciousness that put it into effect, but not through intermediate levels. Hence we must not confuse the planes of consciousness through which recollection is actualized with the regions, sections, or levels of the past according to which the always virtual state of recollection varies. We must distinguish intensive, ontological contraction—where all levels coexist virtually, contracted or relaxed—from translative, psychological contraction through which each recollection on its own level, however relaxed, must pass to be actualized and become image.
Bergson says there is also rotation: recollection does not confine itself to translation uniting it to the present; it rotates on itself to present its useful face. Bergson does not clarify this rotation’s nature, and we must make hypotheses from other texts. In translation, a whole level of the past is actualized at the same time as a particular recollection.
The Moments of Actualization and the Two Unconsciousnesses
A fourth moment completes the account: the mechanical movement of the body secures the utility and present performance of the whole. But this utility depends on a condition valid for all four moments. Pure recollection was contemporaneous with the present it had been, so recollection, in actualizing itself, tends to become actualized in an image contemporaneous with that present. Such a “recollection of the present” would be useless, merely doubling the perception-image. Recollection must instead be embodied in terms of a new present, relative to which it is now past. This condition is realized by the nature of the present, which constantly passes, moving forward and hollowing out an interval. This is the fifth aspect of actualization: a displacement by which the past is embodied only in terms of a present different from the one it has been. Its corresponding disturbance is paramnesia, in which the recollection of the present is actualized as such.
Deleuze then distinguishes a psychological unconscious from an ontological unconscious. The latter corresponds to recollection that is pure, virtual, impassive, inactive, in itself; the former represents recollection in the course of actualizing itself. Like Leibnizian possibles, recollections try to become embodied and exert pressure to be admitted, so that a full-scale repression originating in the present and an attention to life are needed to ward off useless or dangerous recollections. The two descriptions of two distinct unconsciousnesses do not contradict; the whole of Matter and Memory plays between them.
One or Many Durations?
The Bergsonian method, Deleuze writes, has two aspects: dualist and monist. First, diverging lines or differences in kind must be followed beyond the turn in experience; then the point of convergence of these lines must be rediscovered, restoring a new monism. This program is realized in Matter and Memory: first the difference in kind between object and subject—perception and recollection, matter and memory, present and past—is brought out; then, when recollection is actualized, its difference in kind from perception tends to be obliterated, leaving only differences in degree between recollection-images and perception-images. Without intuition, one remains prisoner of a badly analyzed psychological composite.
Bergson adds an ontological proposition: while the past coexists with its own present and with itself on various levels of contraction, the present itself is only the most contracted level of the past. Pure present and pure past, pure perception and pure recollection, pure matter and pure memory now have only differences of expansion and contraction, rediscovering an ontological unity. A deeper contraction-memory at the heart of recollection-memory lays foundations for a new monism. Perception contracts an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; the present infinitely contracts our past. Sensation is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface; quality emerges as contracted quantity. Contraction and tension thus move beyond the duality of homogeneous quantity and heterogeneous quality. Conversely, matter is like an infinitely dilated or relaxed past; relaxation and extension overcome the duality of the unextended and the extended. Perception itself is extensity; sensation is extensive insofar as what it contracts is the extended. It makes space available in the exact proportion in which we have time available.
Hence the importance of Matter and Memory: movement is attributed to things themselves, so material things partake directly of duration and form a limit case of duration. The immediate data are surpassed; movement is no less outside me than in me, and the Self is only one case among others in duration. Two problems arise. First, is there a contradiction between the dualism of differences in kind and the monism of contraction-relaxation? The first condemned philosophies confined to differences of degree and intensity as sources of false problems; now Bergson seems to restore degrees, intensity, opposition. The present is only the most contracted degree of the past; matter the most relaxed degree of the present. Escaping matter as deterioration of duration requires conceiving matter as a reversal of duration—threatening the project of understanding Difference as difference in kind independently of the negative. Second, even if solved, can we speak of a rediscovered monism? Since duration is dissipated in differences of degree, intensity, relaxation, and contraction, we tend toward quantitative pluralism. Hence the question: is duration one or many, and in what sense?
Bergson’s texts vary. Matter and Memory goes furthest toward a radical plurality of durations: the universe is made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of tension and energy, nothing else. Bergson speaks of a plurality of rhythms of duration, each duration an absolute, each rhythm itself a duration. In a key text from 1901 he insists on the progress since Time and Free Will: psychological duration, our duration, is now only one case among an infinity of others, a certain well-defined tension whose very definitiveness seems like a choice between an infinity of possible durations. Psychology becomes an opening onto ontology. But once installed, Being is multiple; our duration is caught between more dispersed and more taut, more intense durations. The idea of virtual coexistence of all levels of the past and of tension extends to the whole universe: everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous Memory. Intuition alone enables going beyond idealism and realism, making things coexist. This extension stands out in Creative Evolution, where life is compared to a memory, genera or species corresponding to coexisting degrees of vital memory—an ontological vision implying generalized pluralism.
The Nature of the Élan Vital
Bergson’s concept of the élan vital is not a mysterious force but a virtuality in the process of actualization, a simplicity that differentiates, a totality that divides. Life proceeds by dissociation and division, by dichotomy. It splits into plant and animal, animal into instinct and intelligence, instinct into several directions actualized in different species, intelligence into particular modes. Life is this very movement of differentiation, advancing in ramified series. Duration differentiates according to the obstacles it meets in matter, the materiality it passes through, the extension it contracts, but it also differentiates from within through an internal explosive force. When duration appears in this movement, it is called life. Differentiation is actualization because it presupposes a virtual primordial unity that is dissociated along lines of differentiation yet still shows its subsisting unity in each line. When life divides into plant and animal, each ramification carries the whole with it, like an accompanying nebulosity testifying to an undivided origin. There is a halo of instinct in intelligence, a nebula of intelligence in instinct, a hint of the animate in plants and the vegetable in animals. Differentiation is always the actualization of a virtuality persisting across its divergent lines.
A problem peculiar to Bergsonism arises here: two types of division must not be confused. The first begins with a composite—the space-time mixture, the perception-image and recollection-image mixture—and divides it into two actual divergent lines different in kind, extended beyond the turn in experience. This is a reflexive dualism, the method’s first moment. The second starts from a unity, a simplicity, a virtual totality, actualized according to divergent lines differing in kind; it explains and develops what it held virtually. This is a genetic dualism, the method’s final moment, rediscovering the starting point on a new plane. In both, a vision of the world is criticized for recognizing only differences in degree where there are differences in kind, and a dualism is established between tendencies differing in kind. The divergent lines in both types coincide or correspond closely. At each instant pure duration divides into past and present; the élan vital separates into relaxation descending into matter and tension ascending into duration.
The Virtual and the Possible
What is the nature of this one and simple Virtual? Bergson attributes such importance to virtuality while challenging the category of possibility because the virtual differs from the possible in at least two respects. The possible is opposed to the real; the virtual is opposed to the actual. The possible has no reality though it may have actuality; the virtual is not actual but possesses reality. Proust’s formula defines virtual states: “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” Second, the possible is that which is realized; realization follows two rules—resemblance and limitation. The real is supposed to be in the image of the possible it realizes. Not every possible is realized; realization involves limitation, some possibles repulsed while others pass into the real. The virtual, by contrast, does not have to be realized but actualized; actualization’s rules are difference or divergence and creation. Biologists who invoke organic virtuality yet maintain it is actualized by simple limitation of global capacity confuse virtual and possible. To be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. While the real resembles the possible it realizes, the actual does not resemble the virtuality it embodies. Difference is primary in actualization—between the virtual begun from and the actuals arrived at, and between complementary lines of actualization. The characteristic of virtuality is to exist such that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself, creating its lines of differentiation to be actualized.
Bergson challenges the possible in favor of the virtual because the possible is a false notion, source of false problems. The real is supposed to resemble it—we give ourselves a ready-made, preformed, pre-existent real passing into existence through successive limitations. Everything is already completely given: all the real in the image, in the pseudo-actuality of the possible. The sleight of hand: if the real resembles the possible, it is because the real was expected to come about by its own means, projecting backward a fictitious image and claiming it was possible at any time before it happened. It is not the real that resembles the possible but the possible that resembles the real, abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted like a sterile double. Hence we no longer understand the mechanism of difference or creation. Evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution is actualization; actualization is creation. Biological evolution must avoid two misconceptions: interpreting it via the possible realized, or via pure actuals. The first appears in preformism. Against preformism, evolutionism merits reminding us that life is production, creation of differences.
Finalism, Mechanism, and the Open Whole
Duration forms a virtual Whole actualized along divergent lines, which do not themselves constitute a whole nor resemble what they actualize. Regarding the choice between mechanism and finalism, finalism is preferable if corrected in two ways. First, comparing the living being to the whole universe is right, but interpreting it as an analogy between two closed totalities is wrong—the finality of the living being exists only insofar as it is essentially open onto a totality that is itself open. Finality is external, or it is nothing at all. The organism opens onto a whole rather than the whole closing like an organism. Second, there is a proof of finality when similar actualizations, identical structures or apparatuses, are discovered on divergent lines, such as the eye in the Mollusk and in the Vertebrate. The example is more significant the further apart the lines and the more the similar organ is obtained by dissimilar means. In actualization, resemblance is subordinated to divergence, difference, or differentiation: actual forms or products may resemble each other, but the movements of production do not resemble each other, nor do products resemble the virtuality they embody. Thus actualization is genuine creation; the Whole must create the divergent lines according to which it is actualized and the dissimilar means used on each line. There is finality because life does not operate without directions, but no goal, because these directions do not pre-exist ready-made and are created along with the act that runs through them. Each line of actualization corresponds to a virtual level, but each time it must invent the figure of this correspondence and create the means for developing what was only enveloped.
Duration, Life, is in principle memory, consciousness, freedom—in principle meaning virtually. The question is under what conditions duration becomes in fact consciousness of self, how life actually accedes to a memory and freedom of fact. Bergson’s answer: only on the line of Man does the élan vital successfully get through; man is the purpose of the entire process of evolution. In man alone the actual becomes adequate to the virtual; man can rediscover all the levels, all the degrees of expansion and contraction coexisting in the virtual Whole, as if capable of all frenzies, successively bringing about in himself everything that elsewhere can only be embodied in different species. Even in dreams he rediscovers or prepares matter; inferior or superior durations are still internal to him. Man creates a differentiation valid for the Whole, and alone traces an open direction able to express a whole itself open, whereas other directions are closed and go round in circles, each corresponding to a distinct plane of nature; man can scramble the planes, go beyond his own plane as his own condition, to express naturing Nature.
The Line of Man and the Two Intervals
This privilege’s origin seems humble: every contraction of duration is relative to an expansion, every life to a matter, so the point of departure is a certain state of cerebral matter, which analyzed the received excitation, selected the reaction, made possible an interval between excitation and reaction—nothing beyond the physico-chemical properties of a particularly complicated type of matter. But the whole of memory descends into this interval and becomes actual; the whole of freedom is actualized. On man’s line of differentiation, the élan vital used matter to create an instrument of freedom, to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, to use the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very determinism had spread. Freedom’s physical sense: to detonate an explosive, to use it for more and more powerful movements.
This starting point seems to lead to perception, a utilitarian memory, and intelligence as organ of domination and utilization of matter. Men form societies, but society is not solely or essentially intelligent; human societies imply intelligent comprehension of needs and rational organization of activities, yet also subsist through irrational or absurd factors. Obligation has no rational ground; each particular obligation is conventional and can border on the absurd, but the obligation to have obligations, the whole of obligation, is grounded in a requirement of nature, a virtual instinct, a counterpart nature produces in the reasonable being to compensate for the partiality of his intelligence. Each exclusive line of differentiation seeks to recapture by its own means the advantages of the other; thus instinct and intelligence, in separation, each produce an ersatz of the other. This is the story-telling function: virtual instinct, creator of gods, inventor of religions, of fictitious representations which will stand up to the representation of the real and which will succeed, by the intermediary of intelligence itself, in thwarting intellectual work. As with obligation, each god is contingent or absurd, but what is natural, necessary and grounded is having gods—the pantheon. Sociability exists only in intelligent beings but is not grounded on their intelligence; social life is immanent to intelligence, begins with it but does not derive from it. Thus nothing yet justifies man’s privilege: his societies are no less closed than animal species, form part of a plan of nature, and man goes round in circles in his society as species do in theirs or ants in their domain.
Unless the play of intelligence and society, the small interval between them, is itself decisive. The small intracerebral interval made intelligence possible and the actualization of a useful memory; thanks to it the body imitates the whole life of the mind, and we could with a leap place ourselves in the pure past. Now another interval appears—between intelligence itself and society: might this hesitation of intelligence imitate the superior.
Multiplicity, Intuition, and the Logic of Duration
From Time and Free Will onward, Bergson defines duration as a multiplicity, a type of multiplicity. Deleuze calls this a strange word because it turns the multiple from an adjective into a genuine noun. Bergson thereby exposes the traditional theme of the one and the multiple as a false problem. The word “multiplicity” or “variety” has a physico-mathematical origin, deriving from Riemann. Deleuze finds it difficult to believe Bergson was unaware of the scientific origin of the term and the novelty of its metaphysical use. Bergson moves toward distinguishing two major types of multiplicities: one discrete or discontinuous, the other continuous; one spatial, the other temporal; one actual, the other virtual. This is a fundamental theme of the encounter with Einstein. Bergson intends to give multiplicities the metaphysics their scientific treatment demands. Deleuze calls this perhaps one of the least appreciated aspects of Bergson’s thought—the constitution of a logic of multiplicities.
To rediscover Bergson is to follow or carry forward his approach in these three directions. Deleuze notes these three themes also appear in phenomenology—intuition as method, philosophy as rigorous science, and the new logic as theory of multiplicities—though understood very differently in the two cases. A possible convergence exists, seen in psychiatry where Bergson inspired the works of Minkowski (Le temps vécu) and, in phenomenology, those of Binswanger (Le cas Suzanne Urban) in his explorations of space-times in psychoses. Bergsonism makes possible a whole pathology of duration. In an outstanding article on “paramnesia” (false recognition), Bergson invokes metaphysics to show how a memory is not constituted after present perception but is strictly contemporaneous with it, since at each instant duration divides into two simultaneous tendencies, one going toward the future and the other falling back into the past. He also invokes psychology to show how a failure of adaptation can make memory invest the present as such. Scientific hypothesis and metaphysical thesis are constantly combined in Bergson in the reconstitution of complete experience.
The passage is signed Gilles Deleuze, Paris, July 1988, translated by Hugh Tomlinson. It is followed by the Translators’ Introduction notes and chapter endnotes, which are editorial apparatus citing Bergson’s works, referencing Riemann’s theory of multiplicities, Husson’s book on intuition, Robinet, Hyppolite, Proust, Plato, and others. These notes document page references and clarify distinctions such as that between the motor scheme and the dynamic schema, and between two forms of recognition and memory.
Endnotes and Index
The endnotes and index of the edition are editorial apparatus rather than the main text of Bergsonism. The notes on Chapter IV cite page references to Bergson’s works. Item 2 quotes Matter and Memory on the imperceptible passage from recollections strung along time to movements indicating nascent action in space, and on the impossibility of saying precisely where idea, recollection-image, or sensation begins or ends. Item 4 concerns going beyond two dualisms: quantity-quality and extended-unextended. Item 5 concerns movement belonging to things as much as to the Self. Item 6 reintroduces the theme of degrees and intensities, quoting Matter and Memory on intensities of memory equaling degrees of freedom, Creative Evolution on duration admitting degrees, and Time and Free Will on the passage from concrete duration to symbolical duration and from free activity to conscious automatism. Item 7 reintroduces the negative as limitation and opposition, with Creative Evolution calling matter “a negation rather than a positive reality,” an “inversion,” “interversion,” “interruption,” while noting Bergson elsewhere challenges the notion of the negative. Item 8 cites Matter and Memory on modifications, perturbations, irreducible rhythms, and the absolute character of differences. Item 11 quotes Creative Evolution on the glass of water, sugar, and melting as abstractions, and the Whole progressing like a consciousness; it notes Matter and Memory already invoked the Whole as condition for attributing movement and duration to things. Item 13 notes Bergson says impersonal Time has one “rhythm,” while Matter and Memory affirms plurality of rhythms and personal durations, but denies contradiction since in Duration and Simultaneity diversity of fluxes replaces that of rhythms. Item 15 quotes Duration and Simultaneity on dividing and multiplying consciousness, noting this reflexive aspect brings duration close to a cogito, and cites triplicity: three forms of continuity. Item 20 discusses Bergson’s hypothesis of Relativity and a crucial experience; it argues Bergson’
Main Arguments
The central argument of the book is that Bergson’s philosophy is not a collection of intuitions about time and life but a method, and that this method can be reconstructed with precision. Intuition, on Deleuze’s reading, is a method of division. It proceeds by distinguishing differences in kind from differences in degree, and it does so in order to state problems correctly. The first claim, then, is that false problems are not simply mistakes. They are the product of a fundamental illusion, an illusion rooted in the deepest part of the intelligence, which carries us along and which can only be repressed, never strictly dispelled. We tend to think in terms of more and less, to see differences in degree where there are differences in kind. Only intuition can reactivate a counter-tendency within the intelligence, rediscovering the true articulations of the real and supplying the criteria by which true and false problems can be told apart.
The two types of false problem are distinguished accordingly. The first type mistakes the more for the less, or the less for the more: it treats nonbeing as something more than being, or disorder as something over and above order, or the possible as a preformed element from which the real emerges by simple realization. The second type consists of badly analyzed composites, which arbitrarily group together things that differ in kind. Bergson’s analyses of intensity and of freedom are offered as examples: the notion of intensity is an impure mixture between determinations that differ in kind, and the problem of freedom confuses two types of multiplicity, that of terms juxtaposed in space and that of states merging together in duration. The first type of false problem rests, in the final analysis, on the second, since the idea of disorder emerges from a general idea of order treated as a badly analyzed composite.
From this follows the method’s rules. The first rule is to struggle against illusion and to rediscover the true differences in kind. The second rule is complementary: the real is not only what is cut out according to natural articulations, it is also what intersects again along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point. This is the method of intersection, and Deleuze presents it as a genuine probabilism—qualitative rather than quantitative, since the lines of fact are qualitatively distinct. The example is the first chapter of Matter and Memory, where the problem of memory is correctly stated by starting from the perception-recollection composite, dividing it into two divergent directions corresponding to the difference in kind between soul and body, and then solving it by narrowing to the point where the two directions converge again. The third rule is to state problems and solve them in terms of time rather than space. This gives intuition its fundamental meaning: intuition presupposes duration, and it consists in thinking in terms of duration.
The argument then turns to multiplicity. The word is not a vague name for the philosophical Multiple. For Bergson, it is not a matter of opposing the Multiple to the One but of distinguishing two types of multiplicity. The problem goes back to Riemann, who defined as multiplicities those things determinable in terms of their dimensions or independent variables, and who distinguished discrete from continuous multiplicities. Bergson changed the direction of this distinction. Continuous multiplicities seemed to him to belong essentially to the sphere of duration. Duration was therefore not simply the indivisible or the nonmeasurable; it divided only by changing in kind, and it was susceptible to measurement only by varying its metrical principle at each stage of the division. The quantitative or numerical multiplicity, by contrast, is the object: what divides without changing in kind, what has no virtuality, what is spread out as mere surface and hides nothing. The qualitative multiplicity is the subject, or duration: the virtual insofar as it is actualized, inseparable from the movement of its actualization, since actualization comes about through differentiation, through divergent lines, creating differences in kind.
The third major argument concerns memory. Duration is essentially memory, consciousness, and freedom—consciousness and freedom because it is primarily memory. Bergson presents this identity in two ways: the conservation and preservation of the past in the present, and the present containing the ever-growing image of the past. There are therefore two memories, or two indissolubly linked aspects of memory: recollection-memory and contraction-memory. The basis of this duality lies in a movement by which the present that endures divides at each instant into two directions, one dilated toward the past, the other contracted toward the future. The special problem of memory is how duration becomes memory in fact, how what exists in principle actualizes itself. Deleuze works through the five aspects of subjectivity—need, brain, affection, recollection, and contraction—and shows how they are distributed on two very different lines of facts, the objective line of matter and the subjective line of memory. The question “Where are recollections preserved?” is a false problem, a badly analyzed composite: the brain is wholly on the line of objectivity, and it is absurd to conceive of it as the reservoir of recollections. Recollections do not have to be preserved anywhere other than “in” duration.
The paradoxes of the past follow. There is the paradox of the leap, by which we place ourselves at once in the ontological element of the past; the paradox of Being, that there is a difference in kind between present and past; the paradox of coexistence, that the past does not follow the present it has been but coexists with it; and the paradox of psychic repetition, that what coexists with each present is the whole of the past, integrally, on various levels of contraction and relaxation. Ordinary theories of memory form a group characterized by a single illusion about the essence of time, a single badly analyzed composite, which makes us believe that we can reconstruct the past with the present, that we pass gradually from one to the other, that they are distinguished by before and after, and that the mind’s work is carried out by addition of elements rather than by changes of level, genuine jumps, and reworking of systems. Against this, Deleuze insists on the Bergsonian revolution: we do not move from present to past, from perception to recollection, but from past to present, from recollection to perception.
The fourth argument concerns the unity and plurality of duration. Bergson’s texts vary, and Matter and Memory goes furthest toward a radical plurality of durations: the universe is made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of tension and energy, nothing else. There is a plurality of rhythms of duration, each duration an absolute, each rhythm itself a duration. Psychological duration, our duration, is only one case among an infinity of others, a certain well-defined tension whose very definiteness seems like a choice between an infinity of possible durations. Psychology becomes an opening onto ontology. But once installed, Being is multiple; our duration is caught between more dispersed and more taut, more intense durations. The idea of the virtual coexistence of all levels of the past and of tension extends to the whole universe: everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous Memory. Yet Creative Evolution underlines a major limitation: things endure less in themselves than in relation to the Whole of the universe in which they participate insofar as their distinctions are artificial.
Deleuze’s resolution is that Bergson reconciles the unity of time with a plurality of durations. There is only one time, although there is an infinity of actual fluxes that necessarily participate in the same virtual whole. The demonstration of the contradictory character of the plurality of times is clarified at the level of the theory of Relativity, which paradoxically makes it clear and convincing. With qualitatively distinct fluxes, it is difficult to know whether two subjects live and perceive the same time; unity is supported only as the most plausible idea. Relativity, by contrast, is based on the hypothesis that there are no longer qualitative fluxes but systems in a state of reciprocal and uniform replacement, where observers are interchangeable. Bergson claims that Relativity in fact demonstrates the opposite of what it asserts about the plurality of time. From the first page of Duration and Simultaneity to the last, he criticizes Einstein for having confused the virtual and the actual, and for having confused the two types of multiplicity. By confusing them, Einstein has merely invented a new way of spatializing time. The originality of his space-time and its achievement for science cannot be denied, but this achievement is that of a symbol for expressing composites, not that of something experienced. Being, or Time, is a multiplicity, but it is precisely not “multiple”; it is One, in conformity with its type of multiplicity.
The fifth argument concerns life. The élan vital is always a virtuality being actualized, a simplicity differentiating, a totality dividing up. Life’s essence is to proceed by dissociation and division, by dichotomy. Life divides into plant and animal; the animal into instinct and intelligence; an instinct divides into several directions actualized in different species; intelligence itself has particular modes or actualizations. Life merges into the very movement of differentiation, in ramified series. Differentiation is actualization because it presupposes a unity, a virtual primordial totality dissociated along lines of differentiation, yet still showing its subsisting unity and totality in each line. When life divides into plant and animal, each ramification carries the whole with it, like an accompanying nebulosity testifying to undivided origin.
Here Deleuze distinguishes two types of division that must not be confused. In the first type, one begins with a composite and divides it into two actual divergent lines different in kind, extended beyond the turn in experience. In the second type, the starting point is a unity, simplicity, virtual totality, actualized according to divergent lines differing in kind. The first is a reflexive dualism, the method’s first moment; the second is a genetic dualism, the method’s final moment, rediscovering the starting point on a new plane. The divergent lines in both types coincide or correspond closely.
The nature of this one and simple Virtual is then specified by contrast with the possible. The virtual differs from the possible in at least two respects. First, the possible is opposed to the real; the virtual is opposed to the actual. The possible has no reality; the virtual is not actual but possesses reality. Proust’s formula defines virtual states: “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” Second, the possible is that which is realized, and realization follows two rules, resemblance and limitation. The real is supposed to be in the image of the possible it realizes, and not every possible is realized, since realization involves limitation. The virtual, by contrast, does not have to be realized but actualized; actualization’s rules are difference or divergence and creation. To be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason is that while the real resembles the possible it realizes, the actual does not resemble the virtuality it embodies. Difference is primary in actualization, both between the virtual begun from and the actuals arrived at, and between complementary lines of actualization.
Evolution, then, takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution is actualization; actualization is creation. Biological or living evolution must avoid two misconceptions: interpreting it via the possible realized, or via pure actuals. The first appears in preformism. Against preformism, evolutionism merits reminding us that life is production, creation of differences. Regarding the choice between mechanism and finalism, finalism is preferable if corrected in two ways. First, comparing the living being to the whole universe is right, but interpreting it as an analogy between two closed totalities is wrong; the finality of the living being exists only insofar as it is essentially open onto a totality that is itself open. Second, there is a proof of finality when similar actualizations, identical structures or apparatuses, are discovered on divergent lines, as with the eye in the Mollusk and in the Vertebrate. In actualization, resemblance is subordinated to divergence, difference, or differentiation. There is finality because life does not operate without directions, but no goal, because these directions do not pre-exist ready-made and are created along with the act that runs through them.
The final movement of the argument concerns man. Duration, Life, is in principle memory, consciousness, freedom—”in principle” meaning virtually. The question is under what conditions duration becomes in fact consciousness of self, how life actually accedes to a memory and freedom of fact. Bergson’s answer is that only on the line of Man does the élan vital successfully get through; man is the purpose of the entire process of evolution. In man alone the actual becomes adequate to the virtual; man can rediscover all the levels, all the degrees of expansion and contraction coexisting in the virtual Whole, as if capable of all frenzies, successively bringing about in himself everything that elsewhere can only be embodied in different species. Even in dreams he rediscovers or prepares matter; inferior or superior durations are still internal to him. Man creates a differentiation valid for the Whole, and alone traces an open direction able to express a whole itself open, whereas other directions are closed and go round in circles, each corresponding to a distinct plane of nature. Man can scramble the planes, go beyond his own plane as his own condition, to express naturing Nature.
The origin of this privilege seems humble. Every contraction of duration is relative to an expansion, every life to a matter, so the point of departure is a certain state of cerebral matter, which analyzed the received excitation, selected the reaction, and made possible an interval between excitation and reaction—nothing beyond the physico-chemical properties of a particularly complicated type of matter. But the whole of memory descends into this interval and becomes actual; the whole of freedom is actualized. On man’s line of differentiation, the élan vital used matter to create an instrument of freedom, “to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism,” “to use the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very determinism had spread.” Freedom’s physical sense is “to detonate” an explosive, to use it for more and more powerful movements.
This starting point seems to lead to perception, a utilitarian memory, and intelligence as organ of domination and utilization of matter. Men form societies, but society is not solely or essentially intelligent; human societies imply intelligent comprehension of needs and rational organization of activities, yet also subsist through irrational or absurd factors. Obligation has no rational ground; each particular obligation is conventional and can border on the absurd, but the obligation to have obligations, “the whole of obligation,” is grounded in a requirement of nature, a “virtual instinct,” a counterpart nature produces in the reasonable being to compensate for the partiality of his intelligence. Each exclusive line of differentiation seeks to recapture by its own means the advantages of the other; thus instinct and intelligence, in separation, each produce an ersatz of the other. This is the “story-telling function”: virtual instinct, creator of gods.
Key Concepts
The concept of intuition as method is the organizing idea of the book. Intuition is not a vague sympathy but a rigorous procedure with rules: it divides according to natural articulations, it intersects divergent lines at a virtual point, and it thinks in terms of duration rather than space. It is the faculty that decides between true and false problems, even if this means driving the intelligence to turn back against itself.
The two types of false problem are the first type, which mistakes more for less or less for more, and the second type, which consists of badly analyzed composites. The first rests on the second, since the idea of disorder emerges from a general idea of order treated as a badly analyzed composite. The general error underlying both is thinking in terms of more and less, seeing only differences in degree or intensity where there are differences in kind.
Illusion is the fundamental tendency of the intelligence to think in terms of more and less. It is not a simple mistake but something inseparable from our condition, a mirage. It cannot be strictly dispelled, only repressed, and only intuition can activate the counter-tendency that resists it.
Multiplicity is the concept that signals the problems to come. There are two types: the quantitative or numerical multiplicity of space, which divides without changing in kind, and the qualitative or continuous multiplicity of duration, which divides only by changing in kind. The distinction goes back to Riemann, but Bergson changes its direction by assigning continuous multiplicities to duration.
Duration is the qualitative multiplicity of the subject, the virtual insofar as it is actualized. It is not simply the indivisible or the nonmeasurable; it divides constantly, but it changes in kind in dividing. It is essentially memory, consciousness, and freedom.
The virtual and the possible are distinguished in two respects. The possible is opposed to the real; the virtual is opposed to the actual. The possible is realized through resemblance and limitation; the virtual is actualized through difference or divergence and creation. The virtual is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”
Recollection-memory and contraction-memory are the two indissolubly linked aspects of memory. The first is the conservation and preservation of the past in the present; the second is the contraction of a number of external moments. The basis of this duality lies in the movement by which the present divides at each instant into two directions, one dilated toward the past, the other contracted toward the future.
The paradoxes of the past are the leap, Being, coexistence, and psychic repetition. Each depends on the others, and together they define the Bergsonian conception of the past as a virtual coexistence with each present.
Appeal and evocation are distinct moments in the actualization of recollection. The appeal is the jump by which I place myself in the virtual, at a particular level of contraction; evocation is the actualization of recollections as recollection-images capable of being recalled.
Translation and rotation are the two simultaneous movements by which memory responds to the present. Translation moves memory in its entirety to meet experience, contracting more or less without dividing; rotation turns memory upon itself toward the situation of the moment, presenting the side most useful.
The ontological unconscious and the psychological unconscious are two distinct unconsciousnesses. The ontological unconscious corresponds to recollection that is pure, virtual, impassive, inactive, in itself; the psychological unconscious represents recollection in the course of actualizing itself.
Contraction and relaxation (détente)
