The Career of Living Things Is Continuous: Reflections on Bergson, Iqbal, and Scalia

The Career of Living Things Is Continuous: Reflections on Bergson, Iqbal, and ScaliaAuthor(s): Donna JonesSource: Qui Parle, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2012), pp. 225-248Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/quiparle.20.2.0225 .

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The Career of Living Things Is ContinuousRefl ections on Bergson, Iqbal, and Scalia

donna jones

It is the forgotten war, but still the watershed event of moderni-ty. The Great War was a catastrophic shock to world civilization. The rationalization of slaughter raised the question of what value Western civilization actually placed on life, but the fascist reaction to the horrors of World War I also gave new meaning to life and identifi ed it with death. Only some responded to the carnage with calls for healthy and sensuous living—calls to limit nicotine or al-cohol use, to wander in nature, and to display the naked body. But in Germany the intense lived experience of the battlefi eld formed the basis of a new Kriegsideologie. The German Erlebnis captures this fusion of life and experience. To live meant to live life danger-ously. Ernst Jünger’s war writings explored the psychodynamics of extreme lived experiences (echoing all the way to Katheryn Bi-gelow’s Hurt Locker). We also fi nd an increasingly strident irratio-nal commitment to the vitality of the nation, predicated on the rac-ist destruction of life that is weak.1 Life either had to grow or die out. But life could only grow through death. Imperial expansion in search of Lebensraum created holocausts, but it was ontologized as an expression of life itself, and the bully boys trying to throw off the bridle of the intellect to think with the blood found that there was no better way to silence the reasonable criticism of an



qui parle spring/summer 2012 vol.20, no.2 226

opponent than to paint him as against life. Life became a political banner, but it was also understood implicitly as a perverse Hege-lian identity of opposites: life passed discursively into death, death proved itself to be life. It was already known that all living things share the always realized capacity to die and that the word “life” makes it diffi cult to express that death is part of it, just as the word “day” implies that the night is not part of it. But the relationship between life and death after the Great War was newly based on a profound identity.

Life had become a concept as central to cultural dialogue and production as nature, God, ego, and consciousness had once been.2 A vitalist metaphysics posited the world as fundamentally com-posed of matter and life forces that were taken to be the primary reality. In German philosophy and European thought in general, this metaphysics eclipsed that of critical idealism, in which objects and ideas were held as equally constitutive of reality. The appeal to the guiding life forces of entelechy and élan vital was strengthened by the putative inability of the mechanical life sciences to solve problems in developmental and evolutionary biology and by gener-al resistance to the mechanical worldview. Life, understood as both a spiritual and naturalistic force, came to be widely accepted as the fundamental reality in part due to its mysterious nature. Speaking in terms of life discourses became a sign of the depth of one’s mind and attunement to the era’s most profound metaphysical questions regarding ontology and the nature of experience, and hence a form of cultural capital.

While the fascist uses of the life concept proved to be the most historically important, “Life” was in fact as polysemous as it was culturally central (and perhaps central because it was polysemous): life came to have several meanings, most often oppositional to the nineteenth-century scientifi c mind-set and the mechanistic assump-tions commonly thought to be inherent to it. In Europe, life, leb-en, erlebnis, élan vital, and la vie became philosophemes and ex-pressed, inter alia, the rejection of the protocols of naturalism for the sake of the creativity of the artist; a thoroughgoing skepticism of language to express private and primal experience; the immedi-ate demand for real experience and real life against the detested



Jones: Refl ections on Bergson, Iqbal, and Scalia 227

artifi ciality of bourgeois manners and the enervating nature of ur-ban life and against the promise of an afterlife predicated on the acceptance of suffering and dying well; a progressive demand for the creative reform of institutions as they became outdated in the course of the evolution of social life and an elitist opposition to the putatively life-denying demands of rational democratic discussion, parliamentary politics, and the law; the activist desire to reclaim long-buried ancestral values in a modern world hostile to them for the sake of an organic, solidaristic, and palingenetic national-ism and the fatalistic belief that all societies are yet fated to follow the life cycles of organisms; an alternative system of valuation of things in terms of their specifi c vitality rather than their abstract monetary value; and a veiled theological critique of the Cartesian program that the wonders of the living organism, the creative evo-lution of life-forms, and the gift of man’s moral freedom could be understood in purely mechanical terms without reference to special vital forces.

The life discourses are still with us. Indeed, we still put cultural forms before what Wilhelm Dilthey called the tribunal of life, sens-ing that our cultural objectifi cations may now inhibit new life and even fearing that life is today sacrifi ced at the altar of the forms meant to serve it; we worry that by putting us in the company of strangers, market society requires linguistic and other impersonal social conventions to coordinate our social activity, conventions that cannot but be false to our lived experience and disruptive of organic solidarities; we remain haunted by the thought of becom-ing automatons, the anxiety worked through in comedy, as Henri Bergson argued, and we often long for vital experience and free ac-tion; we worry that scientifi c methods and the technologies based on them allow us to know precisely or mechanically mere aspects of living things but only superfi cially the whole of things, conse-quently leaving us alienated from a living world that we are losing; we wonder whether life, so intimate yet so opaque to us, may still hold the secret to overcoming nihilistic responses, in the face of the death of God, to those two ancient questions of what the good life is and what we ought to do. We turn to “life” out of anxiety about modernity only to fi nd that its very inchoateness simply mirrors the




diffuseness of our anxiety. A stem cell concept, “life” has had the semantic variability to name the responses to the different forms of modern alienation.

In this essay I shall offer some critical comments on Henri Berg-son’s varied and contradictory uses of the life concept. Not just a philosopher or a metaphysician, Bergson won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 and had an infl uence on cultural life unmatched by any philosopher after him. Here I shall consider how Bergson crudely used the life concept in war propaganda only to years lat-er rework it for the purposes of a politicized mysticism. From his fi rst book, Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson conceived of life in terms of an irrationalist theory of identity putatively rooted in time. Part of my aim in this essay is to critique recent attempts, es-pecially by Gilles Deleuze and those infl uenced by him, to recover this theory.

Let me begin with Bergson’s comments on the eve of the Great War, as they show vividly the political nature of vitalism. Enthu-siastically putting his creative vitalist metaphysics in the service of war, Bergson supported Belgium’s struggle against Prussia in 1914, writing of Prussia as a metaphysical problem in the grandest sense:

Many years hence, when the reaction of the past shall have left only the grand outline in view, this perhaps is how a philoso-pher will speak of it. He will say that the idea, peculiar to the nineteenth century, of employing science in the satisfaction of our material wants had given a wholly unforeseen extension to the mechanical arts and had equipped man in less than fi fty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on the earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ—an artifi cial organ which merely prolongs the natural organs—his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the same time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body. From this dispro-portion there issued the problems, moral, social, international, which most of the nations endeavoured to solve by fi lling up the soulless void in the body politic by creating more liberty, more fraternity, more justice than the world had ever seen. Now,




while mankind laboured at this task of spiritualization, inferior powers—I was going to say infernal powers—plotted an inverse experience for mankind. What would happen if the mechani-cal forces, which science had brought to a state of readiness for the service of man, should themselves take possession of man in order to make his nature material as their own? What kind of a world would it be if this mechanism should seize the human race entire, and if the peoples, instead of raising themselves to a richer and more harmonious diversity, as persons may do, were to fall into the uniformity of things? What kind of a society would that be which should mechanically obey a word of command me-chanically transmitted; which should rule its science and its con-science in accordance therewith; and which should lose, along with the sense of justice, the power to discern between truth and falsehood? What would mankind be when brute force should hold the place of moral force? What new barbarism, this time fi nal, would arise from these conditions to stifl e feeling, ideas, and the whole civilization of which the old barbarism contained the germ? What would happen, in short, if the moral effort of humanity should turn in its tracks at the moment of attaining its goal, and if some diabolical contrivance should cause it to pro-duce the mechanization of spirit instead of the spiritualization of matter?3

Technology (telecommunications, railways, intermodal freight transportation) gives us a world beyond the human scale, connect-ing us over distances that we cannot easily imagine (the connected world is beyond imagining, contra Benedict Anderson); such an open and connected world needs political guidance and arbitration to realize and maintain itself, but those who have a stake in peace may have lost their political will because one and the same technol-ogy that has created the post-human world has reduced them, in their working lives, to appendages of machinery, if not machines or even matter. Drilled into obedience, they are thus easily manipu-lated by those intent on aggrandizing power, and have little will of their own to create an open, cooperative society of liberty and jus-tice (it was of course implied that such relations were not meant to be extended to the colonies). Beating back mechanism and matter,




France and Belgium remain infused with the creative élan; Prussia is reduced to inertness. The Prussian transcends the human only to revert to matter (Oswald Spengler would later reverse the iden-tifi cation, charging the Prussian with the life energy of a bird of prey).4 Descartes had speculated: “I remember that, when looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men. . . . And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines.”5 This most stunning expression of the me-chanical philosophy—the idea that as one looks down at the street from the upper story of a house what one sees might not be people at all but automata wearing hats and coats—culminates in war propaganda where the ambiguous passersby have become entire national populations. At the same time, Bergson understands the Belgian and French masses as carriers of the élan vital for a world now beyond the human individual and even the nation-state. The scope of the new society puts strains on all the actors involved, but it can be realized by a creative force cosmic in its reach. The Great War is thus reconfi gured as a battle of life and matter over the fu-ture of the post-human world.

The theological nature of the opposition between life and death is only thinly veiled, and is worth commenting on, for it answers the question of why the charge of being anti-life was so effective rhetorically.6 Decoded, the damning charge is simply that of a re-fusal to do God’s work, but God fi rst had to be reconfi gured as the élan vital. Darwin had discredited the biblical theory of special creation and introduced a thick time into the universe. To vindicate spiritualism, Bergson accepted that understanding could no lon-ger be atemporal such that the past and the future are exactly like the present. Bergson waxed poetic about how life is in a constant state of fl ux, in which past, present, and future can be differenti-ated, though not sliced apart. George Herbert Mead understood this well in his interpretation of Bergson:

What evolution has done is to present to us the conditions out of which new forms can arise. It has given us those conditions; and our thought, our interpretation, of them implies constant appear-ance of new forms. If we turn back to a mechanical statement of




the world, what we get is simply a distribution of physical parti-cles now at one instant and now at another. In all these situations what we have is practically the same. We have the same amount of energy, the same kind of motion. Everything is interrelated with everything else. The new form that arises means simply the redistribution of physical particles. It is only our interpretation of it that makes the new animal, the new plant, out of this shift of positions. What Bergson does is to insist that this process of change that is going on, with the appearance of that which is novel, is the reality of things, and that our philosophy of nature should be an evolutionary philosophy which takes into account a theory of change. This change involves duration. His is an ap-proach to the interpretation of the world from the evolutionary point of view which takes into account the whole of our nature.7

But what Bergson also did—and what makes inapposite recent ar-guments that Bergson anticipated evolutionary mechanisms other than natural selection such as genetic drift, spandrel effects, the dy-namics of self-organizing systems, or the nature of dissipative sys-tems8—is reject, or at least express unremitting skepticism about, the possibility that changes in the system could be related to each other in a causal materialist fashion. Darwin had replaced the his-torical chronicle of living forms with a materialist or—if we are to accept Bergson’s characterization—mechanical theory of what was called transformism. Referring in his most famous example to the development of the eye in species “that have not the same his-tory,” Bergson insists that “combinations of physical and chemical causes” will not secure the result and that “a psychological cause intervenes” (emphasis mine). He thus arrives at the original impe-tus of life, which is both “the fundamental cause of variation” and the reason “why at certain defi nite points [species] evolve identi-cally”—for example, develop something as complex and improb-able as eyes, which would have provided no transitional advantage before their full evolution.9 One could be forgiven for reading an implicit argument in all this for a bold new conceptualization of God as Life where Life itself represents both the spiritualization of the biological and the biologization of the spiritual.




Yet, as already suggested, far from being simply a scientifi c, metaphysical, or theological concept, the élan vital proved to be also a sociopolitical self-conception, held by only certain nations at war. Bergson himself made a failed attempt at the end of his life to refashion his vitalist metaphysics in the wake of the catastro-phe of the Great War. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) Freud had registered and radicalized the rethinking of the human condition caused by the Great War. While Freud called attention to the asocial nature of human sexuality and the need for and con-sequences of its repression, he also subsumed some libidinal drives under Eros, interpreted as the vital force by which life is driven to create more complex connections—today, for example, life is com-monly understood as an ascent from self-replicating molecules to multicellular organisms to ever more complex societies. In Berg-son’s Creative Evolution (1907)—which had captured the opti-mistic prewar zeitgeist like no other work—the whole process was understood to have culminated in the human mind becoming con-scious of itself as the highest expression of such an élan vital and life thereby achieving a form with which to beat back matter and even death, against which it had hitherto vainly battled. Yet while Freud saw that Eros may drive humankind to ever more enabling forms of global cooperation, he tentatively speculated in the after-math of the Great War and the rise of anti-Semitic nationalism that the deep roots of discontent are in man’s own death drive, which aims not (as he is commonly understood to have said) at the re-turn of the oceanic feelings associated with the ego-less state of the infant but at the inorganic, disorganized state of dispersed matter from which life emerged. Life is now seen as tempted not just by its death or decomposition but, even more disturbingly, by its very disintegration into disorganized matter, implying, as well, that the line between life and non-life cannot be drawn because the latter is present in the former. Freud then postulated that externalized ag-gression results from the organism attempting to secure its ability to die or disintegrate on its own terms. The human condition was understood as essentially tragic, fi nite, and violent. The distance between the exuberant optimism of Bergson’s Creative Evolution and the grim pessimism of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents




defi nes precisely the effects of the Great War on European thought. Europe had come to expect death.

Having already worked on behalf of the League of Nations, Bergson rose above his wartime jingoism in his last work, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality (1935), in which he proposed an intriguing contrast between closed societies that practice closed morality with a static religion and an open society that would practice open morality with a dynamic religion. In this last work Bergson strives to distance his conception of an open society in-spired by dynamic religion animated by love of humanity in gen-eral from the dynamically vitalist ideology of imperialism, which he calls “a counterfeit of true mysticism.” Just as motion cannot be reconstructed out of the points into which it decomposed by the analytic intelligence, the mystical love of humanity in general does not emerge, Bergson argues, out of a widening of sympathy beyond family, community, and national identities that result from the accidents of birth and heredity. The mystical love of humanity in general is sui generis, and it is a radically deterritorializing en-ergy, but Bergson’s vision is frustratingly vague.10 If the élan vital moves the mystic and moral hero to a dynamic religion of love of humanity in general—and Bergson appears to fi nd this dynamic openness in Christianity alone—will this love of humanity in gen-eral be expressed only as an openness to any and all converts to the one dynamic religion, paradoxically resulting in its becoming invidious and intolerant in nature? What are the criteria by which the human and thus the object of universal love, humanity in gen-eral, are defi ned? And how will we know whether we have leaped out of one closed group for another? Bergson’s vitalist mysticism of an élan vital motivating humanity to aspire to universal love makes the whole process inherently irrational, a problem compounded by his reliance on a moral hero to show the way by inspiring en-thusiasm among his fl ock. Bergson’s ethics compares poorly to the recent attempt by Amartya Sen to subject parochial identities of closed groups to the rational scrutiny of what Adam Smith called an impartial spectator, who looks outside his society to see which practices would appear arbitrary and unjustifi ed in other societies (Sen gives the example of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg consulting




German judicial thought on the justice of capital punishment) and to determine the impacts that his society has on others (one thinks here, for example, of what is done to innocents abroad for the sake of protecting one’s own society from terror; or of the effects of the greenhouse gases produced by one economy on another society; or of the reservation of citizenship in wealthy and stable polities over-whelmingly for those with the luck of having been born on native soil or of having been born to citizens).11

Bergson would, however, argue that the assumption of the point of view of even the Smithean impartial spectator, much less his mystical hero, cannot be encouraged by rational argument or ar-rived at by small enlargements of the circles of one’s concern from family to community to nation and to humanity as such. He insists unpersuasively on the importance of mystical experience and in-spiration to break the hold of closed societies with closed moral-ity and static religions. But it is diffi cult to see either real ethical advantages to the Bergsonian skepticism toward the expansion of reason in global ethical and political discussion or the importance of mystics and moral heroes, given the presence of global literature through which our horizons can be more reliably expanded.12

At one level, then: anticipating Gilles Deleuze’s geo-philosophy, Bergson identifi es life with the irrationalist experience of deterrito-rialization and predicates an ethics on this experience. But I want to suggest that while this is the manifest focus of Two Sources, its real ethical center derives from another sense of life, defi ned not in contradiction to blockages and closed orders but in terms of time and spiritual immortality. In this book Bergson turned against the entire social machinery for the production of an ever greater accu-mulation of inanimate things of convenience by means of mechani-cal human action on the grounds that it exacerbated international confl icts over territory and resources to the point of bringing Eu-rope to the brink of war (there is little concern about the con-sequences on the colonies). He had hoped somewhat idly for a mysticism suffused with the spirit of Christian love to inspire the formation of small Christian communities moving Europe beyond its national divisions of its respective closed societies; and he urged the public to turn away from the artifi cial needs powering the ma-




chinery of production and toward mystical experiences of love for humanity in general and the consolation of the immortality of a life spirit whose past always already remained coextensive and contem-poraneous with itself and had thus survived as it presumably would the future disintegration of bodily forms. In other words, he had taken on the pastoral role of teaching people how to console them-selves to and even welcome death (it should be remembered that throughout his career Bergson was actively involved in paranormal and occultist societies), and tried to turn people away from even the vital needs of the living individual through an open-ended cri-tique of artifi cial needs and luxuries rooted in the desires of women. Insisting that “psychical research” had shown the existence of di-mensions of memory that are irrelevant to the organism attending to life, Bergson called at the end of his last book for “a belief in the life beyond” so that we would not cling to this life “so desper-ately” and would “snap our fi ngers at death.” Worldly pleasures would thereby become “drab and jejune” and “pale like our electric lamps before the morning sun.”13 Bergson’s last work ends not as a poststructuralist ethics avant la lettre but as a form of tradition-al theology, providing the solace of spiritual immortality and thus preparing subjects for dying well. Max Horkheimer lamented that Bergson had lost touch with the Enlightenment demand for happi-ness in this life.14 Where Nietzsche found value in the advancement of life even if or exactly because it came at the expense of suffering, Bergson had turned his inference from the limits of mechanical or materialist biology of an élan vital into a proof of the existence of an immortal spiritual life and wish for the transcendence of earthly things. But this same spiritual life that outlasts the disintegration of the organism also carries with it memory, in fact the whole of one’s past, though we only glimpse it in those rare moments when our at-tention is not focused on the demands of present action.

One simply cannot make out whether Bergson is a social vision-ary, a pessimist, a mystic, or a pastoralist by the end of his writing career. But if he himself could draw no clear meaning from the life concept that he more than anyone else had made central to cultural life, fascists drew clear implications from his critique of the intellect, paean to the creative life, and distinctions between




the static and the dynamic. Bergsonism had provided the discourse for the dynamic, aggressive racial imperialism that Bergson him-self disavowed for a Christian escapism. The very abstract nature of his life metaphysics allowed it to be appropriated by almost any tendency. The creative artist could just as easily be seen as the expression of his system as the anarcho-syndicalist or mystical nationalist; recently, as I will discuss below, Bergsonism has been interpreted as the theoretical expression of common-law jurispru-dence. But fi rst let me turn briefl y to the meaning that Bergsonian vitalism had in the colonies.

In a strikingly erudite analysis in this journal, “Bergson in the Colony: Intuition and Duration in the Thought of Senghor and Iqbal,” Souleymane Bachir Diagne has explored the Bergsonian in-fl uences on the father of Senegal and the spiritual father of Paki-stan, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Muhammad Iqbal, respectively.15 One of Diagne’s most important contributions (to my mind) is his demonstration that the most interesting and defensible interpreta-tions of Bergson’s thought were developed in the colonies. I fi nd myself in enthusiastic agreement with his rigorous assessment of Bergson’s importance for Senghor’s understanding of intuition as a critique of false immediacies and of dance and rhythm as both the unique African expression of the élan vital and metaphors for the epistemological relationship between knower and object, con-ceived non-instrumentally.16 Senghor countered racist and humili-ating claims about the pre-logicality of the African mind with as-sertions of a greater intuitiveness of life forces, which were taken to be an even more fundamental reality than matter. Grounding his vision in a vitalist metaphysics, as Diagne shows, Senghor valo-rized the African mode of being for its deeper understanding of living things, its identifi cation with life forces whether embodied in so-called lower life-forms or ancestors, its appreciation of rhythm and movement as refl ected in its dance and sculpture, and its ca-pacity for a politics of abiding organic solidarity. Senghor sought a framework in terms of which colonized Africans could insist that they are not a problem, a nuisance, a historic relic, clowns of in-competence, a zoo exhibit, and a violent threat, but an embodi-ment and active source of value in the world.




Diagne’s analysis of Iqbal’s Bergsonism fi lls a void in the litera-ture on Bergson, which suffers from neglect of his extra-European reception and interpretation. Diagne is explicit about the contem-porary political importance of Iqbal’s interpretation of Bergson. Diagne argues that Iqbal’s chemical fusion of Bergsonism and the Koran creates the spirit needed for the modernity of “Muslim so-cieties faced with the necessity of reconnecting with a spirit of re-form and openness, and the values on which this spirit is founded: the affi rmation of the individual, the practice of free judgment not ballasted by the weight of tradition, the value of scientifi c inquiry, progress, and liberty” (“BC,” 136). Pivotal here are the equation of life with newness and a positive sense of emergence as qualita-tive difference realized in, but punctuating, the fl ow of time.

“The binding thread” in Iqbal’s poetic and philosophical corpus, Ayesha Jalal has recently written, is “the idea of human freedom centered on khudi, literally the self or personality, a term which he uses to refer to the self-conscious and dynamic individual.”17 Now Iqbal’s indebtedness to Bergson can of course be overstated, and the apparently fundamentally Islamic nature of his thought obscured. Jalal emphasizes that Iqbal critiqued both Buddhism and Christianity for treating as virtues self-renunciation, poverty, and other forms of otherworldiness. Poverty in Islam is a vice, Iqbal in-sisted. Jalal further notes: “As free, equal and responsible individu-als, human beings are the makers of their own destiny and require no mediator between themselves and God. Islam rejects Christian doctrines of redemption and the infallibility of the Church because these assume the insuffi ciency of the human personality and create a dependency that Iqbal saw as obstructing the ethical progress of man” (“FE,” 465).

But Iqbal feared that Muslims would not realize the Islamic ethi-cal ideal of a strong will in a strong body—Jalal quotes this formu-lation from Islam as an Ethical and a Political Ideal (1908) with-out blinking—and explained the visible absence of the life force as the result of the decay of the religious spirit. The individuation of the person as a responsible and creative actor is a historical and dynamic result demanded by Islam, but Islam had been co-opted by rival faiths, according to Iqbal. The remarkable claim here is




that genuine Islam uniquely provides the conviction and obliga-tion for the individual to achieve the autonomy to think, judge, and decide for oneself in the face of pressures for conformity to the social group. Doubt and disobedience are signs of the individua-tion that God desired for people to realize, so that they could share power and freedom with him. Diagne fi nds the spirit of Bergson-ism in Iqbal’s idea that the individual is a constant creation while Jalal hears in Iqbal an anticipation of the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen to make the measure of development individuals’ real opportunities to live lives consonant with their own values.

It may be, however, that Iqbal did not believe that he had in-fused Islam with Bergsonism, but rather that the spiritual core of Islam better expressed the élan vital than Bergsonism, a revisionist Western theology, could. It would doubtless change matters for a more dynamic and individualistic Islam to dominate in those Is-lamic courts that decide on the faithfulness of legislation to core re-ligious tenets in theocracies today, though we have the prior ques-tion of whether a state should be institutionally identifi ed with a single religion (Jalal suggests that Iqbal himself preferred repub-lican forms of government and took the Caliphate to be a distor-tion of Islam), and I certainly have my Enlightenment doubts about that. Jalal insists, however, that Iqbal’s case for a revitalization of Islam’s ethical ideals on freedom and equality should “force one to pause and consider whether invoking the old oppositional frame-work between religion and secularism is really valid in this con-text” (“FE,” 467).

The language of revitalization here is philosophically interest-ing. The suggestion is that Muslims are born only nominal heirs and that they must thus actively recover the core of their faith in a decadent Hindu-dominated world hostile to it. For Iqbal, Jalal notes, Islam had also been distorted through its encounters with Greeks, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Nestorians. So the fundamen-tal teachings of Islam are not given to the present generation but must be recovered. The self becomes free to the extent that one is faithful to and makes one’s actions consistent with fundamen-tal doctrines alone. And here Iqbal’s notion of freedom overlaps




with Bergson’s. It is identifi ed with the active recovery of continu-ity with one’s cultural inheritance, faithfulness to which actually demands creative responses in the unfolding of time. Identifi cation with the past, otherwise lost to time, is the means through which the self creates itself as true and free. J. W. Burrow captures Berg-son’s sense brilliantly:

Bergson’s identifi cation of the self with its whole past is the re-verse of the determinism it might at fi rst seem to be. It is not that our past determines how we shall act. Rather, it requires a con-centrated act of will to, as it were, gather and focus our whole self in order to act freely and creatively, in contrast to the repeti-tive, perfunctory acts of our fragmented practical, self-interested self. It is like the Idealists’ concept of the true, higher, integral self, but built now out of the fashionable materials of the fl ow of existence and Unconscious Mind.18

I have elsewhere expressed skepticism of this idea of freedom on account of its manifest conservatism in spite of the invigorating claims of newness and creativity (RD, 102ff). As life is distin-guished by memory or even characterized by durée, then to live or live truly or authentically is, now paraphrasing Bergson, to re-coil the personality on itself, gather up the past, which is slipping away, in order to thrust it, compact and undivided, into a present that it will create by entering. Calling for Muslims to reclaim their heritage, revitalize their present, and build a future that was truly worthy of the teachings of Islam, Iqbal would write:

How can the transient scene of grief frighten me?I am confi dent of the destiny of my millat [nation].My world is free of the component of despair;The news of complete victory is the secret of my zeal.Yes, it is true I keep my eye on the times long gone,I tell an old story to the assembly’s audience.Memory of the past is the elixir of life,My past is the interpretation of the future.I keep that uplifting period before me,I see tomorrow in the mirror of yesterday.19




I am critical of such a radical reorientation both for making iden-tity something that is simply recovered, however creatively, rather than assumed on the basis of reasoned choice, and for positing that identity has a genuine or authentic core defi ned by this puta-tively rediscovered transgenerational religious (or in Negritude’s case ethnic) commitment.20 Diagne recovers an Iqbal whose vision is focused on the creation of the new, yet Bergsonism has also given philosophical depth to projects of radical traditionalism by paint-ing such projects as characteristic of life, truly lived. What I have called Bergson’s mnemic vitalism can be understood in terms of the distinction between processes that store up information about past events and those that do not (RD, 104, 149–50). Life is considered a type of the former alone. To get this technical distinction right, let me quote biologist Richard Lewontin at length:

Because the past is a condition of the present and the present is a condition of the future, it is tempting to assert that we cannot predict what is to come without a knowledge of what has been. In general, however, that assertion is wrong. Although it may seem paradoxical, the relevance of the past for the present does not carry over into the future for most physical systems. That is, what happens next depends only on the present state of the sys-tem, not on how it arrived at that state. If I leave Marlboro and travel south for a half hour, I shall arrive in West Halifax irre-spective of whether I originally got to Marlboro from the north, south, east or west. This dynamics of travel does not depend upon a memory of the past. Such systems, in which the future depends on the present but not on how the present was arrived at, are called Markovian processes, as does any physical process that cannot store up information about past events. Thus, the size of the American population in 1982 depended only on how many people of different ages were alive in 1981 and on the birth and death rates among people of the various ages in that year. It makes no difference at all whether the population was larger or smaller in 1980 than it was in 1981. Not all physical systems are Markovian. For example, the next word that I write on this page depends not only on the preceding word, but on every other word that I have written. Moreover, since the next word also de-




pends on my intentions, it may very well depend on every word that I have ever written (or read!). And, as the book grows lon-ger, every word in it will depend on a longer and longer sequence of preceding words.

The distinction between Markovian and non-Markovian pro-cesses is fundamental to the difference between human cultural history and human biological evolution. Language, writing, cul-tural artifacts (such as buildings), and cultural phenomena (such as modes of production) all provide direct information about the past that infl uences the future. The low state of European culture that continued long after the disintegration of Rome was at least in part a consequence of the immense loss from the fund of technical and humanistic knowledge that occurred at the fi nal destruction of the libraries of Alexandria in 391. In contrast, Muslim culture grew at a prodigious rate beginning in the seventh century because knowledge of the classical times—knowledge then unavailable to the Latin and Greek scholars of Europe—was preserved in Arabic manuscripts. The history of a species’ biological evolution, however, is stored nowhere in the individual members of the species. Their present state is, indeed, a consequence of their history, but the genes currently possessed by the species are all that matter for its evolutionary future, irre-spective of how it acquired those genes. There is no “race mem-ory” in biology, only in books.21

For Bergson, life is achieved by a Markovian system transcend-ing itself to become non-Markovian; that is, life is achieved to the extent that the memory of the past changes the dynamics of the system. A system becomes not only living but also free as person-al memory or cultural memory condition action, allowing for the system not to simply react to the forces impinging on it any given moment. Bergsonism is not a conservative doctrine of physical race memory, but it does give the ontological status of virtual existence to the past. That is, it does create the possibility of spiritual, not biological, race memory, and books are not required to recover it. Recovering such a virtual spiritual legacy in the present of changed circumstances requires its modifi cation or differentiation, but this is still an inherently conservative procedure. The obeisance to the




past can masquerade as freedom, as it entails liberation from the buffeting about represented by a Markovian process; but the sys-tem is required to carry over the whole of the past and to make the present consistent and continuous with it. This follows from the fetishization of continuity implicit in Bergson’s conception of du-rée. Milic Capek has helpfully visualized the total continuity of the Bergsonian durée réelle in comparison with William James’s “next-to-next-continuity of the stream of thought.”22 One sees that the former is a non-Markovian process (as Capek puts it: “the Berg-sonian past is indivisibly immanent in the present ‘occasion’”) and the Jamesian stream is Markovian (fi g. 1). What Capek is visual-izing here is personal consciousness over the course of a lifetime, but if we rotate the diagram so that it appears vertically with P1 at the top and P4 at the bottom, then durée réelle appears as a trans-generational model in which each generation can inherit from all the previous ones. Having presented a similar vertically positioned diagram, the anthropologist Tim Ingold fi nds that it illustrates

the possibility of an open-ended way of thinking about the his-tory of life, as a trans-generational fl ow in which people and their knowledge undergo perpetual formation. It also gives us a way of describing ancestry and descent which, I believe, more faithfully refl ects the way people generally talk about such matters—in terms of the narrative interweaving of present and past lives rather than the plotting of connections between unique and self-contained in-dividuals. . . . The past . . . does not tail off like a succession of dots left further behind. Such a tail is but the ghost of history, retrospectively reconstructed as a sequence of unique events. In reality, the past is with us as we press into the future. In this pres-sure lies the work of memory, the guiding hand of a consciousness that, as it goes along, also remembers the way. Retracing the lines of past lives is the way we proceed along our own.23

My concern, though, is not with the empirical description of self-understanding as crucially transgenerational in some aspects but with the ideal of continuity of the present with, to use Bergson’s expression, a “past that gnaws into the future and swells as it ad-vances” (CE, 4–5). In short, there is no recognition here of a cru-




cial Nietzschean insight—the importance of forgetting for creative action and the enhancement of life.24

Support for my interpretation of Bergsonism as a fundamen-tally conservative doctrine of continuity can be found in one of the most interesting—and certainly lucid and painstakingly argued—recent attempts to recover the philosopher, Alexandre Lefebvre’s The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza.25 Lefebvre fi nds that Bergsonian metaphysics fi ts like a glove to common-law juris-prudence, a relatively conservative fi eld of endeavor intended to give social life the properties of constancy, predictability, and ob-jectivity. Yet Lefebvre is so impressed with the uncanny relevance of this abstract metaphysics to what is an inherently conservative practice that he neglects to ask what this fi t says about the limits of Bergsonian philosophy as an expression of change and novelty. Common-law systems, after all, give precedential weight to com-mon-law decisions on the principle that it would be unfair to treat like cases differently. Governed by the principle of stare decisis, a common-law judge is bound to follow the reasoning in the relevant past decisions. Lefebvre, however, calls attention to the creativity demanded of a judge bound to precedent in a world that is itself constantly changing, though that creativity should not slip into discretion, voluntarism, or decisionism. The judge has to create the law to adjudicate the new, but in a way that keeps the present

Fig. 1. Milic Capek’s diagram of the stream of thought and durée réelle. Reprinted from Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpre-

tation and Reevaluation (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishers, 1971), with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

STREAM OF THOUGHT

DURÉE RÉELLE

P1 P1P2 P2P3 P3P4 P4

m1 m1m2 m2m3 m3m'3

m'''3

m''3




bound to or continuous with the past. This is a jurisprudence of small changes with no real disruptions (and that raises the question of whether Bergsonian metaphysics also fi ts the practice of statu-tory law). Common-law adjudication happens through time, con-ceived in Bergsonian terms as continuous interpenetration of past, present, and future and itself a factor of change. Alastair Morgan has recently argued that Adorno critiqued “the Bergsonian notion of a virtual becoming” for not allowing “any fi xed or determin-able points within the vital fl ux in order for a refl ective thought to adopt . . . a [critical] subject position.”26 But this is exactly what Lefebvre shows not to be true of the common-law judge who must rework the common law which forms a virtual past coexistent with his present in the face of encounters that would seem to exceed the common-law precedents. Lefebvre develops an entire theory of what he calls refl ective (as opposed to inattentive) judgment in cases or encounters like this, and it would be too simple to say that subjectivity in relation to the virtual past is simply extinguished in common-law judgment. In fact, refl ective subjectivity is demanded by those encounters that seem to be both recognizable within and excessive to the common law. This discussion is fated to remain abstract without discussion of Lefebvre’s analysis of actual com-mon-law judgments in terms of Bergsonian metaphysics, but his philosophical argument is clear enough. For example, he discusses refl ective judgment as a circuit of encounter and memory until one can establish a continuity of experience, meaning that there are no breaks in temporal consciousness. Lefebvre’s philosophical execu-tion is marvelous and inspired, but Bergson’s conception of the circuit is closed and suffocating (IL, 185). To be sure, Lefebvre shows implicitly how inapposite the Adornian criticism of Bergson in fact is, but he only frees Bergson from one criticism to show how conservative Bergsonism proves to be, as shown by its tight fi t with common-law jurisprudence. Indeed, Lefebvre turns to Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia for the description of common-law adjudication as bounded creativity that allows for no gaps in the law (IL, 138). Lefebvre defi nes durée as a single state prolonged and transition as continuous, but then tells us that time is internal difference or, it goes without saying, becoming (IL, 93–94). Yet




difference only prolongs the single state. Reality is the One, and the possibilities of novelty and creativity have been sharply delim-ited while what has been rendered metaphysically out of bounds is simply dismissed, as noted above, as the demons of discretionism, voluntarism, and decisionism. As the discussion of Markovian pro-cesses was intended to show, discontinuity presumably belongs to the career only of inanimate things—how a billiard ball moves does not depend on how it arrived at its present position, making it dis-continuous with its past, while the history of a living thing affects its reaction and movements to stimuli, thereby giving the living organism a kind of temporal continuity or duration to itself. The judge makes the common law a living thing by making it continu-ous even with those encounters that would seem to exceed it, and life proves not to be limited to the organic. We are left, however, with the question of what limits to Bergsonism are exposed by its uncanny fi t with the norms and demands of common-law adjudica-tion. In a book guided by Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson, one may be surprised to fi nd the image of Scalia’s responsible common-law judge who recognizes the need for only the bounded creativity demanded by time reifi ed into itself a cause of change. There is a long line of actors who have spoken in the language of Bergson: an-archo-syndicalists, futurists, occultists, fascists, anticolonial rebels, and religious reformers and mystics. But I have meant to say that there is sense to fi nding Antonin Scalia at the end of this list.

Notes

1. André Pichot, The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler (London: Verso Books, 2009).

2. Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

3. Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Confl ict (London: F. T. Unwin, 1915), 35–36.

4. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to the Philos-ophy of Life, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1932).

5. René Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy (Whitefi sh, MT: Kes-singer, 2004), 21.




6. T. Jackson Lears reaches a similar conclusion. See T. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009), 237.

7. George Herbert Mead, “Science Raises Problems for Philosophy—Vi-talism; Henri Bergson,” in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 304–5.

8. John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 85; Michael Vaughan “Introduction: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution,” SubStance 36, no. 3 (2007): 7–24.

9. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Miller (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 96–98. Hereafter cited as CE.

10. Paola Marrati embraces the opening of which Bergson speaks. But she insists that the opening has no object, not even humanity in gen-eral, which she claims is too abstract an object for real ethical con-cern. But that leaves me with little understanding of what the value and meaning of openness are. I also argue that “opening” is not the real center of Bergson’s concerns. See Paola Marrati, “Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society: Bergsonian Politics,” in Politi-cal Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 591–601.

11. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). The chapter “Open and Closed Impartiality” is at pages 124–54. I thank Rakesh Bhandari for pointing me to this chapter and discussion of it in relation to Bergson’s ideas.

12. For such a horizon-widening work of literary criticism, see Jahan Ramazani, Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

13. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: H. Holt, 1935), 315–17.

14. Max Horkheimer, “On Bergson’s Metaphysics of Time,” Radical Phi-losophy 113 (May–June 2005): 9–19.

15. Souleymane Bashir Diagne, “Bergson in the Colonies: Intuition and Duration in the Thought of Senghor and Iqbal,” Qui Parle 17, no. 1 (2008): 125–46. Hereafter cited as “BC.” See also by the same author Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Thought of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar: Codesria Books, 2011).

16. Explored in Donna Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 29–150. I am a bit more unforgiving than Diagne of




Senghor’s racialization of the differences in cognitive temperament between Africans and Europeans. Hereafter cited as RD.

17. Ayesha Jalal, “Freedom and Equality: From Iqbal’s Philosophy to Sen’s Ethical Concerns,” in Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honour of Amartya Sen, vol. 2, Society, Institutions and Develop-ment, ed. Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 452–69. Hereafter cited as “FE.”

18. J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 168.

19. Muhammad Iqbal, n.d., “Bang-i-Dara,” in Kullsyat-I-Iqbal (Lahore: Sheikh Muhammad Bashir and Sons, n.d.), 249–50. Quoted in “FE” 458. See also, for other translations of his work, http://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/poetry/urdu/bang/translation/index.htm.

20. The ideas I developed in my book are similar in important ways to those of Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006), 9–10. Sen argues for a full recognition of each person’s plural identities; he begins his argument with the description of the descent into the prizing of one’s fundamental iden-tity over all others in the events that led to the Rwandan genocide. But at the same time Sen exaggerates the plurality of identities that the majority of people are in fact allowed to develop and enjoy, given the constraints of real life and the institutionalization of group op-pression relief, which does at times require politics organized around single identities, e.g., as women, ethnic minorities, or insecure work-ers. That is, if real freedom depends on the ability to enjoy multifac-eted development—and I mean here something more than the new identities people are required to assume for the sake of employment in an unstable economy—then single identity (or what Deleuze would call molar) politics are in fact required at times to create the condi-tions propitious to such development (for example limited working hours), that is, to challenge real constraints and institutional oppres-sion for the sake of real opportunities for multifaceted development. We therefore need not always fear the central place of singular identi-ties in peoples’ lives as a self-infl icted “minaturization” of their be-ing. As Gayatri Spivak once put it, strategic essentialism does have its place in politics.

21. Richard Lewontin, Human Diversity (New York: Scientifi c Ameri-can Library, 1995), 147–48. Of course, only in light of the modern theory of inheritance can we say that there is no race memory in biol-ogy; for most of history descendants were thought to have inherited




substances and properties from all past generations. For example, the one-drop racial rule only could have made sense on the assumption that some germinal substance was passed on from all previous gen-erations; in terms of modern genetics there is only a probability that the relevant “race” alleles (assuming that they exist) would have been passed on down generations. In fact, as Lewontin underlines, the de-scendant inherits genetic substance only from the parents.

22. Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Reevaluation (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), 159.

23. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 117–19.

24. Our ability to forget faces a formidable threat in digital memory. In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princ-eton University Press, 2009), 118–19, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has laid out the dangers very well:

[A]s we expand the use of external memory through digital re-membering, we endanger human reasoning [in] a number of ways. . . . First, external memory may act as a memory cue, causing us to recall events we thought we had forgotten. If hu-man forgetting is at least in part a constructive process of fi lter-ing information based on relevance, a recall triggered by digital memory of an event that our brain has “forgotten” may under-mine human reasoning. Second, comprehensive digital memo-ry may exacerbate the human diffi culty of putting past events in proper temporal sequence. Third, digital remembering may confront us with too much of our past and thus impede our ability to decide and act in time . . . as well as to learn.

25. Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of the Law: Bergson, Deleuze, Spino-za (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Lefebvre offers care-ful and rigorous explanations of Bergson’s conception of images, his analysis of the paradoxes of time and implicit theory of what Lefeb-vre calls attentive judgment. Hereafter cited as IL.

26. Alastair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life (London: Continuum, 2007), 125.



Documents

The Career of Living Things Is Continuous: Reflections on Bergson, Iqbal, and Scalia