Monday, February 22, 2016


248. Connections with Bergson: The linguistic U-turn

Here I start a series to explore connections of this blog with the thought of Henri Bergson.

These days I found out that what I have written in this blog resembles the thought of Henri Bergson, in some important, but certainly not in all respects.

I tried to read Bergson before, but found his writing difficult to understand, until I turned to the secondary literature. That has frequently happened to me before, with Kant, Hegel, Habermas, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Levinas, and Deleuze, to name a few. In content I largely prefer continental philosophy to analytic philosophy, but in style I prefer the latter. Analytical philosophy often is a fountain of clarity compared to the pit of obscurity of much continental philosophy. However, perhaps that is due, at least in part, to the fact that continental philosophy is more willing to turn to the fundamentally more obscure issues of philosophy. However, there are exceptions: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are a pleasure to read.

First, I turned to a book on Bergson by Deleuze, but that hardly helped. From that I find that I still fail to understand much of both Bergson and Deleuze. Then, recently I found a helpful, clear exposition of Bergson, in Dutch, by Hein van Dongen.[i]

To my surprise and delight I then found that my claim of an ‘object bias’ in language, introduced in item 29 of this blog, comes close to a similar claim by Bergson.

I claimed that language, and consequently many concepts and much thought, are biased by an aptitude and irresistible inclination, developed in evolution of the human being, to conceptualize things as if they were objects moving in space. This fundamentally distorts the views we have of abstract categories such as meaning, thought, identity, happiness, justice, culture, ….. , the proper handling and understanding of which now forms the challenge for survival of the human species. Here and there I tried to conceptualize differently.

Bergson had a similar claim, that in language we have a distorted view of everything in terms of objects that are fixed and distinct from each other. In particular, we are captive to a spatial notion of time as a succession of distinct moments, like separate objects juxtaposed in space. Here also, the explanation is that this bias arose because it served survival in past evolution.

As noted by Hein van Dongen, after the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, where models of thought were sought in ordinary language, this constitutes a U-turn, a turn away from language as fundamentally misleading. But of course that presents a huge problem: how to use language to turn away from language. That probably accounts for much of the apparent obscurity of this kind of philosophical talk. Yet it is not an entirely hopeless endeavour, Bergson was convinced. One can seek recourse to metaphors and images.

But the use of metaphor can be misleading. After all, the use of objects as metaphor for abstract concepts is precisely what is now misleading us. So, we should look elsewhere. For example, in item 209 for the notion of identity I used the notion of networks of connections between people. 

Bergson proposed a conceptualization of time as ‘duration’, as a coherent, connected flow of heterogeneous elements, in ongoing flux of change, emergence, as fundamental to both thought and outside nature. I will return to this theme in following items in this blog.  

Similarly, I have followed a pragmatist line of thought, in a philosophy of process, in an interaction between thought and action in the world. That, I argued, is also connected to the thought of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The pragmatist philosopher William James and Bergson were acquainted, and there is a similarity between Bergson’s notion of duration and James’ view of the ‘stream of consciousness’, which was probably inspired by Bergson’s duration.  
     


[i] Hein van Dongen, Bergson (in Dutch), Amsterdam: Boom, 2014.

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