Freedom and Sociability for Bergson

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ISSN 1475-9551 print; ISSN 1477-2760 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

Culture and Organization, 2003, Vol. 9(1), March, pp. 5971

*Email: [email protected]

Freedom and Sociability for Bergson

CARL POWER*

Unit 3, 31 Herbert Street, Dulwich Hill, NSW 2203, Australia

This paper discusses the way that Bergson relates the notions of freedom and sociability. It retraces a pathleading from his first major work to his last, from a proto-phenomenology of freedom to a kind of biologyof social life. The continuity of this passage is explained, at least in part, by Bergsons continual rethinkingof his chief philosophical invention: the concept of qualitative multiplicity. This paper also seeks to indicatethe importance of Bergsons understanding of both freedom and sociability for the poststructuralist politicalphilosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Key words: Bergson; Deleuze; Freedom; Society; Poststructuralism; Multiplicity

INTRODUCTION

In this paper, I want to discuss the way that Bergsons notion of freedom is related to that of

sociability. In a sense, this will require grasping both ends of the chain of texts that make up

Bergsons oeuvre; for, on the one hand, freedom is the subject of Time and Free Will,

Bergsons first book, and, on the other hand, his notion of sociability only receives a full

treatment 43 years later in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Quite a

distance separates these two works. Bergson has passed from a phenomenological account of

the experience of freedom to a kind of biological account of social life. What I plan to do is

show how the early work on freedom developed into his later work on society. The continuity

of this passage is due to Bergsons continual rethinking of his chief philosophical invention:

the concept of qualitative multiplicity. Along the way, I will indicate the importance of

Bergsons understanding of both freedom and sociability for the poststructuralist political

philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

TIME AND FREE WILL

Bergson introduces his notion of freedom in the context of one of modernitys classicmetaphysical dilemmas: the problem of reconciling ones own experience of freedom with

sciences mechanistic picture of the universe, a picture that seems to render freedom

completely impossible. Kants solution is famous: surrender the whole of the phenomenal

world, including the domain of psychology, to the natural sciences and relegate freedom to

the noumenal realm; thus freedom becomes an idea we can and must thinkbut not something

we can know. With Time and Free Will, first published in 1889, Bergson invents a new

solution. He insists that freedom is a factof experience and indeed among the facts which

we observe there is none clearer (Bergson, 1913: 221). Of course, it is not the kind of fact


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that science can grasp. It is not, after all, a measurable quantity. Bergsons general strategy

is to demonstrate that some empirical phenomena, by their very nature, resist measurement

and hence scientific treatment. In this way he seeks to secure a place for freedom within the

empirical world.

According to Bergson, immediate experience offers us, primarily, two kinds of empirical

distinction. There are, he says, two kinds of multiplicity, two possible senses of the word

distinguish, two conceptions, the one qualitative and the other quantitative, of the difference

between same and other (Bergson, 1913: 121). The source of these two principles of

differentiation lies in the distinction between duration and space which, adopting Kantian

terminology, we might describe as the forms of intuition corresponding to inner and outer

sense. Where Kant had reconciled freedom and determinism with the help of the

phenomenal/noumenal distinction, for Bergson the all-important distinction is the one

between inner and outer sense, duration and space.1 As we will see, it is by a close

examination of duration that Bergson will establish the ground of freedom. His examination

of space, on the other hand, will lead him to consider the conditions of social life.

Through a phenomenological description of inner experience, Bergson shows us thatconsciousness essentially endures. Here we should note the inaccuracy of describing

Bergsonian duration as a formof intuition. Rather, for Bergson, duration is the very being

of consciousness which we intuit directly whenever we turn our attention inwards and grasp

our experience as we live it. If we examine closely our ideas, emotions and sensations, we

find that they present us with qualities that melt together, like the notes of a tune, to form an

ever-changing whole; this is what Bergson calls a qualitative multiplicity. We can thus

conceive of succession without distinction, and think of it as a mutual penetration, an

interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and

cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought(Bergson, 1913: 101).

Consciousness exists as a constantly growing temporal synthesis, each succeeding moment

gathering within itself all those that have come before. It is this solidarity of the past with the

present that precludes strict repetition. Indeed it demands that each succeeding moment is

essentially a new one, radically heterogeneous to all others (Bergson, 1913: 199200).

Hence Bergsons notion of duration manages to unite seemingly contrary determinations: the

fusional continuity of moments and their qualitative heterogeneity, the preservation of the

past and the production of the new.

In its temporal structure, consciousness displays a mode of existence very different from

that which we generally attribute to a thing. Far from being a determinate actuality given

here and now, consciousness allows past and present to coexist i.e., it has temporal depth

and, as an ongoing process, it is open to the future. It is on the basis of this description of

consciousness that Bergson argues for the reality of freedom. For, if every succeedingmoment of our lived experience involves the creation of something qualitatively new,

something that was not already prefigured in its antecedents, then there is no question of a

before strictly determining an afterand no possibility of genuine prediction.2 Thus causal

indetermination belongs to the very structure of consciousness. Or, in more positive terms,

consciousnessfreedom is a measure of its creativity.

Bergson draws his notion of quantitative multiplicity from an analysis of external

perception. Somewhat in the manner of Kant, he seeks the formal conditions of our

perception of an objective world in the intuition of space, an unbounded, homogeneous and

1According to Bergson, Kants great mistakewas to think of inner sense on the model of outer sense; he failedto notice that time has its own form, point for point opposed to that of space (Bergson, 1913: 2324).

2As Bergson argues, the law of causality implies that the same causes produce the same effects. Consciousness


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FREEDOM AND SOCIABILITY FOR BERGSON 61

infinitely divisible medium with no temporal depth and no hidden potentials. Certainly the

material world always appears to us as a quality-laden extensity, but if we are to discern in

it discrete and measurable objects distinct from each other and from ourselves, we must be

able to abstract from all the qualities by which they are given. The emergence of an objective

world depends on an activity of the mind which perceives under the form of extensive

homogeneity what is given it as qualitative heterogeneity(Bergson, 1913: 95).

Now, according to Bergson, this intuition of space also foreshadows and prepares the way

for social life (Bergson, 1913: 236). How? It frees us from the singularity of individual

experience, providing us with an observable, objective world of clear-cut distinctions in

which all minds can have a common share. But living together requires more than this. It

demands that I imagine my own lived experience stretched out in the homogeneous medium

of space. Only by doing so am I able to objectify my inner life, to divide this fusional

multiplicity into an assemblage of discrete ideas and emotions, to translate it into the ready-

made generalities of language, and, by articulating it, to throw it out into the current of social

life (Bergson, 1913: 231). Spatialising lived experience profoundly misrepresents it but we

could hardly get by without doing so, for it allows each person to become, in some measure,intelligible to others, and even to herself.

Bergsons critique of this useful illusion has both a speculative and a practical relevance.

On the speculative side, he argues that the confusion of duration with space is the source of

all determinist theories of mind; the latter merely push to an extreme the common error of

treating consciousness as a determinate thing. When duration is assumed to be, at bottom,

a homogeneous medium, consciousness is effectively stripped of all true temporal depth and

all creative power; the difference between past, present and future, so fundamental to

consciousness, is elided so that psychological life can be reduced to a series of discrete

moments already given, like points lying side by side on a line. Only on this assumption can

modern determinists assert that our psychological states proceed in a law-like fashion and

that, consequently, our experience of freedom is a mere epiphenomenon. According to

Bergson, however, all species of determinism are refuted once we grasp the dynamic being

of our own inner experience.

The practical side of Bergsons critique appears in his warning that our tendency to confuse

duration with space may alienate us from our own true being. We risk mistaking our inner

experience for the symbols by which we communicate it. Worse still, the mechanism we use

to explain our conduct may end by also controlling it: Our psychic states, separating then

from each other, will get solidified; between our ideas, thus crystallized, and our external

movements we shall witness permanent associations being formed; and little by little, as our

consciousness thus imitates the process by which nervous matter procures reflex actions,

automatism will cover over freedom(Bergson, 1913: 237).In Time and Free Will, Bergson points to a certain threat to individual freedom posed by

social life. Not the manifest power of physical constraints, violence, social sanctions etc., but

rather a force that quietly takes hold of freedom from the inside, a mode of the subjects own

being: habit. Through habit, we interiorise ready-made ideas and customs, automatically

adapting ourselves to life in common. Through habit, we surrender our very essence without

even realising it: many . . . die without ever having known true freedom(Bergson, 1913:

166). Bergson stages the opposition between the individual and society within consciousness

itself, in the struggle between freedom and automatism. The result is an image of

consciousness divided. On the one hand, a deep-seated self, which is fundamentally free. On

the other, a parasitic, superficial, unfree social self. This takes us to the heart of the practical

concerns of Time and Free Will. Freedom may be intrinsic to our nature as conscious beings,

but it is rarely experienced and difficult to achieve; it demands an extraordinary effort of self-


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LOCATING BERGSONS CONCEPT OF FREEDOM

What I want to do now, just briefly, is find a place for Bergsons notion of freedom on the

terrain of modern social and political thought. Isaiah Berlins distinction between positive

and negative freedom will serve as a useful starting-point.3

Freedom in the negative sense is typically associated with the liberal tradition of political

theory and signifies freedom from interference. Negative freedom describes a space of

possible actions within which a subject can pursue her own interests without being

unobstructed by others. It is generally assumed that this space must be limited by laws,

institutions etc. so that people can live together without too much conflict, though just where

these limits are to be drawn is a matter of some dispute. The chief difference between

Bergsonian freedom and negative freedom revolves, as we might expect, around the question

of duration. Negative freedom implies choice and choice implies a spatialised image of time.

We generally imagine a subject who chooses to be faced with a set of more or less

determinate possibilities, much like a traveler who comes to a fork in the road. All possible

outcomes are already prefigured in the present and the act of choice does no more than selectone to actualise; it certainly brings nothing really new into the world. For Bergson, this is not

true freedom, or at any rate, it displays a relatively low degree of freedom. Concrete duration

is creative and genuine freedom expresses this fundamental fact; the free act invents its path

and before it does so there are no paths, possible or impossible, waiting to be taken (Bergson,

1913: 182).

On the face of it, Bergson has more in common with those philosophers who Berlin

associates with the notion of positive freedom, e.g., Kant, Hegel and Marx. Like them,

Bergson conceives of freedom as autonomy, the capacity to be wholly oneself and to act in

conformity with oneself. Also, like many philosophers of positive freedom, Bergson

imagines the subject to be divided against itself, split between an essential or authentic self

and an inessential or inauthentic self. However, there are two aspects of Bergsonian freedom

that tend to set it apart.

First of all, for Bergson, the deep and the superficial selves are not really distinct. Rather,

they are two tendencies within the self, one that fragments consciousness into discrete ideas

and emotions for the sake of social life, another that fuses all aspects of the self into a creative

whole. When we pursue the latter tendency, we achieve freedom not at the expense of the

superficial or social self, but through its full immersion in the deep-seated self. Hence,

Bergson understands autonomy in a rather unusual way, not as self-mastery (i.e., the

domination of one part of the self by another) but as the assimilation of the heteronomous.

As he says, suggestion would become persuasion if the entire self assimilated it; passion,

even sudden passion, would no longer bear the stamp of fatality if the whole history of theperson were reflected in it . . .; and the most authoritative education would not curtail any of

our freedom if it only imparted to us ideas and feelings capable of impregnating the whole

soul(Bergson, 1913: 167).

Secondly, while positive freedom is generally defined as self-determination, i.e., the

affirmation of the authentic interests of a given subject, Bergsonian freedom is better

described as self-alteration, a dynamic progress in which the self and its motives . . . are in

a constant state of becoming (Bergson, 1913: 183). It must be admitted that a number of

philosophers of positive freedom do regard the subject as a work-in-progress. Very often,

however, they posit a subject whose essence is already given though largely hidden from

view and a historical narrative that serves merely to manifest this essence. In this way, they

3See in particular Berlins classic essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty (1969:


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fail to grasp the genuine unpredictability and openness to the future that are, for Bergson,

constitutive features of true freedom.

To my mind, Bergsons concept of freedom resonates most strongly with the

poststructuralist philosophies of Derrida, Foucault and, above all, Deleuze. This might seem

surprising since someone like Deleuze scarcely thematises the notion of freedom at all.

However, in his bookDeleuze and the Political, Paul Patton coins the term critical freedom

to designate a notion implicitor operative in the political thought of Gilles Deleuze (Patton,

2000: 837). Patton describes it as a third concept of freedom, one that is irreducible to the

two Berlin distinguishes. I would argue that its resemblance with Bergsonian freedom is very

striking and bears on at least four main points:

1. Freedom is intrinsically linked to the open-ended becoming of the subject, a becoming

that characterises the subjects very existence.

2. Freedom only becomes manifest at singular moments, those that disrupt the ordinary

course of our lives, moments of great and solemn crisisto use Bergsons expression.

3. Freedom involves a movement by which we momentarily manage to lift ourselves up to

the level of our own transcendental conditions. Here, I think we can measure the distance

between Kants transcendental idealism and the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze and

Bergson. It is the distance between freedom understood as a transcendental idea and

freedom as a limit experience.

4. Since the free act is genuinely creative, preexisting standards are inadequate for judging it

good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate. Not that this puts it altogether beyond

normativity. The free act demands new standards by which it can be judged and is itself part

of the process that produces them. In addition, Bergson and Deleuze clearly regard freedom

as a preferred mode of existence, even though its consequences are unpredictable.

Having outlined the similarities between Bergson and Deleuze on the issue of freedom, I

should mention an important dissimilarity. For Bergson, at least in Time and Free Will, the

chief locus of freedom is the deep-seated self, the kernel at the heart of individual

consciousness; for Deleuze, on the other hand, freedom belongs essentially to a collective

assemblage. This is a significant difference, especially when it comes to finding a place for

Bergsonian freedom on the terrain of social and political thought. When Bergson divorces

freedom from social life, he conforms to a precept that rules the vast majority of political

philosophers whether they embrace a concept of negative or positive freedom. As Hannah

Arendt has observed, Our philosophical tradition is almost unanimous in holding that

freedom begins where men have left the realm of political life inhabited by the many, and that

it is not experienced in association with others but in intercourse with ones own self

(Arendt, 1961: 157).4

Arendt criticises this widespread philosophical prejudice not only forobscuring the social reality of freedom, but also for helping to justify a variety of more or less

unhappy practices, from quietism to fascism. What we need, she argues, is a concept of

freedom that is intrinsically linked to social life.

Eventually Bergson himself came to a similar view, not least because Time and Free Will led

him to an impasse concerning the possibility of freedoms expression. In the remainder of this

paper, I will look at how Bergson reconsidered the question of freedoms relation to social life

so that, by the time he wrote The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he could insist that true

freedom involves a certain kind of sociability. Finally, I will say a few words about how

Bergsons final work anticipated aspects of Deleuzes social and political thought.

4The divorce of freedom and the social takes many forms; for instance, the inner liberty of the Stoics which evena slave in chains can enjoy; or again, the liberal theorists notion of personal freedom which is juxtaposed to the laws


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PROBLEMS RELATING TO FREEDOMS SOCIAL EXPRESSION

According to Bergson, I am always potentially free due to the temporal structure of

consciousness. But for freedom to become actual, a feeling must take possession of my whole

soul and move me to act. Bergsons is an expressivist theory of freedom. Free action

expressesmy consciousness through my body, projecting it into a world that I share with

others. Unfortunately, in Time and Free Will, Bergson does not thematise the issue of

freedoms expression. Worse still, he seems to foreclose its very possibility both in the

physical and the social world.

Freedoms physical expression is blocked by the sharpness of the distinction Bergson

draws between duration and space, the inside and the outside. A seemingly unbridgeable

divide opens up between the feeling of freedom and the bodily movement that is supposed

to express it. But freedom fairs no better in the social world. After all, they are, for Bergson,

at odds. I experience freedom only insofar as I rediscover the fluidity, wholeness and

absolute singularity of my being, all of which resist translation into the rigid, clear-cut

generalities provided by language and custom. How, then, can I find a social expression formy unique feeling of freedom? Bergson tells us that freedoms signature is a shade or quality

of the action itself (Bergson, 1913: 182), but how can someone other than the agent

experience this quality?

There is no question here of giving a proper explanation of how Bergson manages to solve

the problem of freedoms physical expression. A few comments will have to suffice. One of

the most decisive developments thatMatter and Memory (first published in 1896) introduces

into Bergsons philosophy is the acknowledgement that the world, and everything in it,

endures. Despite first impressions, this is a rather big step. What, in Time and Free Will, had

defined the being of consciousness now comes to define being in general so that even the

physical world, in acquiring duration, also acquires psychological characteristics. Bergson

maintains a certain dualism of matter and mind but not in the manner of Descartes. Rather

than putting them in abstract opposition and so taking it for granted that they have

absolutely nothing in common he describes matter and mind as qualitatively distinct modes

of duration. By recasting dualism within a temporal monism, Bergsons ultimate aim is to

make the interaction of mind and body thinkable. He also lays the foundation for a

remarkable hypothesis about how an organisms freedom depends on without being

reducible to its material constitution. Anticipating the findings of quantum physics, he

suggests that matter itself harbours a certain degree of micro-indetermination. When matter

is organised in a living body, it is drawn into superior temporal rhythms; its latent

indetermination is harnessed, given direction, contractedinto higher degrees of freedom and

expressed in the organisms manifest actions (Bergson, 1991: 2479). Living beings are, forBergson, veritable machines for extracting freedom from matter.

Before turning to the problem of freedoms social expression, I want to say something

more about what Bergson means by social life. Actually, this is itself a thorny issue. While,

in Time and Free Will, Bergson does not doubt that we are fundamentally social beings, he

makes no attempt to unearth the foundations of social life. If it has an ontological ground

distinct from or in excess of that provided for individual consciousness, we learn nothing

about it. Bergsons method of intuition has, in this early work, a resolutely introspective bent;

it reveals the convergence of knowledge and being in a direct vision of mind by itself, but

fails to really grasp the relations that exist between consciousnesses. This is why he treats the

opposition of the individual and society only insofar as it is reflected in the opposition of the

deep and the superficial self. Here, without realising it, Bergson runs the risk of solipsism.

After all, if I only have an immediate intuition of my own inner being and only perceive


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they resemble me in external form and behaviour? Had Bergson seriously pursued this line

of thought rather than merely dabbling in it he would perhaps have ended up affirming

the monadic isolation of consciousness and, much as Husserl had done, demonstrating how

the ego constitutes, from within its own proper sphere, its sense of other subjects and,

indeed, the whole social world.5 The shortcomings of such egological reductions of

intersubjectivity are well known. On the one hand, they always presuppose what they try to

establish; it is, for instance, impossible to determine the egos proper spherewithout having

some prior comprehension of the otheragainst which it is to be defined. On the other hand,

any attempt to describe the social world as the product of an egos imaginative or inferential

activity effectively reduces intersubjectivity to a mere appearance; it explains how the social

world comes to exist for me but cannot account for the reciprocity of distinct perspectives

that real intersubjectivity entails.6

Fortunately, Bergson sidesteps this impasse. While he asserts the fundamental singularity

of consciousness, he does not claim that it exists in monadic isolation and therefore need not

attempt an egological theory of intersubjectivity. I would argue that, through his notion of

qualitative multiplicity and despite the fact that it is the product of a phenomenologicaldescription of inner experience Bergson seeks to dissolve absolute individualism before it

has a chance to crystallize. To see this, we need only attempt to think of a plurality of

Bergsonian subjects and then ask ourselves what kind of plurality this must be. As we saw

earlier, Bergson recognises only two conceptions of the difference between same and other,

the one qualitative and the other quantitative. Now, of course, persons always have bodies

and bodies are easy enough to count; external observation presents subjects as a numerical

multiplicity. However, in its very being each consciousness is a continuous or qualitative

multiplicity with no resemblance to number(Bergson, 1913: 105). What this means is that

the qualitative singularity of a person is not reducible to the numerical singularity of its body.

Less obviously, it also means that a plurality of minds is not a quantitative multiplicity at

least not fundamentally but a qualitative multiplicity. That is to say, my consciousness, in

its qualitative singularity, must join together with others to form a more comprehensive

fusional whole. After Time and Free Will, Bergson makes this idea explicit. A particularly

good instance appears in the introduction to Creative Mind:

Between our consciousness and other consciousnesses the separation is less clear-cut than between our body andother bodies, for it is space which makes these divisions sharp. Unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, which sooften have the power of divination, give evidence of a possible interpenetration of human consciousnesses. Itwould appear then that phenomena of psychological endosmosis exist (Bergson, 1946: 32).

The idea that society is, at bottom, a kind of collective consciousness governs Bergsons first

extended attempt at social theory,Laughter(first published in 1900). It enables him to stage therelationship between the individual and society right where it occurs, in the psycho-social

relations that exist between people. It also allows him to insert his image of a stratified

consciousness into a much broader picture. Where, in Time and Free Will, Bergson had spoken

of various levels of consciousness, each with its own temporal rhythm and degree of freedom,

he now speaks of the various levels of social life in which we directly participate. The deep and

the superficial self thus find their complement in a deep and a superficial we. This image of

society as a layered yet fusional whole is one Bergson will still endorse over 30 years later when

he comes to write his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

5In his essay, Life and Consciousness, Bergson makes strategic use of this kind of argument (Bergson 1911c:67). Husserl provides an incomparably more sophisticated egological theory of intersubjectivity in his fifthCartesian meditation (Husserl, 1991).

6For a much fuller treatment of this topic, see Alfred Schutzs essay, The Problem of Transcendental


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As is clear from the quote above, Bergson affirms the interpenetration of minds not just

because it follows logically from his theory of multiplicities, but because it is suggested by

relevant evidence. As ever, he seeks empirical support for his metaphysical hypotheses. Of

especial importance to Bergson are phenomena of unreflecting sympathy and antipathy,

sub- and supra-rational modes of consciousness in which we are carried beyond ourselves

and immediately feel our community with others.7 From Laughterto The Two Sources, he

attends to their various forms, their levels of emergence, the tendencies they express etc.,

always attempting to draw together the evidence of intuition i.e., our first-hand experience

of social existence with the results of the life and social sciences.8

Let us turn now to freedoms social expression. This is not a problem Bergson even

broaches in Time and Free Will. Nevertheless, it does impose itself upon the reader, as does

the beginnings of a possible solution. Bergson asserts that the more superficial my thoughts

and feelings are, the easier they can be given definite contours, detached from the whole of

my personality, translated into the generalities that words and gestures provide, and thrown

out into the current of social life. As it stands, this thesis renders my freedom, and the feeling

from which it springs, incommunicable. However, in his discussion of art, Bergson begins todevelop a contrary but complementary thesis concerning a very different kind of

communicability. Briefly, the task of the artist is to cultivate absolutely unique emotions,

those that sum up a more or less considerable part of her singular life-history, and, with the

help of a range of techniques (the careful selection of outward signs, the hypnotic use of

rhythm, etc.), to engage the bodily and spiritual sympathy of spectators so that they too can

experience a similar deep emotion (Bergson, 1913: 18). For our present purposes, what

makes this view of art particularly interesting is the fact that Bergson explicitly compares the

free act to an artwork: we are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when

they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds

between the artist and his work(Bergson, 1913: 172). Perhaps, then, freedoms expression

can be compared to aesthetic communication.

7Borrowing the words of Nick Crossley, we might say that Bergson develops a theory of radicalintersubjectivity, one based on experiences that display a lack of self-awareness and a communicative opennesstowards the other which is unconditional(Crossley, 1996: 23).

8Georges Gurvitch, one of the pioneers of the sociology of time, explicitly acknowledges the value of Bergson sphilosophy of duration for the social sciences (Gurvitch, 1948: 294306).

9This view fits the brief but general account of sense Bergson had already given in Matter and Memory. Therehe argues that the process of interpretation, though set in motion by a material sign, essentially moves from thesignified down to the signifier (Bergson, 1991: 1167). When I hear another speak and even before I can identifyexactly what she is saying I leap into the element of sense and begin to mimic both her physical and mental

We can pursue this theme further in Laughter, though, again, it is not one Bergson

explicitly addresses. What the artist communicates is a new way of seeing the world, a new

sensibility. In doing so she cultivates a free play of sympathy between herself and others,

bringing to the fore an affective osmosis that, while already present in everyday life and ever-

ready to manifest itself, is generally held in check. On the topic of our everyday sympathies,

Bergson claims that the deeper the emotion and the more it impregnates the whole of one s

personality, the more dramatic and contagious it is (Bergson, 1911b: 1401). When I

witness in others the process by which their feelings gradually precipitate into action, my

sympathies are stirred and I re-ascend from the observed action to the inner feeling (Bergson,

1911b: 144). True enough, I cannot have anothers experience. But this does not mean thatI merely observe the other from an entirely extrinsic perspective. On the contrary, I

immediately (though perhaps dimly) grasp the sense of the others action i.e., its dynamic

unity with her personality and am affected by it. A real movement passes between us,

magnetising us, giving us an orientation in relation to each other.9


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The idea that art cultivates a deep sociability already present in everyday life gains a

particularly striking formulation in Bergsons account of drama. According to Bergson,

drama brings to light a pure nature at the heart of social life, a turbulent domain of

transitive affect: As contrary electricities attract each other and accumulate between two

plates of the condenser from which the spark will presently flash, so, by simply bringing

people together, strong attractions and repulsions take place, followed by an utter loss of

balance, in a word, by that electrification of the soul known as passion (Bergson, 1911b:

158). This pure, unformed, mutual affectivity serves both as a milieu out of which social

order arises and as a corrosive element in which all institutions, agreements and

conventions risk dissolution. By itself, this rather chaotic sociability cannot ground social

life. The freedom it bears is too volatile and violent; it has no intrinsic principle of

organisation. A stabilising counter-tendency is needed to hold it in check so that social

life be actually livable. Utility demands both for the sake of the individual and society

as a whole the formation of an outer layer of feelings and ideas which make for

permanence, aim at becoming common to all men, and cover, when they are not strong

enough to extinguish it, the inner fire of individual passions (Bergson 1911b: 1589).Thus Bergson compares society to a living planet, a fiery mass of seething metals

surrounded by a cool and solid crust.

There is much I could say about the way Laughteranticipates The Two Sources, but I will

confine myself to indicating one way the former falls short of the latter. Despite his discovery

of a deep sociability, Bergson is yet to conceive of the positive unity of freedom and social

life. Society would, he thinks, tear itself apart were its pure natureto be directly actualised,

that is, literally put into action. Far better to merely imagine the return of a repressed freedom

than to enact it. This, in fact, is how Bergson defines drama: it is societys dreamof an

eruption by which it gains imaginary possession of its innermost nature as a kind of

compensation for not being actually able to do so (Bergson 1911b: 15960). Unlike its

aesthetic representation, the freedom of deep sociability remains opposed to social life.

THE TWO SOURCES OF MORALITY AND RELIGION

It is over 30 years later, with the publication of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,

that Bergson presents his definitive solution to the problem of freedoms relation to social

life. In what follows, I will only be able to introduce this development in a very cursory

fashion.

Drawing on the philosophy of life he had developed in Creative Evolution, Bergson gives

what he calls a biologicalinterpretation of both freedom and sociability. This does notmeanthat he seeks to reduce psychological and social phenomena to the kinds of facts that the

biological sciences treat. On the contrary, he seeks to expandthe concept of biology so that

it embraces all the levels of existence, from the most material to the most spiritual. Bergsons

vitalism involves a resolutely non-reductive brand of naturalism. When he says that

psychological and sociological phenomena must be grasped as, before all else, biological

phenomena, what he means is that, in order to properly understand them, we must determine

their place in the general scheme of things, or rather, we must determine their significance

for the general project of life(Bergson, 1935: 91, 106).

According to Bergson, freedom and sociability are two manifestations of life which can be

found, in one form or another, throughout nature. I have already said a little about how he

regards living beings as machines for extracting freedom from matter. Here I will merely add

that Bergson views the ever-bifurcating branches of the evolutionary tree as so many attempts


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a creative movement towards the invention of new modes of life which can support

increasing degrees of consciousness and freedom.10

Sociability also has, for Bergson, its basis in a universal characteristic of life. The most

general form of living activity whether we are talking about the development of a living

individual or the evolution of life as a whole is organisation. Organisation involves a

double process, one towards the differentiation of parts, the other towards their association

into a whole. Bergson argues that, because we pass by imperceptible transitions from the

relations between cells in an organism to the relations between individuals in a community,

it makes sense to say that the tendency towards society is found across nature (Bergson,

1935: 85, 106). At first glance, it seems that Bergson risks falling victim to an error that

vitiates most versions of social organicism, namely the mistake of assuming that a human

society bears a significant resemblance to an individual organism. Apart from the fact that

there is no good evidence to support this analogy, social organicism tends to exaggerate the

forces of social solidarity and underestimates the individuals capacity for free action; the

result is an image of society in which individuals are radically subordinate to the social body.

Bergson, at least in The Two Sources, is very careful to avoid this pitfall and explicitlyacknowledges that no significant analogy holds between a human society and an organism.

For Bergson, it may well make sense to describe the rigidly ordered societies of ants and bees

as veritable organisms; in such societies, social instinct merely extends into patterns of

behaviour the process of vital organisation itself. But a human community is very different.

It is, says Bergson, a collectivity of free beings(Bergson, 1935: 3). The whole task of The

Two Sources is to determine what kinds of vital organisation can comprehend human

freedom.

Bergson, in fact, finds two fundamental forms of human sociability, two ways of

combining freedom and vital organisation. Why two? Again, it is to the concept of life that

we are referred. In Creative Evolution, Bergson found a basic dualism at the heart of life: the

act by which life goes forward to the creation of a new form, and the act by which this form

is shaped, are two different and often antagonistic movements (Bergson, 1911a: 142). In

very general terms, life involves a process of creation and a process of solidification, an

openness to the future and a closure around an actual form. Variations of this duality can be

found at all levels of life (and even in the duality of life and matter). We can, in retrospect,

see that it was already prefigured in the opposition between the rigid, habitual life of the

superficial self and the creative movement of the deep self. The Two Sources restages it once

more at the level of society as a whole in the duality of the closed and the open society. As

we might expect, this involves a new attempt to inscribe the original psychological dualism

into a broader social context.

Bergson argues that, in order to understand social life, we have to dig beneath its manifestclass divisions, institutions, customs and sign-systems, all of which are things more or less

easy to observe and describe, and discover the underlying processes by which they are

originally produced, maintained and transformed. On the one hand, there is a collective work

that seeks to preserve a given social order; this activity defines the closed society. On the

other hand, and more profoundly, there is a collective creativity or freedom that gives rise

to new social forms; this activity characterises the open society. Just as the deep and

superficial selves represent opposing tendencies within the subject, the open and the closed

society represent opposing tendencies within society. They are abstract figures that symbolise

the extremes of human sociability. On the field of liberty that characterises human

10One aspect of Bergsons critique of Darwin bears on precisely this point. Bergson argues that the notion ofnatural selection altogether fails to account for the positive tendency expressed in evolutionary advance. See


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sociability, the open and closed societies describe the upper and lower limits. Every actual

society lies on this plane, a kind of compromise that combines both tendencies, though in

different proportions and configurations. Or rather, every society moves between these poles,

oscillating between closure and openness, fixity and self-transformation.

In very schematic terms, the closed society is defined by a tendency to constitute and

preserve itself as a relatively fixed identity, turned in upon itself and distinct from an outside.

Its world is internally differentiated, a totality of well-defined forms, functions and subjects.

What, then, binds the closed society together? No doubt social regulation demands the

exercise of power in one or other form. Through discipline we are enrolled into society,

assigned our proper place, taught our obligations etc. But extrinsic force merely prepares us

for social life or else corrects us when we disobey its rules. The real social glue is habit

insofar as it involves the internalisation of discipline:

[S]ocial life appears to us as a system of more or less deeply rooted habits, corresponding to the needs of thecommunity. Some of them are habits of command, most of them are habits of obedience, whether we obeya person commanding by virtue of a mandate from society, or whether from society itself, vaguely perceivedor felt, there emanates an impersonal imperative. Each of these habits of obedience exerts a pressure on ourwill. We can evade it, but then we are attracted towards it, drawn back to it, like a pendulum which has swungaway from the vertical (Bergson, 1935: 2).

Bergsons insight, in Time and Free Will, that social life is constituted by habits of thought

and action gains a remarkable development in The Two Sources. Where initially these habits

seemed to be a function of individual consciousness, they are now quite literally social habits

and refer us to a collective mentality in which individuals participate. And, likewise, when

Bergson speaks of how we feel obligation as a social pressure, he has in mind our first-person

intuition of a genuinely impersonal force that holds society together. Social habits are

contracted not just by individuals but by collectivities; they support each other, forming a

system that presents itself to individuals as a solid block of obligation in general. Despite

all this, the closed society presupposes some measure of individual freedom. After all, habit

is not the pure automatism of instinct; the pressure it brings to bear always implies a certain

capacity to consciously resist it. Moreover, unlike instincts, which are generally fixed for a

species by nature, social habits are largely contingent, conventional; they can, through

collective action, be instituted and transformed. Only the necessity of having some such set

of rules/habits is natural for humans (Bergson, 1935: 19 20).

In his account of the closed society, Bergson still poses freedom and social life in an

agonistic relationship. However, in his account of the open society, he imagines, at last, their

full reconciliation. Returning to the notion of a deep-seated sociability, Bergson casts a much

more positive light on it. Where, inLaughter, he had identified the pure natureof sociability

with a domain of violent passions in themselves destructive of social order; and where he hadheld that collective cohesion and stability could only be found on the rigid surface of society;

in The Two Sources, Bergson speaks of a deeper and more dynamic kind of solidarity, a

spontaneous power of organisation based on creative emotions (Bergson, 1935: 67). It must

be admitted that Bergsons description of the open society is enigmatic, even paradoxical, but

I think that we can understand it as his final and most elaborate attempt to view society as

at bottom a qualitative multiplicity. In fact, the words he had originally used to describe

a qualitative multiplicity serve quite well to characterise the open society: a mutual

penetration, an interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents

the whole(Bergson, 1913: 101)

As I have already mentioned, from the very beginning Bergson had suggested a parallel

between the work of art and the work of freedom. With The Two Sources, this parallel

becomes more explicit and is pursued further. In Laughter, Bergson had argued that the


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expresses; we may never feel or see precisely what the artist did, but her sincerity is

contagious. The effort she made to overcome her habits of thought and behaviour calls for

our imitation. Her work is an example which we take as a lesson; its power of conversion is

the sign by which we recognise it (Bergson, 1911b 1623). In The Two Sources, Bergson

translates this same idea into the practical domain. The result is a notion of moral genius. A

true moral innovator is an exceptional individual who leads by example. The force of her

personality and the originality of her vision call us to change our way of feeling and acting;

a new morality makes its appearance not as a system of universal laws but as a personal

appeal with a universal power of conversion. In a remarkable passage, Bergson insists that

the source of both aesthetic and moral invention is a creative emotion that, in its propagation

from person to person, constitutes a veritable ontological milieu in which a people can live

or, rather, become together:

When music weeps, all humanity, all nature weeps with it. In point of fact it does not introduce these feelingsinto us; it introduces us into them, as passers-by are forced into a street dance. Thus do pioneers in moralityproceed. Life holds for them unsuspected tones of feeling like those of some new symphony, and they drawus after them into this music that we may express it in action (Bergson 1935: 32).

What is at stake is not the unification of a particular group of people around an already

given ideal or set of values; it is the spontaneous invention of a social atmosphere in which

new ways of living together, new customs, new institutions, new ideas and new values can

emerge. This is creative freedom writ large, a collective activity by which a people

whether a community of taste or an ethical community constitutes itself. Here it is worth

recalling the unique temporal structure of Bergsonian freedom. We saw earlier that

consciousness involves both the continuity of the past with the present and the eruption of

the new; we are free only at sporadic moments of crisis but in these moments we gather

up our whole life history and transform ourselves. Something similar can be said about the

open society. The open society emerges across a broken line of exceptional people and

historical events; it only appears at moments of social experimentation revolution even

moments in which the institutions of society are de-actualised, put into process, before

being recast in a new form. Tying together these singular moments, gathering up the whole

of the past so that it coexists with the present, the open society develops itself in temporal

depth; its duration can no more be reduced to a linear history than our lived experience can

be adequately measured by clock-time. We can perhaps say that the open society is

untimely in Nietzsches sense of the term. Neither historical nor eternal, the untimely is

an element in which the past and present coexist and resonate in order for the new to be

created.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

To conclude this essay, I want to very briefly return to the question of Bergsons influence

on the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze was perhaps the person largely

responsible for the recent resurgence of interest in Bergsons work, both inside and outside

of France. He made ample use of Bergson throughout his philosophical career. However, it

is generally assumed that his debt to Bergson was limited to things ontological and

methodological and that he made little if any use of his social theory. Michael Hardt goes so

far as to argue that, when Deleuze sought inspiration for his own practical philosophy, he

turned to Nietzsche and Spinoza precisely because Bergson could not help him seriously

address the question of social organisation (Hardt, 1992: 212). This judgement is, I think,

a bit hasty. While Deleuze may not explicitly relate his social theory to that of Bergson, we


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Earlier I tried to show that Bergsons concept of freedom prefigures, in many important

respects, the critical freedomof Gilles Deleuze. I also noted how, at least in Time and Free

Will, Bergsons bent towards absolute individualism not only set him at odds with Deleuze

but threatened to compromise his own account of freedom, depriving it of all possibility of

social expression. I would argue that in his final work, by finally posing the reconciliation of

freedom and social life, Bergson develops a social philosophy that bears a real resemblance

to that of Deleuze. When, in The Two Sources, Bergson regards society as, at bottom, a

fusional multiplicity best characterised by its potential for collective metamorphosis rather

than its actual organisation, he is anticipating Deleuzes socio-political philosophy in a

profound way. Conversely, when Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, says that actual

societies embody a virtual social multiplicity but that we only live this ground of sociability

in the element of social upheaval . . . in other words, freedom, he is reviving Bergsons own

insights (Deleuze, 1994: 193).

But perhaps it is Deleuzes collaborative work with Felix Guattari that best displays the

implicit influence of Bergsons mature social thought. InA Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and

Guattari put forward a social typology the basic structure of which is so similar to Bergsonsthat I am tempted to think that it is their secret model.11 These twin typologies both involve a

conception of human sociability as a problem-field stretched out between two coexistent and

competing poles. For Bergson, these poles are the closed and the open society; for Deleuze and

Guattari, they are the interiority of the State apparatus and the exteriority of the war machine.

Just about every principle distinction Bergson draws between the open and the closed society

finds a parallel in Deleuze and Guattaris text and this despite the fact thatA Thousand Plateaus

never once mentions The Two Sources Of Morality and Religion. All of which suggests we need

to re-evaluate the relevance and value of Bergsons social thought today.

References

Arendt, Hannah (1961) Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, London: Faber and Faber.Berlin, Isaiah (1969) Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Bergson, Henri (1911a) Creative Evolution (Trans. A. Mitchell), London: Macmillan.Bergson, Henri (1911b) Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell),

London: Macmillan.Bergson, Henri (1911c) Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays (Trans. H. Wildon Carr), London: Macmillan.Bergson, Henri (1913) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, (Trans. F. L. Pogson),

London: George Allen and Co. Originally published in 1889?Bergson, Henri (1935) The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Trans. R. A. Audra and C. Brereton), New York:

Henry Holt and Co.Bergson, Henri (1946) The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Trans. M. Anderson), New York: Citadel

Press.Bergson, Henri (1991) Matter and Memory (Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer), New York: Zone

Books.Crossley, Nick (1996) Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming, London: Sage Publications.Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Trans. Brian

Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition (Trans. Paul Patton), New York: Columbia University Press.Gurvitch, Georges (1948) La philosophie sociale de Bergson, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 58(3):

294306.Hardt, Michael (1992) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press.Husserl, Edmund (1991) Cartesian Meditations, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Patton, Paul (2000) Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge.Schutz, Alfred (1966) Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, I. Schutz (Ed.), The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff.

11This claim needs to be backed up by a proper examination of Deleuze and Guattari s social philosophy,something I cannot do here. To my mind the key text is 1227: Treatise on Nomadology The War Machine,


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