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Between Critique And Metaphysics
a
Frédéric Worms & Robin Mackay
b
a
Université Charles-de-Gaulle – Lille 3 , Domaine universitaire du
“Pont de Bois” , rue du Barreau, BP 149, 59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq
Cedex, France E-mail:
b
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy , Middlesex
University , Trent Park, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ, UK Email:
Published online: 17 Dec 2010.
To cite this article: Frédéric Worms & Robin Mackay (2005) Between Critique And Metaphysics,
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 10:2, 39-57
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250500417175
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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 10 number 2 august 2005
or Bergson (1859–1941) as for Brunschvicg
(1869–1944), science is not an accomplished
fact or a given consisting only of a series of
objective data about the world, but an ongoing
task, a conquest even, consisting above all of
a subjective rupture in man. Furthermore, this
veritable break reveals to us, by way of contrast or
through the obstacles that it must surmount, our
metaphysical destination. Whence the crucial yet
highly sensitive role that the problem of science
plays in their respective philosophies.
But two questions immediately suggest themselves, responses to which will occupy us here.
First of all, if the problem of science is common
to them – moreover, if in the encounter between
these two philosophers, ascendant at the time,
it defines one of the central questions of an epoch,
of a certain moment, 1900s France – are not the
two responses they put forward nevertheless
profoundly opposed to one another? What could
there be in common between the critical deepening
and the metaphysical surpassing of science which
Brunschvicg and Bergson respectively assign as
the task of philosophy?
What is more, supposing that this internal
deepening and this external surpassing of science
have something in common, would it not be
precisely that double-edged ‘‘spiritualism’’ which
represents the more dated – or outdated – aspect of
that very same moment, 1900s France? Is there
something worth salvaging today in the way in
which they pose the problem of science, even if not
in their proposed solutions?
We will seek here to defend the following two
theses: firstly, that the comparison of these two
doctrines concerning science brings to light
a common problem which is central to a key
moment in the history of philosophical thought,
and which allows us better to appreciate both of
these bodies of work on their own account; but,
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F
fre¤de¤ric worms
translated by robin mackay
BETWEEN CRITIQUE
AND METAPHYSICS
science in bergson and
brunschvicg
in addition, that it pertains to a problem which
we cannot ignore today, namely that of thinking
the place of science in the context of the entirety
of our experience, whether in order to maintain a
critique of the former, as has been done after
Bergson (and in ways other than his own),
for example by Deleuze or Merleau-Ponty, or to
continue to deepen it, as has been done after
Brunschvicg (and in ways other than his own), for
example by Bachelard or Cavaillès. Unless we
revisit these two doctrines, we can understand
neither the problem nor the way in which it
continues both to connect and to oppose the
philosophical enterprises that have succeeded it,
up to the present day.
But we must first try to understand precisely the
problem of science itself as it is posed here, and the
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/05/020039^19 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250500417175
39
critique and metaphysics
two different solutions to it that are proposed.
Thus the following remarks will argue:
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. That we must initially study the two different
principles which, according to Bergson and
Brunschvicg, establish a break between the
endeavours of scientific thought and the rest
of our knowledge or our experience. We find
a strange parallel here, despite the divergences,
between the points of departure and arrival.
Whether it is a question of the representation of
space or of the activity of judgement, the two
thinkers both locate the specificity of scientific
thought primarily in a particularly precise
activity of the mind (whose analysis seems to
refer back in part, in both cases, to different
moments in Kant’s work). But in addition,
whether it is a matter of partly contesting it, or
on the contrary of seeing in it a quasi-definitive
accomplishment, both thinkers will find their
ultimate criterion in the study of Einstein’s
theory of relativity, which they both seek at the
same moment to study ‘‘from the inside.’’ This,
in any case, will be the first path we shall briefly
retrace here.
. We must then return to the obstacles that,
according to each of the two authors, science
encounters in its way or must try to surmount.
Here the divergences will be still more marked
(despite the parallels) between the resistance
which time – or rather, duration – presents,
according to Bergson, to scientific cognition,
owing to its susceptibility to another mode of
knowing, one in which our metaphysical – and
even moral – destination lies; and that which
our spontaneous representation or our imagination ceaselessly presents, according to
Brunschvicg, to the progress of scientific knowledge, whose metaphysical and moral import
thus appears inversely through the very threats
that it encounters. Meanwhile, one might well
ask whether, in these two bodies of work, the
distinction between scientific endeavour and the
obstacles that it encounters does not assume a
more immanent significance for science even as
it ensures the fecundity and pertinence of the
latter, to the present day. Beyond the distinction
between ‘‘Science’’ and its other, it is by
studying those problems wherein the diversity
of sciences runs up against the diversity of
experience that it becomes possible to put to the
test not those doctrines that there can be no
question of reviving, but rather a problem
which it may not prove possible to abandon.
i science: a break in our life which
reunites the world?
Let us recall first of all what appears to us to be the
problem common to Bergson and Brunschvicg
with regard to scientific cognition, and the
principles of the opposing solutions which they
propose, before studying each of them in their
turn.
For both of them it seems that the existence of
science has its basis in a specific activity of our
mind, an activity whose role in even our most
everyday experience must be demonstrated, but
whose elaboration into the most profound understanding of the universe must also be examined.
Thus, it is not solely a question of a ‘‘critical’’
examination (in Kant’s sense of the word) of the
basis of science, but also of a study – ‘‘psychological,’’ in a certain sense – of the concrete role
which its existence plays in our life, and of an
ultimately ‘‘cosmological’’ perspective on what it
can teach us of the universe. Thus, the break
introduced by the existence of science, irreducible
both to its logical conditions and to its technical
productions, does indeed make itself known in all
dimensions of our life.
But here the resemblances end, giving way to
profound divergences which must be examined in
more detail.
the function, structure and object of
science in bergson
‘‘There is nothing to prevent us from calling every
type of cognition ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’, as has
been done for a long time’’: this is the surprising
thesis advocated by Bergson in The Creative
Mind.1 But only so as to remark immediately
that one can in fact no longer proceed thus, that
one must, on the contrary, name a certain type of
cognition ‘‘science’’ in opposition to another, in
a distinction which he considers fundamental, and
which in effect underlies his entire philosophy.
40
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worms
What distinguishes science – what obliges us, even,
to distinguish science, according to Bergson – is
at once its function, its structure and its object. Let
us state right away, so as to register as soon as
possible the paradoxes involved in this definition,
that what Bergson calls science is that mode of
cognition which, oriented towards action, cleaves
nevertheless to precision and prediction, to truth
and to efficiency, in its relation to its objects, and
specifically to the material universe.
What primarily distinguishes science, then, is
its function: it does not seek to know objects for
themselves, but in order to serve our own
purposes. This fundamental thesis, from which
Bergson will never waver, has at least two
important consequences: certainly, it permits us
to oppose science to another mode of cognition
which would seek to know things ‘‘in themselves,’’
and which Bergson calls ‘‘metaphysics’’; but in
another sense it situates science within the bounds
of the entirety of our practical or psychological
knowledge, or what Bergson calls ‘‘common
sense.’’ Further still: ‘‘it can only find its basis in
the tendency of common sense, which is a
commencement of science’’ (Bergson, Oeuvres
1255; my emphasis). Contrary to what we said
above, it does not seem, then, that science would
introduce a fundamental break in our life. Would
it not consist, rather, in extending the practical
function of our perception, as demonstrated in
the first chapter of Matter and Memory (1896),
and the technical nature of the intelligence that
characterises our species, the Homo faber
described in the celebrated pages of the second
chapter of Creative Evolution? But we must not be
deceived: far from being founded in a common
sense and a pragmatic action which would be the
whole of our knowledge and of our life, science
manifests and carries to the limit, according to
Bergson, the rupture between this common sense
or this action itself and the ultimate reality of
things, accessible solely through another type of
thought. Thus, science can do no more than carry
to the limit a distinction between two modes of
cognition which is already operative in our lives,
and which seems to distance us from the true
reality of things in order to fulfil our bodily needs.
But what distinguishes ‘‘science’’ and constitutes its unity is not merely its practical function
41
but also its theoretical structure, which takes to its
ultimate limit the structure of our perception or of
our intelligence, as described in passages which we
shall discuss shortly. Whether science begins with
these psychological functions, in order to study
their conditions of possibility, or whether it begins
with effective scientific tasks, specifically measurement and calculation, amounts to the same thing
according to Bergson: science resides in a very
particular representation distinct from all others,
that of space. It is through the disposition of
material objects in space, at a distance from
bodies, that perception prepares them for the
possibility of our acting upon them; it is through
the representation of a pure space wherein only
homogeneous objects can exist that our mind
renders calculation and measurement possible.
So the basis of science resides, as Kant saw, in
a representation of pure space which does not
result from the experience of objects – specifically,
of their distance – nor from a logical construction,
but on the contrary from the condition, independent de jure, of these latter. It is this representation of space that guarantees for science the
precision that constitutes it as such, this time in
opposition to a simple ‘‘common sense’’; this it is
also that permits us to posit as norm and ideal of
scientificity an arithmetic or more profoundly still
an ‘‘immanent geometry,’’ immanent to our very
intelligence. Knowledge is scientific only in so far
as it is mathematisable or rather geometrisable;
accessible to number, or more precisely still,
to measurement.
It is here, however, that we return to the
problem discussed above, where science as such
begins to pose a problem for Bergson. If, in effect,
science is doubly relative, owing to both its vital
function and its spatial structure, to both the needs
of our body and the representations of our mind,
then how can we understand if not its truth then its
efficiency – how can we understand its hold on
things? Bergson certainly seems to have exacerbated the Kantian problem of the accord between
our knowledge and its objects, by adding the prism
of our actions to that of our minds, but without
being able to accept a purely pragmatic or
utilitarian solution, since precision alone ensures
the possibility of prediction, and since mathematics affords a guarantee for action. We must
critique and metaphysics
distinguish here three different solutions to this
problem, put forward successively by Bergson in
his first three books:
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. In Time and Free Will: Essay on the
Immediate Givens of Consciousness (1889)
Bergson argues that science, being founded
on space, is applicable to everything that is
spatial – i.e., external objects – as distinct from
states of consciousness situated in time or rather
in duration, but as distinct also from movement
or change, which, however, is less in things than
in our consciousness, alone capable of making a
‘‘mental synthesis’’ of them. Already there
seems to be a division of objects or of the real
into two types of cognition, but its metaphysical
foundation is not yet explicit.
. In Matter and Memory (1896), on the other
hand, and as confirmed by the radical theses of
the Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), it can
be baldly affirmed that science has no object.
The fourth chapter of this book demonstrates in
effect that even in the case of the inert matter of
the universe, spatial structure is but a veil or
a purely imaginary guiding thread furnished by
our minds in order to master a reality which is
essentially temporal and inaccessible to calculation and measurement (as demonstrated by
the phenomenon of change, which is taken
this time as a fundamental, definitive obstacle to
a purely geometric physics). This being understood, then, to the extent that science is spatial
and mathematical, it is merely a relative and
instrumental ‘‘symbolic’’ knowledge. It can
only gain access to reality by reuniting with
metaphysics, with its immediate access to
temporal reality; as is demonstrated, according
to Bergson, by the great innovations of modern
mathematics and physics.
. But this does not help us understand any better
how our perception and our spatial intelligence,
extended by science in this precise sense, is able
to exert a grip on the universe. Whence our
representation of space itself? What is the origin
of geometry? With regard to these two questions, the tour de force of Creative Evolution
(1907) is twofold: not only is our intelligence,
with its representation of space and its immanent geometry, the product of life; but it is only
produced by life to act on an object with the
same structure as itself, namely the inert matter
of the universe in so far as it is opposed to life,
which latter Bergson tries to show is itself partly
spatial and tends towards geometric extension,
even if it never passes entirely into it. At this
point, the accord between science and its object
is at once founded and limited: mathematical
physics knows the very essence of the material
universe, but only physics can be perfectly
mathematical and only matter can be completely an object of science. The accord
between number and the material object is no
longer founded solely upon a common spatial
structure, but upon a partitive metaphysical
(or cosmological) genesis.
Thus ‘‘Science’’ finds its unity not only in its
practical function and its spatial structure but also
in its material object. It is in the introduction to
The Creative Mind (published in 1934) that
Bergson will develop this argument most fully,
and moreover will return, in a sense, to a remark
which we have cited above concerning the inevitable necessity of a radical distinction between the
two types of cognition:
Both [science and metaphysics] are concerned
with reality itself. But each grasps only a half of
it, with the result that we can treat them, if we
wish, as two subdivisions of science, or two
departments of metaphysics, perhaps indicating divergent tendencies of the activity of
thought. (Oeuvres 1286)
It is this specificity of ‘‘Science,’’ then, that
allows Bergson both to oppose it to metaphysics
and to use it as a criterion for evaluating all of our
knowledge, the entire actual diversity of ‘‘the
sciences’’ beyond the twofold limit represented by
mathematics and physics respectively. We will
return to these two points shortly. Let us simply
add here, as an additional verification, one last
remark bearing on the status accorded by Bergson
to Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Written in the same year as the book in which
Bergson discusses this theory (Duration and
Simultaneity, 1922), the introduction to The
Creative Mind was not to be published until
twelve years later, thereby allowing Bergson
42
worms
(if this hadn’t been the very reason for the delay in
publication) to add a note which would return to
the conclusions of this discussion. Now, in this
note we find an opposition between two senses of
the word ‘‘real’’:
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. ‘‘We most often call by this name that which is,
or can be, given in experience: that is real which
is observed or observable’’ (Oeuvres 37): now, in
this first sense, according to Bergson, Einstein’s
theory of relativity does not bear on the real.
In fact its essence is to ‘‘seek a mathematical
representation of things independent of the
point of view of the observer (or more precisely
of a system of reference) . . .’’ (Oeuvres 1280). If,
then, there must be a fixed point of view and an
observer (bringing along with him, according to
Bergson, consciousness and duration) in order
for there to be a ‘‘real,’’ then the universe of
Einstein, which neutralises the relativity of
points of view, which describes their equivalences, including the point of view of time and
movement (which had not previously been
done, and which rendered the Newtonian
universe obsolete) does not describe a real
universe. Inversely, according to Bergson, as
soon as one reintroduces a real consciousness or
observer, one leaves the universe of relativity.
Einstein’s universe is therefore irreal, that is to
say uninhabitable, according to Bergson at any
rate. But then surely one would seem to be
falling back once more into the idea of an
‘‘imaginary’’ science, incapable of achieving
any access to the real.
. However, Bergson adds: ‘‘the universe of
Relativity is a universe as real, as independent
of our mind, as absolutely existent as that of
Newton and as the common universe of
men . . .’’ (Oeuvres 1283). How are we to understand this? Here, ‘‘real’’ means to say precisely:
‘‘independent of our mind.’’ Einstein’s universe
is real in the sense that the system of equivalence between the points of view is mathematically independent. The universe is no more than
the absolute relation between the points of view,
the mathematical compatibility of perspectives
and movements, itself rendered necessary by
certain experiences contradictory to our own
point of view. It is real, insists Bergson, twice
43
over (in the same two phrases of which we have
only cited one), as a collection of ‘‘absolute
relations’’ (emphasised in the original text) or as
‘‘a collection of relations.’’
What allows us to pass from one of the two senses
of ‘‘real’’ to the other is therefore observation or
effective perception, whose mixed character is
evident here more than ever. According to
Bergson, the physicist is obliged to re-establish
an absolute point of view as soon as he
re-establishes an effective perception or observation (which Newtonian physics still does, according to Bergson). But inversely, we may add, the
observer is obliged to neutralise his own point of
view in order to take account of the universe as a
system of relations. Thus the Michelson–Morley
experiment, which lies at the origin of the theory
of relativity, necessitates a detour via mathematical transformations in order to render compatible points of view which, taken separately,
would each have absolute scope.
In this crucial note in The Creative Mind,
Bergson therefore seems to abandon what had
been the principal difficulty in his book on
Einstein (and the controversy that had immediately surrounded it), namely the contestation of
multiple times to the profit of a unique universal
time. But only at the price of an additional
reduction of the object of physics which is no
longer directly matter itself, but only the universe
of geometric relations, that which includes mathematically, without absorbing them metaphysically, temporal consciousnesses – or more simply,
individual points of view. Einstein thus obliges the
philosopher of Creative Evolution to take an
additional step that once again brings into play
the distinction between science and the rest of our
knowledge, and the point of their possible unity.
It is possible to see in this confrontation
between Bergson and Einstein, to whose work
Brunschvicg would also dedicate himself in that
same year of 1922, a sort of high point in the
relation between science and philosophy that is
singularly characteristic of this ‘‘moment’’ of
philosophy ‘‘in France.’’ A real or illusory high
point, though? Real if one thinks that this
confrontation offers us an example of an urgent
issue still relevant today, illusory if one thinks,
critique and metaphysics
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on the contrary, that it is simply a culmination of
certain illegitimate pretensions which need to be
critiqued, as Sokal and Bricmont have tried to
argue in making Bergson, in their celebrated and
controversial book, the ancestor of the ‘‘intellectual impostures’’ of a certain strain of French
philosophy in its relation to science.2 We will not
directly address this issue here. We will simply
attempt, in briefly retracing the journey of
Brunschvicg’s thought on this same question, to
outline the problem on the basis of which it can
begin to be properly posed.
the analysis, critique and history of
science in brunschvicg
‘‘The problem of perception is resolved by the
child, the problem of science by the scientist,’’
wrote Brunschvicg in Contemporary Idealism
(1905) (L’Idéalisme contemporain 8). So does
that leave anything for the philosopher to do?
In fact, Brunschvicg draws a paradoxical definition
of philosophy from this initial thesis, one which
Canguilhem will even judge ‘‘simple and profound,’’ ‘‘making it his own’’ in The Normal and
the Pathological:3 ‘‘philosophy is the science of
resolved problems’’ (L’Idéalisme contemporain 8).
What are we to understand by this?
Precisely that the very solution of the
problem (in the two differing cases of perception
and of science) seems to mask the problem
itself, and the break which it supposes seems to
mask the fact that there is or was a problem and
that a specific act (different in the case of the
child and that of the scientist) was necessary in
order to resolve it. Now, there can be no
problems in science unless the scientist is made
to confront the real by the internal exigencies of
his cognition, in the same way as the perceiving
subject must confront sensible givens in the very
act of perception. Let us say immediately that
here once again, therefore, the term ‘‘science’’
does not designate for Brunschvicg every type of
cognition, if one understands by this only
the relation between a subject and an object,
but that type of cognition that manifests the
norms of intelligibility proper to the activity
of the mind and applies them to its objects,
and to the physical universe in its entirety,
in a necessarily progressive but always unfinished manner.
We can then understand at once why ‘‘the
problem of science is resolved by the scientist’’
and can only be resolved by him, and what task or
variety of tasks remains, meanwhile, for philosophy. In effect, for Brunschvicg it is not even a
Kantian question, before the objective fact of
science, of seeking its subjective conditions of
possibility. One cannot study science, the scientific
endeavour, except through its own exercise, before
its objects. On the other hand, this immanent
study is the sole means of knowing the activities of
our mind, the purpose of this reflection on science
(or of this ‘‘epistemology’’) being to furnish less
a sum of objective cognitions of the world than a
series of discoveries and propositions concerning
the characteristic acts of our thought, which it falls
to philosophy to extricate. The task which must be
undertaken here is at least threefold: to demonstrate through a reflexive analysis how science,
already supposing the rupture of perception and
within it the act of judgement, extends this rupture
and deepens it by discovering the norms and
internal procedures of intelligibility; to unravel in
a critical manner the exercise of these procedures
beginning with the study of practically effective
science, by formulating a philosophy in which
science remains the privileged touchstone; and
finally, because this rupture and this practice
constitutively demand an always-unfinished
process in relation to experience, one is obliged
to follow this entire history and, in understanding
it as the true history of humanity in a certain sense,
to use it as a gauge of philosophical significance.
We understand now why, for the Brunschvicg of
1922, Einstein is at the apex of this movement
which, in deliberately accentuating the rupture
with a falsely immediate knowledge of the world,
brings us face to face not only with ourselves and
our destiny but with the reality of the universe.
One would be mistaken, however, to content
oneself with placing science, in Brunschvicg, in
direct continuity with perception, which is itself
severed by the act of judgement from the sensible
givens of our immediate experience. Certainly, in
order to prove the very existence of a ‘‘life of the
mind,’’4 it is important to show that our perception itself supposes a specific act, which cannot be
44
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worms
reduced to a simple association of different
images, but which recombines them in order to
constitute new unities, ‘‘fixed centres,’’
‘‘concepts,’’ and thus supposes an independent
activity, a ‘‘mind.’’ Furthermore, what is proper to
this activity of judgement in perception itself is
not only the product or the relation: it is, above all,
according to Brunschvicg, the affirmation, the act
through which our mind says ‘‘that is,’’ an act
irreducible to sensation, and which is the primitive
condition not only of the relation but of the very
existence, for us, of an object and of a world. This
affirmation, in itself universal, can even be said
already to virtually implicate the whole universe,
and never just an isolated object. We can then
understand why perception, according to such an
analysis, cannot be reduced to a simple association
of images and sensations, and why Brunschvicg in
the same Introduction to the Life of the Mind,
having already asked: ‘‘How does the mind
constitute science?,’’ can respond: ‘‘it takes up
the work of perception . . .’’ (Introduction à la vie
de l’esprit 61).
However, this is still not enough, as
Brunschvicg immediately remarks:
But [the mind] has a different aim in science to
that which it has in perception. (Ibid. 62)
Brunschvicg had already maintained this same,
apparently paradoxical, position – even more
strongly in fact – at the centre of his thesis on
The Modality of Judgement:
Ultimately, the life of the mind comprises two
tendencies in opposite directions: the attempt
to fix that which is given first of all in the form
of an ungraspable shock in itself [. . .]; and on
the other hand the filling of the empty frames of
intelligibility which manifest the internal force
of thought, adapting the real progressively;
constructing, in a word, the universe of exterior
perception and the universe of science.
(La Modalité du jugement 170)
In fact, judgement is not solely a putting into
relation, and neither is it only, for Brunschvicg,
an affirmation of being: beyond these two fundamental characteristics, it is also constituted by
a double procedure of analysis and of synthesis
which gives it its proper criteria of validity and
45
even of truth. More precisely still, the analysis
and the synthesis, the decomposition of a whole
into elements, the reconstitution of the whole
through its elements, is susceptible, according to
Brunschvicg, to a sort of autonomous formalisation, which leads not only to the operations of
‘‘abstract mathematics’’ but also to its operations
becoming the conditions for a reappropriation of
the external universe in terms of the internal
norms of truth. Reflexive analysis, which again
takes up the subjective conditions of the possibility of knowledge, is therefore seen to coincide
here with analysis tout court, and consequently
cannot be pursued except through the effective
study of the work of science in its progressive
reconstruction of the universe, where experience is
no longer a given needing to be determined but
a verification to be arrived at; where unity is no
longer an isolated object but the very system of all
relations.
We can see how, armed with such a criterion,
Brunschvicg can outline, in the first phase of his
work, a programme for a philosophy that would at
once complete the movement of a certain philosophical tradition and that of the development of
the sciences, whilst also permitting their double
critique in the name of their own principles.
In effect, we see in the texts of Contemporary
Idealism the task that Brunschvicg assigns to
philosophy (and the critique that he is able to
address to certain prior efforts). Firstly, ‘‘science
[having], by definition, aggregated to itself all
positive theses and experimental verification, all
that remains to metaphysics is the domain of the
hypothetical and the unverifiable’’ (Brunschvicg,
L’Idéalisme contemporain 2). One must, then –
and this particularly against Bergson’s contemporary philosophical enterprise – opt resolutely
for critique. It is in this vein that he writes:
It is not an attempt to add to the quantity of
human knowledge, but a reflection on the
quality of that knowledge. It is internal to
science: it puts the scientist on guard against
the natural temptation to place the whole
content of science on the same plane: experiments and postulates, facts and theories: it
renders them more scrupulous in scrutinising
sources and in measuring the exact import of
their affirmations. (Ibid.; my emphasis)
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critique and metaphysics
Thus the task that Brunschvicg assigns himself is
no less critical for its being immanent to science.
In philosophy, as in science, what is required is to
explicate acts of the mind that conform strictly
both with his ideal of intelligibility and with
experimental verification, resisting both the illusions of the imagination and those of perception
itself. Once again it is not only in philosophy that
Brunschvicg assigns himself a strict critical
programme, reproaching Aristotle for remaining
at the stage of perception and infancy with a
substantialist logic, and even accusing Kant of
having betrayed the pure acts of judgement by
presupposing pure forms of intuition, space and
time, which modern mathematicians would come
to contest (in fact, only Spinoza, according to
Brunschvicg’s reading, which appeared in his very
first published work, represents to his eyes a
perfect fidelity to this immanent exigence of
intelligibility). It is towards science itself that
one must turn the weapons of ‘‘idealist’’ or
‘‘intellectualist’’ critique, in order to measure the
inevitable gap between its internal norms and the
collection of facts or the image of the universe into
which they can be integrated: such is the aim of
the historical detour wherein the central phase
of Brunschvicg’s philosophical work finally
culminates.
One might be surprised, having read the early
works where he seems to affirm that mathematics
has no object, that the historical work begins in
1912 with the book entitled The Stages of
Mathematical Philosophy. But Brunschvicg
shows precisely, in this book and in the résumé
of it that he presented to the Société Française de
Philosophie, how ‘‘at the basis of mathematics,
there is a certain correlation between experience
and reason’’ (The Idea of Mathematical Truth,
1912; Brunschvicg, Écrits philosophiques III, 71).
Arithmetic and geometry derive from elementary
practices, ‘‘the acts of exchange’’ or ‘‘drawing’’
studied by ethnographers, which are subject to
rules and inventions that give rise to verification,
and thereby surpass the framework of ‘‘intuitive
representations’’ whilst still retaining a ‘‘hold on
experience,’’ which would explain the formation
of ‘‘imaginary numbers’’ or ‘‘systems of metrical
geometry different from the Euclidean system’’
(Ibid. 72). It is a question, then, of following
internally the developments of these practices and
their internal norms, in a method oriented towards
future innovations.
But since science, like perception, albeit in an
opposite way, has as its primary goal the unified
knowledge of the universe in its entirety; since,
then, it is this unity which explains that, according
to Brunschvicg, despite the diversity of sciences
one is justified in speaking of ‘‘Science’’ in general,
one realises that the apex of this work is
constituted by the book entitled Human
Experience and Physical Causality, published in
1922. We must, then, say a few words about this
book.
We can distinguish three overall arguments in
the complex construction of this work in six
distinct parts, which sets out to compare two
mixtures, these being an ‘‘experience’’ which
encounters things, but remains ‘‘human,’’ and a
relation established through us (‘‘causality’’),
which, however, has a ‘‘physical’’ scope:
. Following the programme outlined in the
introduction, Brunschvicg begins in the first
part with a challenge to the empiricist conception of experience, as ‘‘absolute experience’’ or
‘‘pure experience,’’ that is to say, experience to
which the mind does not contribute anything
of itself, along with an effort (where, beyond
Hume, Biran and Mill, explicitly studied in the
first part of the book, it seems that Bergson
is being critiqued) ‘‘to base ourselves in the
things themselves’’ (Brunschvicg, L’Éxperience
humaine et la causalité physique VI).
. The three following parts study ‘‘the intellectual
organisation of experience’’ – that is, in a very
particular sense, the history of physics in so far
as it is also the history of thought. It is the
central movement of the work that culminates
in the study of Einstein’s theory of relativity. In
effect what Einstein’s theory supposes, and that
in virtue of which, according to Brunschvicg,
it ultimately surmounts the false immediacy of
the experience called ‘‘sensible,’’ is that the
physicist no longer has direct access, from an
overarching position, to the universe, to space
and to time, but must reconstruct it, taking
account of his own position and his own
displacement, not being able to presuppose
46
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anything other than his capacity to measure,
and thus anything other than that which ensures
the correspondence between different points of
view and measure, namely invariants such as
the speed of light. The physicist can no longer
construct from scratch an instrument to
measure the world, a universal clock; he
merely understands the relation between his
position of measurement of the world, his
singular clock and all the others:
We are not transcendent observers in relation
to the universe; we are occupants of space,
living in an actuality which is ceaselessly driven
and displaced by the mobile course of time.
(Ibid. 391)
Or again, we are not ‘‘clockmakers’’ but ‘‘inhabitants of a clock’’ (Ibid. 396).
Consequently, an additional detour through
abstraction is necessary in order to permit us to
surpass the so-called intermediary abstraction of
the cosmotheoros or spectator of the world – which
Merleau-Ponty would also denounce – and to
return paradoxically to the concrete site of our real
perception, with a coefficient of relativity-becomeradical. As to the unity and objectivity of the
universe, they are not threatened: but they are no
longer guaranteed by completed structures, those
of absolute or intuitive space and time, which
become on the contrary relative coordinates,
constructed locally, but by constants and invariants which assure us that our relative point of
view on space and time, confirmed experimentally,
is also compatible with the unity of the collective
entirety of the universe described by the physicist.
As Brunschvicg says later on, ‘‘the fundamental
invariants upon which relativistic physics rests
exist at the meeting-point of theory and experience’’ (Ibid. 587).
. From here, in the two last parts of the book,
which were particularly closely read by MerleauPonty,5 Brunschvicg can elaborate his own
theory of causality by returning firstly to the
link between perception and judgement.
It comes as no surprise that he concludes with
‘‘the essential relativity of mind and of nature’’
(ibid. 590). On the other hand, he indicates
a new problem when he affirms that, if science
47
‘‘reveals’’ a humanised ‘‘nature’’ which knows
nothing of an in-itself, and if it thereby enables a
knowledge of self which ‘‘is of more value than
science itself,’’ it also exists in order to act, upon
nature and for practical concrete effects.
Technical progress is a paradoxical and ambiguous sign of a double progress, one which
obliges Brunschvicg to undertake a moral
reflection which will be intensified later on,
but which amounts at this moment simply to
writing that: ‘‘the progress of knowledge
involves a progress of nature’’ (ibid.).
We see, then, that from the third of the important
books that attempt to retrace this history (The
Progress of Consciousness in Western Philosophy,
1927), and then in the studies which would follow,
Brunschvicg had had to reflect not only upon the
obstacles that science encounters in this history
but also upon the interpretation of its very
meaning and hence on the place of science
within the whole of our experience. It is with
regard to this second aspect that a re-examination
of his work, as it intersects with Bergson’s, will
allow us to go further.
We have already been struck, in any case, by the
way in which each poses the problem of science,
opposing it to our immediate knowledge and even
to our perception, but interpreting in profoundly
opposed senses not only this initial opposition but
also its theoretical and historical development, in
a science of the universe that each of them
nevertheless tries to keep in contact with our
perception and our immediate experience, thereby
preserving the unity of experience even across the
distinctions that it becomes necessary to make.
ii obstacles, stakes, legacies
We cannot, however, let things rest there.
After having studied these two conceptions of
science in themselves, it seems that we must
briefly review their presuppositions and their
major preoccupations. If ‘‘Science’’ in Bergson
and Brunschvicg is seen in its antagonistic pairing
together with its ‘‘other,’’ we must firstly ask what
their bases and philosophical consequences are,
thereby no doubt bringing out their divergences
more fully. This opposition seems to go
further still, even as far as moral and political
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critique and metaphysics
consequences and the philosophy of history, which
in both thinkers flows directly from the problem of
science. It is not just the metaphysics of duration
but also moral intuition and creation which
Bergson opposes to science and technique; it is
not only the return to a superficial realism but also
the regression to a dangerous barbarism which
Brunschvicg denounces in that which opposes the
progress of science and civilisation. Nothing,
apparently, could be more incompatible than
these two doctrines which, in the midst of the
torment of the 1930s, appeal respectively to a
resort to the mystical, and to intelligence (as
though in a strange and misheard French echo of
the positions, themselves also opposed, adopted
at the same moment in Germany by Husserl and
Heidegger)! Nevertheless, these two metaphysical
and moral viewpoints seem at the same time to be
predicated upon some common presuppositions,
which laid these doctrines open to the same
critique, sometimes radical, beginning in those
same years of the 1930s. Ultimately, it must be
asked whether the opposition between science and
its other in these doctrines is so simple and so
radical itself, or whether on the contrary it might
lead to a diversity of approaches and of problems
which would explicate Brunschvicg’s and
Bergson’s double legacy, if not with regard to
the combination of their philosophical projects,
at least specifically with regard to their relation to
science or to the relation between philosophy and
science which defines and opposes them. Let us
therefore briefly return to these different points.
the metaphysics of duration and the
philosophy of the spirit
Here we can once more consider the elements
studied above, but in reverse order.
In effect, what Bergson opposes to science is
firstly a fact that seems to escape its principal
condition, or at least that cannot be submitted to it
without contradiction, namely time, or rather
duration, which is incapable of being submitted
to number or measurement, that is to say to space,
without being denatured. The contradiction
between succession, which defines time in so far
as it passes, and simultaneity, characteristic of
every representation in space, appears to him to be
insurmountable. This is the initial surprise that
Bergson recounts as having been the origin of the
whole of his philosophical thought: ‘‘we were very
much struck by having seen how real time [. . .]
escapes mathematics’’ (Oeuvres (2/1254)). But this
first discovery gives way to a double expansion,
which in fact defines Bergson: types of reality, first
of all, characterised by this time or this real
duration; and then modes of knowing, capable of
accessing them. Duration is not only ‘‘that which
puts a spanner in the works’’ (Oeuvres (214/676)),
that which according to Bergson presents an
obstacle to the ever-reprised Cartesian dream of
mathesis universalis: it is also that which
positively defines, if not all being and the whole
of being, at least a part of being and hence the
knowing which seizes it as properly metaphysical
knowing. Here also, we can distinguish three steps
in the journey of this thought:
. If duration is for us not the mere logical
condition of succession, and moreover of the
conservation of time, this is primarily because
we have a direct and immediate experience of
this succession and this conservation, according
to Bergson: ‘‘this duration which science eliminates, which it is difficult to conceive of and to
express, we sense it and we live it’’ (Oeuvres (4/
1255)). Bergson’s first book therefore makes of
this immediate experience of succession,
attested to by insensible changes such as
gradually falling asleep or active hesitation,
the proof of the reality of duration, and of its
nature: duration is not only, for us, the abstract
frame of succession and its cognition, but is the
act which allows us to endure, that is to say to
be, in time, and which thus defines not a relative
form of cognisance of the self but an ultimate
reality beyond which there is nothing more to be
sought; the immediate and sensible consciousness that one has as soon as one seizes this
duration for itself, a true metaphysical value.
Therefore there seems to be, at the same time,
along with the opposition between space and
duration, a radical term-for-term opposition
between science and metaphysics.
. But the reality of duration is not of a merely
psychological and interior order. Just as
Bergson, in Matter and Memory and the
48
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Introduction to Metaphysics, comes to withdraw every real object from science, he also does
the reverse, extending the domain of duration
and the intuition which has access to it, to the
totality of the real. Thus, whereas the science of
matter only has access to objects or images
arranged in space for the convenience of our
action, metaphysics (or a science which takes on
the same task) would have access to a moving
reality of matter attested to by our very
experience, through the irreducible phenomena
of change and movement.
. Nevertheless, if from Creative Evolution
onwards space comes to define matter positively, even giving to science as treated therein
an intuitive and absolute status, duration can no
longer define anything but a small part of the
real, that part which seems always to be
irreducible to the first according to Bergson
and which he calls ‘‘mind,’’ the reality of which
is attested to by certain acts irreducible to
mechanical effects – and this in various degrees,
from the free act of a consciousness to the act of
creation which, according to Bergson, manifests
the evolution of species and even the undefinable growth of the universe.
We can now appreciate how, beginning from the
distinction between space and time, succession
and simultaneity, Bergson can arrive at a general
distinction between science and metaphysics, one
upon which in fact all of his philosophy is founded,
including its moral import and its concrete
applications – precisely those problems which in
fact suppose conjointly the two dimensions which
he comes to oppose to each other.
But before speaking of this let us say something
about that which, according to Brunschvicg,
resists – albeit in a totally different sense – the
work of science.
Where all hope of a metaphysics of nature is
removed, there appears the freedom characteristic of a philosophy of the spirit. A great
lesson for which we are indebted to the
developments of contemporary science and
one whose reverberations cannot fail to have
an impact upon the orientation of practical
life. (Brunschvicg, Héritage de mots, héritage
d’idées 32)
49
Such is one of the last phrases of Brunschvicg’s
work, one that could well stand as a résumé of the
whole, in its opposition to a metaphysics of nature
such as Bergson’s!
What is opposed term-for-term to science,
according to Brunschvicg, but at the same time
reveals by contrast its true philosophical significance, is firstly an inevitable tendency of our
imagination, or rather what he calls in his first
book ‘‘spontaneous and vulgar dogmatism.’’ It is
indeed in our imagination, and in the necessary
conditions of our animal life, that we find this
spontaneous tendency to represent the real as a
collection of things and not as a tissue of relations;
our experience as an encounter with an absolute
exteriority and not as an always-incomplete
construction of our mind; science as a collection
of empirical findings or a scholastic classification
rather than as the rational unification of this very
experience.
But these spontaneous tendencies of our individual and social ego, which demand ‘‘a renewed
effort of reflection’’ (Brunschvicg, Introduction
à la vie de l’esprit 11) each time in order to
overcome them, do indeed open the way to a
‘‘metaphysical hope’’ which is the true theoretical
adversary of scientific research, and which
Brunschvicg will never hesitate to denounce.
It is, moreover, let us say in passing, that which
at once relates him to and separates him from
Bergson. In Bergson, he finds an ally in criticising
our practical tendencies to think a static universe
of objects as an absolute reality, in denouncing the
spontaneous realism of our imagination. But he
also reproaches him for reviving this ‘‘spontaneous
dogmatism’’ at the heart of his metaphysics of
duration: instead of proceeding via a reflection on
the primitive acts of our mind, which cannot be
reduced to any other thing, Bergson still seeks in
the intuition of duration an encounter with an
absolute reality, and claims to extend it throughout the entire domain of nature. We must therefore use Bergson, in a certain sense, against
himself, mobilising the ‘‘interior life of intuition’’
against every metaphysical representation of the
real, including those which are predicated upon
the form of duration.6
In the conclusion of his thesis on The Modality
of Judgement, Brunschvicg denounces the double
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critique and metaphysics
form which this ‘‘metaphysics’’ that translates the
spontaneous tendencies of our mind into philosophy might take, by presenting an obstacle to the
reflexive effort best (but not only) exemplified by
science. The ‘‘metaphysics of the object’’ might
take various forms: from an empiricism that
claims to have access to a reality anterior to the
act of judgement, to a certain interpretation of
Platonism, which would attempt to pose the
existence of ideas transcending the dialectic act,
through to a metaphysics of life and every
‘‘ontology’’ in general. Likewise, the ‘‘metaphysics
of the subject’’ is not limited to dogmatic theses on
the existence of the soul: it includes, according to
Brunschvicg, the idea of an ultimate synthesis of
judgements which would reunite ‘‘by an internal
law successive moments of intellectual life,’’ as is
the case in Hegel, but also – once more against
Bergson – the idea of a temporal experience that
would precede acts of judgement, whereas ‘‘the
spontaneous consciousness of life which flows
across the moments of time implies a centre of
reflection that does not pass with the course of time
and is posed by itself under the category of the
internal’’ (Brunschvicg, La Modalité du jugement
233). This being understood, the two metaphysical
tendencies are then indeed opposed to the unique
tendency indicated by science: to every claim to
seize being in itself in the form of an object or a
subject, to every claim to accede to being, science
must oppose the reflection on the at once universal
and always incomplete acts of our mind,
a reflection which nevertheless does not suggest
a limit to our cognition, but on the contrary the
very truth of our life.
In fact, in opposing himself in this way to every
metaphysical pretension, Brunschvicg nonetheless
inscribes science within a philosophical significance that surpasses it, and hence within a more
general argument. Nothing could be clearer in this
regard than the pedagogical stance of the
Introduction to the Life of the Mind, which
envisages a description in the Fichtean manner
of ‘‘the continuous progress which takes place in
the interior of the thinking being.’’ ‘‘The two
extreme terms’’ are marked by ‘‘conscious life,’’
and in it the emergence of purely intellectual
acts, and ‘‘religious life’’ which, according to
Brunschvicg, ‘‘has as its unique content the
notion of absolute unity’’ (Brunschvicg,
Introduction à la vie de l’esprit III). Between the
two can be found the three intermediate stages
of ‘‘scientific life, aesthetic life, moral life.’’
Brunschvicg’s philosophy cannot therefore be
limited to an internal analysis of science. This
latter is subtended by an intellectual activity which
is deployed in other domains, notably human
relations, and possesses its own absolute ends.
It is certainly not a matter of completing science
with a metaphysics that claims to accede directly
to one or another part of being. But it is also not
merely a case of contenting oneself with critiquing
this metaphysics, in its unceasingly renewed
pretensions, even if this is indeed the first task
which Brunschvicg assigns himself. For him, it is a
matter – perhaps more surprisingly – of interpreting the ‘‘spiritual’’ significance of science, in a way
that unites mind with the universe but also with
itself and with the principle of its activity, and
which would thus make of science not the contrary
of philosophy nor even of religion, but the
criterion by which we can make a distinction
between two philosophies, or even two antagonistic religions.
This is also the reason why, despite their
divergences, the philosophies of Bergson and
Brunschvicg were able to incarnate two faces of
the same ‘‘spiritualism.’’ The same contrast in
their responses, but also the same paradoxical
proximity of questioning, was to appear more fully
elsewhere, if more fleetingly, with regard to the
moral, political and historical issue of the problem
of science.
science between two moralities
If there were still a point of commonality, on this
plane, between Bergson and Brunschvicg, it would
doubtless consist in their having pushed the
‘‘moral problem’’ of science to the limits. It is
not a question merely of knowing what moral
value to attribute to science as a function of a
moral scale established elsewhere; on the contrary,
it is a question of knowing whether one can find
within science itself, or in the acts which make
it possible, the foundation for a morality or
a possible sense for history. In science’s very
rupture with the rest of our experience and
50
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practice, throughout its technical and social
effects, does science or does it not contain
a norm for our conduct, does its progress hold
a meaning for our history, or not? There is a sense
in which both authors’ point of departure obliges
them to pose such questions, as sweeping as they
might seem, at the centre of their confrontation
with the most contemporary events.
It is not until 1932, in fact, and The Two
Sources of Morality and Religion, that the
problem becomes clearly formulated in
Bergson’s work. This is not because he had
envisaged science up to that point as a purely
theoretical or disinterested activity. Indeed, on the
contrary, for Bergson science is determined
through and through, as we have seen, by its
practical and technical aims, by its vital and
utilitarian function. It has its origin in the needs
of our bodies, in the structure of the human
species and the conditions of its action and its
matter; it only knows in order to act, and its
knowledge is in a certain sense first of all a power.
To this, then, is opposed not action – founded, like
science, on our ‘‘intelligence’’ or our reason – but
that which depends on individual and unpredictable duration, which in escaping the conditions of
science also escapes determinism and recovers
freedom. It is precisely because scientific determinism is only bound to the conditions of our
action and our knowledge, to space and to
mathematics, that it leaves a place for freedom
in every degree of being or of duration. But if this
seems to imply a critique of science, it is nevertheless no longer a properly moral evaluation. If
space, like duration, is bound to action, then
neither of the two seems able to provide us with a
norm capable of surpassing practical utility or
individual freedom, both being necessary for our
life, and both being described by Bergson as
inescapable facts.
One might well anticipate, then, the conclusion
reached straightforwardly in The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion with regard to the
Bergsonian philosophy of science. In this book,
the two dimensions of our action lead in some way,
at their vital origin, to the two principles of a
universal obligation, which find their echo in all
of humanity, and are both capable of orienting its
history. Despite the intelligent and liberal forms
51
which they take, social obligations can but
translate vital obligations and therefore turn
within the closed circle of the human species.
On the other hand, in returning to the creative
principle of life, and in passing outside the limits
of the species, certain men feel an obligation
towards all mankind which founds an open
morality, alone capable of counterbalancing the
former. However, science, for Bergson, is not at all
at the exclusive service of closed morality. It is
here that the argument of Creative Evolution takes
on its fullest import, certainly linking science to
life, but also giving it structure and an autonomous
object, with space and matter, and already
permitting man to detach himself from the
purely organic mode of action of other species
by envisaging a deliverance from servitude by
means of machines. Bergson will finally insist on
this point in the last chapter of his last book.
Incapable of founding action, science cleaves no
more to one moral position than to another:
morally neutral, it can, on the contrary, serve
one or the other of the ‘‘two’’ moralities.
Humanity’s science and technique, whilst virtually
liberatory, can also exacerbate servitude. Scientific
‘‘progress’’ can only, according to a celebrated
and ambiguous formula, enlarge ‘‘the body’’ of
humanity: it henceforth requires a ‘‘supplement of
soul.’’7
This is why, just as much through the logic of
his own doctrine as through the events of the
1930s, Bergson seems to suggest a recourse to
mysticism, not against the ‘‘mechanical’’ but as a
response to its address, and to counterbalance the
risk that it cannot resist pushing to its limit the
warrior instinct of closed morality, even unto
the extermination of the enemy and the destruction
of the planet – and even if this is made possible by
technologies no less capable of delivering man
from hunger and alleviating his labour. If it is not
a question for Bergson of condemning science
and technique, it certainly is, on the other hand, a
question of separating the scientific problem from
the moral problem, not only by refusing to see in
science and its progress the norm for our action
and our history, but by seeking this latter in a
fundamentally different direction, a metaphysical
intuition become henceforth the privilege of a few
grand men, and which philosophy is therefore
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no longer sufficient to procure. So what is opened
up is a mysticism which claims to stem from the
instincts of life, since for Bergson the mystical is
opposed to the closed morality produced by a
static sense of life – and thus continues the moral
creation of humanity – but also the pretensions of
science and of philosophy to find in the autonomy
of intelligence or reason the basis for some
principle capable of compelling and obliging men.
We can understand why critiques of Bergson in
the 1930s, although unjustly attributing to him a
confusion capable of justifying political or totalitarian ‘‘mystics,’’ could simultaneously reproach
him for making a metaphysical analysis of the
moral and political stakes of the epoch, and of the
role that science and technology had played in
them. So that whilst Politzer imputed to Bergson a
hypocrisy capable of justifying social and religious
power, Nizan similarly reproached Brunschvicg
at the same time, thereby helping, despite the
divergence of their philosophies, to unite both
philosophers in the same refusal.8
Meanwhile, Brunschvicg’s evolution with
regard to the moral problem posed by science
does seem to go in the opposite direction to
Bergson’s. For him, science never ceased to
contain, through the act of judgement and through
its aim of unity, the very source of real morality,
in its aim of solidarity between men, of historical
unification of humanity. But between this moral
goal and its realisation, the space seemed to him to
progressively hollow out, to the point where the
threat was felt of an evil utilisation of the progress
of science and technique, indirectly putting into
question their intrinsic value, and thereby
confirming that this value does not consist in
their results or their effects so much as in the
source that, according to Brunschvicg, rendered
them possible. We might even say that the more
science progressed, the less the concomitance of
this progress with a moral and historical progress
appeared to be guaranteed, as numerous passages
attest:
Because positive knowledge is uncovered every
day that is not only more extended, but further
from imaginative representation, more properly spiritual, the distance closes between
humanity taken at its speculative apex and
the mass of men considered in their everyday
life at the median level. (Cited in Deschoux,
La Philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg 144)
Or again:
from 1926 to 1935 [between a text of Bréhier’s
and the time when Brunschvicg is writing],
the gap seems to have become more marked.
The epoch when reason, taking to task the tautological formalism of pure deduction and the
rigidity of a priori categories, was freed from
the prejudices of an abstract and sterile
rationality, [. . .] is also the epoch where the
efficacy of its practical power for the conduct of
individuals and societies appeared ever more
threatening. (Ibid. 163)
This paradox has a meaning for science itself, in a
text on the ‘‘European spirit’’ which is not without
evoking that great unfinished work of Husserl, the
Krisis:
delivered to its truth, science would therefore
be that which was, in the time of Plato, of
Descartes, of Kant, the mode of access to a true
spirituality. A formula which never fails to
appear as a tragic paradox in the testing time of
war, before the threat which the development
of technique, the product of science, has made
weigh heavy over the very existence of the
European continent. (Ibid. 165)
But we only find a sentiment of sadness, even of
defeat, here, in so far as there is also, in
Brunschvicg’s thought, a consistent demand for
unity: ‘‘the unity of speculation and of practice,
alone capable of assuring the integrity of human
consciousness’’ (Brunschvicg, Héritage de mots,
héritage d’idées 40). In other words, what is
defeated is not a naı̈ve faith in scientific progress
and technique which had never been his, and
which is perhaps even equally responsible for the
risks which make this progress weigh so heavily
upon humanity. Perhaps it is not either the
more profound idea which is indeed a principle
of Brunschvicg’s thought, namely that this
progress translates an interior progress of selfconsciousness, valuable in principle for all humanity. Maybe it is, rather, the idea of an adequation
between this intellectual progress and the moral
reflection of a consciousness upon its own existence and, moreover, upon the collective history of
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humanity. On this level, even Nabert, taking his
reflexive method from Brunschvicg in his
Elements for an Ethics, published in 1943, had to
distance himself somewhat. It is not only a factual
breach which opened up in the twentieth century
between intellectual advances and moral progress:
this factual breach perhaps only confirmed a
distance in principle between the different dimensions of consciousness’s relation to itself.
Despite their divergences, however, we can
only be struck by the proximity of accent or tone
of the texts written by Brunschvicg and Bergson
in the 1930s. Certainly, the former was taken by
surprise (to gloss somewhat) by the disjunction
between Einstein’s proofs and Hitler’s seductions,
and by what this implied for the very idea of
humanity, whereas the latter added to this
opposition a third order wherein the great mysticism would come to intervene. But both, in any
case, saw in the events of their times a conflict of
the ‘‘spiritual’’ order which, far from damning the
idea of a ‘‘spirit’’ in the work of science or beyond
it, suggested a return to it. We can thus understand why Merleau-Ponty, partly reiterating the
type of political critiques of Bergson and
Brunschvicg made by Politzer or Nizan, and
before returning to their doctrines themselves in
the course of his work, could implicitly but
conjointly reproach both philosophers, in The
War Has Taken Place,9 for example, with having
held up the idea of a pure consciousness escaping
the world and history. Beyond the objections
which were addressed to them, about their
treatment of science for example, these are without doubt the reasons for the shock which so
brutally affected the two doctrines at the time of
the Second World War, creating an apparently
irreducible break with those that were to follow.
But perhaps we must nevertheless, whilst returning to the question of science, make a brief
attempt to go a little further.
between science and philosophy
The two aspects that we will discuss here tend in
effect to widen the radical distinction which these
two philosophers establish, in opposing senses,
between science and metaphysics. But this distinction only has any meaning, in either case, because
53
the two terms so distinguished are initially the
object of a mixture in our experience or our
concrete knowledge. It is in order to treat precise
problems that Bergson is led to distinguish but
also to link the scientific and philosophical
approaches; it is in order to study the effective
history of discourses and knowledges that
Brunschvicg arrives at an analysis that discriminates between the two tendencies of our minds.
Thus, beyond the metaphysical and moral stakes,
this distinction has a methodological dimension
which characterises two relations between philosophy and science, which have not ceased, through
profound modifications, to make their effects felt
and to prove fruitful.
Thus, in order to complete what has been said
above, Bergson’s concrete efforts should be
studied under three aspects, each of which
deserves mention: the classification of sciences,
the study of precise scientific and philosophical
problems, the central place of biology, and within
it two senses of ‘‘life,’’ to which we may finally
trace back, whilst remaining within its metaphysical stakes, the very distinction between science
and pure metaphysics discussed above. Between
physics and pure metaphysics, founded respectively on space and duration, our experience
unfolds in admixtures which are studied by
specific sciences, constrained to make the distinction between the two pure elements which are
mixed in their object in order to obviate the
confusions which give rise to false problems. Thus
Bergson successively studied the status of psychoanalysis, the problem of memory (the distinction
between generic memory and individual memory),
the question of the evolution of species, and that of
the structure of society, to which we can add, in
various essays, the question of laughter, of dreams,
or of the brain. This being understood, between
the two extremes it is indeed our lives themselves
which take on a mixed status par excellence, and
become central to the study of Bergson, not only
under the form of a metaphysics of ‘‘élan vital,’’ as
a degree of creation and of duration, nor only in
the form of a critique of intelligence and of man
as Homo faber. Ultimately, throughout his whole
philosophy, it is the double sense that grasps our
life from the interior, as generic life, dictating its
conditions to our action and our knowledge,
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critique and metaphysics
and as individual history, apparently irreducible.
In which case it is less a question of definitively
opposing science and metaphysics than one of
verifying in our experience itself an irreducible
distinction that resists one unique mode of
knowing, and which, whether or not based upon
an ultimate ‘‘metaphysical’’ foundation, in any
case necessitates a radical conceptual and philosophical distinction.
Just as for Bergson there is no purely metaphysical experience in our lives (except for extreme
cases of free acts or of moral creation), for
Brunschvicg there is essentially no perfectly pure
science, except in the extreme cases of the progress
of analysis and of the unity brought by it to certain
domains of our experience, for example Cartesian
geometry or Einsteinian physics. The work of
philosophy consists, therefore, in a critical epistemology studying the constitution of concepts and
scientific theories, and gauging the threat
harboured in the latter’s tendency to assume the
mantle of an unconscious philosophy of themselves. Thus, the idea of a unity of science,
fundamental for Brunschvicg, gives way, through
a failure that is in some sense inevitable, to the
study of specific sciences in their progressive
unification and the elaboration of their proper
concepts. To the abstract idea of a classification of
sciences, Brunschvicg opposes that of an operative
and provisional unification of the domains of our
experience. Certainly, Brunschvicg seems to
maintain throughout his work, despite taking
into account the ‘‘aesthetic life,’’ a radical break
between science and literature, intelligence and
imagination. But one might ask whether his
method does not leave open the possibility of
a complementary study of the imagination
itself – something like that of Bachelard, whose
double work again displays Brunschvicg’s critical
distinction – adjoined to his properly epistemological work.
Thus, beyond the doctrinal bases of their
approach to science, the works of Bergson and
Brunschvicg open up two types of philosophical
relation to science which neglect neither the
specificity of scientific knowledge nor the place
that it nevertheless leaves open for a properly
philosophical discourse. To study, on the one
hand, that which resists, in the real itself or in our
thought, the endeavours of scientific thought (but
without ceasing to confront it); to study, on the
other, the risks that threaten this thought from
within with being frozen into a dogmatism or an
ideology (without meanwhile ceasing to see in it
the very reality of thought): these would be, then,
for example in Merleau-Ponty on one side, in
Bachelard or Canguilhem on the other, some of
the possible continuations of Bergson’s and
Brunschvicg’s work. One might even ask whether
the distinction between the concepts of philosophy and the functions of science which one finds
in Deleuze, or the project of a critical study of
the historical constitution of knowledges like
Foucault’s, may not push to their respective
limits if perhaps not the philosophies of
Bergson and Brunschvicg themselves, with
whom of course the differences are on the
contrary irreducible, then at least a certain
relation between philosophy and science at work
in their thought.
The study of the problem of science in these two
philosophers can thus lead us not only to the heart
of each of their doctrines and of their relation to
each other – a relation which in its density defines
a specific philosophical moment – but also to the
centre of a relation between science and philosophy which cannot be collapsed
precipitately onto either one of
its terms, and which still
remains today, in every sense,
an open question.
notes
Originally published as ‘‘Entre critique et me¤taphysique: La Science chez Bergson et Brunschvicg’’ in
Les Philosophes et la science, ed. Pierre Wagner
(Paris: Gallimard, 2002) 403^ 46. Reproduced
here with permission.
1 ‘‘Introduction to Metaphysics’’ in The Creative
Mind ^ a note added, at the time this work
appeared ^ 1934 ^ to a text originally published in
1903.
2 Sokal and Bricmont’s book Impostures intellectuelles [published in English in the UK as
Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile, 1998), and
in the USA as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern
Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador,
1998) ^ translator’s note] mentions Bergson in its
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last chapter, but limits its treatment of Bergson’s
relation to science to a discussion of the theory of
relativity in Duration and Simultaneity. What
Bergson is criticised for here is less an imposture,
however, than an error, concerning the role of
time in the theory itself.We nevertheless maintain
(having been cited ^ in erroneous fashion, incidentally ^ by the authors of this book ^ op. cit. 270)
that something remains to be discussed here,
namely the very question of the reality of the
universe described by physics, or its ideality, since
the role of ‘‘consciousness’’ ^ not psychologically
conceived, but first of all phenomenological or
perceiving ^ in this attribution of reality cannot
be other than decisive. Moreover, we might
remark that the authors say nothing of
Brunschvicg, nor of his ‘‘successors,’’ whose role in
the history of philosophy’s relation to science is
just as important in France as that of Bergson’s
‘‘successors,’’ and, as we seek to demonstrate
here, complements and completes the latter.
3 Preface to the first publication of the work
[Canguilhem, ‘‘Essai sur quelques proble'mes concernant le normal et le pathologique’’ ^ translator’s
note], reprinted in the 3rd edition [(Paris: PUF,
1966) ^ published in English as The Normal and the
Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert
S. Cohen (New York: Zone, 1989) ^ translator’s
note].
4 According to the Fichtean title given by
Brunschvicg to the book, published in 1900,
where he generalised the results of his 1897
thesis: Introduction to the life of the Mind, which thus
succeeded The Modality of Judgement.
5 Even if this reading only appeared explicitly in
the recently published Course on Nature
[M. Merleau-Ponty, La Nature: Notes, cours du
Colle'ge de France (Paris: Seuil, 1995), published in
English as Nature: Course Notes from the Colle'ge de
France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UP, 2003) ^ translator’s note], it is
of implicit importance from The Structure of
Comportment [Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement, translated as The Structure of Behaviour,
trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon, 1967) ^
translator’s note] through to the last articles of
Signes [Merleau-Ponty, Signes, published in English
as Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UP,1963) ^ translator’s note].
6 Among the numerous texts on Bergson by
Brunschvicg, the reader is referred particularly to
55
a nice article entitled ‘‘The Inner Life of Intuition’’
published during the war in Be¤guin and The¤veraz’s
1943 collection dedicated to Bergson [Be¤guin and
Thevenaz (eds.), Henri Bergson: Essais et te¤moignages
^ translator’s note]. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, in
his preface to the republished The Stages of
Mathematical Philosophy, gives an exposition of
how Brunschvicg enters into Bergsonian thought
only to then overturn it ‘‘like a cre“pe’’: ‘‘Arriving at
the point where he finds himself availed of the
core of Bergsonian thinking, he overturns it as
one does a cre“pe, and cuts it down to its proper
status: that of an invalid intuition’’ (Brunschvicg,
Les E¤tapes de la philosophie mathe¤matique ii^iii).
7 Even before we find it in The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion, this expression had been
employed by Bergson in 1920, and again in 1928 in
his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize
[Bergson, Oeuvres 1489].
8 We should compare here Politzer’s Le
Bergsonisms ou la fin d’une parade philosophique
[1929, republished Paris: Pauvert, 1968] and
Nizan’s Le Chiens de garde [1932, republished Paris:
Maspero,1968].
9 An article which appeared in no. 1 of Temps
modernes in 1945, and was taken up again in Sens et
non-sens [Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, translated as Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H.L. Dreyfus
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1964) ^ translator’s note].
10 For a general bibliography on Bergson and
science see F. Worms, ‘‘Le Bergsonisme’’ in
Dictionnaire d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences,
ed. D. Lecourt (Paris: PUF,1999).
bibliography
works by bergson
Oeuvres, including, in particular, Essaisurles donne¤es
imme¤diates de la conscience. 1889 [published in
English as Time and Free Will. Trans. F.L. Pogson.
New York: Dover, 2001 ^ translator’s note];
Matie're et me¤moire. 1896 [published in English as
Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S.
Paher. New York: Zone, 1991 ^ translator’s note];
L’E¤volution cre¤atrice. 1907 [published in English as
Creative Evolution. Trans. A. Mitchell. Lanham, MD:
UP of America, 1983 ^ translator’s note]; Les Deux
Sources de la morale et de lareligion.1932 [published in
English as The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.
critique and metaphysics
Trans. R. Ashley Audra and C. Brereton. Notre
Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1977 ^ translator’s
note]; La Pense¤e et le mouvant.1934. Ed. A. Robinet.
Paris: PUF,1959 [published in English asThe Creative
Mind. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York:
Citadel,1992 ^ translator’s note].
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Me¤langes, including, in particular, Dure¤e et simultane¤ite¤. 1922. Ed. A. Robinet. Paris: PUF, 1972
[published in English as Duration and Simultaneity.
Trans. Leon Jacobson. Manchester: Clinamen,
1999 ^ translator’s note].
Cours. Vols. I^III. Ed. H. Hude. Paris: PUF,
‘‘E¤pime¤the¤e’’ collection,1990 ^99.
[For an English-language overview of, and critical
selection from, Bergson’s work, see also Keith
Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (eds.). Key
Writings. London: Continuum, 2002 ^ translator’s
note.]
Worms, F. Le Vocabulaire de Bergson. Paris: Ellipses,
2000.
works by brunschvicg
E¤crits philosophiques. Vols. I^III (vol. I: L’Humanisme
de l’occident; vol. II: L’Orientation du rationalisme;
vol. III: Science, religion). Paris: PUF,1951^58.
Les E¤tapes de la philosophie mathe¤matique. Paris:
Alcan,1912. Reprinted Paris: Blanchard,1972.
L’E¤xperience humaine et la causalite¤ physique. 1922.
3rd ed. Paris: PUF,1949.
He¤ritage de mots, he¤ritage d’ide¤es. Paris: PUF,
1945^53.
L’Ide¤alisme contemporain. Paris: Alcan,1905.
Introduction a' la vie de l’esprit. 1900. 5th ed. Paris:
Alcan,1932.
La Modalite¤ du jugement. 3rd ed. Paris: PUF,1964.
10
studies of bergson
Barreau, H. ‘‘Bergson et Einstein, a' propos de
Dure¤e et simultane¤ite¤.’’ E¤tudes bergsoniennes, X.
Paris: PUF,1973.
Capek, M. (ed.). Bergson and Modern Physics. Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 7. Dordrecht:
Reidel,1971.
Deleuze, G. Le Bergsonisme. Paris: PUF, 1966
[published in English as Bergsonism. Trans. P.
Patton. London: Athlone,1991 ^ translator’s note].
Gallois, P. and G. Forzy (eds.). Bergson et les
neurosciences. Paris: Les Empe“cheurs de penser en
rond,1997.
Le Progre's de la conscience dans la philosophie
occidentale.1927. 2nd ed. Paris: PUF,1953.
Spinoza et ses contemporains. 1923 (collection
comprising Brunschvicg’s monograph on Spinoza
^ first published Paris: Alcan, 1894 ^ and other
texts). 4th ed. Paris: PUF,1951.
studies of brunschvicg
Deschoux, M. Brunschvicg. Paris: Seghers,1969.
Deschoux, M. La Philosophie de Le¤on Brunschvicg.
Paris: PUF,1949.
E¤tudes philosophiques (special issue) (1945).
Gouhier, H. Bergson et le Christ des E¤vangiles. Paris:
Fayard,1961.
Revue de me¤taphysique et de morale (special issue)
(1945).
Gunter, P. (ed. and trans.). Bergson and the Evolution
of Physics. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P,1969.
other works cited
Merleau-Ponty, M. ‘‘Bergson se faisent.’’ Signes.
Paris: Gallimard,1960.
Milet, J. Bergson et le calculinfinite¤simal, ou Laraison et
le temps. Paris: PUF,1974.
Worms, F. ‘‘Le Bergsonisme.’’ Dictionnaire d’histoire
et de philosophie des sciences. Ed. D. Lecourt. Paris:
PUF,1999.
Worms, F. Introduction a' ‘‘Matie're et me¤moire’’ de
Bergson. Paris: PUF,1997.
Be¤guin, A. and P. Thevenaz (eds.). Henri Bergson:
Essais et te¤moignages. Neucha“tel: La Baconnie're,
1943.
Canguilhem, G. ‘‘Essai sur quelques proble'mes
concernant le normal et le pathologique.’’ Thesis,
University of Strasbourg,1943.
Merleau-Ponty, M. La Nature. Paris: Seuil,1995.
Merleau-Ponty, M. Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel,
1948.
56
worms
Merleau-Ponty, M. Signes. Paris: Gallimard,1960.
Merleau-Ponty, M. La Structure du comportement.
Paris: PUF,1942.
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Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont. Impostures intellectuelles.
Paris: Odile Jacob,1997.
Frédéric Worms
Université Charles-de-Gaulle – Lille 3
Domaine universitaire du ‘‘Pont de Bois’’
rue du Barreau
BP 149
59653 Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex
France
E-mail: f.worms@wanadoo.fr
Robin Mackay
Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy
Middlesex University
Trent Park
Bramley Road
London N14 4YZ
UK
E-mail: robin@urbanomic.com