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bs_bs_banner 640 Reviews At one point in his contribution to this volume, McDowell says that the principle of charity requires that we not attribute bad philosophy to someone unless we are forced to do so (p. 85). The problem with this construal of the principle of charity is that it is often very difficult to distinguish between bad philosophy and extraordinary philosophy, especially when it comes to Hegel. The final impression I took away from this fine collection is that Hegel’s theory of action is, in fact, most interesting and even most insightful precisely on those points where it looks most implausible, even outrageous. This volume represents a welcome effort to make Hegel’s ‘hard sayings’ intelligible in more contemporary philosophic language. Mark Alznauer Department of Philosophy Northwestern University USA m-alznauer@northwestern.edu REFERENCES Quante, M. (1993), Hegels Begriff der Handlung. Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann Holzboog. Wood, A. W. (1990), Hegel’s Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bergson and Phenomenology, edited by Michael R. Kelly. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, xii + 277 pp. ISBN 978-0-230-20238-2 hb £55.00 Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is widely recognized to be France’s greatest philosopher of the modern period. He was the author of four classic texts of philosophy, three of them characterized by a combination of exceptional philosophical gifts and impressive mastery of extensive scientific literature. Each text offers readers a number of theoretical innovations. Time and Free Will (1889) provides a novel account of free will by showing that time is not space and that psychic states do not lend themselves to treatment as magnitudes. Matter and Memory (1896) provides a non-orthodox (non-Cartesian) dualism of matter and mind, seeking to show that while the difference between matter and perception is one of degree (unless we construe it in these terms, the emergence of perception out of matter becomes something mysterious and inexplicable), that between perception and memory is one of kind (unless we construe it in these terms, memory is deprived of any autonomous character and is reduced to being a merely diluted form of perception). Matter and Memory offers an extremely rich and novel account of different types of memory that philosophical psychology is still catching up with today. In Creative Evolution (1907) Bergson endeavours to demonstrate the need for a philosophy of life in which the theory of knowledge and a theory of life are viewed as inseparably bound up with one another. In the text, Bergson seeks to establish what philosophy must learn from the new biology (the neo-Darwinism established by August Weismann) and what philosophy can offer the new theory of the evolution of life. It is a tour de force, a work of truly © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Reviews 641 extraordinary philosophical ambition. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), his final text, and where the engagement with scientific literature is not as extensive, Bergson outlines a novel approach to the study of society (sociology) with his categories of the ‘closed’ and the ‘open’ and the ‘static’ and the ‘dynamic’. Bergson’s ambition was to restore the absolute as the legitimate object of philosophy and to accomplish this by showing how it is possible to think beyond the human condition—that is, beyond our spatialized and instrumental habits of representation. Although he contests Kant’s stress on the relativity of knowledge to the human standpoint in a manner similar to Hegel, his conception of the absolute is not the same. This is the surprise of Bergson, and perhaps explains why he appears as such an unfamiliar figure to us today: he seeks to demonstrate the absolute—conceived as the totality of differences in the world, differences of degree and differences of kind—through placing man back into nature and the evolution of life. In other words, he uses the resources of naturalism and empiricism to support an apparently Idealist philosophical programme. Indeed, Bergson argues that true empiricism is the real metaphysics and held that the more the sciences of life develop, the more they will feel the need to reintegrate thought into the very heart of nature. In his own day he was read primarily as an empiricist whose thinking amounted, in the words of his former pupil and later harsh critic, Jacques Maritain, to a wild experimentalism. Maritain accused Bergson of producing an ontology of becoming not after the fashion of Hegel’s panlogism, but rather after the fashion of an integral empiricism. Julien Benda vigorously protested against Bergson’s demand for new ways of thinking and new methods in philosophy and called for a return to the hyper-rationalism of Spinoza. Bergson does not readily fit into the two main camps that define the contemporary academic institution of philosophy: neither the continental one which insists on keeping apart philosophy and science and regards any interest in science as philosophically suspect, nor the analytic one which cheerfully subsumes philosophy within the ambit of the natural sciences and renders metaphysics otiose. As Gilles Deleuze rightly observed, in the case of Bergson, scientific hypotheses and metaphysical theses are constantly combined in an effort to reconstitute complete experience. As Michael Kelly notes in his Introduction, it is in fact only in the twenty-first century that a Bergsonian school of thought has emerged. Bergson’s thought was in serious decline in his own lifetime, and after the end of the Second World War existentialism became the popular philosophy in France. This new Bergsonian school of thought seeks to revive Bergson’s thought on its own terms, but here, in this volume, the editor seeks an encounter between Bergson and phenomenology—the dominant discourse in continental philosophy today. If there is reason for accepting Bergson into this tradition, a good place to start would be with exploring his unacknowledged influence on phenomenology and even how the concepts Bergson fashioned might be relevant for issues in contemporary research in phenomenology. To a large extent, this is what is attempted in this edited collection of essays, which has been skilfully put together by the editor. He notes at the outset of his Introduction to the volume that although Sartre admitted to being bowled over by Bergson—Merleau-Ponty would go further and maintain that Bergson bowled over philosophy—his ideas and texts have received little attention from phenomenology both in its history and today: ‘Twentieth-century phenomenology in its relations to Bergson thus ranges from the polite to the dismissive to the confrontational. But serious engagement never occurred’ (p. 3). History gives us only isolated incidents and neglected possibilities for staging an encounter between Bergson and phenomenology, such as Husserl’s reported disclosure that phenomenologists are the ‘true Bergsonians’. But, as © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

642 Reviews Deleuze pointed out in his Afterword to the English translation of his book Bergsonism (first published in France in 1966), any return to Bergson nowadays should mean not only a renewed admiration for a great philosopher but an extension of his project today in relation to transformations taking place in life and society and in parallel with transformations in science. He thought Bergson’s research could be followed through in three directions and he noted that the same themes are to be found in phenomenology: intuition as a method, philosophy as a rigorous science, and the theory of multiplicities as a new logic. Michael Kelly also notes that the ground is fertile for staging a productive rapport between Bergson and phenomenology, with both Husserl and Bergson making, in response to scientism and psychologism, a turn to experience and emphasizing the importance of time, embodiment and intuition. Having noted this, it is equally important to appreciate the extent to which the agendas differ and the two traditions of thought diverge on the question of experience. Where Husserl sought a science of the essential structures of consciousness, Bergson sought to develop a new philosophy of life and within it a metaphysics of freedom and novelty. Moreover, can phenomenology effect, as Bergsonism seeks to, a transformation of life and society or, in its quest for the primordially lived, is it unable to fight against the tyranny of perceptual and affective clichés, being content to imprison the movement of life within the realm of common sense? Although we can locate in Bergson a ‘Bergsonian epoché’, in which the question about the reality or ideality of the external world is bracketed, and although Bergson’s expansion of experience and Husserl’s deepening of it put the two on the same road, they ultimately are walking, as Kelly puts it, in different directions. As he notes, Bergson does not focus on the qualitative feel of life so as to accord privilege to the first-person perspective of consciousness and against the reductive claims of the sciences. Although he does invoke a ‘turn of experience’, this, as the editor correctly notes, denotes in Bergson a turn to a moment prior to experience becoming relative to human needs and intelligence. Bergson is thus proposing a turn away from what is given to consciousness and, as the editor notes, ‘phenomenology does not fully turn away from the human contribution to experience because its epoché turns only to a clarification of the dogmas and mundane engagements that obscure the phenomena as presented to experience’ (p. 9). Bergsonism does not, then, privilege human consciousness since the aim is to reintegrate it into nature or life (we are presented with a ‘Whole’ that is neither given nor giveable). Indeed, Bergson conceives philosophy as the discipline that ‘raises us above the human condition’ (la philosophie nous aura élevés au-dessus de la condition humaine) and makes the effort to ‘surpass’ (dépasser) it (Bergson 1965: 50). Philosophy provides us with the methods for reversing the normal directions of the mind (instrumental, utilitarian), so upsetting its habits. Because it finds itself having to work against the most inveterate habits of the mind, Bergson compares philosophy to an act of violence. The aim of the enterprise is to expand the humanity within us and allow humanity to surpass itself by reinserting itself in the whole (it recognizes it is part of nature and the evolution of life). Intelligence is reabsorbed into its principle and comes to know its own genesis. In spite of what one might think, this makes the task of philosophy a modest one. If we suppose that philosophy is an affair of perception, then it cannot simply be a matter of correcting perception but only of extending it. As Michael Kelly notes, Bergson goes beyond the aim of clarifying the intentionalities of the natural attitude by seeking to effect a radical turn to what he called the ‘very life of things’ in the realm of the real world and our own implication in them. As Merleau-Ponty noted in one of his appreciations of Bergson, for Bergson absolute knowledge is not detachment but inherence. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty goes so far as to impute to Bergson the regaining at the heart of our being in the world © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Reviews 643 a pre-Socratic and ‘prehuman’ meaning of the world: ‘Never before had anyone established this circuit between being and myself which is such that beings exists “for me”, the spectator, but which is also such that the spectator exists “for being” ’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 185). It is in this attempt to radicalize the meaning of human experience that the editor of this volume thinks a ‘nouvelle-Bergsonism’ can be found in contemporary phenomenology. This may strike many readers sympathetic to phenomenology as an audacious claim, but it makes sense when one considers the effect that the work of several post-phenomenologists, such as Derrida for example, have had on our thinking about consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, presence and so on. As Kelly puts it, ‘the increasing talk in phenomenology of the solicitation of the object, sensitivity to how being gives itself and the call of the other suggests an increasing convergence of phenomenology and Bergson’ (p. 11). The aim of this volume as a whole is to rediscover an ‘audacious’ Bergson and, moreover, through such a recovery give serious consideration to the claim, equally audacious perhaps, that Bergson always has had more to say to phenomenology than phenomenology has allowed him to say. The principal effort of the volume, then, is to place the two traditions of thoughts in dialogue and there would be little point in doing this if there was not in the first place quite fundamental concerns the two share and have in common, such as the claims of modern science to give us the only true access to the real. Both traditions of thought call into question scientism and the attempt to quantify the quality of life and so have a common foe—namely, the positivistic conception of science. Bergson called for what one might call a ‘superior’ positivism which he outlined in his Huxley lecture of 1911 on ‘Life and Consciousness’: ‘we possess now a certain number of lines of facts, which do not go as far as we want, but which we can prolong hypothetically’ (Bergson 2007: 4). This is taken up again in the Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where he states that the different lines of fact indicate for us the direction of truth but none go far enough; the attainment of truth can only take place when the lines are prolonged to the point where they intersect. In Creative Evolution, Bergson attempted to show that the problem of knowledge, the problem of accounting for the faculties of intellect and intuition, is one with the metaphysical problem—the problem of gaining access to the real: the two form a circle, the centre of which is the empirical study of evolution. The double form of consciousness (intuition and intellect) is shown to be the double form of the real itself. The attempt to demonstrate this constitutes what we might choose to call the ‘Bergsonian revolution’. It is an effort to enter into life’s own domain, conceived as ‘reciprocal interpenetration, indefinitely continued creation’. Bergson and Phenomenology features thirteen essays in total and is divided into three main parts. Part one endeavours to lay the ground for opening up a debate between Bergson and phenomenology. It features essays by Leonard Lawlor on intuition and duration; Rudolf Bernet on the driven force of consciousness and life; Gary Gutting on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on experience and science; and Stephen Crocker on art, life and finitude in Bergson’s essay on laughter. Part two brings the two traditions into close rapport and centres on the actual debates between them. It features essays by Hanne Jacobs and Trevor Perri on intuition and freedom in Husserl and Bergson; Dan Zahavi on life and phenomenology in the early Bergson; Pete Gunter on a Bergsonian critique of Sartre’s concept of time; Alia Al–Saji on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on a new theory of vision; Nicolas de Warren on Bergson and Levinas on ‘creation’; and John Mullarkey on Bergson and Michel Henry on the psycho-physics of phenomenology. The third and final part is on the life-world and life and aims to expose the core issues at stake in © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

bs_bs_banner 644 Reviews the debate between Bergson and phenomenology. As the editor puts it, the issue of life ‘cuts to the very point at which Husserl (phenomenology) and Bergson may both meet and diverge, namely the relation between intentionality and the élan vital’ (p. 16). The core issue centres on whether classical phenomenology or Bergson can make a positive contribution to a phenomenology of life and where ‘life’ is taken to mark the meeting point of the natural and the transcendental. This third part features three essays: Pierre Kerszberg on life and life-world in Bergson and phenomenology; Frédéric Worms on consciousness and life in Bergson and that situates him between phenomenology and metaphysics; and Renaud Barbaras on the ‘failure’ of Bergsonism which focuses on Bergson’s inability to get to the essence of the meaning of life. The essays are uniformly excellent and the editor Michael Kelly has succeeded in putting together a welcome and timely volume of essays; it is a book that should greatly aid the recovery of Bergson now taking place and it succeeds in showing him to be a major philosophical figure that is refreshingly contemporary. Keith Ansell-Pearson Department of Philosophy University of Warwick UK K.J.Ansell-Pearson@warwick.ac.uk REFERENCES Bergson, H. (1965), Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams. —— (2007), Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), ‘Bergson in the Making,’ in Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. The Pragmatic Turn, by Richard J. Bernstein. Cambridge: Polity, 2010, xi + 263 pp. ISBN 978-0-7456-4907-8 hb £55.00; ISBN 978-0-7456-4908-5 pb £17.99 If one is asked what ‘pragmatism’ is about, no short or precise answer comes readily to hand. The term ‘pragmatism’, arising from the Greek ‘pragma’, meaning action, signals an effort to bring intellectual things down to questions of practical interest—but this surely is too wide a circumscription. Fundamentalist political movements are typically doing just this: setting academic goals regarding what to produce intellectually, out of a given interest. This is not what pragmatists are in sympathy with. Rather, what they have in mind is both a critique of socially decontextualized thought (paradigmatically traditional philosophy) and a programme of social democratic culture. These are difficult and somehow overambitious—perhaps even conflicting—aims. Their attack on ‘pure’ thought demands from pragmatists a wide-ranging campaign not only against traditional philosophy, but also against its more recent ‘analytic’ manifestations: already an enormous task. To go one step further: How do pragmatism’s therapeutic quest and its partisanship for a left-wing liberal policy work together? Are philosophical self-criticism and democratic policy not simply too far apart? © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.