Who owns anti-foundationalism? Arguments that truths arise from contextual and plural sources, as well as studies of the social and intellectual environments through which these truth claims arose, have gained surprising attention in the past decade. Not because they are new, necessarily; debates between the Sophists and the Platonists point to similar epistemological fisticuffs. Rather, the decline of Marxism as an institutionalized, statist doctrine underpinning a quasi-expansionist Soviet Union, combined with a marked distrust for universalist, one-size-fits-all mechanistic determinism, has created an opening for more esoteric and pluralistic understandings of political, cultural, and social events.
The accepted narrative explaining these recent years has been relatively and deceptively simple: in the late 1970s, a number of American academics began reading European authors, generally known as "postmodernists" or "poststructuralists." Convinced by (or seduced by, depending on the political proclivities of the narrator) the arguments of theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Latour, and their progenitors Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Adorno, scholars replicated their anti-foundationalism, their critical approaches, and their opaque writing style. For those critics who tell this story most often, these tendencies have led to a slippery aestheticization of philosophy, a propensity for jargon which obscures any real argument, and a betrayal of the truth. Defenders, in their turn, show the political potentialities, the intellectual challenge, and the continuing explanatory power of such analyses.1
This essay does not continue this debate. Instead, I want to challenge its underlying presumption that a European invading philosophy displaced the pragmatic truth-telling of the Anglo-American world. This insistence on the radical disconnection between English-language and Continental European theory both profoundly misrepresents the foundations of American intellectual history and willfully ignores the cross currents of philosophical thought predating the advent of "postmodernism." In contrast, I look back a century to a period when both the American and European scholarly worlds grappled with the sureties of Hegelian thinking (of both its left and right varieties).
William James and Henri Bergson embodied this philosophical approach at the beginning of the twentieth century. One American, one French, they were both friends and competitors. Each was the best-known philosophical intellect of his time and place, each transcended the narrows of academia to hold a place in the popular imagination, and each was a unavoidable influence on subsequent minds. Most importantly, each viewed the other as a colleague and an influence, a relationship which (for reasons discussed below) remains mostly unexamined today.
Within the United States, James is known as the exemplary American philosopher: he created (or at least popularized) pragmatism, the philosophy of everyday experience, and he embodied the plainspoken and straightforward style of the Harvard man. He brought philosophy into its own, freeing it from the excessive abstractions of its history, and built a new, streamlined mode of thought which could serve as the foundation of a truly American approach. James, in other words, stands as the rebuttal to European ownership of philosophical inquiry.
But this summary ignores at least three vital truths, as well as disregarding the complexities of pragmatism. First, William James's renown extended far beyond the borders of the United States. Because of the historical marginalization of this fame, the implications and effects of his popularity in Europe and beyond are too often discounted or slighted. Thus the international influences and consequences of his thought, the Jamesian reverberations in the philosophy and art of other languages and countries, are lost. Second, James's reputation during his lifetime rested upon far more than his pragmatism: his empiricism, his psychological theory, and his pluralism held wide recognition as equally or even more important than pragmatism. James became solely identified with pragmatism only as his contributions to intellectual history were reduced to their most simplistic levels. Third, James saw himself as part of an international community of philosophers. Certainly he rejected certain European theoretical approaches, most notably Hegel's, but he drew upon and even promoted other thinkers doing the same. James's personal and intellectual relationship with the French philosopher Henri Bergson typifies these engagements, for Bergson both inspired James's pluralism and was in turn profoundly influenced by James.
My point here is not to prove that James owed his conceptualization of pluralism to Bergson (which he often modestly claimed) nor that Bergson was ultimately a Jamesian (which he originally denied, but which others asserted). Such an approach too readily becomes a contest over who influenced whom, a discussion of intellectual commodity ownership and usufruct. Instead, I contend that James's intellectual development arose from a confluence of plural worlds, an imbrication of thought and trajectories that created a rich network of borrowing, inspiration, and creation. James's thought, while indisputably his own, was itself pluralistic through and through, a status which encourages searching for its effects and emanations in unexpected and surprising places.
Demonstrating these relationships highlights the groundless superficiality of dividing the past century of theoretical thought into Continental and Anglo-American philosophy. Simplifying these traditions into two warring camps is an ideological move of condensation and simplification that occludes the true complexity of their intellectual history.2 The effects and echoes of Jamesian pluralism, both within his time and through the international influence of his work, demonstrate a more complex and accurate relationship between influence and thought, reading and writing, originality and debt.
For the last seven years of his life, from 1903 onward (and coinciding with his development of pluralism) James praised Henri Bergson publicly, in personal letters, and in conversations with friends and philosophers, making extensive reference to Bergson's thought as answering a number of questions central to philosophy. James encouraged translation of Bergson's work, wrote to him eagerly, and dedicated the pivotal chapter in A Pluralistic Universe to his thought. Bergson, in turn, repeatedly invited James to Europe through the duration of their correspondence and wrote the introduction to the French translation of Pragmatism. Neither man wholeheartedly embraced the other's positions, but each held up the other's work as exemplary work on the most interesting philosophical questions and readily admitted to being inspired and led by those advances.
As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, the political and intellectual spaces that Bergson and James inhabited were increasingly concerned with the centralization of power and knowledge. Both came to a philosophical world dominated by Hegelian absolutism, teleology, and unity, and both found such an approach wrongheaded. Each also argued that traditional conceptualizations of the quandaries of the world had arisen less from the world than with the limitations of our conceptions of intellect. Foremost, each considered the world irreducible to the conventional understandings that logic required: that, in Bergson's words, while "our intelligence loves simplicity," the world dispenses an infinitely complex and copious range of things, motions, beings, and states.3
Understanding their relationship requires at least a schematic understanding of certain aspects of Bergson's thought. The affinities between the two is clear even in a sketch. For example, Bergson's radical post-Darwinian understanding of evolution dovetailed closely with James's anti-teleology. In Creative Evolution, published in 1907 and translated into English (with James's help) in 1911, Bergson challenged not only the idea of evolution as a steady, upward process, but also the philosophical conceptions of time as knowable and knowledge as primary. For Bergson, evolution occurs not as a problem to be solved, as with Darwin, but as a creative interaction of species with environments. Matter, or creatures, generate their environs as much as are generated by them; the energy by which both individuals and species do this leads to profound and profligate divergences.
For Bergson, the result of these innumerable evolutionary divergences is the harmony of the present world, but he used "harmony" with many reservations.
This harmony is far from being as perfect as it has claimed to be. It admits of much discord, because each species, each individual even, retains only a certain impetus from the universal vital impulsion and tends to use this energy in its own interest....Harmony, or rather "complementarity," is revealed only in the mass, in tendencies rather than states.4
Like James's ideas of the multiverse, Bergson based the existing world on the diversity, even "discord," of individualism, ultimately positing individual multiplicity as the basis for the apparent harmonies of the world.
Bergson and James's fierce reciprocal admiration was no accident: their approaches, while obviously not identical, were closely related, shared many common concerns, and doubtless shaped one another. Comparing James pluralism with two of the most important themes in Bergson's writing demonstrates a variety of important linkages. The first, the importance of time (as experienced in duration), is widely recognized as Bergson's greatest insight. The second, the multiplicity of being (as experienced in memory), while linked to the first, has received comparatively less attention, both in Bergson's day and in present reimaginings of his writings. Through both, Bergson's desire to explain experience ultimately rested upon intrinsically multiplicitous foundations.
Duration (duree), the philosophical concept most connected with Bergson, is the "unbounded flux" of time that "gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances."5 It is through duration that all matter exists, and though duration comes the ceaseless growth, decay, and life of the world. Duration is not a succession of moments, as is popularly believed; instead, it is the combination of time and motion that encompasses all existence.
Zeno's arrow, which paradoxically never reaches its target, serves as an ideal foil for duration. The paradox arises, Bergson explained, only when we erroneously conceive of the arrow as fixed and rigid at a certain point. But the arrow does not stop; it is never stationary; "the arrow never is in any point of its course."6 Instead, the arrow exists in continuity, through space and time. It, simply, moves. "The absurdity vanishes," Bergson stated, "as soon as we adopt by thought the continuity of the real movement," that is, when duration -- not stasis -- is considered as real.7
Bergson argued that other kinds of duration, other patterns and flows of time, exist alongside our own, generally uncomprehended due to our own lived nature. Indeed, our usual patterns of thought, what Bergson call "intellectualism," disregard duration, and thus reify the matter existing within it. We therefore wrongly think of things as static and absolute. The paradox emerges when Zeno philosophizes the arrow, not when one is actually shot. Fixity is merely an internal mode of thought, not a fact about the outside world. Thus, it is possible for us think (or, more precisely, "intuit") outside of duration by recognizing the tensions and intensities of external forces.8
This is not just an empiricism of lived time, but a mulitiplicity of empiricisms. Bergson considered conceiving time as intrinsically fragmentary as much a mistake as it is to ignore it overall. Duration is complete, though not totalized; it is a becoming-process, not a point of change. As such, duration multiplies itself. Gilles Deleuze, in his book on Bergson, explained that "duration divides up and does so constantly: That is why it is a multiplicity. But it does not divide up without changing in kind...: That is why it is a nonnumerical multiplicty, where we can speak of 'indivisibles' at each stage of the division".9
Bergson, always aiming to escape theoretical dualism, argued that duration is both singular and multiple. Duration for Bergson is "a virtual multiplicity, a singular reservoir of potential times," says Timothy Murphy, "but this does not mean that time is not also, in actualisation, irreducibly multiple."10
As such, time is almost impossible to think through. When time is discussed, it is always spatialized, Bergson pointed out. Language, deliberately philosophical or not, remains enmeshed with solids and matter. Words are more about things than they can be about time, unless they are used with the utmost care. Language, like all sorts of symbolic representations, serves to isolate, stabilize, and fix, all of which disable an understanding of duration. Science must work within moments and represenations, but "the principle justification of metaphysics is a break with symbols."11 Philosophy, in other words, gets bogged down in representative emblems, when it should attend to motion, action, and time.
Bergson's other important pluralism arose from his conception of memory. Memoire serves as the mechanism through which time and selves interact. Though less remarked upon than duration, this concept holds no less centrality within Bergson's thought. The self, like time, is both unitary and multiplicitous, primarily because the self is made up not of physical substance, but of experience and memory.
"The past is never dead," wrote Faulkner. "It is not even past."12 This Bergsonian phrasing nicely sums up the constant presence of memory in identity. The present, for Bergson, is active yet meaningless, while the past, though inactive and unchangeable, ultimately is. As Deleuze interprets Bergson, "While the past coexists with its own present, and while it coexists with itself on various levels of contraction, we must recognize that the present itself is only the most contracted level of the past."13 The past exists eternally, as the constant basis for meaning and understanding and selfhood, whereas the present merely is where we make sense of what has come before: "We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception."14 All that we have gone through now makes up who we are: there is no self outside of the continuity of experience.
However, memory, while continuous, must also be partial and fragmentary: imagine life without relief from all that has ever happened! Thus consciousness, rather than being primarily about adding to the store of events, instead must recurrently eliminate all that is not currently required.15 It is eliminative, suppressive memory as much as it is a recalling of events; memory disposes of surplus baggage as efficiently as possible while continuously raising or restraining other kinds of potentially useful events, experiences, and evocations. And all this to what result? Certainly not a self, fully contained and complete. The idea of a continuous, linked, and teleological path misrepresents memory as much as it misunderstands duration.
How then can Bergson begin to explain how memory works, to describe the mobile and transitory states which form the basis of our selves? His solution was to describe memory (and selves) in terms of layers, or "planes." Memory operates as conjoined series of perceptions, experiences, and imaginings; what we think, experience, and feel collaborate and reinforce at a variety of levels.16 When memory occurs (which it always does), different planes of knowledge and experience intersect one another. Some of these will be explicit and conscious; others will register only with introspection and self-awareness; still others will be altogether instinctive and virtual. All together, they create what we perceive as a unified experience (and a unified self), but that unity belies the multiplicity of which it is formed.17
Even within memory there are separate intensities and remembrances. Take reading itself: you have learned to read at some point, and you read better than most others who can read (that is, you take less time to sound out words, or look up unfamiliar terms). Yet actively remembering how to read would get in the way of actual reading, as well as to the memory of what you are reading. Indeed, you were likely not particularly aware of the nature of your reading until a moment ago, as it had passed from what Bergson calls "recollection memory" to "habit memory." Are you conscious of reading? Yes and no: "yes" in that you are not repressing your memory of reading practices in a Freudian sense, but "no" in that you are not thinking at a level of how-to-read, but instead what-I-am-reading. Finally, when your imagination is engaged with reading, you are creating meanings and an experience as the text becomes "yours"; when it is not (as any overworked undergraduate can attest) your eyes merely note subsequent words without forming them into larger ideas, and your moments of reading never coalesce into anything more.
Thus the experiences in which it seems that you are "merely acting" or "merely remembering" are in fact acutely amalgamated with one another, and the usual philosophical differentiation between them is manifestly wrong. Frederic Worms calls this Bergson's "second fundamental thesis":
We must replace the hypothesis of a single level of representations which are connected to each other through a horizontal work of association with that of a plurality of levels of representations, connected to each other through a vertical work of interpretation or comprehension.18
Ultimately, Bergson focused his philosophical inquiry on the various levels by which we work, which could collectively be called memory, consciousness, or "the self." But it is the work, not the abstraction doing the work, which is worthy of these names.
As many Bergsonians have pointed out, such an approach posits a serious disjuncture within memory and the self, without minimizing either. The self therefore has "access to novelty" without reducing all novelty to the self, what Levinas calls in his discussion of Bergson (and elsewhere) "the ontology of the Same."19 The "interpretation and comprehension" mentioned by Worms is not merely a matter of applying the correct meanings. Bergson abominates predetermination. True creativity and innovation take place here; memory and creation inextricably connect.
Bergson's conception of memory far exceeds that of formal logical formulae and representation. Memory and existence cannot be understood abstractly; they must be approached "in terms of a plurality of planes (a plane of action, a plane of recollection, a plane of dreams, etc.)."20 This pluralization of memory makes for a better and more complex understanding of life, but also makes the discussion of such complexity far more difficult; what kind of metaphysics, after all, can encompass such variety and intricacy?
If reality is mobile, then the act of abstracting ideas and concepts-both of which are fixed and inflexible-excludes reality from thought. For Bergson, memory and duration must be conceived through certain forms of mental experience that exceed what generally counts as philosophical thought. These approaches he calls "intution," which neither exists separate from thought nor is identical to it. Unlike analysis, which he says "operates on immobility, intuition is located in mobility or, what amounts to the same thing, duration."21 Intuition encompasses thought and instinct, self and other, wholeness and multiplicity. For Bergson, intuiting towered over other forms of understanding.
The linkages between James's and Bergson's pluralisms may be clear at this point. But their respective conceptions did not evolve in isolation. James and Bergson interacted creatively, responding to one another's ideas, and thus developed new innovations and understandings. While James did so more explicitly at first, Bergson lived many years longer (until 1941) and continued to develop his theories, often specifically using James as a foundation.
The connections between the two were explicitly recognized by both, and by the philosophical community at large. James, for his part, never ceased praising Bergson, for example calling Creative Evolution the "absolutely divinest book on philosophy ever written up to this date."22 In his letters to Bergson, James constantly and repeatedly commended his work; in his letters to others, he continued to praise Bergson.23 Perhaps most importantly, Bergson holds pride of place in A Pluralistic Universe, James's most thorough and complete analysis of pluralism. Indeed, James's original difficulties in composing the series of lectures that was later to form the book were overcome, he noted, by using Bergson.24 "Reading his works," James wrote, "has made me bold".25
Shortly before delivering the lectures at Oxford that would make up A Pluralistic Universe, James wrote to Bergson, "I feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks."26 The structure of the lectures and chapters was meant to evoke the same message: the first five posed philosophical difficulties, particularly those drawn from Hegel and Fechner, and Bergson arrived in the sixth to solve them. James found in Bergson's concepts of time and memory a devastating critique of "intellectualism" similar to his own anti-hegelianism.
Bergson, for his part, became convinced that James shared his philosophical aspirations, especially after reading Pragmatism in 1907. He wrote to James, "you give the very formula of the metaphysics which I am convinced we will come to...."27 His appreciation of his role in A Pluralistic Universe was intense; he wrote that "never before have I been examined, understood, penetrated in such a manner."28 And in his introduction to Pragmatism's translation, he positioned James as a fellow traveler who had discovered the same truths he had: that "relations are fluctuating and...things fluid."29 He summarized James's overall project in the same language he used for his own epistemology:
if reality does not form a single whole, if it is multiple and mobile, made up of cross-currents, truth which arises from contact with one of these currents-truth felt before being conceived-is more capable of seizing and storing up reality than truth merely thought.30
To Bergson, each was in his own way creating the future of philosophy. These new paths to a more holistic truth, would result in a "positive metaphysics" he argued, "one that is susceptible of progressing indefinitely, instead of being entirely taken or left, like the old systems."31
Such metaphysics cannot be foreclosed, nor be teleological. The development of truth, in this view, must occur along a variety of roads, using various methodologies. And these philosophies explain certain operations for subjects as diverse as truth, selves, and the universe. Each of these, in James's or Bergson's hands, turns out to operate pluralistically, to exceed that which can fit into any particular system.
To argue that, in Bergson's summary, "We invent the truth to utilize reality," meant not that truth is inconsistent (for it could not well utilize reality if it were) but that it is -- most importantly -- subjectively particularist: each person works through some of the infinitely possible truths that the world throws up. This particularism attacked many of the foundational ideas in philosophy, as metaphysicians of the time well understood. Similarly, the debates over the Jamesian conception of pragmatism were well underway throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. His central idea that truths are what we use, rather than ideal forms which exist independently of human experience, had already become as controversial and misrepresented as it has remained.
Each pluralized the self as well. Bergson's discussion of memory makes clear the multiplicity of the individual in his thought. Even a decade before he began to use the term "pluralism," James's Principles of Philosophy had argued for the multiplicity of the individual. Critics noted the similarity: many accused Bergson of deriving his philosophy from James's.32 Much of James's early psychological work had insisted on the continuity and variation of consciousness. By 1910, in one of his final essays, James argued that consciousness itself should not be thought of as either unitary or differentiatated, as it consists of "a mass of present sensation, in a cloud of memories, emotions, concepts, etc." He called this a "field," echoing Bergson's "planes," and emphasized its temporal nature: each feeling "came out of its predecessor and will melt into its successor as continuously again...."33 In A Pluralistic Universe, he made clear the excessive and fundamentally indescribable (that is, impossible to fully "intellectualize") nature of all moments of being: "Every smallest state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition."34
Neither man ultimately supported the idea of the singularity of the universe, yet both pointed far more to life within it than other non-materialist philosophers. Bergson argued that, contrary to our desire to think of the universe as either eternal or divine in creation (or both), the universe exists as overlapping and ensuing events, such as changing, acting, and growing. "It is no longer then of the universe in its totality that we must speak."35 Instead, we should recognize that, though a situation or law may seem natural and thus universal to us, it not only could be different elsewhere, new situations may emerge from growth and change. James, in his turn, preferred to speak of the "multiverse" which makes up a "'universe;'for every part, tho it may not be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediated connexion, with every other part however remote."36 Multiplicity and connection were intimately connected, for James; the aim for absolutism and unity creates distance and difference as problems. This is not Leibniz's idealistic integration, he pointed out, but a "strung-along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation."37
James saw his modes and methodologies as combined with Bergson's. Toward the beginning of their correspondence, he wrote to Bergson of his intent to write a book on metaphysics "which in many of its fundamental ideas agrees closely with what you have set forth...."38 Yet James was not above rhetorical slight-of-hand to make clear the connections between his thought and Bergson's. In the appendix to A Pluralistic Universe, he drew out an extended parallel between Bergson's approaches and those of his close friend (and founder of pragmatism) Charles Pierce. Pointing out the similarities between Bergson's denials of universal, unchanging axioms and Piercean probability theory, James argued that both ultimately share the same view of newness and creation: it is never created wholesale, but arrives in qualitatively important but empirically minute changes.39
Suggesting either thinker considered these questions strictly "philosophical" would be misleading, however. For the openness by both Bergson and James to religious experience and supernaturalism bespeaks a further connection between them, and a similarity of their outlooks. The ultimate test of empirical pluralism is an acceptance of the possibility, even the likelihood, that others' experiences have a measure of legitimacy, even if those experiences make no "sense." This openness has been long used to discredit the theoretical developments of both thinkers; how, it is asked, can we take seriously formulations of thoughts which leave room for ghosts, seances, and divine intervention in human affairs?
What, after all, is the divine but an everyday explanation for things which make little sense? And while science seems to displace the divine, James points out that a scientific explanation is mostly another allegorical representation of personal experience; pragmatically, science must be understood by the individual no more than myth must be. An example: in the book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson quoted an extended passage from James. In the excerpt, from The Principles of Psychology, James tells of visiting Stanford University. Before his visit, a friend tells him to beware California's earthquakes, so, when a temblor awakens James one morning, he is thrilled to have acquaintance with his friend's earthquake. Not only does he admire the strength of the earthquake while it is occurring, but he discovers that everyone else who experienced it attributed their own versions of intention and personalization to it. But, then, if each sees it differently, he asks "What was this 'It'?40
Let us take in turn James's and Bergson's lessons from this story. For James, the earthquake reminds him of how impossible it would be in a theological world to reject the idea of God responding to specific acts, if even today he and others experience such an event in immediate and personal terms. For Bergson, however, the story shows how individuation leads to fragmentation: each individual, without guidance in interpretation, will see divergent causes. This, in turn, leads to Bergson's focus on mystics, within and without Christianity, who create commonality of meaning of experience and break down invidious competitions.41 For both, the plurality of experience leads to needs for supranatural explanation, though for James there remains little need for that explanation to be collective.
Lines of influence, as James argued, are hard to track precisely: such a large number exist, and act in such multiplicitious ways, that drawing connections can never be an absolute project. To trace Bergson's influence on French philosophy for the next century, even if that influence remains little recognized in English, is also to trace James's. The connections between the two thinkers, their mutually constituted recognition that truth and thought often have lacuna between them, echo throughout the century that followed them.42
For the first decades of the twentieth century, Bergson was widely regarded as the most important philosopher in France, if not the world. And yet the public and academic recognition of the influence of his thought has steadily declined, revived only in recent years. Even within his lifetime, Bergson's insights stopped seeming particularly original, in part because they thoroughly saturated the time's conceptions. The emergence of phenomenology neglected its own roots in Bergson's insistence that bodies exist in motion; at times, European phenomenologists even quoted James with more approval than they were willing to extend to Bergson.43 Existentialism preferred to emphasize Nietzsche's and Heidegger's ostensible rejection of metaphysics rather than recognizing its similarities to Bergson's privileging of existences over essences. And the overall desire of philosophers to develop systematic and all-encompassing theoretical systems left little room for theorists whose ideas overtly rejected such systemization.
Yet Bergson never entirely disappeared. One cannot overemphasize Bergson's influence on Merleau-Ponty, who was elected to Bergson's chair in Modern Philosophy at the College de France and seemed "Bergson's most faithful and original interpreter."44 Georg Lukacs became fascinated with Bergson (and with the German Bergsonian Georg Simmel) and used Bergsonian language to criticize Taylorist principles of fixing and organizing time.45 Heidegger used many of Bergson's insights about the complexity and unity of being in his work. And the very foundations of phenomenology and existentialism, for all their differences, emphasized temporality and privileged experience over idealization; Bergson had helped make these acceptable philosophical inquiries. Indeed, today's tendency for French thinkers to regard philosophy as "supple, living, and human" bears the mark of Bergson.46
Nor did those outside philosophy entirely forget him. Marcel Proust, whose cousin married Bergson, used a Bergsonian conception of memory in Remembrance of Things Past. Bergson's influence on the major European art movements of the early twentieth century, namely fauvism, cubism, and futurism, were thoroughly acknowledged by the artists themselves.47 A misguided, anti-Semitic professor in Finnegan's Wake ridicules both Bergson and Einstein.48 A variety of theoretically-inclined creations continued Bergson's legacy outside and beyond the boundaries of academic philosophy.
Bergson's most important legatee of the late twentieth century was Gilles Deleuze. In an early essay on Bergson (1956) and a later monograph (1966), Deleuze found in Bergson a motivation for a new kind of philosophy, an approach which emphasized pluralities of being instead of building correlations and emphasizing homogeneity. "There was," Deleuze said in retrospect,
something in him that could not be assimilated, which enabled him to provide a shock, to be a rallying point for all the opposition, the object of so many hatreds: and this is not so much because of the theme of duration, as of the theory and practice of becomings of all kinds, of coexistent multiplicities.49
Inspired in part by his own reading of Bergson, Deleuze developed a conception of pluralism as central for his philosophical concerns. For Deleuze, the sources of identity and action proliferate endlessly, and the philosopher's proper role is to encourage this expansive creation. Much of his later, more famous work, developed from combining these Bergsonian concepts with other theoretical and political trajectories. Deleuze found in Bergson the inspiration of difference: putting disparate overabundance in the center of evolutionary and intellectual creativity allows for new concepts and approaches. Bergson, he said, showed that "If difference itself is biological, consciousness of difference is historical."50 This provides the potential for different kinds of philosophical investigations: Deleuze's interests are those philosophers who bestow deviations rather than systems, networks rather than straits, options rather than compulsions.
Bergsonian pluralisms pervade Deleuze's writings, from his solo projects to his overtly political work with Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari built the notion of the "rhizome" from Bergson's Creative Evolution: rhizomes develop not through units which determine those which come after them (the arboreal model of evolution), but through "variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots."51 In A Thousand Plateaus, the authors entitle one section "Memories of a Bergsonian." Elsewhere, they take almost verbatim Bergson's phrase "places of flight" to identify those corporeal and intellectual locales where new connections, transitions, and creations are built.52 Finally, Deleuze's works on cinema are themselves specific and conscious attempts to work through Bergson's concepts of motion, duration, memory, and time.53 In all of these attempts, Deleuze followed Bergson in "one of the least appreciated aspects of his thought-the constitution of a logic of multiplicities."54
This is not to argue that Deleuze is somehow fundamentally a Jamesian; such reductionism impoverishes the richness and differences between both philosophical approaches. But two important conclusions can be reached by connecting the philosophical and ethical approaches of Deleuze, Bergson, and James. First, these connections enable the exploration of certain similarities between them, such as their anti-foundationalism, their foci on tendencies and intensities rather than certainties and closures, and their respective tychistic pluralisms. Second, and more importantly, attending to the intellectual history around these philosophies, separated by almost a century, makes clear that none emerged in a vacuum. Both those who treat James or Bergson as unimportant traditional figures and those who dismiss Deleuze as indiscriminate or haphazard ignore the complex developments that make up philosophical thought. Such readings are intrinsically ahistorical and thus reinforce boundary disputes within philosophy rather than investigating what seemingly different branches can say to one another.
The last section of this essay explores what made these divisions possible, even commonplace. Seeing the century-long connection between Anglo-American pluralism and Bergsonian multiplicity seems easy enough, especially when attention is paid to the historical foundations of each. So why do current American and European philosophers, or more simply Jamesians and Bergsonians, fail to recognize these intellectual connections? What, in other words, happened to create and propagate this great divide?
In the subsequent century, these connections were erased, to the point where one can speak confidently of the respective traditions of "Anglo-American" and "Continental" philosophy. But this division is political as much as a geographic. For the motivations underpinning the creation of this division influence (and are influenced by) the continual recreation of both a nationalist project of autochthony on the part of the United States and a conscious historical amnesia on the part of French thinkers.
Clear as it seemed to their contemporaries, James's connection to Bergson faded dramatically, to the point where their relationship passes entirely unremarked in most portrayals of his thought. Following James's death, the similarities between his thought and Bergson's (and that of continental philosophers generally) were downplayed by his followers in the United States. James, they felt, should be sui generis, and debts to others (even those he himself expressed) undermined his originality. "Society's most precious products are its undisciplinables," wrote Horace Kallen, one of the most indefatigable of James's students. "Its most creative and masterful dynamic forces are its unaccountable geniuses."55
Kallen argued, therefore, that James and Bergson had radically different approaches, and that James's was the work of a true visionary. While admitting that, to the untrained eye, Bergson may seem "democratic and pluralistic" and that he properly "acknowledges the consubstantiality of every item of experience," Kallen contended that Bergson ultimately fails to stand up against James in almost all ways, resulting in a philosophically universal dogmatism which creates an "inert and powerless" world.56 At one point Bergson's arguments are merely a warmed-over transcendentalism, whereas the "main outlines of James's thought are not prefigured in the history of philosophy."57 At another, Kallen argued that Bergson holds to a conception like all other philosophers before him, unlike James's profound overcoming of intellectual history. Bergson, as opposed to James, "is before all things systematic, consistently architechtonic, a monist who insists on an irrefragable difference between appearance and reality...."58 To add insult, he also mentions in passing how much easier Bergson's writings are to understand than are James's (an opinion noticeably -- and warrantedly -- absent in any other comparison of the two theorists).59
Kallen was not alone in trying to differentiate the two methods and philosophies. James's friend Theodore Flournoy and the writer Walter Pitkin noted important similarities between the two but emphasized their differences.60 And those who came later continued in the separation, until very little of their affiliation was noted at all (except in a strangely negative persistence). Virtually no encyclopedias of philosophy, for example, even suggest an overlap between Bergson and James, and those latter-day theorists who have been interested in one rarely take the other seriously. A recent example: Louis Menand's popular rendition of the history of pragmatism's emergence, which entirely avoids substantive mention of Bergson (or just about any European influences).61
Clearly, important differences between the two modes of thought must be taken into account. But what is so dramatically at stake that James's readers must renounce aspects of his inspiration and contradict James's own statements of intellectual connection? Some of the effects of James's thought -- the idea that ideas must be masculinely robust and self-sustaining, for example -- clearly undermined the pluralist recognition of interrelated engagement.62 Similarly, the common desire to analyze (and heroize) philosophers in isolation from one another and their historical influences affects James's readers as much as anyone. But U.S. exceptionalism is critical here as well: it was impossible that a great (even the great) American philosopher, perhaps the first one to stand up to the tyranny of European philosophy, could have been truly inspired and guided by a popular exemplar of that tradition. Thus, the defense of James necessitated for many a rejection of these lines of influence, lest their hero (and by extension their American selves) be diminished.
Europeans, on the contrary, emphasized the connection between the two to a far greater extent. The perceived connection between Bergson and American pluralism, pragmatism, and radical empiricism continued well into the emergence of existentialism. James was widely read in Europe, and the parallels between his psychology and Bergson's theories of time and memory seemed much clearer, perhaps even too clear. Even during James's lifetime, Bergson felt misrepresented as being dependent on James, and wrote in to the Revue Philosophique to correct a claim that his book Time and Free Will was inspired in part by James.63 (This claim was been a matter of great debate in Bergson's time: it is unlikely to be the case that Bergson had read James's work, given the extent of French translation and debate of James by the book's publication.64)
But by the end of his life, Bergson embraced the connection: he overtly referred to James's influence on his thought. He used James's examples and theories in his own work, and continued to champion the American to a French audience. Indeed, he kept a picture of James over his workdesk, one that remains in its museological mummification to this day.
European recognition of the James-Bergson connection slowly dissipated as Bergson's fame faded. Debates over communism and the embrace of existentialism, as well as the emergence of positivist models of social thought, made Bergson's inspirations and influence increasingly uninteresting and immaterial to French thought. Nor did the circumstances of Bergson's death -- he died from an illness contracted while standing in the rain to be registered as a Jew under the Vichy regime -- make for comforting history in France. Bergson's diminishment actually came in part through his connections to James. French critics often attacked Bergson through his Jamesianism; a negative review of James's work was implicitly understood to assail the tides of Bergsonian influence. Durkheim, for example, deplored James's alleged antipathy to reason, a criticism generally recognized as more about Bergson's anti-rationalism than James's pragmatism.65 Debates as to whether or not Bergson was a "radical empiricist," a Jamesian term Bergson never employed, continued far beyond the death of both.66
Thus the severing of Bergson's and James's thought, so thoroughly reinforced in the United States, was never as much an issue in France. But as extensive as Bergson's influences were at the beginning of the century, the memory and study of this thought slowly disappeared from the scene of Continental philosophy. The Bergson-James connection -- indeed, the entire turn-of-the-century period of substantial overlap and influence between the central approaches of American and French thought -- thus became obscured by the equally important differences which predated this connection and developed from it.
But lines of influence remain. Conscious acknowledgment, as James and other psychologists of his time pointed out, is far from the only form of motivation and inspiration in human endeavors. Inasfar as James was an American philosopher, he was a European philosopher, too. Insomuch as Bergson was the archetypal French metaphysician of his time, he was an American thinker as well. The building of wall between the two, the ignorance and disappearance of the overlaps between their intellectual projects and their historical influence, comes at a price. The proper pluralistic projects of philosophy are replaced with a deluded conception of radical distance.
And this distance comprises the return of the absolutism that James's pluralism meant to displace. For the insistence of purity, of the clear demarcation of intellectual history, serves to depoliticize and decontaminate the project of national thought. By drawing clear walls between differing traditions and denying mutual inspiration, exemplarity and native genius can better serve as stand-ins for national character. If America's intellectual genealogy is untainted by European influence, so much the better for America. Nothing is owed, since nothing was given, and nothing was taken. If postmodernism has infected our shores, it can be represented as the thoughts of foreigners, profoundly distant from the moderate and pragmatic American tradition. If students are being taught Deleuze or Foucault, it can be argued that they are being turned against their scholarly birthright. This is possible only when a great American thinker like William James is one of us, not one of them. The alternative -- that we are part of them, and they are part of us -- can remain unthought.
1 Anyone interested in following up these approaches could consult: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals and the Abuse of Science, (New York: Picador, 1999); Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New Yok: Routledge, 1995); Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, ed. Jonathan Culler and Brian Lamb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: HarperCollins, 1990) if he or she were inclined (against counsel) to do so.
2 Of course, similar arguments have been made elsewhere: most intellectual historians accept Emerson's influence on Nietzsche, or acknowledge Pierce' on French semiotics. But too often even these acknowledgments become struggles for recognition ("Look! We Americans influenced Nietzsche!") rather than attention to the interrelationships of intellectual trajectories.
3 Henri Bergson, "On The Pragmatism of William James: Truth and Reality," trans. Melissa McMahon, in Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 267.
4 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911) pp. 50-51.
5 Ibid., p. 4.
6 Ibid., 308. (Emphasis in original).
7 Ibid., 310.
8 F.C.T. Moore terms this use of intuition "thinking backwards" to highlight the central role of multiple durations in thought. Bergson: Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
9 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, Trans. Hugh Tomplinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 42 (emphasis in original).
10 Timothy S. Murphy, "Beneath Relativity," The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), P. 77 (emphases in original).
11 Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Wisdom Library, 1961), p. 73.
12 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun,
1959, Act I, Scene III.13 Deleuze, Bergsonism, 74.
14 Ibid, 63.
15 This is the central thesis of Marie Cariou's essay "Bergson: the Keyboards of Forgetting," trans. Melissa McMahon, in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, pp. 91-117.
16 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911).
17 See, e.g., ibid., 323-324.
18 Frederic Worms, "Matter and Memory on Mind and Body," in Mullarkey, The New Bergson, pp. 93-94.
19 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, Trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 132.
20 Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 171.
21Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 43.
22 Quoted by John J. McDermott in his Introduction to James's Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, Harvard University Press: 1978), p. xxxi.
23Ibid., xxxii.
24 James wrote to FCS Schiller, on February 14, 1908, "Came into clear water Oxford lectures-Bergson helping." A Pluralistic Universe, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 215.
25 APU, 97.
26 June 13, 1907, letter, quoted in Richard J. Bernstein's "Introduction" in APU, p. xxii.
27 Letter of June 27, 1907, in Melanges, 361.
28 Letter of July 23, 1908, ibid., 363.
29 On the Pragmatism...," 268.
30 Ibid., 273.
31 Letter of February 15, 1905, in Melanges, 361.
32 G. Rageot, "5th International Congress of Psychology," Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger V 60 N 1, pp. 84-85. Bergson writes in to the journal to rebut this, as discussed below. See Melanges, p. 387, note 30.
33James, Essays in Philosophy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 158.
34 APU, 129.
35 Creative Evolution, 241.
36APU, 146.
37 APU, 147.
38 December 14, 1902, letter, quoted in Bernstein, xii.
39 APU, 151-154.
40 William James, Essays in Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 331-338; quoted (and translated by) Bergson in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashely Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (New York: Henry Holt, 1935).
41 P.A.Y. Gunter sees this move toward commonality within diversity as a source of meaning for environmentalism. See his "Bergson and the War Against Nature," in The New Bergson, pp. 168-172.
42 Frederic Worms, "James et Bergson: Lectures Croisees," Philosophie, N 64 (1999), pp. 54-68.
43 Cf. Michael Tavuzzi, "A Note on Husserl's Dependence on William James," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology V. 10, N. 3(October 1979): 194-196.
44 Richard A. Cohen, "Philo, Spinoza, Bergson: Rise of an Ecological Age," in The New Bergson, p. 28.
45 Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1979), esp. chapter 10.
46 Bergson, in "La Philosophie Francais," La Revue de Paris, III (1915), quoted in Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Roots of Bergson's Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
47 Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
48 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 149. See also Dominic Manganiello, Joyce's Politics: (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 230.
49 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam (London: Althone, 1987, p. 15, also quoted in Bergsonism, 8.
50 Gilles Deleuze, "Bergson's Conception of Difference," in The New Bergson, p. 51. The essay can also be found in slightly expanded form in Les Etudes Bergsoniennes, V. IV (1956), pp. 79-112.
51 Keith Ansell-Pearson makes this point in his essay "Bergson and Creative Evolution/Involution," The New Bergson, esp. pp. 157-163. The quotation itself is from Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 21.
52 Letter to James, January 6, 1902, Melanges, 355. Though the letter is written in French, this phrase is in English.
53 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1988).
54 Bergsonism, 117.
55 Horace Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914), p. 234 (italics mine).
56 Ibid., p. 35.
57 Ibid., 177.
58 Ibid., 104.
59 Ibid, viii.
60 Flournoy, The Philosophy of William James; Emile Boutroux, William James (New York: Longman's, Green, 1912); Walter Boughton Pitkin, "James and Bergson; Or, Who is Against Intellect?," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, V.7 N.9, pp. 225-231.
61 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Note Menand's implicit thesis regarding U.S. exceptionalism in the title, in a book with more than one chapter devoted to pluralism.
62 See, e.g., Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
63 See his letter of July 20, 1905 to James, in Henri Bergson, Key Writings, pp 360-361. The letter appears in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger, V60 N 2 (August 1905), pp. 229-230.
64 See Ben-Ami Scharfstein's Roots of Bergson's Philosophy, (New York: Columbia University PREss, 1943), pp. 29-32.
65 Introduction to Emile Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, trans. J.C. Whitehouse, intro. John B. Allcock (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
66 Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation, (Dordrect: Reidel, 1971).