Bergson and History by Leon ter Schure;

Author:Leon ter Schure;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

THE SURVIVAL OF THE PAST

We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or point of reference.1

—Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy,

History,” in The Foucault Reader

Henri Bergson rates as one of the most original and important twentieth-century thinkers about time. Jorge Luis Borges considered anything written on time after Bergson to be anachronistic.2 It may therefore seem strange that the implications of Bergson’s philosophy of duration for the philosophy of history have rarely been investigated. An important reason for this lacuna is, undoubtedly, that Bergson himself seems never to have had a particular interest in history. Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks that it is “hard to understand why Bergson did not think about history from within as he had thought about life from within.”3 Other interpreters have even concluded that duration is incompatible with a notion of history. Peter Osborne, for instance, recently argued that “the ontological monism underlying Bergson’s account of temporality . . . cannot sustain any philosophical concept of history.”4

The topic of history has not been entirely absent from Bergson’s writings, however. Besides some references scattered throughout Bergson’s oeuvre, history makes a dramatic and unexpected appearance in the conclusion to Bergson’s last original book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), which was published years after Bergson had traded in his academic career for international politics. It can therefore even be argued that, at least chronologically, Bergson’s entire oeuvre steers toward the formulation of a theory of history.

In this chapter I will start exploring the theory of history that is implied by Bergson’s philosophy of duration. I will argue that Bergson speaks so little and inconsistently about history because his thought implies a fundamental revision of the conventional meaning of the term history. As I have discussed in chapter 2, the emergence of the modern concept of history in the eighteenth century is entangled with the development of modern historical consciousness—or what François Hartog calls a modern regime of historicity. History as a discipline implies a qualitative difference between past and present. It is structured by the “arrow” of modern time, in that it presents history as a progress through time toward the future while the past is annihilated “behind us.”

The notion of history implied by Bergsonian duration is fundamentally different from this modern concept of history. An entry to a Bergsonian perspective on history can be provided by reformulating the question posed by Merleau-Ponty and to ask “why historians and philosophers of history never thought about life from within.” Bergson denies one of the fundamental premises of the “modern Constitution” (Latour) on which the modern concept of history is based, namely a strict division (and purification) of the natural and social world.

In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion in particular Bergson reunites the social and the natural world. He emphasizes that human culture and society have a “vital” basis and that the social is a manifestation of life.

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