Introduction
Henri Bergson’s thinking on the meaning of life is worthy of attention for several reasons. In regard to his own work, the concept serves to highlight his innovative ideas concerning metaphysical method and the renewal of spiritualism, and to illustrate the ethical objectives which oriented his engagement with a broad spectrum of issues, including biological, ontological, neurological, and sociological ones. In broader terms, Bergson’s discussion of the topic helps draws together a number of perspectives and potential conflicts that arise in the context of life’s purported ‘meanings’, such as a cosmological angle on the significance of organic life in the universe, an evolutionary angle on the origins and directions of life on our planet, and an axiological angle on what makes for a meaningful human life. In this paper, I want to foreground a particular issue that Bergson’s encounter with these various ideas offers to clarify, namely the relations between the ‘virtual’ ontology for which he was resurrected and lauded in the later years of the 20th century, and the ‘spiritualist’ ethics which arguably contributed to his undeserving erasure from post-Kantian philosophy prior to that point.
A bio-ontological meaning of life in creative evolution
Bergson’s is a particularly interesting case insofar as he appeals to a ‘meaning of life’ in explicit terms, and in several places throughout his work. The primary locus is Creative Evolution (1907), in particular the third chapter, entitled ‘On the meaning of life’. [1] Here the meaning of life is proposed in terms of the ongoing ‘advance’ of the élan vital. Bergson’s thinking of life here rests equally on his prescient and highly imagistic understanding of matter. He views materiality as itself a dynamic tendency, in this case towards the spatialisation of mutually external parts in relations of necessary determination. Precisely because such relations are an ‘ideal limit’ which the tendency never reaches, however, matter remains ‘supple’ and ‘elastic’ (Bergson, 1959, pp. 824-5, 579, 709), within limits ‘forcible’ (1959, p. 827), and as a result shot through with ‘quasi-infinitesimal indeterminations’ (1959, p. 827). [2] These qualities, Bergson proposes, provided a foothold for life: it is by ‘insinuating’ itself in these elastic ‘interstices’ (1959, pp. 555, 723, 830), and by virtue of its distinctive capacity to indefinitely multiply itself given the smallest sum of indeterminacy (1959, pp. 824-5), that life is said to seize hold of and contend material necessity (1959, pp. 708, 827), and its ‘current’ able to take up and spread.
The élan vital, then, is principally an immaterial counter-tendency that traverses matter and leaves it progressively organised in its wake. It does so not only by resisting its deterministic torpor, but by turning it to its own advantage. Bergson likens this ‘resistance’ to the effort to hoist a falling weight, in which the law of the conservation of energy is inverted and the slope down which matter descends ‘remounted’ (1959, pp. 703-4). And he understands this ‘advantage’ to consist in the dilation of those infinitesimal margins of variability inherent in matter by means of a capacity to utilise time, or to endure in a certain manner: whereas the material tendency towards mutual externality and necessary determination consists in a tendency to jettison the past or dispose of duration in the sense of throwing it away, the vital tendency disposes of duration in a constructive way, by harnessing the past in the form of memory and in the name of an open future. This is the meaning of Bergson’s celebrated phrase, ‘wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed’ (1959, p. 508). This temporal enfolding permits life to procure from matter a source of energy, one it is capable of requisitioning, compiling and redirecting in such a way as to create the conditions for its own free activity. By gradually accumulating and virtually storing material energy, that is, life is able to manufacture ‘increasingly powerful explosives’ (1959, p. 704), which it uses to execute increasingly powerful actions and engraft onto the necessity of physical forces ‘the greatest possible sum of indeterminacy and freedom’ (1959, p. 708).
Bergson projects the evolutionary trajectory of life along the lines of this effort to indefinitely dilate such margins of indeterminacy and progressively cut loose from matter’s confines by seeking to release maximal amounts of accumulated energy via minimal amounts of effort. This can clearly be observed, Bergson claims, in the evolution of the animal series, which exhibits a progressive canalisation of nervous matter from undifferentiated yet contractile protoplasmic mass to elaborate sensori-nervous systems (1959, pp. 587, 597, 709). Bergson also characterises this trajectory as paradoxical, because ‘life as a whole’ strives towards a mastery of matter in which the latter’s necessity is made an instrument of the former’s freedom. This provides for a broad sense of the meaning of life in Bergson’s work. Insofar as life is said to ‘adopt’ the mechanical rhythms of matter, ‘imitate’ its habits, and progressively ‘bend’ and ‘drag’ it ‘outside of pure mechanism’ (1959, pp. 825-6, 830), it can be said to operate by means of its own kind of mechanics which is capable of triumphing over mechanism (1959, pp. 719, 829).
Bergson is far-reaching in his proposals as to where this might lead. If life is possible ‘wherever energy descends the slope indicated by Carnot’s law, and a cause, working in the inverse direction, is able to retard that descent’ (1959, p. 712), then it is neither limited to the carbonic form it has taken on earth nor even to organismic forms: Bergson hypothesises that energy could be accumulated and released ‘on varying lines running across a matter not yet solidified’. The difference between this kind of vitality and that which we know may be the same, he suggests, as that between the dreaming and waking states of psychological life (1959, pp. 712-3).
An ethical meaning of life in ‘Psychophysical Parallelism and Positive Metaphysics’
There is, however, a second, lesser-known discussion of the meaning of life in Bergson, contained in a short, unpublished paper he presented in 1901 called ‘Psycho-physical Parallelism and Positive Metaphysics’ (1901, PPPM). [3] Here he articulates many of the same themes concerning the evolutionary relationship between life and matter, with one important difference. PPPM was written in between the publications of Matter and Memory (1896, MM), in which Bergson’s concerns centre on the brain’s relations to the various markers of human consciousness (perception, memory, thought), and CE, in which he broadens those concerns towards the founding of a vitalistic ontology. This means that what Bergson says of ‘life’ in relation to ‘matter’ in CE is here, to some extent, prefigured in what he has to say of ‘thought’ in relation to ‘life’, or rather of ‘the insertion of thought into life’, where ‘life’ tends to represent the material conditions of action. [4] Perhaps as a result of this transition, however, Bergson’s ideas regarding the meaning of life in PPPM also culminate in a more ethical rendition. The question of how vital and material orders relate to one another here turns not only on determining the correct relation between ‘man the thinking being’ and ‘man the living being’ (1901, p. 59); Bergson claims, furthermore, that if we can discern ‘the true sense of the distinction between the soul and the body’, we can also understand ‘the reason they unite and collaborate’ in such a way as to permit speculation upon humankind’s moral destiny.
In order to affirm the distinction between body and mind, Bergson describes how he first sought their point of contact. At stake here is a point of method which he is at pains to highlight throughout the paper.
Nothing is gained by stating that two concepts such as mind and matter are external to each other. On the other hand, important discoveries can be made if we start from the point at which two concepts meet, at their common frontier, in order to study the form and nature of their contact (1901, pp. 62-3).
Condemning the tendency of ‘the old spiritualism’ to pit mind and matter against one another as two abstract concepts separated in extremis, Bergson proceeded instead by considering manifestations of these terms in their most complex forms. [5] He raised matter, he claims, to the point at which its activity ‘brushes against that of mind’, examining it in a well-localized and highly-determined cerebral fact, where it conditions a certain function of speech (1901, p.63). And he brought mind down, through ideas, images and memories, to the point at which it almost coincided with matter, concentrating alone on ‘the special memories we retain of the sounds of words’ (1901, p. 63). Here he says he found himself at the frontier of mind and matter, where thought seeks to develop itself through movement in space, and where he was able to discern simultaneously both their distinctness as well as the ‘concrete and living’ nature of their relation (1901, p. 63). What is the nature of this relation?
For Bergson, psychological states are qualitatively complex multiplicities, comprised in part of an ‘enactable’ element. The ‘possible action’ inherent in this aspect of the psychological state is what is revealed by the attitude or actions of the physical body; more precisely, it is most readily identifiable with what he calls a ‘motor schema’, a sort of sketch of incipient action that, so to speak, invites in that enactable aspect of consciousness. It is strictly within this limited zone of concomitance, where cerebral facts can be said to overlap with conscious facts, that the parallelist theory holds—where, more specifically, thought finds itself somewhat conditioned by life, inasmuch as it is forced to adapt to the body’s available motor pathways in order to continue into the action(s) it desires. Otherwise, Bergson is clear, the rest of the psychological state, or thought in general, remains relatively independent and undetermined. In terms Bergson appeals to elsewhere, thought overflows the brain, just as life overflows matter. [6] He thus claims that the relation he witnessed at the threshold of body and mind cannot be grasped by any of the simple, well-worn concepts of philosophy, since it displays ‘neither the absolute determination of one by the other, nor the production of one by the other, nor a simple concomitance, nor a strict parallelism, nor […] any of the relations that can be obtained a priori by using or mixing abstract concepts’ (1901, p. 65). Instead, he insists, it is entirely sui generis, emerging only from a higher form of empiricism willing to trace the sinuousities of lived experience: a cerebral activity that expresses itself through the motor articulations of conscious ideas, brushing against a consciousness that allows its ideas to be canalised towards the material manifestation in which alone they can be actualised.
These reflections on the insertion of thought into life lead Bergson by an alternative route to consider, and to entertain the possibility of ‘empirically and progressively determining’, the meaning of life, which he articulates, in highly provisional terms, as follows:
I cannot envisage general evolution and the progress of life throughout the organised world, the mutual coordination and subordination of vital functions in the same organism, the relations that psychology and physiology combined seem to establish between cerebral activity and thought in man, without arriving at the conclusion that life is an immense effort made by thought to obtain something from matter that matter does not want to give up (1901, p. 67).
This phrasing clearly anticipates the bio-ontological meaning of life as discussed in CE; but here Bergson immediately redirects his concerns towards an ethical perspective, offering the rudiments of a morality modelled on this philosophy of life. The special limitation that life places on thought, as revealed by his analysis of the relations between body and mind, is said not simply to confine thought, but to indicate the path of its expansion: ‘as the form of this limitation became increasingly apparent, would we not find, with increasing accuracy, in which direction we should make an effort to transcend it?’ (1901, p. 63). In response to this, Bergson suggests that this ‘transcendence’ will emerge from the dual direction likely taken by the development of human activity, namely that of ‘attachment and release’, which he describes as the twin poles between which morality oscillates (or what he will later call, in TSMR, the ‘law of double frenzy’ (1959, pp. 1227-30). Thus, ‘at the same time as thought is inserted into life and concentrates on action (which appears to be the object of life), it realises better its own nature and as a result also its independence form matter’ (1901, p. 68). Reflecting an insistence that traverses his thinking in general, Bergson emphasises that it would be counterproductive to seek a fixed commitment to either one of these poles, since moral action requires both an attachment to life, in order to have the force to act, and the ability to release or abstract itself from the moment through thought, in order to consider what is to be done (1901, p. 68).
The virtual openness of ethics and ontology
These two contexts offer two different angles on the question of the meaning of life in Bergson’s work, corresponding to the diverse meanings of the French words sens and signification, which can translate as ‘meaning’, ‘sense’ and ‘direction’. These two angles also appear closely related: the normative import of life’s purported ‘meaning’ for humans, that is, is inscribed within Bergson’s evolutionary understanding of life’s ‘direction’ on a bio-ontological level. A pertinent point for discussing the meaning of life thus emerges, and it is further reason for turning attention to Bergson on the topic, for despite this apparent continuity between ethics and ontology, it is a significant feature of his philosophy that it strongly resists reducing moral action to a biological essentialism.
Indeed, the original purpose of the élan vital hypothesis was to both surpass the underlying metaphysics of mechanistic approaches—especially their presupposition that ‘all is given’, that real duration is obsolete, and that the appearance of novelty is reducible to pre-existing possibility—and to contest the mechanistic conceptions of life prevailing in the biology of Bergson’s day, which he thought stunted an appreciation of the nature of the living by translating it in terms of the inert, and ultimately threatened to curtail the prospects of human activity. Alongside this, Bergson knew that any alternative conception of life had to evade the framework of substantival vitalism, since the latter tends only to rehearse and reinforce dualism by appealing to a supervening life force that would apply to matter as a transcendent agent of evolution.
The vital impulse hypothesis addresses these challenges by centring an account of evolution on the creation of novelty rather than on the re-combination of pre-given parts, an error to which he attributes the insufficiencies of both neo-Darwinism and neo-Lamarckism, who alike underpinned evolutionary variations with invariant physico-chemical elements and differed only in their manner of bringing these together. Thanks to Gilles Deleuze’s seminal reading of Bergson in the 1950s, this account can be understood in terms of its appeal to the ‘virtual’ nature of life’s movement. [7] According to Deleuze, this accounts for the unity and totality that subsist throughout life’s divergences and dissociations (Deleuze, 1991, p. 95), as well as the creativity inherent in that movement of differentiation. It is the latter point that best displays the concept’s considerable philosophical force, and is most pertinent here. [8]
The élan vital is intended to depict a movement that is both immanent to matter and capable of generating novelty without pre-containing it, in a way that is consistent with Bergson’s affirmation of the identity of organised and unorganised matter: just as life did not separately pre-exist matter before being externally applied to it, so the élan vital does not pre-contain the myriad forms of life made manifest in natural history, but creates these in its intransitive ‘encounter’ with the material order. Thus the élan vital does not ‘reveal’ or ‘dislodge’ anything, as if it carried these preformed within it or excavated them out from the depths of matter. It rather indicates a certain kind of thrust-like movement corresponding to the idea put forward in PPPM that life is an immense effort to make matter give up something that it does not want to (1901, p. 67). Dissociation, divergence, and differentiation, at least in the particular direction and forms in which evolution shows them to have gone, represent precisely the actual capitulation of matter to the virtual demands of this movement, which is the effort to indefinitely dilate margins of indeterminacy within matter itself. Crucially, this capitulation is entirely contingent and thereby quintessentially creative, emerging, in singularly specific forms, pari passu with the indivisible movement of that demand.
It is in this respect that the image of the élan vital develops the notion of a qualitative (or, in Deleuze’s terms, ‘virtual’) multiplicity that Bergson borrows from the mathematician G.B. Riemann and uses in Time and Free Will (1889, TFW) to first introduce the idea of duration. The key characteristic of this kind of multiplicity is its capacity to draw from itself more than it appears to contain—a definition, significantly, that Bergson also uses to describe mind or esprit (1959, pp. 830-1, 720, 1229-30). And it is indicative of the continuity between bio-ontological and human life that Bergson borrows an image from psychology to describe the interpenetrating multiplicity inherent in life, insisting that no image from the physical world would be adequate. This applies not only to the virtual unity provided by the élan vital, but its virtual creativity: just as the psychological order reveals a plurality of states which, in partaking of others, virtually include within themselves the whole of the personality to which it belongs (1959, p. 595), so too life, for Bergson, enfolds a plurality of entangled, interpenetrating tendencies, unforeseeable and indistinct until their creative encounter with matter.
Conclusion: Virtuality and the meaning of life
This brief analysis of the virtuality of life’s movement brings to light two important conclusions for Bergson’s thinking on the meaning of life.
First, it shows that, if Bergson’s speculations upon an ethical meaning of life are indeed rooted in the evolutionary direction of a broader bio-ontology, what this serves to ensure is that both are premised upon the irreducibly open and inventive rather than on the reductively closed and repetitive. Indeed, the morality Bergson will later embrace in TSMR is distinctively ‘open’, and the religion he affirms essentially ‘dynamic’. This is important, not only because it forestalls a reduction of the normative to the essential, but because it allows the ethical and the ontological to mutually inform one another in an ongoing and creative way. This is one of the capital consequences of the durational monism he establishes by extending the model of a qualitative or virtual multiplicity from psyche to cosmos: it effects a rapprochement of previously severed terms, radicalises relations between nature and human life, and clears a platform for pursuing a superior kind of empiricism, whether of biological investigation or human evaluation. From this it also follows that the two re-joined terms must legitimately reflect in one another along the monistic continuum, in such a way that human becoming provides a source of insight into the nature in which it participates by degrees rather than differs from in kind. By the same token, that rapprochement means that insight into nature may well provide direction to human flourishing: our species’ evolution, that is, enjoins us to view ourselves as partial views on nature as a whole, whose movements, trajectories and destinies cannot be without relevance to our own. [9]
The second point that emerges from considering life’s virtual aspect involves a clarification of how to pursue the ethical meaning of life as only intimated by Bergson in PPPM, namely an increasing independence of thought from material conditions through a renewal and growth of spiritualism. [10] Bergson proposes that a closer understanding of the sui generis relationship between mind and matter, or the ‘very special kind of limitation that life gives to our thought’ (1901, p. 63), would serve to restrict spiritualism to narrow boundaries, but in the process pave the way for an indefinite increase in its fertility and force—‘making it acceptable to those who reject it, bringing to it a theory of knowledge through which it could dissipate its obscurities, and finally to make it the most empirical of doctrines in terms of its method, and the most metaphysical in terms of its results’ (1901, pp. 63-4). Though written in 1901, these aspirations arguably indicate what Bergson’s entire philosophical project would converge on, namely the establishment of a mature empiricism of the immaterial. [11]
In advancing this superior spiritualism, however, Bergson not only outlines a form of empirical research, but provides the philosophical resources for a set of practices that would enable us to fulfil our evolutionary potential in the form of an increasing independence from matter. The ‘meaning’ of life at play here is conceived as the capacity to withdraw from the body and its rootedness in the present by means of sounding the virtual expanses of consciousness, and the proposed practices—or ‘spiritual exercises’ in the manner of an important reader of Bergson, Pierre Hadot—are seen as further articulating the vital mechanics that operate against the grain of mechanism. This prospect appeals to key ideas from MM. There, Bergson argues that the body and its immediate pragmatic concerns provide the basis of our understanding and experience of the present. Our conscious perception of the present, however, actually belies the entire wealth of the past, which Bergson claims survives in its entirety in virtual form, to be selectively channelled into our current concerns in order to inform our actions with the benefit of previous experience. This claim is a major feature of Bergson’s contribution to the philosophy of time, and a further result of his appeal to the virtual multiplicity: the latter allows him to affirm, contra a long tradition that stems from Aristotle, that the past and the present co-exist in a virtual fashion, separated not by any ontological schism between what is and is no longer, but by a distinction between an actual present that is in-the-making and a virtual past that is no longer being used (1959, pp. 278, 291). [12]
What this means is that, as soon as we relax our most immediate bodily engagements, we are at once well-disposed to delve into vast expanses of time, whose flows, influences and stratifications will likely diverge from our orthodox representations of them, and thus permit new perspectives on the possibilities of human activity. This breaches onto one of the most stimulating and transformative aspects of Bergson’s work, concerned with exploring phenomena like dreams, psychical disturbances and mystical experience as naturalistic sources of both philosophical insight and spiritual illumination. In this respect, it is to a third locus that we should turn to further pursue Bergson’s thoughts on the meaning of life, namely the collection of essays that explores these themes in fascinating detail, Mind-Energy (1919). What is important here, however, is that this virtual withdrawal from the body through immersion in deep consciousness be seen not as any contemplative end-in-itself of the sort that Bergson in fact disparages (in Eastern mysticism, for instance). It is rather best seen, in line with his observations regarding the twin poles of human activity, and paradoxical as it may seem, as a profound form of attachment to life, whose concomitant release would consist in a superior moral action premised upon an elevated perspective on the human condition and our place within the life of the universe—an action motivated, as he will say in his final work, by universal love, and exemplified by the Christian mystic. [13]
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