Carnal Spirit - Matthew W. Maguire

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beyond the habitual or interested relation of the self to other selves, to society, to the world, and to itself.

      Bergson argued that the self, drawing its life through durée and in memory, is constituted not as an object or discrete qualities or drives but as a mobile totality of its whole existence in time. As he put it in his first book, the Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, for Bergson the “fundamental self [moi]” can only be recovered by “vigorous analysis” in large part because “language cannot seize it without fixing the mobility of it.”182

      In Bergson’s account, the mind, like life itself, allows the present to express radical creativity from a real if discursively elusive multiplicity, a creativity whose profound continuities with the past are real but unforeseeable. According to the early Bergson, “Durée in all its purity is the form that the succession of our states of consciousness takes when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present and anterior states.”183 “A free act” is accomplished in such a state, when “the self alone will have been the author of it, since it will express the entire self … we are free when our acts emanate from our whole personality.”184

      In Matter and Memory, freedom is similarly manifest in moments where we live “with an intenser life” in which we, “creating acts of which the inner indetermination, spread over as large a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please,” are able through memory to “pass the more easily through the meshes of necessity.”185 Matter “repeats the past unceasingly” because it is subject to this necessity. But memory is “not a regression from the present to the past” but a “progression from the past to the present”: it is “spirit [that] borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.”186

      In this way, freedom for Bergson is unpredictable, and is much more than the ability of the will to choose from different options.187 Rather freedom is a kind of unifying integrity that draws upon the whole temporal reality of the self to express the new in surprising, sometimes even shocking continuity with the past, that expresses itself in and transforms the material world through the free meeting of matter and memory.

      Bergson opened a spectrum of possibilities for his readers and his audiences radically distinct from those of both the intellectual coalition and of French reactionary politics. Evolution should lead us to question the “commonsense” habits of mind we bring to experience, since we understand them to be shaped by the imperatives of survival and control rather than the full expanse of reality. The Cartesian and popular-Comtean assumptions about “science” are not supported by actual scientific research, and the attempt to transpose these assumptions into “human sciences” is misbegotten and superficial. Determinism in particular is precisely what is vindicated neither by meticulous review of scientific literature nor by careful philosophical understanding. Properly understood, past and present, body and soul are integrated in our experience. Our freedom is temporally integrative and reconciles origins and originality; it is not finally transgressive and supersessionist.

      Learning and Time

      The philosophical differences we have explored logically entailed different positions within the white-hot debates about learning in the Belle Époque.

      Specialized research had taken secure hold of the New Sorbonne in the Belle Époque. As we have seen, Lanson among many others praised the “faculties of specialists and scholars”188 who were bringing the Third Republic’s educational system into a new century assumed to be ruled by objective methods drawn from science, particularly in its universities.

      Bergson’s position was different. In 1882, Bergson gave a Prize Day speech at the lycée in Angers, where he then taught. While he argued that “the division of the disciplines is a natural thing” and its accomplishments in the arts and sciences demand “eternal gratitude,” he thought that it is “specialization [spécialité], that makes the scholar sullen.” For “in contact with the specialist, everything becomes dry and sterile.” Instead, we should remember it is animals who are specialized; “since the variety of abilities is that which distinguishes us, let us remain men.” Bergson ends the address with a warning against the peril of following specialization, et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas (“and for the sake of life lose the reasons for living”).189

      Bergson’s openness to nonspecialized inquiry remained a living possibility throughout the age. A leading socialist politician like Jean Jaurès could write a highly regarded multivolume history of the French Revolution,190 and independent persons of letters like Salomon and Théodore Reinach could also make contributions to archaeology.191 For Bergson, nonspecialists often had a vitality and freshness of perspective that the professionally trained, bourgeois scholar often too quickly set aside.

      Sometimes the dissenters from the broad intellectual coalition around the Sorbonne presented more pointed critiques of their opponents’ positions on education. Given his prominence as a mathematician and scientist—and as a graduate of the École Polytechnique—Henri Poincaré appeared to have little reason to involve himself in debates about liberal learning. But in fact, along with other members of the Académie Française, he joined the Ligue pour la culture française, in order to fight, in the words of the group’s manifesto, secondary education’s “corruption by the utilitarian and professional spirit.”192 Poincaré aligned himself firmly against Simiand, Durkheim, and other educational reformers—but for expressly scientific and mathematical reasons.

      Poincaré wrote a brief for his concerns in his 1911 essay The Sciences and the Humanities. He argued that while an education in the humanities is not necessary for scientific achievement, in his experience it was extremely helpful. For Poincaré, the “spirit of analysis”193 in, for example, the study of classical languages required a precision and mental agility that was very helpful for high-level mathematics, one that could be taught to children and adolescents in a way that high-level mathematics could not. For biologists, instruction in the development of words from different languages allowed for a morphological consciousness of reality useful for understanding the subtleties of biological development.194 For Poincaré, the careful study of the liberal arts trained the student in conceptual dexterity—that is, moving concepts and ideas from one conceptual language to another. This dexterousness had a powerful relationship to scientific creativity.195

      As for Bergson, an education in the humanities was neither an act of dutiful reverence for the past nor an “objective” supersession of the past, but rather a living encounter with the past that opened new possibilities. In his speech “Good Sense and Classical Education” (delivered at the Sorbonne in 1895),196 Bergson describes foreign tourists in Paris gathered “in front of our monuments and in our museums” reading guidebooks. He then asks the assembled students: “Absorbed in this reading, do they not sometimes seem to forget for its sake the beautiful things they had come to see? It is in this way that many of us travel through existence, eyes fixed on catchphrases [formules] that they read, neglecting to look at life.”197

      For Bergson, this “guidebook” approach to philosophy, literature, and history was disastrous, whether the guidebook consisted of novel or venerable formulae. Whatever its historical provenance, the knowledge of a single language or a single way of thinking (including “scientific” assumptions in a given discipline) created intellectual habits that made the infinite richness of reality a ready-made, easy-to-read—but dead—text. Such habits were lazy, very partial, and reductive—but once acquired, very difficult to break.

      Bergson finds “precisely in classical education, before everything, an effort to break the ice of words and to find again beneath it the free flow of thought.”198 He argues that foreign languages—especially ancient ones, with very different ways of “carving” the real—free us from “our conventions, our habits and our symbols,” all of which dull creativity and an interest in a living precision.199 They require an intense effort to learn, and thus associate understanding with meticulous effort rather than the indiscriminate application of

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