Powers of Time - David Lapoujade
Henri Bergson has been for me one of the most important sources for thinking about time, experience, and philosophy since beginning this project several years ago. While Bergson’s thought is woven throughout many of the essays here, he has remained very much a figure in the background.
David Lapoujade’s short work on Bergson, Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson, is essential reading for anyone looking to engage Bergson’s thought seriously. Lapoujade was a student of Gilles Deleuze, so Deleueze’s Bersonism plays an important role in Lapoujade’s presentation. Whereas Deleuze uses Bergsonism as a way to further his own philosophical endeavor — much like he did with Spinoza, Nietzsche, Hume, et al. — Lapoujade provides a much more straightforward reading of Bergson’s work.
The Introduction, ‘Time and Affect’, provide a compact understanding of Bergson’s intervention into Western Metaphysics. For me, the most important line of the Introduction comes near the end where he writes, ‘Duration is always the duration of a movement’ (14). Lapoujade has done the hard work of landing Bergson’s thought as this fundamental insight: everything is in motion and duration is nothing more or less than reality understood as motion without a mover.
Western Metaphysics desires that reality be a thing, and that motion is the effect of things. Such a view of human experience makes us attend to motion as ‘the moving of beings (or nothings)’ (14). Bergson wants us to see motion as fundamental, which means that it is not reducible to things, whether we think of things as beings or stable Newtonian laws that can be captured in mathematical equations.
As such, Bergson’s thought is not offered as a new truth as if he were capturing a system of stable concepts like Kant. Rather like that of William James (his friend) and Nietzsche (his immediate generational predecessor), Bergson’s thought is meant to be an intervention into how we experience our experience:
To become attached to duration liberates us from attachment to beings and to nothings to the extent that it makes us sympathize with their movements. Bergsonian duration is an ascesis, almost a lesson in morality. (15)
To call duration an ascesis and therefore a moral lesson is to push philosophical thought away from abstract concepts. It is to descend into experience and open it to a plasticity that is unavailable when we think of the world as populated by substantial and essential beings.
It took a long time for me to be able to see the world this way, and I mostly have Bergson to thank for this. Once one is able to see motion as fundamental, experience has little use or need to attach itself to conceptual systems and to seek underlying stabilities in its quest to ‘know’.
There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change; change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile. (Bergson, Key Writings, ‘The Perception of Change’, 317)
A long-term meditation on these two sentences can go a long way to making Bergson’s thought pass from the merely conceptual to the experiential and transformative, which was exactly his point: ‘This conversion of attention would be philosophy itself’ (ibid., 310).
End Note: Lapoujade’s work on Bergson can be read in conjunction with his similar study of William James: Empiricism and Pragmatism. Both Bergson and James share a similar understanding of experience, and reading both books side by side makes that clear.