Henri Bergson and the Flow of Time

Ray Briggs
Is everything in constant motion?

Josh Landy
Can you ever hear the same sound twice?

Ray Briggs
Could intuition put us in touch with the deepest reality of the world?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosopher’s corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about Henri Bergson and the flow of time.

Josh Landy
You know, I love Bergson so much Ray. He’s one of the great French philosophers of the 20th century, most famous, I think, for saying that everything is in motion.

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, of course, everything is in motion. I’ve been in motion all day. First I was at my house, then I was at the studio, and in between I was on a bus which was also in motion.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I know. But think about what that means. Being in motion isn’t just about first being in one place and then in another place.

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, it is. The bus was at the stop near my house, then it was at the next stop, a little closer to the studio, and then finally it arrived here. That’s motion for you.

Josh Landy
Bergson actually wants us to resist this way of thinking about movement. He thinks we imagine movement like a series of jumps between bus stops. But those bus stops, they don’t exist.

Ray Briggs
Really? bus stops don’t exist. Then where was I standing when I waited for the bus?

Josh Landy
Well, think about Zeno’s arrow paradox. Remember that one? You shoot an arrow at a target, right, and when the arrow reaches the target, it’s stationary. It’s stuck still in the target, right? And when it’s about to leave the bow, it’s stationary there too, right? And and at every any moment along its route, it’s stationary. So when on Earth, does the thing move?

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on, Josh, it doesn’t move at any one moment. What it means for it to be moving is just that it’s in different places at different moments. Time is just like space that way. I’m not following say a bit more. So imagine you have a multicolored quilt. So what does it mean for it to be multicolored? It’s just that this one patch is red and then this other patch is blue, and then this third patch is green. And you put them all together, you get a multicolored quilt. And in just the same way, your arrow is at one place in the beginning and other places in the middle and a final place at the end. Put them all together, and you get movement.

Josh Landy
Bergson doesn’t see it that way. He says there’s no place the arrow is at the beginning or the end that that arrow is never stationary. He thinks photographs have messed with our minds, making us think we can freeze time, but we can’t.

Ray Briggs
Ah, so you’re saying that photographs fool us that they’re they’re freeze frames, wherein nothing in reality is stationary. So a photograph is a static picture of something that’s really moving. Is that right? Yeah, that’s it, exactly. Ah, you just admitted that the photograph is a static picture. So that proves that something in the world is stationary.

Josh Landy
Okay, I spoke too soon, but I do have an answer for you. You ever seen a photo from 100 years ago?

Ray Briggs
Oh, sure. It’s got some stodgy looking people in it. It’s all sepia toned. Everyone’s wearing hats.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but not just that. It’s almost certainly gonna be faded. Even a photograph changes over time, it just changes too slowly for us to notice everything is in movement.

Ray Briggs
I don’t buy it, but even if you’re right, so what?

Josh Landy
Well, for one thing, it shows how easily your mind can mislead you, and people think it’s objective to see the world in terms of freeze frames, but once you get Brooks point about movement, you’ll never see anything the same way again.

Ray Briggs
I don’t find these arguments very moving, Josh.

Josh Landy
Oh good pun. Ray, but okay, even if you don’t agree with Brooks all about movement, maybe you’ll like his idea about free will. He thinks it’s real, or the enduring self, he thinks it’s not real, or conformity. Brooks all thinks that the greater part of the time we live outside ourselves. That’s what he says, because, because we’re constantly trying to please other people.

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m not going to be convinced, because I don’t care about pleasing you.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s fair enough, Ray, but maybe you’ll want to please our guest. It’s Barry Allen from McMaster University, author of “Living in Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson.”

Ray Briggs
But first… More than 100 years ago, Henri Bergson met Albert Einstein in a high profile debate that pitted science and technology against philosophy and humanism. Any guess who won?

Josh Landy
We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sheryl Kaskowitz, to find out. She files this report,

Ali vs. Frazier
Muhammad Ali in the red trunks, Joe Frazier in the green trunks. They appear very light.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Over the years, many high profile boxing matches were hyped as the fight of the century. One of the greatest was Ali versus Frazier in 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Ali vs. Frazier
Hundreds of millions are seeing this bout around the world, packed house at Madison Square Garden.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
But almost 50 years before that fight, there was another epic battle between two titans on the world stage that most people don’t know anything about. This one happened on April 6, 1922 in Paris, in one corner was 62 year old Henri Bergson, one of the most famous philosophers of his day. He was surrounded by his friends and colleagues at the French society of philosophy, basically the intellectual equivalent of Madison Square Garden. And in the other corner was a theoretical physicist, 20 years younger than berksel, who was just starting to become an international celebrity, Albert Einstein. He was the first German scientist to travel to Paris in the years after the Great War. So things were a little tense from the start. Of course, there was no physical boxing ring. In fact, there wasn’t even a stage with two podiums set up facing each other.

Jimena Canales
Nobody really expected a debate. Nobody wanted a confrontation. I’m Jimena Canales. I’m a historian of science.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Canales is the author of the physicist and the philosopher Einstein, Bergson and the debate that changed our understanding of time.

Jimena Canales
Einstein had just become famous in 1919.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That’s when two British scientists studied a solar eclipse and found that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was correct. It caused a worldwide sensation.

Jimena Canales
Einstein was invited to give a talk to explain the philosophical implications of his theory of relativity. It is significant that he wasn’t invited to the Societe de physique by the physicist. He was invited to philosophers who were even more open to his revolutionary views.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
So Einstein was standing in front of a room full of philosophers in Paris who were invited to ask him questions.

Jimena Canales
And one could say perhaps the most famous intellectual of his era was in the audience.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That’s Bergson. He rose to international fame in 1907 with his book “Creative Evolution,” which was a philosophical response to Darwinism. His lectures attracted overflow crowds. He was actually working on a book responding to relativity.

Jimena Canales
When Einstein came to Paris, the conference organizers prompted Bergson to speak.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
He said, “I came here to listen. It was never my intention to give a speech, but I yield to the amicable insistence of the philosophy society.” He went on to talk for long enough that even though other philosophers also spoke, this event would forever be known as a debate between Einstein and Bergson. He started by saying how much he admired Einstein’s work, before delving into the problem of time in Einstein’s theory, since that was, after all, bergson’s area of expertise, some people later said that the science was too complex for a philosopher like Bergson to understand.

Jimena Canales
Bergson was not making a point of physics. He was making a philosophical point. And the philosophical point that he was making is that Einstein was confusing or exchanging clocks and people.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
For Bergson clocks were human inventions. They pointed to an underlying concept of time with a capital T, and weren’t a substitute for time itself. But Einstein wasn’t convinced about this larger capital T time.

Jimena Canales
Einstein responded with a very provocative statement. He said, “The time of the philosophers does not exist.”

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That was a Mic drop, even back then. He continued, “There is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.”

Jimena Canales
The common interpretation is that Einstein won the debate.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That seems clear just in the fact that Albert Einstein is still a household name, while most people haven’t heard of Henri Bergson. But the victory went beyond those two men. Science and Technology won, pushing philosophy and the humanities aside as the arbiters of our understanding of how things work. aAd with the monumental rise of technology since then, the essence of their debate continues.

Jimena Canales
It’s about the relation between a human being and a mechanism. In their case, it was a clock. And now in the era of AI, where we’re completely thinking of replacing humans who think, who write, who are artists, it’s the same question.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
So if all those epic boxing matches were known as the fight of the century, maybe this debate should be called the fight of all time, both for its subject matter and because its impact has already stretched past the century mark. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sheryl Kaskowitz.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for that fascinating report, Sheryl, what an interesting character that Bergson was. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Henri Bergson and the flow of time.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Barry Allen. He’s professor of philosophy at McMaster University and author of “Living in Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson.” Barry, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Barry Allen
Well, hi. Thanks very much for your invitation.

Josh Landy
So Barry, you’ve written a lot about Bergson. Written brilliantly about Bergson, but how does he affect your everyday life?

Barry Allen
The thing that I like to take away from Bergson is that to remember that he’s an enemy of dogmatism, and he wants his philosophy to temper any tendency that his readers may have to fall into dogmatism. And the most important way to do that, to temper it, that way is to remember that every perception, visual, audio, everything, all perception, is conditioned by life and by need, conditioned by my life simply as a human being conditioned by my needs as a particular individual. So discontinuity, things seeming separate, here’s one thing, and here’s something entirely different that is in the service of our action and not a representation or of an intrinsically viable metaphysical insight.

Ray Briggs
I like this as a reason to be less dogmatic about yourself. So another thing that Bergson said very is that all action is interaction. Can you explain what that means?

Barry Allen
Yes, they’re very closely related. To say that all action is interaction means that there is no disinterested or merely passive looking, merely to perceive, your eyes, your ears, merely to perceive is already to interact with the world. Our every breath involves us in a relation to practically the whole world. It’s just a question of scale, of course.

Ray Briggs
So I kind of see two things going on there. So one is like, I can’t look at the world without affecting it. And the other suggestion that I hear, and what you say, is that I can’t look and look at the world without caring about it. And those seem kind of separate to me. Does he believe both of them?

Barry Allen
Yeah, I think maybe caring about it is perhaps the wrong word. But just not not thinking that your perception has any validity beyond your interests, so that you may, yes, continue to care about it but it but to remember that that’s because of your background, because of your your home life, because of things about you, and not some intrinsic response to the way that something is in itself.

Josh Landy
So Does that just mean that the things I’m bothering to look at are driven by my interests, or does it also mean that whatever I look at I’m getting wrong, and there’s there’s just no way to get a kind of objective picture of things out there?

Barry Allen
No, it’s certainly that everything you see is is conditioned by your interests. But that doesn’t mean getting it wrong, because things don’t have an intrinsic Identity. Identity is an artifact of the interests and conditions of the perceiver who is noticing the identity. So perception is an artifact. It’s an artifact of human life, but it’s also an artifact of my particular organization in life.

Ray Briggs
So okay, so say, say, I and my worst enemy are looking at a chess board. We’re playing chess and we’re trying to beat each other at chess. We have diametrically opposed interest, but we both agree about what’s going on enough to to play chess with each other. How can that be according to person?

Barry Allen
Well, we have, I mean, that’s just the big the chessboard is just the beginning of your agreement. I mean, you’ve also got the same organism, the same organs, the same eyesight, the same eyeballs, the same brain. That’s a whole lot of sameness on which simply seeing the chessboard from the one side or the other side is a very, very small part. And of course, the lesson of life, the lesson of growing up, is learning to negotiate that, to know where you can count on other people agreeing, and where you’re going to have to be careful and maybe draw back.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Henri Bergson with Barry Allen from McMaster University.

Ray Briggs
Why are we confused about time is storing a memory like taking a picture? What happens when past experience comes, flooding back?

Josh Landy
Motion, memory, and mental models—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Black Sabbath
I’m going through changes.

Josh Landy
Going through changes—that’s just what time feels. Like, I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Henri Bergson and the flow of time with Barry Allen from McMaster University.

Josh Landy
Got a timely or moving question about Bergson’s life and thought. Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org or you can comment on our completely revamped website. And while you’re there, you can subscribe for free and go with the flow in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Barry earlier, Josh was trying to convince me that everything is in motion, and I wasn’t super convinced. Are brooksand arguments any better than Josh’s?

Barry Allen
Well, I think the most important one is better, and that is simply the reality of perspective. And we can’t take our medium sized body walking down the street as if that was the perspective, or the point of view, or the coordination for all possible beings, something you think about a grain of sand on a beach, there’s the beach. What could be more the same all those grains of sand. That’s true for the child playing, for the couple walking. But what about the ant that’s crawling over those grains? The different, every aspect of its shape is different. Or even more, think about a microbe spending its entire life on one grain of sand, and aware, I mean, at some level, in some way, aware of the kind of differences, the different affordances or opportunities that it holds because of its shape and size.

Ray Briggs
That seems like a really important insight. But how do I get from there to the idea that motion is is real and constant, like, couldn’t I equally think? Like, oh, motion is an illusion that just results from my perspective as a human and other things might see the world differently.

Barry Allen
Well, motion is a part of fact of perspective, and other things do see the world differently. But that doesn’t make motion unreal. It makes it relative, relative to the organism and the organism’s life. So for every different kind of life, for every different species of organism, you’ve got a different understanding of motion, but the same. What’s the same, and what makes it all count as motion is precisely spatial discontinuity, introducing spatial discontinuity. Here’s one thing, here’s something else that is always our artifact, or not personally, but the artifact of the perceiving organism.

Josh Landy
I That makes a lot of sense. I I’m just curious to go a little bit further into the into Brook songs, picture of time. He says, The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change. I mean, he’s got, he’s brilliant. He has a brilliant way with words, right? So he’s saying, it’s not just that right now I happen to be happy, but then, you know, I’ll be sad tomorrow. It’s that, even this notion that I am right now happy, that’s too static a picture. You know, he thinks that our our verbs are all wrong, our nouns are all wrong, our adjectives are all wrong. Our language doesn’t reflect the fact that things are everything is constantly emotion. So where does he get this idea from, that that we change without ceasing, and even a state is nothing but change.

Barry Allen
It’s the character of time. The quality of time is continuity. That’s what distinguishes it from space, and it pervades everything at an appropriate scale. So it’s not that he thinks that that everything is just changing arbitrarily. It’s not a question, really, of change. It’s continuity, so that one thing unfolds into another, which continues to unfold, which continues to unfold, that’s time and its continuity.

Ray Briggs
So Bergson has has this kind of insight that things aren’t really separate from each other, that a lot of what we perceive is dependent on our perspective. His way of thinking about like the world and about time is really different from a lot of common ways of thinking like a lot of people do think that time just consists of one discrete moment followed by another, discrete moment followed by another. Where does that appearance come from? Like, what? Why? Why do others think that time consists of a series of discrete moments. What would lead you to think that way?

Barry Allen
Because they’re organisms, because they’re alive, and that the way to be a successful organism is to break up the world into the bits that you have to deal with now and the bits that you don’t, the bits that are nearby and the bits that aren’t. It’s a requirement of life, but it’s conditioned by the particular organism. So it’s not something that you know relates us to everything, and it certainly doesn’t unfold some kind of absolute reality.

Josh Landy
So we’re organisms, and as we were saying a moment ago, we have particular interests in. Needs right? Tell me if this is right or wrong. As an assessment of what berksong is saying, I take him to be saying something like this. You know, as human beings, we’re a certain kind of organism. We need food, we need shelter, and so on. And those needs cause us to think about the world in a certain way, they cause us to think about in a practical way, right? There, I need to do things with the world. I need to find food. I need to find shelter. And in order to do that, well, I kind of need to be able to see the world as a set of kind of regularities, right? So rather than seeing every berry on the bush and as the unique individual that it really is, I’m going to say berry berry berry berry berry. That’s a bunch of berries, and that’s what’s really that’s going to be useful for me, that’s going to help me to survive and feed myself. But I’m missing something. If I look at the world just in that way, I also need to see the uniqueness of the berries is that, is that a reasonable way of characterizing part of bergson’s thinking?

Barry Allen
Yes, good. And not so much a need to see the individuality, but you need to remember that there is individuality, so that you’re aware that perhaps in some scenario, it may become relevant. Maybe not. Bergson is dedicated. Bergson wants to see us as having part of our life dedicated to survival, things we got to do to get through a day. But survival isn’t the whole thing. This is where he’s different, really, from pragmatism, that he thinks that pragmatism is a half truth, and what about that whole other half? Well, it’s got some some rather sad names in the history of philosophy. One of those sad names is spirit, or spirituality. Many philosophers, they just hear that word and don’t want to hear anymore, but that’s really our problem, and it points us or it leads us into a big question, which I won’t open up, but it leads us into a big question of the validity of materialism. Bergson is certainly not a materialist. And the question then, is, so why not? And given all the authority that materialism has, all the science that apparently is behind it, how can we try to understand its distinctions, its limitations and the possibility of something beyond or more, not beyond, like superstitious, but just different and more.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Henri Bergson with Barry Allen, author of living in time, the philosophy of Henri Bergson. So Barry, you were just telling us that Bergson, unlike a lot of the people around him, rejects materialism, we should probably take a step back and say, like what materialists are committed to. So I think of materialism as the view that there is nothing in the world other than matter, like our minds can ultimately be explained by matter, maybe by physics. Is that a good gloss?

Barry Allen
Well, I think it’s a good gloss on the status quo. It’s a good gloss on what many philosophers, even most today, and at least analytic philosophers, might say, but it isn’t also a good statement of the problem, as Bergson would see it.

Josh Landy
We have a question from Kate on LinkedIn that I think connects with what we’ve just been talking about. Kate wonders if Brexit view of a world in constant motion and no enduring self is basically Buddhism. Do you think she’s right about that? Is there something Buddhist about the brooksonian culture?

Barry Allen
That’s not That’s not bad. I personally, I would say Taoist, but that’s an argument within Chinese philosophy. I think it’s closer to Tao than Buddhism. But that’s a small point. Yes, I think there’s, there’s a lot of unexplored continuity between early connection between Bergson and Chinese philosophy broadly construed.

Ray Briggs
And is that connection just that you had two groups of people independently arriving at similar insights, or was there their influence from Chinese philosophy on Bergson?

Barry Allen
I think it’s as you suggest. Bergson. I seriously doubt if he I don’t know, but I seriously doubt if he ever read any Chinese philosophy. And you know what you say is equally true of pragmatism, that there’s many points where Bergson and say William James, you say, well, that’s practically the same. And though it’s true that there are such points, but not through influence and not because for either. I mean, James wasn’t developing his ideas on Bergson and Bergson wasn’t reading James. But there is that overlap.

Josh Landy
That’s That’s great, Barry, because you just answered another question we had from a listener from egynego on blue sky, who asked about the influence of William James on Brooks all and so I like your answer that, you know, sometimes it just so happens that two great thinkers or two different traditions come up with similar answers. I want to get back, if I can, to something we were just talking about in relation to, you know, how we need to orient. Ourselves towards the world in order to to perceive it and understand it to the extent that’s possible. Berksah, as I see it, is worried that when we are just kind of trapped in our practical mindset, when we’re just locked into how can I use the world we’re seeing part of it, but not all of it, is intuition. The other part right is the other way of getting at things through intuition. Is the intuition, what gives us a sense of variety of difference, of the fact that each individual berry may actually differ from the other berries, is intuition. What points us in the direction of, you know, other aspects of memory that we might not be thinking about is intuition. What points us in the direction of our freedom as human beings. What does Bergson say about intuition, as opposed to intellect?

Barry Allen
Well, your your precis of it is very nice, but not really bergson’s Okay. For Bergson, the general concept is perception, and he thinks that perception can be either internal or external. External perception. That’s the perception of material things in an outer world. What he calls intuition is internal perception. It’s mind feeling, mind, mind feeling and aware of itself. So that’s the mind’s experience of itself. That’s what he calls intuition.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask also about memory, because I know he had a lot to say about memory, so I guess my first question is, actually, is memory internal or external perception, because it seems like it’s it’s depicting something that happened outside of me a long time ago. But I have to somehow go through like my internal state to get there, because the thing isn’t present anymore. Just me remembering is the only thing that’s present right now.

Barry Allen
Yes, that’s quite true, but it’s a mistake to think of it as anything like a photograph, technically, of just a little bit of technicality, memory is virtual experience. It’s not actual experience, it’s virtual experience. And that makes it a supplement to perception. The relation to perception and memory. Memory supplements perception. It fills in all the detail that perception glosses over or doesn’t notice. Memory is also, as you say, the past. Memory is the way the past survives. Memory is how past exists. It remains real, it remains effective. But it’s not actual. It’s not an actual trace, an actual image or anything like a brain cell.

Ray Briggs
I think that a lot of contemporary psychologists have really come to agree with bergson’s idea that memory isn’t like taking a photograph and that you have to do a lot of reconstructive work every time you remember something. I think he was very prescient in that way.

Barry Allen
That’s very that’s true and interesting and relevant. I’m not sure how far the agreement would reach, though, because to really agree with Bergson, you’ve got to buy into the idea of virtual reality. And maybe those psychologists do, or maybe at a certain moment they start, might start getting queasy and suddenly start sounding like positivists and saying, Well, if it’s not in space and time, how can it exist?

Josh Landy
I take your point, but I want to ask you a related question. As a Proustian, as someone who loves Marcel Proust, I cannot help but ask you about bergson’s Spontaneous memory, because he seems to make a distinction between the kind of memory that you summon deliberately. Somebody asks you, what’s the capital of France and you, I think it’s Paris, as opposed to the kind of memory that sneaks up on you when you’re listening to a song you haven’t heard in a while, or something like that. And brooksand says, I smell a rose, and immediately confused recollections of childhood come back to my memory that sounds very Proustian. So is there something special about the second kind of memory, this memory that comes to you unbidden and and drowns you in this lovely flood of things you haven’t thought about for a while?

Barry Allen
I wish I could be agreeable and agree with that. But I, I have to admit that that sounds a whole lot like Proust and not much like Bergson.

Josh Landy
But that’s, that’s a direct quote from from Bergson.

Barry Allen
The bit I know, the bit you read. But the other part about flowing and flooding over, right.

Josh Landy
Right, right. Okay, yeah, yeah, that part I added as a as an inveterate Proustian, I apologize.

Ray Briggs
So I have a criticism that’s maybe for Bergson and not for Proust, I hope, which is about the virtual reality part of memory. Ordinarily, I want my memory and maybe my perceptions, too, to be accurate. Like I think there’s a difference between remembering. A conversation as it really happened, and remembering a conversation in a way that like I came off as way clever and nicer than I actually was. How do I support that distinction? If all of my perceptions and all of my memories are sort of infected with my perspective.

Barry Allen
You’re uh, you’re bringing perception and memory a little closer together than Bergson wants, just for a very brief moment of technicality. He defines perception as virtual action. It’s not acting, but it’s tending. It’s a tendency, and it’s a preparation, preparing to act memory. Memory is virtual experience, that is. It’s a supplement to perception. So perception gives you these tendencies to act. You’re walking down the street and you look one way and see something, perceive something, and that sets up a tendency to stop or to not cross, etc. Memory simply amplifies that with remembering what happens to people that walk in front of cars, or remembering what happens last time you tried to run and make the count before the light changed. But that’s all supplement to the tendency that perception inaugurates.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Henri Bergson with Barry Allen from McMaster University,

Ray Briggs
What do you do to express your individuality? Do you also appreciate the uniqueness of people around you? Does the absurdity of life sometimes make you laugh?

Josh Landy
From chameleons to comedians—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Reel 2 Real
I like to move it, move it.

Josh Landy
I like to move it, move it. You like to move it, move it. Everything is movement, movement. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…exccept your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Barry Allen from McMaster University, and we’re thinking about Henri Bergson and the flow of time.

Josh Landy
So Barry, before the break, we were talking about memory, and you were telling us about how memory is virtual experience, and how important that is, right? Because it’s a way of preparing us for action. I’m completely in agreement with you, but I’m still, again, maybe it’s the Proust in me, but I’m still wondering about the other form of memory that Brooks all discusses, where he seems to suggest that, you know, there’s basically, basically memory has these two modes in a way, one of which is sort of designed to serve action, and what it’s registering is the repeatable aspects of experience. So I remember, ah, a thing on a tree that has this shape is good to eat. And now I can just remember. I don’t need to really know any much more than that. The other aspect of memory is retaining the uniqueness of objects, the individuality, the special flavor of a particular moment. And that seems, I think Bergson says explicitly, doesn’t really have that same practical utility. He has this nice line, in order to experience this, he says, We must have the power to value the useless. So, so in order to experience that other kind of memory, we have to, you know, be able to value the useless and say, you know, it’s actually also kind of valuable in a certain sense, to be able to remember that particular apple on that particular tree at that particular moment. What is the value of the useless?

Barry Allen
It takes us beyond practical implications. It’s all too easy, really, to be a pragmatist. Except for philosophers, they have a lot of struggle with that. But it’s all too easy in ordinary life to be just absorbed by practical interest. And people even think it’s common sense and it’s good and it’s good, and that means you’re a serious person. But Bergson is saying there’s more, there’s a lot more, and in fact, that more may become very important in life. I mean, it depends like, like when you’re dying, for example, or when someone around you dies. I don’t want to get into spiritualism and spirituality here now, but it is in the background here and can’t be ignored. And Bergson himself will bring it up systematically.

Ray Briggs
I might be a little annoying and push you to say something about spiritualism and spirituality, like, how much is Bergson committed to spirituality?

Barry Allen
Well, he’s committed to the existence of something which he calls spirit. But what that means? Of course, you have to read the book. Spirit is, for him, a form of temporal existence. It’s the peculiarity of spirit that it can exist solely in time. It doesn’t occupy space, it doesn’t take up space, but it can never. As It Is, nevertheless effective. It’s real, it’s effective. It’s non spatial. Although, you know, his view really is not just here’s spirit, here’s body, but rather, every body has a spiritual side. Every spirit, so far as we know, is has some relation, some connection, to body. So it’s really a question of their interaction, and of allowing them to interact, of respecting their interaction, not trying to be like a, you know, analytic philosophy, materialist, who just closes his ears as soon as he hears about something that’s allegedly non material.

Ray Briggs
And is it only human beings who have spirit, or is it all animals, all physical beings? Whether they’re animals or not.

Barry Allen
I would say it’s everything alive. In fact, that’s what it is to be alive. And furthermore, not only everything alive, but that there isn’t, if you really think about it, there isn’t much that isn’t alive. It’s all too easy to say, oh, you know, the non organic and the organic, but a matter of scale and movement, the supposedly inorganic can reveal an organic dimension. It’s just a question of time. You know, like a planet, you’ve got to watch the planet for millions and millions and millions of years before it starts doing anything that will differentiate it from another planet.

Josh Landy
This is fantastic. It brings me to ask about the Elon vital. So Berkson is famous, among other things, for talking about a as something I I’m not sure what the English translation is, something like a vital force, or something like that. Could you tell us a little bit about that, and is that connected with what we’re talking about right now?

Barry Allen
Well, yes, it’s, it’s the cause of evolution. You ask Darwin, what causes evolution? He says, Well, it’s natural selection. What causes that? Well, it’s just random, randomly differences get thrown out. Bergson says, No, because what Darwin doesn’t pay attention to is that evolution has directionality. That’s not purpose, but it’s directionality so that things evolve out of other things. There’s always continuity. And Ilan vital is really just a name for that continuity.

Ray Briggs
Barry, this is all really fascinating, and I know we’ve been dunking on pragmatism a little, but if somebody wanted to know the practical implications of bergson’s theory, does it tell us anything about how we should live our lives?

Barry Allen
It doesn’t by deliberation. The practice, if you ask, if you just ask the simple question, what’s the practical implication of bergson’s philosophy? The shortest answer would be to turn us away from a preoccupation with practical implications. That those practical implications, they limit us, they confine us, whether to our individual form, or to our human form, and Bergson wants to go away from that. Let me read a single sentence from Creative evolution. Bergson says philosophy should be an effort to go beyond the human state. Now, of course, you think well beyond the human state. So what do you mean? Spirit, God, who knows what, but what he means is to go beyond the human state. Is to go beyond fixation on the present, to go beyond fixation on utility, to go beyond fixation on material bodies, to go beyond our preoccupation with the practical people often think, you know, I’m really practical, and that means I’m down to earth and I don’t get people don’t mislead me. But that attitude, you know, it might get you through your day, but it won’t get you. You won’t make progress in philosophy. With that attitude, you won’t be led to open new questions, or to question yourself or your commitments in a new way.

Ray Briggs
All right, I may have asked the question a little bit wrong, because, on the one hand, like, I take your point about bergson’s kind of disdain for being narrowly focused on the practical. On the other hand, like even the advice not to be narrowly focused on the practical seems like an opinion about what is good or bad for people to do. And I think not the only opinion he had like didn’t, didn’t he think that sort of people often felt pressured to kind of conform, and that this was a bad thing that we should resist. So it looks like he has some advice about what to do.

Barry Allen
That’s good, not and conformity not a bad thing to resist, but simply something to not, not universalize, not to allow it to become the dominant preoccupation. All of human life is a mixture of conformity and nonconformity, and the value of philosophy is simply to remind us that it’s okay to press beyond, beyond the implications, to turn away from a preoccupation with utility and not be afraid of being open to something that’s higher and higher. In this context, it does not mean divine or really spirit. What higher means is singular. You. An individual to not be like interchangeable with others, so that his understanding of something higher, to aspire to something higher means aspire to individuality.

Josh Landy
I love that. And so it has these two faces to it, right? One is, aspire to individuality in yourself. Don’t always conform. Sometimes you need to, but not always. And then the only other side is something you were saying right at the beginning. Right at the beginning, which is, be alive to the uniqueness in other people and in other phenomena. And I think that’s just beautiful. It leads me to raise a question about brooksand theory of humor, which is a famous one, although a famously, kind of controversial one. He believes that humor involves laughing at people, and as far as I understand it, he thinks it kind of serves a social function by sort of keeping people in line, right? He says, you know, a certain rigidity of body, mind and character. This rigidity is the comic and laughter is its corrective, right that society wants to use laughter to make fun of people who are kind of getting it wrong. Does this mean that that laughter for Bergson is sort of potentially dangerous? In other words, it can, can humor be a kind of invitation to conform too much?

Barry Allen
Well, I suppose Yes. I guess so. I don’t think he he may not have made a problem of that for himself. Maybe he just didn’t get get to it. Yes, humor, it’s all too easy to what, what the best way to start laughing is to get somebody else laughing, and it’s contagious for him. What laughter really does is it punishes inattention to life. You’re not paying attention. You’re behaving like a machine. And that’s what he thinks is funny. It’s a huge reduction, but I don’t think it’s a criminal one to say that that really, most, if not all, of the things that typically people laugh at is someone not paying attention.

Josh Landy
More positive view of laughter. It’s not a way of keeping people in line. It’s more a way of opening people up to the beautiful variety of experience.

Ray Briggs
So if I want to appreciate the beautiful variety of experience, like, okay, one way to do it is jokes. Does Bergson have other suggestions about how to take a step back from the everyday in the humdrum, like, Does art help?

Barry Allen
Well, let me mention before art, I’ll say something about morality, because he distinguishes two modes of morality. There’s the open and there’s the closed. Closed morality, that’s convention, that’s being a normal person, acting in a way that people expect. But open morality, that’s aspiration, that’s caring about justice, caring about about ideals, about liberty, that kind of aspiration is morality would only be just behavior if it weren’t for that kind of aspiration, and it’s it’s unique to individuals, and it requires that they are able to think of themselves as individuals who are capable of acting in their own on their own ideals.

Josh Landy
So wow, that’s a that’s a lovely theory of morality. What would you want us to leave our listeners with as something that they can take away from burkson to imbue their own personal lives with? You started off with a really inspiring way of thinking about the way it’s affected you. How would you want Bergson thinking to affect the lives of our listeners?

Barry Allen
To remember that you’re more than an animal, that you’re more than an organism, that organism is very important, and you got to eat your lunch. But don’t make the mistake of pragmatism or of crude pragmatism, and say that’s it, that’s philosophy. That’s the answer to everything. Remember that there’s always more, and the source of that more is what’s individual about you and what only you can think or do or aspire to.

Josh Landy
That’s such a lovely thought. Barry, super moving, super inspiring. I know that we’re all going to take that to heart. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Barry Allen
Well, I hope I did it right.

Josh Landy
You did it more than right. Our guest has been Barry Allen, professor of philosophy at McMaster University and author of “Living in Time: the Philosophy of Henri Bergson. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking about the spider that lives on my back porch and spins a slightly different version of the same web every day, and how I’m gonna go out this evening and just appreciate that spider because it’s beautiful.

Josh Landy
You are valuingly Useless, and that is high praise. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, which now is completely revamped, but it’s still at philosophy talk.org while you’re there, you can subscribe to our feed for free.

Ray Briggs
Or you can support the program with a premium subscription and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
Now, I don’t know if everything’s in motion, but this guy definitely is—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… At the beginning of the 20th century, explorations were pretty much done, and the world was finally global, paving the way for international trade and World Wars. They’re becoming kind of eye on things, as in panopticon or only virtual also kind of like a voice of history, of news we see here and here today in newscast, documentaries, announcers, carnival barkers, this voice names eras, for one thing, turning historical events into retroactive inevitabilities. The Renaissance, the Dark Ages, we had just gone through the Gilded Age, the current age, already, the modern age, since the French Revolution, was now in this new century, the site of modernism, a cultural movement that reflected how very modern we were. Jazz coming up. World of our newspapers, like the internet, except you just shut up and read giant steam ships and dreadnoughts, fast trains, carnivals roaming the land, hypnotists, burlesque and all the while, women striving. TSL at Ezra Pound, Chautauqua, lyceums, education, newspapers even covered philosophers. Ralph Waldo Emerson made a good living just giving lectures. We didn’t have movies or radio or airplanes or recorded musics. We bonded on our quest for ideas. Except being American, we couldn’t pay total attention to them. So Darwinism became social Darwinism survival of the fittest, a lot more congenial to capitalists looking for excuses to be ruthless. But women and folk were increasingly alarmed. Men were bad enough already. Did science have to encourage them? Anyway, many writers and thinkers had made a mark in America, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Henri Bergson in 1915 was the most famous of all. Born in 1859, he had been a mild mannered professor whose third major work written in 1905 creative evolution made him one of the Western world’s first academic superstars. He took from Leibniz foreshadowed quantum physics and employed Zeno’s arrow to drop duration and volition into an evolutionary model. You have to take a step before I can take another. All steps are informed by the process which informs the process. We plan. We change our minds as part of our essence. We are each unique. We have purpose. Bergson called the intuition the drives of footsteps. Elan vital and restored agency to what modernism had claimed was a mechanistic process. Well, the world just loved it. It was the missing link our new secular world was craving. When he appeared at Columbia University in 1815 the crowds were so large they caused the world’s first traffic jam right there on Broadway. His fame did not last forever, of course, times catch up, radio came along, airplanes, dada, World War One, the Russian Revolution, movies. He didn’t enjoy fame that much being a reserved college professor, plus he had rheumatoid arthritis, which wound up leading to partial paralysis and later bronchitis, from which he died. The consensus seems to be that his influence waned quickly after an encounter he had with Einstein in 1927 Einstein was in France talking to assembled Europeans about relativity. Breaks don’t happen to be in the audience and stuff. To make a query about relativity, which posits, more or less the time passes differently if you’re on a train, when you see a clock. Does the theory take into account bergson’s idea of what time is, duration and whatnot, clock time versus live time? Basically, gloves off. Let’s go. How many years have elapsed? The nine times French wasn’t that good, but supposedly, he said, somewhat brusquely, there’s no time of the philosopher. There’s only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist. Well, it wasn’t much of a slam, really, but it turned out to be a nail in the coffin of brick stones. Reputation. He doesn’t understand relativity. He doesn’t understand time. We don’t either. But how dare he challenge the smartest man in the world? Oh, wait, wasn’t Bergson the smartest man in the world? No, that was Isaac Newton. And Isaac Newton, and now it’s Einstein. Well, a lot of wonders gone under the bridge since those heady days. World War Two, surrealism, television, rock and roll, Public Radio. We don’t see much Alain vital anymore, but it seems to me, it is burlesque. You might say, by zombies, step, by shambling step. They never stop. They might not have brains, but they love to eat them and have oodles of intuition. Of course, we only find zombies now in our darkest dreams and in every other six part mini series on Netflix, except we just binge watch now, which is like watching a mini series when you do the whole six hours at once. And that’s evolution in action. I guess. See where free will got us. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Karen Adjluni, Steve Choy and Linda Fagan.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk.org where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Henri Bergson
Quel est l’objet de l’art? Si la réalité venait frapper directment nos sens et notre conscience, je crois bien que l’art serait inutile.