Bergson and Phenomenology This page intentionally left blank Bergson and Phenomenology

Edited by Michael R. Kelly Department of , Boston College, USA

palgrave macmillan Selection and editorial matter © Michael R. Kelly 2010 Chapters © their individual authors 2010 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-20238-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and countries. ISBN 978-1-349-30045-7 ISBN 978-0-230-28299-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230282995 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bergson and phenomenology / edited by Michael R. Kelly. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-349-30045-7 1. Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941. 2. Phenomenology. I. Kelly, Michael R., 1974– B2430.B43B4215 2010 194—dc22 2010010812 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Contents

Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction: Bergson’s Phenomenological Reception: the Spirit of a Dialogue of Self-Resistance 1 Michael R. Kelly Part I Reading Bergson Anew: a Foundation for the Bergson/Phenomenology Debate 1 Intuition and Duration: an Introduction to Bergson’s ‘Introduction to ’ 25 Leonard Lawlor 2 Bergson on the Driven Force of Consciousness and Life 42 Rudolf Bernet 3 Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on Experience and Science 63 Gary Gutting 4 Man Falls Down: Art, Life and Finitude in Bergson’s Essay on Laughter 78 Stephen Crocker Part II Intersections: the Bergson/Phenomenology Debate 5 Intuition and Freedom: Bergson, Husserl and the Movement of Philosophy 101 Hanne Jacobs and Trevor Perri 6 Life, Thinking and Phenomenology in the Early Bergson 118 Dan Zahavi 7 A Criticism of Sartre’s Concept of 134 Pete A.Y. Gunter 8 Life as Vision: Bergson and the Future of Seeing Differently 148 Alia Al-Saji 9 Miracles of Creation: Bergson and Levinas 174 Nicolas de Warren 10 The Psycho-Physics of Phenomenology: Bergson and Henry 201 John Mullarkey

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Part III Life-World and Life: the Fundament of the Bergson/Phenomenology Debate 11 From the World of Life to the Life-World 223 Pierre Kerszberg 12 Consciousness or Life? Bergson between Phenomenology and Metaphysics 245 Frédéric Worms 13 The Failure of Bergsonism 258 Renaud Barbaras

Index 273 Acknowledgements

Many people in many ways contributed to the production of this collec- tion and made it a more manageable and pleasant undertaking. Priyanka Gibbons remained committed to a project that she inherited when she came to Palgrave, and I am very grateful for her kind support and contin- ued endorsement. I also want to thank Dee Mortensen and Anne Roeckline at Indiana University Press for patiently and understandingly guiding me through the acquisition of rights for Renaud Barbaras’s essay reproduced herein. Trevor Perri offered his time and provided a careful eye in reviewing the consistency of my proofing, formatting and copy-editing of the volume. He carried out this task diligently. Any errors that remain are mine and surely have been minimized thanks to his generous efforts. I also want to thank Bob Vallier (with John Nale), Mark Sentesy and Joe Spadula for their care- ful translations of essays by Renaud Barbaras, Frédéric Worms and Pierre Kerszberg, respectively. And Renaud Barbaras is owed thanks for patiently and professionally working with me on his contribution to the volume. Two people perhaps on slightly different sides of the Bergson/Phenom- enology debate played integral roles in the volume at a very early stage, Rudolf Bernet and Leonard Lawlor. Rudolf backed the project by lending his name to my invitation to contributors. His well-earned authority in the world of surely reinforced the importance of this kind of philosophical dialogue and very likely inspired other phenomenologically minded contributors to participate. Len backed the project in many ways throughout, and my greatest debt of gratitude is to him. Like Rudolf, Len agreed to back the project from the time that I circulated invitations. I believe that if he had not put his name and very fine reputation behind my invitation, I probably would not (and certainly would not easily) have secured the contributions from Bergsonists. Len put me contact with the people at Palgrave, and his support greatly reduced the stress and uncertainty of convincing a press of the value of this project. In a specific regard, Len charitably and enthusiastically facilitated my contact with Renaud Barbaras, acquired on my behalf a translator for Renaud’s contribution, and put me in contact with Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press when it came time to work through copyright matters. His commitment to the importance of not letting Bergson’s thought once again go neglected, I think, prompted him to remain very present in, but very qui- etly behind, this project. From start to finish, this volume depends deeply and in large part on Len’s generosity of time and spirit.

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I also must thank Indiana University Press (with Vrin) for allowing me to reproduce in this volume a translation of a chapter from Renaud Barbaras’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Life and Presses Universitaires de for allowing me to reproduce in translation the essay from Frédéric Worms. Finally, I thank my wife, Sabrina, for her love and support throughout the process. She lives graciously with me, even when I am working; she lives apart from me, so that I can work in a different city. I realize that these are not always easy ways to live, and I am more grateful to her than I likely express. Acknowledgment is due to Indiana University Press for permission to print Renaud Barbaras, ‘The Failure of Bergsonism,’ which will appear in Renaud Barbaras, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming) and originally appeared in Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 141–55, for which translation Indiana University Press owns the rights. Acknowledgement is also due to Presses Universitaires de France for per- mission to print in translation Frédéric Worms, ‘La conscience ou la vie? Bergson entre phénomenologie et métaphysique,’ which first appeared in Annales Bergsoniennes II: Bergson, Deleuze, La Phénoménologie, ed. Frédéric Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 191–206. Notes on Contributors

Alia Al-Saji is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. Her research explores questions of embodiment, memory and . In her published work, she seeks to develop an account of the temporality of the lived body and of , drawing on the works of and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She has also written on time in Husserl, Bergson and Deleuze and on the appropriations of Bergson by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In addition to several anthologies, her articles have appeared in such journals as the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Research in Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy Review and Philosophy Today. Her current work interrogates the critical and ethical potential of vision through a feminist and phenomenological lens. Renaud Barbaras is Professor of at l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. Among his ten published books are De l’être du phénomène – Sur l’ontologie de Merleau-Ponty (1991; Prix d’Aumale de l’Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, 1992, reprinted in 2001, and translated into English by L. Lawlor and T. Toadvine (2003)); Le désir et la distance – Introduction à une phénoménologie de la perception (1999, reprinted in 2006, and translated into English by Paul Milan (2005) and Czech by Josef Fulka (2005)); Le mouvement de l’existence. Etudes sur la phénoménologie de Jan Patocˇka (2007); Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie (2008) with an English translation by Robert Vallier forthcoming. Rudolf Bernet is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and President of the Husserl Archives. He has studied at the uni- versities of Louvain/Leuven and Heidelberg and has been the President of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für phänomenologische Forschung. He is on the editorial board of numerous philosophical and psychoanalytic journals. As a guest professor he taught at the universities of Nice, Copenhagen, Rome, Boston College, State University of New York at Stony Brook and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2008 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt-Forschungspreis. Rudolf Bernet has prepared critical editions of Husserl’s late writings on time (1985, 2001) and published more than 200 articles in French, German, English and Dutch in the fields of phe- nomenology, psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy. Together with D. Welton and G. Zavota he edited : Critical Assessments of Leading , 5 vols (2005). His books include An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (in collaboration with I. Kern and E. Marbach) (1993), La vie du sujet (1994) and Conscience et existence (2004).

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Stephen Crocker is Associate Professor of Sociology and Humanities at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. His interests range across philosophy, social theory and aesthetics. He has written on the phenom- enology of time and anticipation; the evolution of the plane in painting, film and philosophy; and on mediation and media in the work of, among others, , Henri Bergson, Michel Serres, and Marshall McLuhan. His work has appeared in Philosophy Today, Continental Philosophy Review, ctheory, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Topia, Cultural Values and various anthologies. Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College, USA, and has been a visiting faculty member of the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research and Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille3. His most recent publications include a book on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenol- ogy of inner time-consciousness, The Promise of Time (2009), and transla- tions of the Vietnamese Tran Duc Thao. He is currently writing a phenomenological study of the imagination. Pete A.Y. Gunter is currently Regents’ University Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas, USA. A lifelong environmentalist, he was instru- mental in creating and enlarging the Big Thicket National Preserve in Southeast Texas, the first such preserve in the history of the National Park Service. A proc- ess philosopher, he has written widely on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and on the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Lecomte du Nouy and George Herbert Mead. Among his books are Bergson and the Evolution of Physics (1969), Bergson and Modern Thought (1987) and Creativity in George Herbert Mead (1990). Among his environmental writings are The Big Thicket: an Ecological Reevaluation (1993) and Texas Land Ethics (1997) with Max Oelschlaeger. Professor Gunter played a major role in creating the program in Environmental Ethics at the University of North Texas. Gary Gutting teaches at the University of Notre Dame, USA, where he holds the Notre Dame Endowed Chair in Philosophy. He is the author of six books: Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (1982), Michel ’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (1989), Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (1999), in the Twentieth Century (2001), : a Very Short Introduction (2005) and What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy (2009). He has co-authored or edited another six volumes. Hanne Jacobs is a doctoral student in philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and is supported by the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO). She is a member of the research center of the Husserl Archives where she has worked as a transcriptor of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. She is currently completing an edition of the Husserliana Materialien series entitled, Einleitung in die Philosophie 1919/20. Notes on Contributors xi

Michael R. Kelly teaches philosophy at Boston College, USA. His research interests and publications primarily deal with Husserl’s reception in the phe- nomenological tradition and history of philosophy, particularly with respect to time and intentionality, as well as Bergson’s relation to phenomenology.

Pierre Kerszberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toulouse, France. His areas of research include history and , Kant and phenomenology. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Brussels in 1982 and his Habilitation from the in 1998. In addition to numerous articles in French and English, his books include The Invented Universe (1989), Critique and Totality (1997), Kant et la nature (1999) and L’Ombre de la nature (2009). He has held professorships at the University of Sydney (1987–89) and Pennsylvania State University (1990–2000). He is a member of the Center for Research in Applied (CREA, Polytechnic School, Paris).

Leonard Lawlor is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of six books: This is not Sufficient: an Essay on Animality in Derrida (2007), The Implications of Immanence: Towards a New Concept of Life (2006), Derrida and Husserl: the Basic Problem of Phenomenology (2002), Thinking through French Philosophy: the Being of the Question (2003), The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (2003) and Imagination and Chance: the between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (1992). He is one of the co-editors of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. He has translated Merleau- Ponty and Hyppolite into English. He has written dozens of articles on Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Gadamer. He is translating Merleau-Ponty’s L’institution, la passivité for publication and he is writing two books: Never will there be enough Written: an Essay on the Problem of the Worst in Deleuze and Guattari and Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside.

John Mullarkey, born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated at University College, Dublin, University College, London, and the University of Warwick, has taught philosophy for the last 15 years at the University of Sunderland, England (1994–2004) and the University of Dundee, Scotland (2004 to date). His major publications include Bergson and Philosophy (1999), Post- Continental Philosophy: an Outline (2006) and Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (2009).

Trevor Perri is a doctoral student in philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and is supported by the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO). He is working on Bergson and French phenomenology. Frédéric Worms is Professor at the Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille3 and Director of the Centre international d’étude de la philosophie française xii Notes on Contributors contemporaine at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. His major publica- tions include Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie (2004) and La philosophie en France au XX ° siècle (2009). Director of the Annales bergsoniennes (4 volumes published), he is also the coordinator of the critical edition of Bergson’s works (2007–11). His personal research leads towards a philosophy of vital and moral relationships. Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He obtained his PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1994 and his Dr.phil. (Habilitation) from the University of Copenhagen in 1999. He was elected as a member of the Institut International de Philosophie in 2001 and of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2007. He served as president of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology from 2001–07, and is currently co-editor in chief of the jour- nal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In his systematic work, Zahavi has mainly been investigating the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. His most important publications include Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität (1996), Self-awareness and (1999), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005) and together with Shaun Gallagher The Phenomenological Mind (2008).