Gathering Intelligence from Taine to Bergson Zakir Paul L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 56, Number 4, Winter 2016, pp. 146-159 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/646899 Access provided by University of Wisconsin @ Madison (27 Jan 2017 18:48 GMT) Gathering Intelligence from Taine to Bergson Zakir Paul ARCEL PROUST DID NOT think philosophers were good read- ers of his novel. In an essay on Flaubert’s style, Proust complains M that philosophers misunderstand the ambitions of his own prose by focusing on his use of concepts. The only example we are given of a par- ticular word that is prone to being misread by philosophers is “intelligence.”1 Proust’s passing reference underscores the dramatic semantic and philosoph- ical transformations of the term “intelligence” since the early modern period, which exposed it to a conflict of interpretation at the cusp of the twentieth century. This article analyzes one stage in the genealogy of “intelligence”: it examines how the notion rearticulated the nature and limits of psychic life in the latter half of the nineteenth century, focusing especially on Hippolyte Taine’s De l’intelligence (1870) and Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice (1907).2 Taine and Bergson describe two mutually exclusive paths for intelligence. Taine’s empiricism questions the existence of the faculty, replacing it with what Hilary Nias dubs an “artificial self,” a subject produced by involuntary neural reactions and semiotic substitutions that stands at the limits of mad- ness.3 In this view, intelligence is only a guardrail that keeps the mind from falling into perpetual error. In contrast, Bergson takes intelligence to be a pragmatic drive to adapt and transform matter that has evolved beyond its scope. His response is to think in a way that places limits on the power of intelligence, allowing intuition to correct its usurpation over life. These two paths—the artificial and the vital—map out the looming cognitive and philo- sophical terrain for thinking about intelligence and its influence on modern French literature.4 Between equality and distinction Before turning to Taine and Bergson, it is worth specifying the semantic valences of intelligence available to them, while clarifying how the notion dif- fers from esprit. As Lorraine Daston argues, the general, quantitative, and putatively morally neutral notion of intelligence is “brashly modern.”5 French thought ascribes two modes of knowing to intelligence: knowledge as “poten- tial or ability” and knowing as “simple possession of knowledge.”6 Émile Littré’s 1874 dictionary offers eight definitions of intelligence. These include the faculty or act of understanding; spiritual substance; an artist’s capacity to © L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 56, No. 4 (2016), pp. 146–159 ZAKIR PAUL produce effects; a rhetorical capacity to achieve certain results; communica- tion among like-minded people; and a secret accord or unity or feeling.7 While many of these meanings date back to the seventeenth century, the concept became “socially charged” in the post-Revolutionary period. As John Carson puts it, “champions of the Enlightenment and practical revolutionaries alike” used intelligence as a partial basis for social distinction that was no longer explicitly guaranteed by class.8 Ceasing to refer to knowledge, it described either a shared or a personally possessed intellectual ability. From the nine- teenth century onward, the concept shifted “from referring to a general faculty to […] an individual attribute,” from plural talents to a singular intelligence, and from limited to expansive cultural significance.9 The difficulty nineteenth-century theorists encountered in translating ear- lier terms that designate the capacity to think and know illuminates the history of mind-body dualisms, and the consequent development of epistemology and metaphysics into national philosophical traditions. For Étienne Balibar, the Latin word mens is paradigmatic: from Descartes onward, it was translated as both esprit and âme in French, which created a tension within philosophy that various epistemologists (and some theologians) sought to resolve in different ways.10 Intelligence, by contrast, stems from intellegere, which suggests that we are dealing with the ability to link or read otherwise disconnected elements together (inter-legere or -ligere).11 This linking ability severs the connection between intelligence and the spiritual dimension proper to esprit (as used by some French-language philosophers). While the association with divinity endured in the notion of a higher intelligence that could ground human thought, nineteenth-century “intelligence” adhered to the movement of life, rather than divine inspiration. Burdened with theological, revolutionary, and idealist connotations (especially in Victor Cousin’s thought), esprit increas- ingly designated collective historical consciousness, while the more malleable “intelligence” became a watchword in science and aesthetics.12 From 1870 to 1927, intelligence dominated the esprit du temps.13 Scientists employed the term to differentiate between the normal and the pathological in the wave of positivist psychological studies that culminated in the invention of intelligence testing. The Ministry of Public Instruction chose Alfred Binet, an eclectic psychologist and a student of Jean-Martin Charcot, to devise a test to identify those unable to profit from compulsory education in a ‘normal’ manner because of the state of their intelligence. Popularized and distorted beyond their original application, intelligence tests furnished a scale to evalu- ate and rank individuals according to mental fitness and adaptability, drawing attention to their supposedly innate qualities at the expense of their ability to VOL. 56, NO. 4 147 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR learn.14 Part of the larger history of the subjectivization and naturalization of reason in modernity, “intelligence” in the nineteenth century became general, measurable, biological, innate, and unequal. Thinkers in fields from physiology and evolutionary biology to experimental psychology and philosophy fought to control the meaning of a term that paradoxically appeared at once universal and particular, republican and elitist, innate and acquired, measurable and incalculable.15 Perhaps for this very reason, it promised to clarify the enigmatic nature of subjectivity and the movement of life itself. Taine’s true hallucinations Taine’s view of intelligence radically limited the purview of the mind while simultaneously making it the ultimate theatre of human endeavor. No fewer than seventeen editions of De l’intelligence appeared between 1870 and 1933. After the decline of Cousin and of Auguste Comte, Taine became a leading intellectual figure in French philosophical circles.16 He quickly distanced himself from thinkers in favor, criticizing Adolphe Garnier, François-Pierre-Gonthier Maine de Biran, and especially Cousin for their eclecticism.17 Admired by contempo- raries from John Stuart Mill to Friedrich Nietzsche, Taine’s unorthodox career led to his election to the Académie Française in 1878. His larger zoologie de l’e- sprit—spanning aesthetics, criticism, as well as cultural and social history— adapted the methods of natural sciences to aesthetics without using explicitly metaphysical foundations.18 Taine’s program for modern aesthetics was to define the nature of each art historically rather than dogmatically, that is, not by impos- ing precepts but by discerning laws.19 The triad he employed to make literary his- tory scientific was “race, milieu, moment”: a systematic consideration of the hereditary, sociological, and historical conditions in which a work was written. Each work could thus be situated in the era from which it emerged, which Taine, in a Hegelian turn of phrase, called its “état général d’esprit” (Philosophie de l’art 55). As the critic increasingly understood the political upheavals of the age through the movement of spirit and natural law, he came to eschew his dissident political views and turn inward to explain the workings of the mind.20 “La vie politique nous est interdite,” he declared, “le seul chemin est la science pure ou la pure littérature” (Vie 1:205). Taine saw De l’intelligence as part of a tradition established by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Hermann von Helmholtz, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain.21 He professed that his book contained the root of all his historical and moral ideas (Vie 2:341). Taine’s epistemology offers a restricted theory of the subject, presenting knowledge as a sequence of “events” inexplicable in terms of spirit. However, 148 WINTER 2016 ZAKIR PAUL it casts doubt upon the existence of intelligence, suggesting that esprit is con- stantly at the threshold of madness, and intelligence is limited to restricting associative chains of images. Mind stumbles upon truth only in error: “Notre esprit touche juste en visant mal” (Intelligence 2:190). Taine places error in lieu of method. His eccentric system—inspired by evolution, anatomy, phys- iology, the second law of thermodynamics, literary criticism, and narrative fiction—depicts intelligence as a drive to conform to one’s surroundings, one whose insights are at best partial and random, at worst blindly destructive. The Tainian subject receives impressions via sensations, which form images in the mind. These images become phantom sensations, less fleeting once memorized. While