Bergson with “Deleuze’s Grounding Heuristic”

Extended discussion

Through the dialogue that this piece, published in last months issue, has been a catalyst to, I’ve been fortunate enough to have my attention drawn to a number of interesting arguments that work alongside or underneath the one I have presented.

The first of these is contained in a short essay by Henri Bergson entitled The Possible and The Real from his 1946 essay collection, The Creative Mind. Deleuze’s admiration and indebtedness to Bergson is no secret, and in this essay Bergson presents an account of “possibility” that perfectly pre-figures the Deleuzian concept that formed the center of my piece.

In Bergson’s view we have a deficient understanding of possibility. This deficient idea is based on the following conceit of “intelligence” (which he opposes to thought):

“our intelligence thinks of the origin and the evolution of all this (world) as an arrangement and rearrangement of parts that would be doing nothing more than changing places. Therefore it could, in theory, anticipate any state of arrangement and assembly; by starting with a definite number of stable elements, one is implicitly furnishing oneself in advance with all possible combinations.” (Bergson)

In other words, the determinist, mechanistic, vision that sees the events of the past as inevitable, and the events of the future as predictable and devoid of novelty.

Most importantly for us is his further argument concerning how the birth of thing is prefigured by intelligence as an absence of the thing, of a void or nothingness. It would be, as Žižek would say, a “positively charged void”. Here the void is charged with all of it possible occupants, and then one is realized. The possibilities are ordered via the structural logic of the arrangements of parts. Thus, certain occupants, in their possibility, are more possible than others. This makes it possible to predict the arrival of the “next thing”. Where this breaks down, he argues, is when we ask the supreme metaphysical question of the origin of Being itself, or the universe; the classic “why is there something rather than nothing?”. However, the error in this line of reasoning (of a void preceding the thing) can be seen in even simpler cases: “How ever did we manage before x?”. What this question presupposes is that there was a time before x that featured the absence of x, and thus x as pure possibility, which x came to fill in its realization. In truth, we managed fine before x, there was no void in the heart of the world, just as right now, there is no void, y, in the heart of our lives, and we manage just fine.

In opposition to this Bergson puts forward the image of Being devoid of absence — everywhere and always full. For example, when we search for something and do not find it, it is not the case we find the absence of the thing, but we find something not sought for, which we then actively suppress. I look for my keys and find some coins, thus, I conclude, my keys are missing. Truthfully (and frustratingly) my keys are exactly where they are (where ever that is), and the coins are perfectly here. The absence is created by the fact that, right now, I am not concerned with coins, but with keys. There is here some oblique connection to the old joke: “Why do you always find something in the very last place you look? — Because you stop looking once you find it.”

This is why the question of the origin of Being is misfounded. In that time before time, there seems to be an absence (one does not find the universe), but what is it that one finds there, that one then suppresses such that a void or absence can appear (the way the coins are suppressed to create the absence of the keys)? Absence is always a dual phenomenon, “suppression” is always, in fact, a “substitution” (keys for coins). The “void” that precedes the universe is, then, an absurdity.

Furthermore, he argues, the very order upon which knowledge is founded works in a similar fashion. Order is opposed to disorder, but disorder is just another order which is not well suited to us. For example, a room is only messy relative to the certain ways of using it. The papers and books on my desk do not need to be vaporized into the void in order to create a more ordered environment, it is enough that I simply transform their current arrangement into one that makes it easier for me to use my desk (by placing the books into the bookshelf, and the papers into the bin, for example). Likewise with the order in nature — for example our infatuation with the absolute beginning of self-replicating chemical evolution. This sudden arise of order out of the primordial soup astounds us, until we realize that the primordial soup had its own order, just one that doesn’t interest us as much. In this uninteresting “disorder”, we see a void of life, or order, but in fact we’re just not finding the thing we are looking for. Self replicating chemical life is, thus, just another order among many, but one that interests us immensely. When we think of all of the possible “dis-ordered” arrangements (without self-replicating chemicals), we are dizzyed and astounded that just this particular one should arise. However, the world just churns out its novelty, and we seize upon those few arrangements, in line with our concerns, that are of interest to us here in the present.