When Marshall McLuhan mentions Henri Bergson at all, it is in a dismissive tone. The reasons why are simple enough. McLuhan was a Thomist inspired by Jacques Maritain, a fellow convert to Catholicism and student of Bergson at The Sorbonne. Bergson’s philosophy of Creative Evolution(1907 in French)—of a rising spirit of change and time coursing through and animating material nature—had at first inspired Maritain out of the nihilism which the otherwise mechanical, scientistic and secular curriculum of the University of Paris had instilled in him. After graduation, however, Maritain fell deeply into the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and subsequently retrieved Thomism for the 20th century with a harsh critique of his beloved professor’s secular spiritualism in 1913.

Here we have it then; the most thorough-going, most intelligent anti-intellectualism,—Bergsonian anti-intellectualism,—compromises and destroys man’s freedom just as much as the intellectualism of Parmenides, Spinoza, Leibnitz and Hegel. Let us realize that intelligence alone can correct intelligence and that if we wish to cure the soul of the false intellectualism of Spinoza and Hegel, which measures being upon thought and to which the dogmatism of our pseudo-savants bears but a faint and crude resemblance, there is only one means, only one remedy: authentic intellectualism,—submission to the real,—which measures thought upon being.

Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (English 1955), pg 266

At issue was the way in which Bergson, after diagnosing the Western malaise as a reliance on logic, rational thinking, and the mechanization of solid objects in fixed Newtonian space, prescribes a surrender or immersion into the constant changing flow and spirit of time and flux. The result would inevitably be, according to Maritain, a failure of rightly-fitting being in the world, owing to a lack of the sufficiently matured or oriented intellectual capacity necessary to rightly embody one’s sense of things. The development of the mature human as described by Aquinas would be forestalled, perpetually contingent upon constant reaction to material conditions.

The Bergsonian theory, moreover, does not escape the drawbacks of dualism, for in it soul and body form an accidental whole, not an essential whole; in it man cannot be regarded as a being composed of a body and a spiritual soul, but only as a soul making use of a body in order to act, and it is the soul by itself alone which would constitute the first subject of action, the human person in the metaphysical sense of the word, if the person could subsist in it.

On the other hand, the Bergsonian theory has all the drawbacks of monism, for it admits between soul and body only a difference of degree or intensity, not a difference in nature; since, according to Bergson, we go by continuous transitions from spirit to matter, since matter is only “inverted psychic,” since the sole reality is becoming, pure change, concrete duration, now ascending, now descending, now concentrated, now diluted, since in short opposites are identical with one another and all is in everything.

Opposites are thus made identical: instead of showing how the soul and the body, while fundamentally distinct, constitute one single and same being, and how opposites harmonize, Bergsonian metaphysics, in fact, seek progressively to attenuate one of the opposites and then the other, to the point that, by scarcely perceptible transitions, one passes on to some notion which is not properly suited to either, but in which each of them disappears. There they are then, placed in continuity and in fact identified; they no longer appear to be anything but different degrees of the same thing (which is not thing, but rather action). This is the way that Bergson identifies body and soul in a certain extensivity, intermediate between the inextended and the extended, in a certain tension, intermediated between quality and quantity, in a certain spontaneity and a certain contingency between freedom and necessity.

Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (English 1955), pgs 237-238

This prediction anticipates N. Katherine Hayles’ retrospective description of the Post Human condition—as being strangely spliced into cybernetic feedback circuits—by over ¾ of a century. Regarding Bernard Wolfe’s 1952 novel Limbo (concerning war in a society of cyborgs) she writes:

Limbo edges uneasily toward [Donna Haraway’s cyborg-]subjectivity and then only with significant reservations. Instead of a circuit, it envisions polarities joined by a hyphen: human-machine, male-female, text-marginalia. The difference between hyphen and circuit lies in the tightness of the coupling (recall Wiener’s argument about the virtues of loose coupling) and in the degree to which the hyphenated subject is transfigured after becoming a cybernetic entity. Whereas the hyphen joins opposites in a metonymic tension that can be seen as maintaining the identity of each, the circuit implies a more reflexive and trans formative union. When the body is integrated into a cybernetic circuit, modification of the circuit will necessarily modify consciousness as well. Connected by multiple feedback loops to the objects it designs, the mind is also an object of design. In Limbo the ideology of the hyphen is threatened by the more radical implications of the cybernetic splice. Like Norbert Wiener, the patron saint of Limbo, Wolfe responds to this threat with anxiety.

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post Human (1999), pg 114

In another post we will get into another critic of Bergson by whom McLuhan was greatly influenced: Percy Wyndham Lewis.

The 1955 re-issue of Maritain’s Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism contains an extensive introduction apologizing for the severe tone of a book written in brash, youthful rebellion against Bergson’s popular influence at the turn of the century. It also includes an added chapter addressing Bergson’s later book, Two Sources of Morality & Religion (1932). Of it, Maritain writes

One fine day, without any notices in the press, without informing any one, not even the author’s closest friends, after twenty-five years of anticipation, the work was published. A classic from the day it appeared, it smashed the narrow framework of the rationalist, idealist and sociologist ethics, or pseudo-ethics; it outlined an ethics which does not shut man in on himself, but reveals and respects in him (and in this the title of the book is remarkably appropriate) the well-springs of moral experience and of moral life. He affirmed in magnificent language, and with new emphasis, that humanity and life can be loved effectually only in Him who is the Principle of humanity and life; he recognized, if not the absolute truth of Christianity, on which he withheld judgement, at least the unique value and transcendence of the fact of Christianity. (pg 326)

In his chapter on dynamic religion, Bergson studies Greek mysticism, Oriental mysticism, the Prophets of Israel, Christian mysticism, and at the conclusion of this study he considers himself justified in saying that Christian mysticism alone has reached real achievement. (pg 328).

An ethics of the cosmic type cannot possibly dispense with a system of the world; the universe of freedom presupposes the universe of nature and fulfills a wish of the latter: I must know where I am and who I am, before knowing, and in order to know, what I should do. All that is fundamentally true; on all that Bergson and Saint Thomas are at one. But it is immediately obvious that the problem now shifts ground and relates to the validity of that metaphysics and system of the world proposed for our consideration. Is the world, as Bergson believes, a creative evolution? Or is it, as Saint Thomas believes, a hierarchy of growing perfections? Is man’s intellect capable of attaining being, and does it consequently possess a power of regulation over life and action so that, as Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it, reason is the proximate rule of human acts? Or indeed is that which keeps man in contact with reality, with the dynamic élan that constitutes the secret of the real, is that, as Bergsonism would have it, a sort of instinct, as it were a vital inspiration, which runs through us from the depths of our souls, an instinct which emotion, above all, is apt to stir into action, to awaken? In each case, clearly enough, the edifice of ethics will be differently constructed. We are grateful to Bergson for having founded his ethics in a metaphysics; but we must note that the metaphysics is the metaphysics of the élan vital, and that the metaphysics of the élan vital does not take into account many essential truths.

Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (English 1955)

In Two Sources, Bergson makes some observations regarding mechanism which undoubtedly anticipate Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of technology as extensions of being. Within the continuity of his own work, Bergson here makes clear what forces are fashioning the “accidental whole” which Maritain and Hayles describe above:

Nature, in endowing us with an essentially tool-making intelligence, prepared for us in this way a certain expansion. But machines which run on oil or coal or “white coal”, and which convert into motion a potential energy stored up for millions of years, have actually imparted to our organism an extension so vast, have endowed it with a power so mighty, so out of proportion to the size and strength of that organism, that surely none of all this was foreseen in this structural plan of our species: here was a unique stroke of luck, the greatest material success of man on the planet. A spiritual impulsion has been given, perhaps, at the beginning: the extension took place automatically, helped as it were by a chance blow of the pick-axe which struck against a miraculous treasure under-ground. Now, in this body, distended out of all proportion, the soul remains what it was, too small to fill it, too weak to guide it. Hence the gap between the two. Hence the tremendous social, political and international problems which are just so many definitions of this gap, and which provoke so many chaotic and ineffectual efforts to fill it. What we need are new reserves of potential energy—moral energy this time. So let us not merely say, as we did above, that the mystical summons up the mechanical. We must add that the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that mechanism should mean mysticism. The origins of the process of mechanization are indeed more mystical than we might imagine. Machinery will find its true vocation again, it will render services in proportion to its power, only if mankind, which it has bowed still lower to earth, can succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenward.

Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality & Religion (1932), pg 267

Clinton Ignatov

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