The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (99 page)

It is important to appreciate that the virtual/actual distinction is not at all the same as another distinction that Bergson acknowledges, the possible/real distinction. (Here a caveat is required. Bergson’s usage of these terms – or rather, his usage of their French equivalents – is awkwardly out of sync with a tendency in contemporary English usage, namely to contrast the virtual with the real and to contrast the possible, or the merely possible, with the actual. A graphic illustration of this was supplied in
Ch. 13
, where we saw Lewis arguing that all possible worlds are equally real though all but one of them is merely possible, the exception being the one that is actual. This is a frustrating terminological discrepancy that we must simply live with and beware of. Throughout this chapter, I adhere to Bergson’s usage.) Bergson’s distinctions cut right across each other. The virtual is as much a part of reality as the actual. The actual, conversely, is as much a part of various unrealized possibilities as the virtual.

One way to register the difference between the two distinctions is by reflecting on Lewis’ modal realism, which furnishes a particularly extreme account of the second of them. On this account there are infinitely many possible worlds which, despite differences of detail between them, are no different in basic kind from one another. One of them, the real world (or the ‘actual’ world, in Lewis’ own terminology), is the one that
we
inhabit. When we say that a possibility is realized, we mean that the real world belongs to some given range of possible worlds, which is of course equivalent to saying that it does not belong to the complement of that range. It follows that,
except in the limit case in which a possibility is also a necessity, the realization of one possibility is always
eo ipso
the non-realization of others.

Bergson would have deep misgivings about this account, as we shall see. But there are two core ideas here which are no less a feature of his own conception of the possible/real distinction:

(1) The possible, even the merely possible, is of the same basic kind as the real.

(2) The realization of a contingent possibility is always the non-realization of others.
²²

Neither has any analogue where the virtual/actual distinction is concerned. The virtual is of a completely different kind from the actual. And the actualization of a virtual tendency is never in any sense the non-actualization of others. Deleuze puts it as follows:

The rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation…. [In] order to be actualized, the virtual … must
create
its own lines of actualization in positive acts…. [It] is forced … to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized. (Deleuze (
1988b
), p. 97, emphasis in original)

Even the spherical Plasticine ball that sits still and retains its shape does so only in the context of change round about it. The identity of things, both through their own changes and through surrounding changes, is a product of those changes, not they of it. (See the next section.
²³
) Actualization proceeds through the ceaseless creation of novelty.
²⁴

Might there be a marriage between Bergson and Lewis? Consider the following view, which I shall call the Hybrid View.

The Hybrid View
: The virtual/actual distinction is, just as Bergson insists it is, quite different from the possible/real distinction. But the former can be explained in terms of the latter, understood in a Lewisian way. The virtual tendencies in any given possible world
w
at any given time
t
can be considered as the set of possible worlds
w
* such that (i)
w
* is just like
w
up to
t
and (ii)
w
* shares with
w
certain patterns of change, laws of nature, or the like.
²⁵
The subsequent actualization of these tendencies in
w
consists in what happens in
w
beyond
t
.

The Hybrid View seems to give Bergson everything he wants. In particular, the virtual/actual distinction admits of no analogue of either (1) or (2). The virtual is of a completely different kind from the actual: the actual is a matter of what happens within a world; the virtual is a matter of how what has happened within a world, up to any given time, along with various principles of development that characterize that world, constrain the possibilities for what will happen thereafter, or, more strictly, delimit the set of worlds to which that world belongs. Again, the actualization of the virtual does not in any sense necessitate the non-actualization of some other virtual. The Hybrid View also makes clear why Bergson’s two distinctions cut across each other. The virtual is as much a feature of the real world as what actually happens there. And conversely, actual happenings are as much a feature of other possible worlds as the worlds’ ever-changing virtual tendencies.

Nevertheless, the Hybrid View would be an anathema to Bergson. The principal reason for this does not lie where it may appear to lie. It may appear to lie in how little the view retains of Bergson’s distinctive conception of the virtual and its actualization. For instance, on Bergson’s conception, the virtual, which is the past of duration, and which continues into the present, grows with its continual actualization. On the Hybrid View, the virtual, which is a particular set of worlds, and which is indexed to a time,
shrinks
with its continual actualization – in the sense that the set corresponding to any given time is a proper superset of the set corresponding to any later time.
²⁶
(We could call this the ‘zip fastening’ view of actualization.) But this is not the discrepancy that it appears to be. It is in fact nothing more than a reflection of (2) above: there is no growth in reality except at the expense of other possibilities.

The principal reason why the Hybrid View would be an anathema to Bergson lies not in how little it retains of his conception of the virtual and its actualization. It lies in how little it retains of his conception of the possible and its realization. Bergson’s conception of the possible is fundamentally different from Lewis’. On Lewis’ conception, the possible is transcendent
and abiding. On Bergson’s conception, the possible is immanent and ever-changing. Bergson holds that the possible, no less than the virtual, grows over time. In particular, possibilities beyond a certain level of specificity do not antedate their realization. Thus consider some event that has occurred, say a football match. In Bergson’s view, nothing so specific was even possible beforehand. True, something of this or that broad kind, say a victory for the away side, was possible; and something of that very particular kind can be said, in retrospect, to have been possible, in the quite different and quite innocuous sense that ‘there was no insurmountable obstacle to its realization’ (‘The Possible and the Real’, p. 102; cf. ‘Introduction I’, pp. 21–22). But in the sense that is of primary concern to Bergson, the sense that has been in play so far in this chapter and will remain in play hereafter, the match itself, in all its unforeseeable detail, actually brought in its train its own possibility, just as it brought in its train untold further possibilities, such as the possibility of that particular game’s being discussed by television pundits a dozen years from now. (See ‘The Possible and the Real’, passim.)

It is plain how Lewis would respond to these suggestions. He would accuse Bergson of conflating epistemological issues with ontological issues, of illegitimately inferring from the fact that there was no knowing about some given possibility at some given time that there
was
no such possibility at that time. Once we have extricated the ontological from the epistemological, Lewis would say, we have licence to view possible worlds as spatio-temporally unified cosmoses, any one of which, including this world, exists in complete detail throughout all eternity.

And it is equally plain how Bergson would respond to this accusation. He in turn would accuse Lewis of committing the basic error of trying to understand through analysis what can be understood only through intuition, of trying to see
sub specie
æternitatis
what can be seen only ‘
sub specie durationis
’ (‘Change’, p. 158). But
can
that which is abstract, such as a possibility, come into existence at a particular time, as Bergson’s view requires? To think not, Bergson would say, is severely to compromise the very idea of creation (‘The Possible and the Real’, pp. 92ff.).
²⁷
It is to think, by implication, that there can be no pure creation except the creation
ex nihilo
of something concrete, that any other act of so-called creation is really an act of discovery, if only the discovery of some possibility of reconfiguration, perhaps accompanied by the relevant reconfiguring. How plausible, Bergson would ask, is that? Does a sculptor, by chipping away at a block of stone, discover a statue inside? Does painting involve discovering some arrangement of pigment on one’s canvas? Are dramatic works discovered?
²⁸

It is certainly true that reflection on the idea of creation lends some intuitive support (in the colloquial, non-Bergsonian sense of ‘intuitive’) to Bergson’s view. But I see nothing in these rhetorical questions to dislodge an inveterate opponent, who can simply hold fast to the idea that, insofar as pure creation consists in bringing something into existence without rearranging already available material,
²⁹
then none of the examples in question
is
an example of pure creation. (Thus consider the passage in which Bergson describes a conversation in which he was asked, ‘How do you conceive … the great dramatic work of tomorrow?’ and replied, ‘If I knew what was to be the great dramatic work of the future, I should be writing it’ (‘The Possible and the Real’, p. 100). The fact is, his opponent can get just as much purchase out of that anecdote.) Note, however, something that will be especially pertinent to the discussion in §6(c), that there is one sort of innovation which, whether it is to be described as pure creation or as a kind of discovery, is marked by an unpredictability of the most extreme form. I am thinking of the introduction of radically new concepts or, more generally, of radically new ways of making sense of things.
³⁰
Obviously, the writing of a dramatic work is unforeseeable in the sense that fully to foresee it would already be to have written the work. But the introduction of a radically new way of making sense of things is unforeseeable in the more profound sense that, until that way of making sense of things has been introduced, there is no way even of making sense of its introduction. It is at least natural to say, even if Bergson’s opponent remains resolved not to say, that the introduction of a radically new way of making sense of things brings its own possibility with it and is an act of pure creation.
³¹

For Bergson, it is not only an act of pure creation. It is a paradigm of freedom. He writes:

Even those [philosophers] who have believed in free will, have reduced it to a simple ‘choice’ between two or more alternatives, as if these alternatives were ‘possibles’ outlined beforehand, and as if the will was limited to ‘bringing about’ … one of them…. They seem to have no idea whatever of an act which might be entirely new … and which in no way would exist, not even in the form of the purely possible, prior to its realization. But this is the very nature of a free act. (‘Introduction I’, p. 19)

He also goes on to insist that ‘to perceive [freedom] thus, as indeed we must do with any creation, novelty or unpredictable occurrence whatever, we have to get back into pure duration’ (ibid.). This illustrates a general feature of Bergson’s conception of philosophy. The problem of how to make sense of freedom is one of many traditional philosophical problems which
he believes can be solved only by an exercise of intuition.
³²
Duration, the continuation of the virtual past into the actual present through nature’s endlessly innovative self-creation, is in Bergson’s view the very essence not only of freedom but also of consciousness and of life itself. A proper philosophical grasp of any of these phenomena requires an exercise of intuition.
³³

4. Identity versus Difference

In §7(b) of the previous chapter I drew attention to one important contrast between the analytic tradition in philosophy and some of the traditions represented in
Part Three
of this book. In the former there is a tendency to prioritize identity over difference. In the latter there is the opposite tendency. Bergson provides a striking illustration of this. Precisely what intelligence does, on Bergson’s view, is to abstract from differences in things to arrive at stable concepts applicable to discrete entities. It imposes the concept of identity onto things. Their own unwrought reality is a reality of mutually permeating differences, graspable only by intuition.

Analytic philosophers, to hark back to that earlier section, find it difficult to think of difference save in negative terms. The reasons for this are many and complex, and they may not be entirely philosophical. But they centrally include the fact that it would be impossible to recast the standard logic of numerical identity in terms of difference without the use of negation. That logic comprises two principles: (i) if
a
=
b
and
a
has feature
F
, then
b
has feature
F
; and (ii)
a
=
a
.
³⁴
True, (i) can arguably be recast in terms of difference as follows: if
a
is qualitatively different from
b
, then
a
is numerically different from
b
. But then to give an adequate explication of this notion of qualitative difference would in turn be impossible without the use of negation.