The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (41 page)

And finally how modern art consummates in the “Aftermath of the Absolute.” In the seventeenth century the sense of the absolute disappears from Western civilization, Christianity declines and is threatened by science and reason. “Our art,” then, is “a questioning of the scheme of things. . . . A new all-embracing conception of art . . . The past seen steadily and whole for the first time. . . . History aims at transposing destiny on to the plane of awareness; art at transmuting it into freedom.” Malraux the Seeker illustrates the power of individual vision by his adoration of the artists of the last four centuries who struggled against the newly secular world. They revealed the power of the artist to “transform a bouquet of flowers into a burning bush.” These heroes are Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, and Van Gogh. And they prove that art needs no ideology, but is itself sacred. “The human power to which art testifies is man’s eternal revenge on a hostile universe . . . a revolt against man’s fate.”

So Malraux concludes that “humanism does not consist in saying: ‘No animal could have done what we have done,’ but in declaring: ‘We have refused to do what the beast within us willed to do,’ and we wish to rediscover Man wherever we discover that which seeks to crush him to the dust.” The sweep and boldness and universality of Malraux’s view is breathtaking. He reveals to us again and again what we had often looked at but never seen. If one reads no other book on the history of art, Malraux’s
Voices of Silence
would awaken us to the grandeur, range, and subtlety of our inheritance—the scope of man’s quest.

Rediscovering Time: Bergson’s Creative Evolution

Just as Job made problems for himself by his faith in one omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, so, as Malraux observed, the modern faith in science and technology created its own new problems. A quantified world was a homogeneous world, oriented toward seeking causes. Not toward the Why but the How. The best thinkers would offer explanations, but no justifications. Technology multiplied data in cataclysmic quantity before meaning could be found or even imagined—opening vast new realms of terra incognita. Never before had Western man known so much about the world or understood so little of his purpose.

By the early twentieth century a galaxy of minds, challenged by this intractable universe, sought new meaning in the very processes of change. Abandoning the breathless quest for absolutes, exhilarated by the flux of the unexpected, they learned to enjoy the mystery in the flow of experience. They justified their doubts of a predictable historic destiny by the new ways of biology, psychology, sociology, and the varieties of religious experience. In place of eternal ideas, they would adore the vitality of an ever-changing world.

The vitalizing spirit of this new way of seeking was the French philosopher and man of letters Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who found the fertile source of this dynamism in a new way of seeing time. To open the European mind to the promise of a world of change—Acton’s “revolution in permanence”—thinkers had to be freed from the narrow channels in which the ways of science had confined them. Western science, making reason and experience their resources for mastering nature, had devised an interpretation that was increasingly mechanistic and materialistic. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and their disciples had sought the laws of physical forces. And Darwin’s
Origin of Species
appeared in the year of Bergson’s birth. “As Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature,” we have heard Friedrich Engels declare at the graveside of his hero in 1883, “so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” Both Marx and Darwin saw the conflict of physical forces in history. For Marx, historic destiny was charted by the conflict of economic classes; for Darwin the rise and decline of species was charted by the conflict of organisms, by natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Evolution, the emergence of higher species (and finally man), was said to be the by-product of physical processes in nature over geologic millennia.

This explanation, somehow, did not satisfy Henri Bergson, a Seeker of the meaning of life. Not because it challenged the Bible and the dogmas of orthodox religion, but rather because it failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of evolution itself, and did not account for human consciousness and the lived experience. Some other force—not merely mechanical—must have been at work.

Creative Evolution
(1911; French edition,
L’Évolution Créatrice,
1907) offered the product of Bergson’s dissatisfaction with the prevailing mechanistic and materialist views of evolution and outlined eloquently his own vitalist view. The book does not evade the technical problems but develops his argument in lively style with commonplace examples to persuade the lay reader. He succeeded in reaching the whole Western world of letters and in 1928 received the Nobel Prize for literature. “Oh, my Bergson,” William James exclaimed when he read the book, “you are a magician and your book is a marvel, a real wonder. . . . But, unlike the works of genius of the Transcendentalist movement (which are so obscure and abominably and inaccessibly written), a pure classic in point of form . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.” When the book appeared, Bergson had already earned acclaim across the literate West with the three brief seminal books that offered the essence of the ideas that would make him one of the most influential writers of the century.

To explain the processes and products of evolution, Bergson argued, there must have been something more than mindless physical forces. The process of natural selection operating on random variations could not explain the evolution of a complex organ like the eye of vertebrates. Evolution supposes that at each stage of development all the parts of an animal and of its organs are varying contemporaneously, for they must function together in order to ensure the survival of the species. Bergson found it implausible to suppose that the coadapted variations in the countless parts of the eye could have been random. What was maintaining the continuity of functions while the various forms were altering? Surely, he proposes, there must have been a vital impulse (
élan vital
) directing the growth of these complex parts and the organism as a whole.

Bergson was led to this suggestion by certain large features in the processes and products of evolution. “Two points are equally striking in an organ like the eye: the complexity of its structure and the simplicity of its function. . . . Just because the act is simple, the slightest negligence on the part of nature in the building of the infinitely complex machine would have made vision impossible.” This suggested, then, that there must have been some other channeling force at work. Bergson called it an impulse—the vital impulse.

The same probability appeared from the fact that evolution advanced from relatively simple organisms to the complex. The earliest living things were unicellular entities well adapted to their environment. Why did not evolution stop at that stage, as pure mechanism would have dictated? Instead, life continued to complicate itself “more and more dangerously.” Does this not make some vital impulse plausible or even necessary to explain the elaboration and multiplication of species? Something must have impelled life, in spite of the risks, to ever-higher levels of organization.

Bergson’s master-insight reached beyond the millennial processes of evolution to describe the uniqueness of current lived experience. He found the meaning of life and its essential character in the lived experience of time. Which also provided his conclusive argument against mechanistic and materialistic dogmas. The prime effort from which the mechanistic view of time sprang was itself a by-product of technology—the idea of clock time, the notion that time could be ticked off and measured in homogeneous units.

On the contrary, Bergson insisted that lived time was
duration.
This simple idea, which appeared in his earliest publications, would dominate and guide his thought and his worldwide influence. Time, he insisted, is just “the stuff” our physical life is made of.

There is . . . no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present—no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so there is no limit to its preservation. Memory . . . is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. . . . In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant. . . .

His elementary idea—the uniqueness of time in the lived experience—was the basis of Bergson’s ideas of memory, freedom, and change. “For an ego which does not change does not
endure. . . .
” “Things do not endure like ourselves.” And
our
enduring is what makes freedom possible. Our freedom, then, is real, but indefinable “just because we
are
free.” Which recalls William James’s observation that “my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” “Finally,” Bergson concluded, “consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself.” “For consciousness,” he wrote, “corresponds exactly to the living being’s power of choice; it is coextensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real action; consciousness is synonymous with invention and with freedom.”

With his flair for the unforgettable metaphor, which made him a literary prophet, he drew on the temptations of the latest technology for his account of human consciousness as “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought.” The word “cinema” had entered English only a decade before. “Reality,” he observed, “has appeared to us as a perpetual becoming. It makes itself or unmakes itself, but it is never something made. Such is the intuition that we have of mind when we draw aside the veil which is interposed between our consciousness and ourselves.” So for Bergson the metaphor of the cinema—a succession of changed images seen in rapid succession—explains both the making of “the mechanistic illusion” and the need for the idea of duration.

Bergson’s role in an age of rising faith in science was thus to liberate Seekers from the search for system and dogma, and to justify their joy in the search. His idea of duration—of lived time—had disposed of the mechanistic view. And he then broadened the sources of knowledge in a way to delight both pragmatists and mystics. For he had “put duration and free choice at the base of things.” He pursued his favorite distinction between the paralyzing static expressed in clock time—the mechanistic spatial view of time—and the fertile dynamic expressed in the flow of lived duration. In
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
(1935; in French, 1932) he developed the difference between the “closed society” dominated by codes of laws and customs and the “open society” expressed in the aspirations of heroes, saints, and mystics. The two sources were intelligence, expressed in science and the static spatial view of experience; and intuition, expressed in duration, lived time, freedom, and creativity, in the works of poets, artists, and mystics. Life could be known only by “bathing in the full stream of experience.”

When Bergson published his
Creative Evolution,
it seemed that the menace to free-flowing thought was a rigid reliance on science and its iron laws, what William James called “the beast, Intellectualism.” So, while some attacked Bergson as “anti-intellectual” he was widely applauded for his vitalism. His ingenious similes and his vivid poetic style had brought him the Nobel Prize for
literature
in 1928. But by 1939 the menace to liberated thought was a belligerent Axis anti-intellectualism, founded on fantasies of blood and race. Bergson, though desperately ailing, seized the opportunity to express his contempt for that barbarism. A few weeks before his death, despite the exemption offered him, at the age of eighty-one he left his sickbed to stand in a queue in order to register as a Jew and so shame the German-inspired Vichy government that had barred Jews from holding educational posts in France. And he renounced all the honors whose retention might have been taken for his approval of the government. He made his position clear in a passage in his will (February 8, 1937):

My reflections have led me closer and closer to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism. I would have become a convert, had I not foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted.

It is not surprising, either, that, impatient as he was with the prosaic rigidities of expanding science, he turned to the faith and insights of religion.

“Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous,” Bergson had warned in
Creative Evolution,
“imagines itself possessed, by right of birth or by right of conquest, innate or acquired, of all the essential elements of the knowledge of truth. . . . it believes that its ignorance consists only in not knowing which one of its time-honored categories suits the new object. In what drawer, ready to open, shall we put it? . . . The idea that for a new object we might have to create a new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant to us. . . . Plato was the first to set up the theory that to know the real consists in finding its idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame already at our disposal.”

We can, perhaps, save ourselves from this imprisoning of our thought by the other source, intuition. While intellect turns away from the vision of time, “It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies everything it touches. We do not
think
real time. But we
live
it, because life transcends intellect.” So, “to grasp the true nature of vital activity . . . we shall probably be aided . . . by the fringe of vague intuition that surrounds our distinct—that is, intellectual—representation.” In contrast to intellect, intuition is a form of instinct. “By intuition,” he observed, “I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.”