Reading Notes on Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion

This post started off as a handful of lines banged out on my phone's notepad as I was working my way through Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Literally this:

I thought I might elaborate a little bit, and that's how I ended up with much too many paragraphs of mostly overly-excited connection drawing. Some of this is a little caricatural, but if they capture something of a spirit, or at least incite some to read some of the authors mentioned, then they will have done their job!

Alain Badiou

I'm stretching my bow a little to start, but what Bergson shares with Badiou is the latter's 'anti-constructivist' bent. For Bergson, there are, as it were, two kinds of moralities - open and closed. 'Closed' morality is just that which is built up, habit by habit until one reaches its limit in 'society'. But this social morality is always partial, always distinguished from the morality of other societies. By contrast, 'open' morality is properly universal: it bears on mankind as such, humanity in general.But key for Bergson is that you can't get from closed to open morality by advancing step-by-step and widening the circle of closed morality until you reach the universal. Open morality requires a 'leap', a qualitative jump into a different register altogether.

In Badiouian, or better, Cantorian terms, what you have is a leap from one cardinality of infinity to another, with no step-wise progression that would lead you from one to the other. On the insistence of this discontinuity in Being, the B's agree! Where they differ of course is that Badiou has no time for 'qualitative' leaps: quantity alone (or better, extensity alone) is enough to ground (groundlessly?), the possibility of leaps. There is only the 'stellar void', and no 'cosmic animal'. Famously, Bergson’s own mathematical point of reference is to Zeno, whose ‘paradox’ can be undone by simply insisting on the indivisibility of movement as opposed to its decomposition into parts; it's this para-mathematical leap that Bergson transposes into morality. But if the mathematical machinery differs, they end up in a curiously similar place. Both aim to ‘break’ with continuity, and both end up insisting on the rarity of such breaks: the rarity of mystical experience (Bergson), and the rarity of Events (Badiou).

Kojin Karatani

For Karatani, what he calls 'universal religion' (UR) is nothing less than a model for communism. A model insofar as URs aims to break with any one community or state and establish, at a 'higher level', modes of reciprocal association among individuals. This break is not unlike Bergson's own effort to articulate a trans-social morality that is not mired in any one society. What Karatani does one better than Bergson however, is ground the emergence of URs in a more materialist account of history. In particular, UR is a reaction to the advent of what Karatani calls 'world money'. World money, emergent with the rise of geographically disparate economic trade, cuts across communities, indifferent to locality, and undermines local clan/band relations.

UR in turn emerges as a reaction to the disruptive effects of world money, harking back to communal relations, but scaled up to match the universality of world money. The Gods of universal religion are transcendent, but their community is equally universal. Interestingly, Bergson also understands religion as a kind of defensive reaction, but not against 'world money' so much as the progress of 'science' and the advance of 'intelligence' over 'instinct'. If intelligence works to secure a measure of certainty in an uncertain world, religion reintroduces the instinctual, without which intelligence, too sure of itself, would run too far astray of the vagaries life, as if a train gone off track. Religion keeps intelligence on the straight rail of instinctual life. The difference in register between Karatani and Bergson should be clear enough. But again, a certain something is shared here, with religion both conserving and introducing something new in the world. Karatani calls it a 'return of the repressed' - so:

Sigmund Freud

OK so I really like this parallel. Alenka Zupančič already wrote powerfully on the similarities and differences between Bergson and Freud in her book on comedy, but the resonances are particularly strong in Two Sources. Recall: religion keeps intelligence close to life, without which it goes astray. Those familiar with Bergson will know the rough contrast: intelligence is mechanical, calculative, and cold, while instinct is vivacious, supple, and responsive. Intelligence threatens to mortify life. Here's Bergson: "A belief which begins by being useful, a spur to the will, has been diverted from the object to which it owed its existence, to new objects where it is no longer of any use, even becoming dangerous". In psychoanalysis, this has a name: the death drive.

 Drive is just that which, 'diverted from the object', attains a certain autonomy and, revolving around itself (or the phantasmic 'objet a' for Lacan), runs at a tangent to life, in some cases even turning against it. As Zupančič points out, what distinguishes Bergson from Freud here is that, where Bergson posits a dualism between the living powers of instinct and the mortifying powers of intelligence, for psychoanalysis, the death drive belongs to life from the very beginning, one of two poles internal to life. The details and stakes of this distinction are a bit too much to get into, but suffice to say that the ‘return of the repressed’ is just how Freud himself understood the triumph of monotheism: as the guilt of Moses' murder returning with a vengeance.

 

     My copy of Two Sources

Paolo Virno

This dynamic, of one reaction (religion) working against another (intelligence) to keep it in check, has more or less been turned into a veritable political project by the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, probably the least read of the writers in my sketch list. Virno places particular significance on the biblical figure of the ‘Katechon’. What is the Katechon? In the bible, it is a ‘restraining force’, it holds back the Antichrist, without, for all that, eliminating the danger entirely: a perpetual keeping-at-bay. Anyway, a politics of the katechon for Virno, is a politics that is best placed to escape the capture of the political realm by the State. As a perpetual effort of ‘keeping-at-bay', katechon politics - or what Virno prefers to call the politics of ‘exodus’ is one that never cedes its power to an institution that would make final promises, deliver ‘final solutions’, if you will. 

Funnily enough, Virno takes as his model the same exemplar as Karatani: the Jewish exiles of Egypt, bound by a covenant without a State. The connection to Bergson here is more than incidental btw. It’s from Roberto Esposito that (I think) Virno draws his inspiration regarding the Katechon (from his book Immunitas), and Espositio explicitly cites Bergson on religion as a source of the idea. Another reason Virno is so interesting in this regard is that Virno explicitly figures this dynamic (of a 'reaction against a reaction') as a ‘negation of a negation’. For anyone whose primary encounter with Bergson has been through Deleuze, this is pretty odd. Virno is anything but a Hegelian though, and even has a pretty funny disclaimer in his An Essay on Negation: “I am sorry if some readers will be repelled by the dialectical tone of this phrase; there's nothing I can do about it.” lol.

Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze of course reads Bergson as a philosopher of ‘positivity’ through and through: negation is derivative, a well founded illusion, whose appearance is, more than anything, the result of philosophical problems poorly posed. What Deleuze takes from Two Sources in particular is hard to place. Deleuze primarily draws upon Bergson’s earlier books (Matter and Memory most of all), with this one falling mostly to the wayside. That said, I wanna make a cheeky suggestion:

That the structure of Two Sources, which has two parts, on morality and religion, has a curious resonance with the structure of Anti-Oedipus, which begins with desiring-production and ends in social-production. Coincidence? (Probably!). Still, if I wanna be more cheeky, I’d say that the way D&G structure AO, around the question of the ‘immanent’ vs. ‘transcendent’ use of desiring synthesis, mirrors Bergson's way of treating open & closed morality, and static & dynamic religion. That last bit will mean nothing to those who haven’t read either AO or Two Sources, and the best I can do here is leave it as a tease and a spur for those to read both.

Hannah Arendt

Getting there! So the connection to Arendt should be pretty obvious to anyone who knows her. Arendt is not a fan, to put it lightly, of ‘the social’. The social kinda sucks because it attends ‘merely’ to the provisioning of life, its reproduction as life. (32) Arendt, cont.: Life is fine as far as it goes for Arendt, but she wants more: she wants capital-A Action. Action is the realm of politics freed from (vital) necessity, where, acting in concert, we make the world we live in, rather than living in what is given of it. Like Bergson, like Badiou (Badiouians will kill me for this), Arendt also wants to conceptualise a break from the given. But unlike both, she wants figure this break as a kind of democratic politics, one in which we can break perpetually and for all. If, in Badiou and Bergson, the Event and mystical experiences are rare, Arendt wants politics to be far less rare than it is, in fact to be able to transpose politics into the everyday so as to transform it. 

The one technical parallel that I want to draw -is that between what Arendt calls the realm of ‘Work’, and what Bergson calls ’static religion’. Both have a kind of stabilising or recuperative function, each drawing us ‘back’ into society. We’ve already seen this at work for religion in Bergson.)  In Arendt, ‘work’ has a similar function. If life in general is full of unexpected contingencies, work and the fabrication of *things* provides a measure of endurance. Fabrication brings into being things that persist, hold steady against the current of time. Again, this is fine for Arendt, but she wants more. She wants heroes, not (just) workers! Heroes have stories, narratives, they are singular, they are a ‘who’ and not just ‘what’ (For Badiou, tellingly, “there is no hero of the event”). But if we find heroes in Arendt, we find mystics in Bergson. Mystics occupy the realm of ‘dynamic religion’: they are in touch with the vital currents of life, which, unlike in Arendt, is always a surging force which cannot ever settle for mere reproduction.

Immanuel Kant

A fun way to think about Bergson's ethics is as (yet another) reformulation of Kant's CI, but as both temporalized and vitalized. If the CI aims to exclude all 'pathology', what is 'pathological' for Bergson's ethics is an exclusive and blinkered attention to the here and now. As he says in Matter & Memory: "To live only in the present... is the mark of lower animals". The present is a kind of 'capture' from which we must free ourselves, by recourse to memory. Otherwise we're a bit like Heidegger's miserable bee, chopped in half & still sucking honey. What makes this more than just an incidental parallel is the role of 'formalism' in both Kant and Bergson. Kant's ethics is 'formal' insofar as it aims to exclude any particular 'content' in guiding action: it appeals solely to the capacity for universalization.

Bergson's appeal to memory is likewise strangely formal: it's not really this or that memory that brings action to Life, but Memory as such, the past 'in general'. Or, in Deleuze's evocative phrasing, it's a case of a 'past which has never been present'. In this regard, where Kant's rationalism entails an intemporal, almost mechanistic ethics, Bergson takes something of Kant but infuses it with both time and 'Life': 'life' for Bergson being nothing other than a kind of infusion of time. There's an inversion at work. If Kant empties the will, bit by bit, shorn of all heteronomy & particularity all the better to achieve autonomy & universality, Bergson works in the other direction, 'filing in' the will with the entirety of the past, such that action is rendered integral & in-formed by memory. 

This last is a little misleading because Bergson doesn't exactly have an 'accumulative' understanding of the past. There is a clearing operation in Bergson too: what is cleared away are things that trap us in the present, so as to better put us in touch with the vitality of Life. But the point is that there is something more 'substantive' in Bergson, as opposed to the - by comparison - thin gruel of Kantian autonomy. For Kant this is a feature not a bug, so I'm not making a point about the superiority of one or the other, just drawing a contrast. I did say that this is 'another' reformulation of the CI -the other I had in mind is Nietzsche's eternal return. That too has a kind of centrifugal function that expels 'reactivity' in the name of Life, but Nietzsche's Life is, crudely, less a matter of Memory than Forgetting. Specifics of Nietzsche aside, another reason to read Bergson as a wayward son of Kant is that Bergsonian Life picks up exactly where Kant himself left off: trying to figure out the strange causality of self-organizing beings unaccounted for by 'mechanism': Life.

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Anyway, that’s it! Well done if you’ve made it this far, you’ve just followed the random neuron activation of my brain going ooh what about this, and ooh what about that, and..! Moral of it all? Idk, read Bergson, he’s an infinitely rich author. Make your own sketches.