Culture and Organization, 2003, Vol. 9(1), March, pp.

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Freedom and Sociability for Bergson

CARL POWER*
Unit 3, 31 Herbert Street, Dulwich Hill, NSW 2203, Australia

This paper discusses the way that Bergson relates the notions of freedom and sociability. It retraces a path leading from his first major work to his last, from a proto-phenomenology of freedom to a kind of biology of social life. The continuity of this passage is explained, at least in part, by Bergsons continual rethinking of his chief philosophical invention: the concept of qualitative multiplicity. This paper also seeks to indicate the importance of Bergsons understanding of both freedom and sociability for the poststructuralist political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Key words: Bergson; Deleuze; Freedom; Society; Poststructuralism; Multiplicity

INTRODUCTION In this paper, I want to discuss the way that Bergsons notion of freedom is related to that of sociability. In a sense, this will require grasping both ends of the chain of texts that make up Bergsons oeuvre; for, on the one hand, freedom is the subject of Time and Free Will, Bergsons first book, and, on the other hand, his notion of sociability only receives a full treatment 43 years later in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Quite a distance separates these two works. Bergson has passed from a phenomenological account of the experience of freedom to a kind of biological account of social life. What I plan to do is show how the early work on freedom developed into his later work on society. The continuity of this passage is due to Bergsons continual rethinking of his chief philosophical invention: the concept of qualitative multiplicity. Along the way, I will indicate the importance of Bergsons understanding of both freedom and sociability for the poststructuralist political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

TIME AND FREE WILL Bergson introduces his notion of freedom in the context of one of modernitys classic metaphysical dilemmas: the problem of reconciling ones own experience of freedom with sciences mechanistic picture of the universe, a picture that seems to render freedom completely impossible. Kants solution is famous: surrender the whole of the phenomenal world, including the domain of psychology, to the natural sciences and relegate freedom to the noumenal realm; thus freedom becomes an idea we can and must think but not something we can know. With Time and Free Will, first published in 1889, Bergson invents a new solution. He insists that freedom is a fact of experience and indeed among the facts which we observe there is none clearer (Bergson, 1913: 221). Of course, it is not the kind of fact
*Email: powercarl@hotmail.com

ISSN 1475-9551 print; ISSN 1477-2760 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1475955032000082784

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that science can grasp. It is not, after all, a measurable quantity. Bergsons general strategy is to demonstrate that some empirical phenomena, by their very nature, resist measurement and hence scientific treatment. In this way he seeks to secure a place for freedom within the empirical world. According to Bergson, immediate experience offers us, primarily, two kinds of empirical distinction. There are, he says, two kinds of multiplicity, two possible senses of the word distinguish, two conceptions, the one qualitative and the other quantitative, of the difference between same and other (Bergson, 1913: 121). The source of these two principles of differentiation lies in the distinction between duration and space which, adopting Kantian terminology, we might describe as the forms of intuition corresponding to inner and outer sense. Where Kant had reconciled freedom and determinism with the help of the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, for Bergson the all-important distinction is the one between inner and outer sense, duration and space.1 As we will see, it is by a close examination of duration that Bergson will establish the ground of freedom. His examination of space, on the other hand, will lead him to consider the conditions of social life. Through a phenomenological description of inner experience, Bergson shows us that consciousness essentially endures. Here we should note the inaccuracy of describing Bergsonian duration as a form of intuition. Rather, for Bergson, duration is the very being of consciousness which we intuit directly whenever we turn our attention inwards and grasp our experience as we live it. If we examine closely our ideas, emotions and sensations, we find that they present us with qualities that melt together, like the notes of a tune, to form an ever-changing whole; this is what Bergson calls a qualitative multiplicity. We can thus conceive of succession without distinction, and think of it as a mutual penetration, an interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought (Bergson, 1913: 101). Consciousness exists as a constantly growing temporal synthesis, each succeeding moment gathering within itself all those that have come before. It is this solidarity of the past with the present that precludes strict repetition. Indeed it demands that each succeeding moment is essentially a new one, radically heterogeneous to all others (Bergson, 1913: 199 200). Hence Bergsons notion of duration manages to unite seemingly contrary determinations: the fusional continuity of moments and their qualitative heterogeneity, the preservation of the past and the production of the new. In its temporal structure, consciousness displays a mode of existence very different from that which we generally attribute to a thing. Far from being a determinate actuality given here and now, consciousness allows past and present to coexist i.e., it has temporal depth and, as an ongoing process, it is open to the future. It is on the basis of this description of consciousness that Bergson argues for the reality of freedom. For, if every succeeding moment of our lived experience involves the creation of something qualitatively new, something that was not already prefigured in its antecedents, then there is no question of a before strictly determining an after and no possibility of genuine prediction.2 Thus causal indetermination belongs to the very structure of consciousness. Or, in more positive terms, consciousness freedom is a measure of its creativity. Bergson draws his notion of quantitative multiplicity from an analysis of external perception. Somewhat in the manner of Kant, he seeks the formal conditions of our perception of an objective world in the intuition of space, an unbounded, homogeneous and
1 According to Bergson, Kants great mistake was to think of inner sense on the model of outer sense; he failed to notice that time has its own form, point for point opposed to that of space (Bergson, 1913: 232 4). 2 As Bergson argues, the law of causality implies that the same causes produce the same effects. Consciousness escapes this law because, strictly speaking, it never repeats itself (Bergson, 1913: 199 200).

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infinitely divisible medium with no temporal depth and no hidden potentials. Certainly the material world always appears to us as a quality-laden extensity, but if we are to discern in it discrete and measurable objects distinct from each other and from ourselves, we must be able to abstract from all the qualities by which they are given. The emergence of an objective world depends on an activity of the mind which perceives under the form of extensive homogeneity what is given it as qualitative heterogeneity (Bergson, 1913: 95). Now, according to Bergson, this intuition of space also foreshadows and prepares the way for social life (Bergson, 1913: 236). How? It frees us from the singularity of individual experience, providing us with an observable, objective world of clear-cut distinctions in which all minds can have a common share. But living together requires more than this. It demands that I imagine my own lived experience stretched out in the homogeneous medium of space. Only by doing so am I able to objectify my inner life, to divide this fusional multiplicity into an assemblage of discrete ideas and emotions, to translate it into the readymade generalities of language, and, by articulating it, to throw it out into the current of social life (Bergson, 1913: 231). Spatialising lived experience profoundly misrepresents it but we could hardly get by without doing so, for it allows each person to become, in some measure, intelligible to others, and even to herself. Bergsons critique of this useful illusion has both a speculative and a practical relevance. On the speculative side, he argues that the confusion of duration with space is the source of all determinist theories of mind; the latter merely push to an extreme the common error of treating consciousness as a determinate thing. When duration is assumed to be, at bottom, a homogeneous medium, consciousness is effectively stripped of all true temporal depth and all creative power; the difference between past, present and future, so fundamental to consciousness, is elided so that psychological life can be reduced to a series of discrete moments already given, like points lying side by side on a line. Only on this assumption can modern determinists assert that our psychological states proceed in a law-like fashion and that, consequently, our experience of freedom is a mere epiphenomenon. According to Bergson, however, all species of determinism are refuted once we grasp the dynamic being of our own inner experience. The practical side of Bergsons critique appears in his warning that our tendency to confuse duration with space may alienate us from our own true being. We risk mistaking our inner experience for the symbols by which we communicate it. Worse still, the mechanism we use to explain our conduct may end by also controlling it: Our psychic states, separating then from each other, will get solidified; between our ideas, thus crystallized, and our external movements we shall witness permanent associations being formed; and little by little, as our consciousness thus imitates the process by which nervous matter procures reflex actions, automatism will cover over freedom (Bergson, 1913: 237). In Time and Free Will, Bergson points to a certain threat to individual freedom posed by social life. Not the manifest power of physical constraints, violence, social sanctions etc., but rather a force that quietly takes hold of freedom from the inside, a mode of the subjects own being: habit. Through habit, we interiorise ready-made ideas and customs, automatically adapting ourselves to life in common. Through habit, we surrender our very essence without even realising it: many . . . die without ever having known true freedom (Bergson, 1913: 166). Bergson stages the opposition between the individual and society within consciousness itself, in the struggle between freedom and automatism. The result is an image of consciousness divided. On the one hand, a deep-seated self, which is fundamentally free. On the other, a parasitic, superficial, unfree social self. This takes us to the heart of the practical concerns of Time and Free Will. Freedom may be intrinsic to our nature as conscious beings, but it is rarely experienced and difficult to achieve; it demands an extraordinary effort of selfovercoming and this is what Bergson wants to encourage in his readers.

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LOCATING BERGSONS CONCEPT OF FREEDOM What I want to do now, just briefly, is find a place for Bergsons notion of freedom on the terrain of modern social and political thought. Isaiah Berlins distinction between positive and negative freedom will serve as a useful starting-point.3 Freedom in the negative sense is typically associated with the liberal tradition of political theory and signifies freedom from interference. Negative freedom describes a space of possible actions within which a subject can pursue her own interests without being unobstructed by others. It is generally assumed that this space must be limited by laws, institutions etc. so that people can live together without too much conflict, though just where these limits are to be drawn is a matter of some dispute. The chief difference between Bergsonian freedom and negative freedom revolves, as we might expect, around the question of duration. Negative freedom implies choice and choice implies a spatialised image of time. We generally imagine a subject who chooses to be faced with a set of more or less determinate possibilities, much like a traveler who comes to a fork in the road. All possible outcomes are already prefigured in the present and the act of choice does no more than select one to actualise; it certainly brings nothing really new into the world. For Bergson, this is not true freedom, or at any rate, it displays a relatively low degree of freedom. Concrete duration is creative and genuine freedom expresses this fundamental fact; the free act invents its path and before it does so there are no paths, possible or impossible, waiting to be taken (Bergson, 1913: 182). On the face of it, Bergson has more in common with those philosophers who Berlin associates with the notion of positive freedom, e.g., Kant, Hegel and Marx. Like them, Bergson conceives of freedom as autonomy, the capacity to be wholly oneself and to act in conformity with oneself. Also, like many philosophers of positive freedom, Bergson imagines the subject to be divided against itself, split between an essential or authentic self and an inessential or inauthentic self. However, there are two aspects of Bergsonian freedom that tend to set it apart. First of all, for Bergson, the deep and the superficial selves are not really distinct. Rather, they are two tendencies within the self, one that fragments consciousness into discrete ideas and emotions for the sake of social life, another that fuses all aspects of the self into a creative whole. When we pursue the latter tendency, we achieve freedom not at the expense of the superficial or social self, but through its full immersion in the deep-seated self. Hence, Bergson understands autonomy in a rather unusual way, not as self-mastery (i.e., the domination of one part of the self by another) but as the assimilation of the heteronomous. As he says, suggestion would become persuasion if the entire self assimilated it; passion, even sudden passion, would no longer bear the stamp of fatality if the whole history of the person were reflected in it . . .; and the most authoritative education would not curtail any of our freedom if it only imparted to us ideas and feelings capable of impregnating the whole soul (Bergson, 1913: 167). Secondly, while positive freedom is generally defined as self-determination, i.e., the affirmation of the authentic interests of a given subject, Bergsonian freedom is better described as self-alteration, a dynamic progress in which the self and its motives . . . are in a constant state of becoming (Bergson, 1913: 183). It must be admitted that a number of philosophers of positive freedom do regard the subject as a work-in-progress. Very often, however, they posit a subject whose essence is already given though largely hidden from view and a historical narrative that serves merely to manifest this essence. In this way, they
3 See in particular Berlins classic essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty (1969: 118 72).

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fail to grasp the genuine unpredictability and openness to the future that are, for Bergson, constitutive features of true freedom. To my mind, Bergsons concept of freedom resonates most strongly with the poststructuralist philosophies of Derrida, Foucault and, above all, Deleuze. This might seem surprising since someone like Deleuze scarcely thematises the notion of freedom at all. However, in his book Deleuze and the Political, Paul Patton coins the term critical freedom to designate a notion implicit or operative in the political thought of Gilles Deleuze (Patton, 2000: 83 7). Patton describes it as a third concept of freedom, one that is irreducible to the two Berlin distinguishes. I would argue that its resemblance with Bergsonian freedom is very striking and bears on at least four main points: 1. Freedom is intrinsically linked to the open-ended becoming of the subject, a becoming that characterises the subjects very existence. 2. Freedom only becomes manifest at singular moments, those that disrupt the ordinary course of our lives, moments of great and solemn crisis to use Bergsons expression. 3. Freedom involves a movement by which we momentarily manage to lift ourselves up to the level of our own transcendental conditions. Here, I think we can measure the distance between Kants transcendental idealism and the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze and Bergson. It is the distance between freedom understood as a transcendental idea and freedom as a limit experience. 4. Since the free act is genuinely creative, preexisting standards are inadequate for judging it good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate. Not that this puts it altogether beyond normativity. The free act demands new standards by which it can be judged and is itself part of the process that produces them. In addition, Bergson and Deleuze clearly regard freedom as a preferred mode of existence, even though its consequences are unpredictable. Having outlined the similarities between Bergson and Deleuze on the issue of freedom, I should mention an important dissimilarity. For Bergson, at least in Time and Free Will, the chief locus of freedom is the deep-seated self, the kernel at the heart of individual consciousness; for Deleuze, on the other hand, freedom belongs essentially to a collective assemblage. This is a significant difference, especially when it comes to finding a place for Bergsonian freedom on the terrain of social and political thought. When Bergson divorces freedom from social life, he conforms to a precept that rules the vast majority of political philosophers whether they embrace a concept of negative or positive freedom. As Hannah Arendt has observed, Our philosophical tradition is almost unanimous in holding that freedom begins where men have left the realm of political life inhabited by the many, and that it is not experienced in association with others but in intercourse with ones own self (Arendt, 1961: 157).4 Arendt criticises this widespread philosophical prejudice not only for obscuring the social reality of freedom, but also for helping to justify a variety of more or less unhappy practices, from quietism to fascism. What we need, she argues, is a concept of freedom that is intrinsically linked to social life. Eventually Bergson himself came to a similar view, not least because Time and Free Will led him to an impasse concerning the possibility of freedoms expression. In the remainder of this paper, I will look at how Bergson reconsidered the question of freedoms relation to social life so that, by the time he wrote The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he could insist that true freedom involves a certain kind of sociability. Finally, I will say a few words about how Bergsons final work anticipated aspects of Deleuzes social and political thought.
4 The divorce of freedom and the social takes many forms; for instance, the inner liberty of the Stoics which even a slave in chains can enjoy; or again, the liberal theorists notion of personal freedom which is juxtaposed to the laws and institutions that limit it.

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PROBLEMS RELATING TO FREEDOMS SOCIAL EXPRESSION According to Bergson, I am always potentially free due to the temporal structure of consciousness. But for freedom to become actual, a feeling must take possession of my whole soul and move me to act. Bergsons is an expressivist theory of freedom. Free action expresses my consciousness through my body, projecting it into a world that I share with others. Unfortunately, in Time and Free Will, Bergson does not thematise the issue of freedoms expression. Worse still, he seems to foreclose its very possibility both in the physical and the social world. Freedoms physical expression is blocked by the sharpness of the distinction Bergson draws between duration and space, the inside and the outside. A seemingly unbridgeable divide opens up between the feeling of freedom and the bodily movement that is supposed to express it. But freedom fairs no better in the social world. After all, they are, for Bergson, at odds. I experience freedom only insofar as I rediscover the fluidity, wholeness and absolute singularity of my being, all of which resist translation into the rigid, clear-cut generalities provided by language and custom. How, then, can I find a social expression for my unique feeling of freedom? Bergson tells us that freedoms signature is a shade or quality of the action itself (Bergson, 1913: 182), but how can someone other than the agent experience this quality? There is no question here of giving a proper explanation of how Bergson manages to solve the problem of freedoms physical expression. A few comments will have to suffice. One of the most decisive developments that Matter and Memory (first published in 1896) introduces into Bergsons philosophy is the acknowledgement that the world, and everything in it, endures. Despite first impressions, this is a rather big step. What, in Time and Free Will, had defined the being of consciousness now comes to define being in general so that even the physical world, in acquiring duration, also acquires psychological characteristics. Bergson maintains a certain dualism of matter and mind but not in the manner of Descartes. Rather than putting them in abstract opposition and so taking it for granted that they have absolutely nothing in common he describes matter and mind as qualitatively distinct modes of duration. By recasting dualism within a temporal monism, Bergsons ultimate aim is to make the interaction of mind and body thinkable. He also lays the foundation for a remarkable hypothesis about how an organisms freedom depends on without being reducible to its material constitution. Anticipating the findings of quantum physics, he suggests that matter itself harbours a certain degree of micro-indetermination. When matter is organised in a living body, it is drawn into superior temporal rhythms; its latent indetermination is harnessed, given direction, contracted into higher degrees of freedom and expressed in the organisms manifest actions (Bergson, 1991: 247 9). Living beings are, for Bergson, veritable machines for extracting freedom from matter. Before turning to the problem of freedoms social expression, I want to say something more about what Bergson means by social life. Actually, this is itself a thorny issue. While, in Time and Free Will, Bergson does not doubt that we are fundamentally social beings, he makes no attempt to unearth the foundations of social life. If it has an ontological ground distinct from or in excess of that provided for individual consciousness, we learn nothing about it. Bergsons method of intuition has, in this early work, a resolutely introspective bent; it reveals the convergence of knowledge and being in a direct vision of mind by itself, but fails to really grasp the relations that exist between consciousnesses. This is why he treats the opposition of the individual and society only insofar as it is reflected in the opposition of the deep and the superficial self. Here, without realising it, Bergson runs the risk of solipsism. After all, if I only have an immediate intuition of my own inner being and only perceive others from without, how do I know that I am living in the midst of other subjects? Because

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they resemble me in external form and behaviour? Had Bergson seriously pursued this line of thought rather than merely dabbling in it he would perhaps have ended up affirming the monadic isolation of consciousness and, much as Husserl had done, demonstrating how the ego constitutes, from within its own proper sphere, its sense of other subjects and, indeed, the whole social world.5 The shortcomings of such egological reductions of intersubjectivity are well known. On the one hand, they always presuppose what they try to establish; it is, for instance, impossible to determine the egos proper sphere without having some prior comprehension of the other against which it is to be defined. On the other hand, any attempt to describe the social world as the product of an egos imaginative or inferential activity effectively reduces intersubjectivity to a mere appearance; it explains how the social world comes to exist for me but cannot account for the reciprocity of distinct perspectives that real intersubjectivity entails.6 Fortunately, Bergson sidesteps this impasse. While he asserts the fundamental singularity of consciousness, he does not claim that it exists in monadic isolation and therefore need not attempt an egological theory of intersubjectivity. I would argue that, through his notion of qualitative multiplicity and despite the fact that it is the product of a phenomenological description of inner experience Bergson seeks to dissolve absolute individualism before it has a chance to crystallize. To see this, we need only attempt to think of a plurality of Bergsonian subjects and then ask ourselves what kind of plurality this must be. As we saw earlier, Bergson recognises only two conceptions of the difference between same and other, the one qualitative and the other quantitative. Now, of course, persons always have bodies and bodies are easy enough to count; external observation presents subjects as a numerical multiplicity. However, in its very being each consciousness is a continuous or qualitative multiplicity with no resemblance to number (Bergson, 1913: 105). What this means is that the qualitative singularity of a person is not reducible to the numerical singularity of its body. Less obviously, it also means that a plurality of minds is not a quantitative multiplicity at least not fundamentally but a qualitative multiplicity. That is to say, my consciousness, in its qualitative singularity, must join together with others to form a more comprehensive fusional whole. After Time and Free Will, Bergson makes this idea explicit. A particularly good instance appears in the introduction to Creative Mind:
Between our consciousness and other consciousnesses the separation is less clear-cut than between our body and other bodies, for it is space which makes these divisions sharp. Unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, which so often have the power of divination, give evidence of a possible interpenetration of human consciousnesses. It would appear then that phenomena of psychological endosmosis exist (Bergson, 1946: 32).

The idea that society is, at bottom, a kind of collective consciousness governs Bergsons first extended attempt at social theory, Laughter (first published in 1900). It enables him to stage the relationship between the individual and society right where it occurs, in the psycho-social relations that exist between people. It also allows him to insert his image of a stratified consciousness into a much broader picture. Where, in Time and Free Will, Bergson had spoken of various levels of consciousness, each with its own temporal rhythm and degree of freedom, he now speaks of the various levels of social life in which we directly participate. The deep and the superficial self thus find their complement in a deep and a superficial we. This image of society as a layered yet fusional whole is one Bergson will still endorse over 30 years later when he comes to write his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.
5 In his essay, Life and Consciousness, Bergson makes strategic use of this kind of argument (Bergson 1911c: 6 7). Husserl provides an incomparably more sophisticated egological theory of intersubjectivity in his fifth Cartesian meditation (Husserl, 1991). 6 For a much fuller treatment of this topic, see Alfred Schutzs essay, The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl (Schutz, 1966: 51 91).

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As is clear from the quote above, Bergson affirms the interpenetration of minds not just because it follows logically from his theory of multiplicities, but because it is suggested by relevant evidence. As ever, he seeks empirical support for his metaphysical hypotheses. Of especial importance to Bergson are phenomena of unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, sub- and supra-rational modes of consciousness in which we are carried beyond ourselves and immediately feel our community with others.7 From Laughter to The Two Sources, he attends to their various forms, their levels of emergence, the tendencies they express etc., always attempting to draw together the evidence of intuition i.e., our first-hand experience of social existence with the results of the life and social sciences.8 Let us turn now to freedoms social expression. This is not a problem Bergson even broaches in Time and Free Will. Nevertheless, it does impose itself upon the reader, as does the beginnings of a possible solution. Bergson asserts that the more superficial my thoughts and feelings are, the easier they can be given definite contours, detached from the whole of my personality, translated into the generalities that words and gestures provide, and thrown out into the current of social life. As it stands, this thesis renders my freedom, and the feeling from which it springs, incommunicable. However, in his discussion of art, Bergson begins to develop a contrary but complementary thesis concerning a very different kind of communicability. Briefly, the task of the artist is to cultivate absolutely unique emotions, those that sum up a more or less considerable part of her singular life-history, and, with the help of a range of techniques (the careful selection of outward signs, the hypnotic use of rhythm, etc.), to engage the bodily and spiritual sympathy of spectators so that they too can experience a similar deep emotion (Bergson, 1913: 18). For our present purposes, what makes this view of art particularly interesting is the fact that Bergson explicitly compares the free act to an artwork: we are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work (Bergson, 1913: 172). Perhaps, then, freedoms expression can be compared to aesthetic communication. We can pursue this theme further in Laughter, though, again, it is not one Bergson explicitly addresses. What the artist communicates is a new way of seeing the world, a new sensibility. In doing so she cultivates a free play of sympathy between herself and others, bringing to the fore an affective osmosis that, while already present in everyday life and everready to manifest itself, is generally held in check. On the topic of our everyday sympathies, Bergson claims that the deeper the emotion and the more it impregnates the whole of ones personality, the more dramatic and contagious it is (Bergson, 1911b: 140 1). When I witness in others the process by which their feelings gradually precipitate into action, my sympathies are stirred and I re-ascend from the observed action to the inner feeling (Bergson, 1911b: 144). True enough, I cannot have another s experience. But this does not mean that I merely observe the other from an entirely extrinsic perspective. On the contrary, I immediately (though perhaps dimly) grasp the sense of the other s action i.e., its dynamic unity with her personality and am affected by it. A real movement passes between us, magnetising us, giving us an orientation in relation to each other.9
7 Borrowing the words of Nick Crossley, we might say that Bergson develops a theory of radical intersubjectivity, one based on experiences that display a lack of self-awareness and a communicative openness towards the other which is unconditional (Crossley, 1996: 23). 8 Georges Gurvitch, one of the pioneers of the sociology of time, explicitly acknowledges the value of Bergsons philosophy of duration for the social sciences (Gurvitch, 1948: 294 306). 9 This view fits the brief but general account of sense Bergson had already given in Matter and Memory. There he argues that the process of interpretation, though set in motion by a material sign, essentially moves from the signified down to the signifier (Bergson, 1991: 116 7). When I hear another speak and even before I can identify exactly what she is saying I leap into the element of sense and begin to mimic both her physical and mental comportment.

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The idea that art cultivates a deep sociability already present in everyday life gains a particularly striking formulation in Bergsons account of drama. According to Bergson, drama brings to light a pure nature at the heart of social life, a turbulent domain of transitive affect: As contrary electricities attract each other and accumulate between two plates of the condenser from which the spark will presently flash, so, by simply bringing people together, strong attractions and repulsions take place, followed by an utter loss of balance, in a word, by that electrification of the soul known as passion (Bergson, 1911b: 158). This pure, unformed, mutual affectivity serves both as a milieu out of which social order arises and as a corrosive element in which all institutions, agreements and conventions risk dissolution. By itself, this rather chaotic sociability cannot ground social life. The freedom it bears is too volatile and violent; it has no intrinsic principle of organisation. A stabilising counter-tendency is needed to hold it in check so that social life be actually livable. Utility demands both for the sake of the individual and society as a whole the formation of an outer layer of feelings and ideas which make for permanence, aim at becoming common to all men, and cover, when they are not strong enough to extinguish it, the inner fire of individual passions (Bergson 1911b: 158 9). Thus Bergson compares society to a living planet, a fiery mass of seething metals surrounded by a cool and solid crust. There is much I could say about the way Laughter anticipates The Two Sources, but I will confine myself to indicating one way the former falls short of the latter. Despite his discovery of a deep sociability, Bergson is yet to conceive of the positive unity of freedom and social life. Society would, he thinks, tear itself apart were its pure nature to be directly actualised, that is, literally put into action. Far better to merely imagine the return of a repressed freedom than to enact it. This, in fact, is how Bergson defines drama: it is societys dream of an eruption by which it gains imaginary possession of its innermost nature as a kind of compensation for not being actually able to do so (Bergson 1911b: 159 60). Unlike its aesthetic representation, the freedom of deep sociability remains opposed to social life.

THE TWO SOURCES OF MORALITY AND RELIGION It is over 30 years later, with the publication of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, that Bergson presents his definitive solution to the problem of freedoms relation to social life. In what follows, I will only be able to introduce this development in a very cursory fashion. Drawing on the philosophy of life he had developed in Creative Evolution, Bergson gives what he calls a biological interpretation of both freedom and sociability. This does not mean that he seeks to reduce psychological and social phenomena to the kinds of facts that the biological sciences treat. On the contrary, he seeks to expand the concept of biology so that it embraces all the levels of existence, from the most material to the most spiritual. Bergsons vitalism involves a resolutely non-reductive brand of naturalism. When he says that psychological and sociological phenomena must be grasped as, before all else, biological phenomena, what he means is that, in order to properly understand them, we must determine their place in the general scheme of things, or rather, we must determine their significance for the general project of life (Bergson, 1935: 91, 106). According to Bergson, freedom and sociability are two manifestations of life which can be found, in one form or another, throughout nature. I have already said a little about how he regards living beings as machines for extracting freedom from matter. Here I will merely add that Bergson views the ever-bifurcating branches of the evolutionary tree as so many attempts at introducing a maximum of freedom into the material world. Evolution involves, he argues,

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a creative movement towards the invention of new modes of life which can support increasing degrees of consciousness and freedom.10 Sociability also has, for Bergson, its basis in a universal characteristic of life. The most general form of living activity whether we are talking about the development of a living individual or the evolution of life as a whole is organisation. Organisation involves a double process, one towards the differentiation of parts, the other towards their association into a whole. Bergson argues that, because we pass by imperceptible transitions from the relations between cells in an organism to the relations between individuals in a community, it makes sense to say that the tendency towards society is found across nature (Bergson, 1935: 85, 106). At first glance, it seems that Bergson risks falling victim to an error that vitiates most versions of social organicism, namely the mistake of assuming that a human society bears a significant resemblance to an individual organism. Apart from the fact that there is no good evidence to support this analogy, social organicism tends to exaggerate the forces of social solidarity and underestimates the individuals capacity for free action; the result is an image of society in which individuals are radically subordinate to the social body. Bergson, at least in The Two Sources, is very careful to avoid this pitfall and explicitly acknowledges that no significant analogy holds between a human society and an organism. For Bergson, it may well make sense to describe the rigidly ordered societies of ants and bees as veritable organisms; in such societies, social instinct merely extends into patterns of behaviour the process of vital organisation itself. But a human community is very different. It is, says Bergson, a collectivity of free beings (Bergson, 1935: 3). The whole task of The Two Sources is to determine what kinds of vital organisation can comprehend human freedom. Bergson, in fact, finds two fundamental forms of human sociability, two ways of combining freedom and vital organisation. Why two? Again, it is to the concept of life that we are referred. In Creative Evolution, Bergson found a basic dualism at the heart of life: the act by which life goes forward to the creation of a new form, and the act by which this form is shaped, are two different and often antagonistic movements (Bergson, 1911a: 142). In very general terms, life involves a process of creation and a process of solidification, an openness to the future and a closure around an actual form. Variations of this duality can be found at all levels of life (and even in the duality of life and matter). We can, in retrospect, see that it was already prefigured in the opposition between the rigid, habitual life of the superficial self and the creative movement of the deep self. The Two Sources restages it once more at the level of society as a whole in the duality of the closed and the open society. As we might expect, this involves a new attempt to inscribe the original psychological dualism into a broader social context. Bergson argues that, in order to understand social life, we have to dig beneath its manifest class divisions, institutions, customs and sign-systems, all of which are things more or less easy to observe and describe, and discover the underlying processes by which they are originally produced, maintained and transformed. On the one hand, there is a collective work that seeks to preserve a given social order; this activity defines the closed society. On the other hand, and more profoundly, there is a collective creativity or freedom that gives rise to new social forms; this activity characterises the open society. Just as the deep and superficial selves represent opposing tendencies within the subject, the open and the closed society represent opposing tendencies within society. They are abstract figures that symbolise the extremes of human sociability. On the field of liberty that characterises human
10 One aspect of Bergsons critique of Darwin bears on precisely this point. Bergson argues that the notion of natural selection altogether fails to account for the positive tendency expressed in evolutionary advance. See Bergsons essay, Life and Consciousness (Bergson, 1911c: 18 20).

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sociability, the open and closed societies describe the upper and lower limits. Every actual society lies on this plane, a kind of compromise that combines both tendencies, though in different proportions and configurations. Or rather, every society moves between these poles, oscillating between closure and openness, fixity and self-transformation. In very schematic terms, the closed society is defined by a tendency to constitute and preserve itself as a relatively fixed identity, turned in upon itself and distinct from an outside. Its world is internally differentiated, a totality of well-defined forms, functions and subjects. What, then, binds the closed society together? No doubt social regulation demands the exercise of power in one or other form. Through discipline we are enrolled into society, assigned our proper place, taught our obligations etc. But extrinsic force merely prepares us for social life or else corrects us when we disobey its rules. The real social glue is habit insofar as it involves the internalisation of discipline:
[S]ocial life appears to us as a system of more or less deeply rooted habits, corresponding to the needs of the community. Some of them are habits of command, most of them are habits of obedience, whether we obey a person commanding by virtue of a mandate from society, or whether from society itself, vaguely perceived or felt, there emanates an impersonal imperative. Each of these habits of obedience exerts a pressure on our will. We can evade it, but then we are attracted towards it, drawn back to it, like a pendulum which has swung away from the vertical (Bergson, 1935: 2).

Bergsons insight, in Time and Free Will, that social life is constituted by habits of thought and action gains a remarkable development in The Two Sources. Where initially these habits seemed to be a function of individual consciousness, they are now quite literally social habits and refer us to a collective mentality in which individuals participate. And, likewise, when Bergson speaks of how we feel obligation as a social pressure, he has in mind our first-person intuition of a genuinely impersonal force that holds society together. Social habits are contracted not just by individuals but by collectivities; they support each other, forming a system that presents itself to individuals as a solid block of obligation in general. Despite all this, the closed society presupposes some measure of individual freedom. After all, habit is not the pure automatism of instinct; the pressure it brings to bear always implies a certain capacity to consciously resist it. Moreover, unlike instincts, which are generally fixed for a species by nature, social habits are largely contingent, conventional; they can, through collective action, be instituted and transformed. Only the necessity of having some such set of rules/habits is natural for humans (Bergson, 1935: 19 20). In his account of the closed society, Bergson still poses freedom and social life in an agonistic relationship. However, in his account of the open society, he imagines, at last, their full reconciliation. Returning to the notion of a deep-seated sociability, Bergson casts a much more positive light on it. Where, in Laughter, he had identified the pure nature of sociability with a domain of violent passions in themselves destructive of social order; and where he had held that collective cohesion and stability could only be found on the rigid surface of society; in The Two Sources, Bergson speaks of a deeper and more dynamic kind of solidarity, a spontaneous power of organisation based on creative emotions (Bergson, 1935: 6 7). It must be admitted that Bergsons description of the open society is enigmatic, even paradoxical, but I think that we can understand it as his final and most elaborate attempt to view society as at bottom a qualitative multiplicity. In fact, the words he had originally used to describe a qualitative multiplicity serve quite well to characterise the open society: a mutual penetration, an interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole (Bergson, 1913: 101) As I have already mentioned, from the very beginning Bergson had suggested a parallel between the work of art and the work of freedom. With The Two Sources, this parallel becomes more explicit and is pursued further. In Laughter, Bergson had argued that the universal appeal of an artwork is tied to the singularity and originality of the perspective it

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expresses; we may never feel or see precisely what the artist did, but her sincerity is contagious. The effort she made to overcome her habits of thought and behaviour calls for our imitation. Her work is an example which we take as a lesson; its power of conversion is the sign by which we recognise it (Bergson, 1911b 162 3). In The Two Sources, Bergson translates this same idea into the practical domain. The result is a notion of moral genius. A true moral innovator is an exceptional individual who leads by example. The force of her personality and the originality of her vision call us to change our way of feeling and acting; a new morality makes its appearance not as a system of universal laws but as a personal appeal with a universal power of conversion. In a remarkable passage, Bergson insists that the source of both aesthetic and moral invention is a creative emotion that, in its propagation from person to person, constitutes a veritable ontological milieu in which a people can live or, rather, become together:
When music weeps, all humanity, all nature weeps with it. In point of fact it does not introduce these feelings into us; it introduces us into them, as passers-by are forced into a street dance. Thus do pioneers in morality proceed. Life holds for them unsuspected tones of feeling like those of some new symphony, and they draw us after them into this music that we may express it in action (Bergson 1935: 32).

What is at stake is not the unification of a particular group of people around an already given ideal or set of values; it is the spontaneous invention of a social atmosphere in which new ways of living together, new customs, new institutions, new ideas and new values can emerge. This is creative freedom writ large, a collective activity by which a people whether a community of taste or an ethical community constitutes itself. Here it is worth recalling the unique temporal structure of Bergsonian freedom. We saw earlier that consciousness involves both the continuity of the past with the present and the eruption of the new; we are free only at sporadic moments of crisis but in these moments we gather up our whole life history and transform ourselves. Something similar can be said about the open society. The open society emerges across a broken line of exceptional people and historical events; it only appears at moments of social experimentation revolution even moments in which the institutions of society are de-actualised, put into process, before being recast in a new form. Tying together these singular moments, gathering up the whole of the past so that it coexists with the present, the open society develops itself in temporal depth; its duration can no more be reduced to a linear history than our lived experience can be adequately measured by clock-time. We can perhaps say that the open society is untimely in Nietzsches sense of the term. Neither historical nor eternal, the untimely is an element in which the past and present coexist and resonate in order for the new to be created.

CONCLUDING REMARKS To conclude this essay, I want to very briefly return to the question of Bergsons influence on the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze was perhaps the person largely responsible for the recent resurgence of interest in Bergsons work, both inside and outside of France. He made ample use of Bergson throughout his philosophical career. However, it is generally assumed that his debt to Bergson was limited to things ontological and methodological and that he made little if any use of his social theory. Michael Hardt goes so far as to argue that, when Deleuze sought inspiration for his own practical philosophy, he turned to Nietzsche and Spinoza precisely because Bergson could not help him seriously address the question of social organisation (Hardt, 1992: 21 2). This judgement is, I think, a bit hasty. While Deleuze may not explicitly relate his social theory to that of Bergson, we can nevertheless perceive a strong underlying influence.

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Earlier I tried to show that Bergsons concept of freedom prefigures, in many important respects, the critical freedom of Gilles Deleuze. I also noted how, at least in Time and Free Will, Bergsons bent towards absolute individualism not only set him at odds with Deleuze but threatened to compromise his own account of freedom, depriving it of all possibility of social expression. I would argue that in his final work, by finally posing the reconciliation of freedom and social life, Bergson develops a social philosophy that bears a real resemblance to that of Deleuze. When, in The Two Sources, Bergson regards society as, at bottom, a fusional multiplicity best characterised by its potential for collective metamorphosis rather than its actual organisation, he is anticipating Deleuzes socio-political philosophy in a profound way. Conversely, when Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, says that actual societies embody a virtual social multiplicity but that we only live this ground of sociability in the element of social upheaval . . . in other words, freedom, he is reviving Bergsons own insights (Deleuze, 1994: 193). But perhaps it is Deleuzes collaborative work with Felix Guattari that best displays the implicit influence of Bergsons mature social thought. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari put forward a social typology the basic structure of which is so similar to Bergsons that I am tempted to think that it is their secret model.11 These twin typologies both involve a conception of human sociability as a problem-field stretched out between two coexistent and competing poles. For Bergson, these poles are the closed and the open society; for Deleuze and Guattari, they are the interiority of the State apparatus and the exteriority of the war machine. Just about every principle distinction Bergson draws between the open and the closed society finds a parallel in Deleuze and Guattaris text and this despite the fact that A Thousand Plateaus never once mentions The Two Sources Of Morality and Religion. All of which suggests we need to re-evaluate the relevance and value of Bergsons social thought today. References
Arendt, Hannah (1961) Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, London: Faber and Faber. Berlin, Isaiah (1969) Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bergson, Henri (1911a) Creative Evolution (Trans. A. Mitchell), London: Macmillan. Bergson, Henri (1911b) Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell), London: Macmillan. Bergson, Henri (1911c) Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays (Trans. H. Wildon Carr), London: Macmillan. Bergson, Henri (1913) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, (Trans. F. L. Pogson), London: George Allen and Co. Originally published in 1889? Bergson, Henri (1935) The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Trans. R. A. Audra and C. Brereton), New York: Henry Holt and Co. Bergson, Henri (1946) The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Trans. M. Anderson), New York: Citadel Press. Bergson, Henri (1991) Matter and Memory (Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer), New York: Zone Books. Crossley, Nick (1996) Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming, London: Sage Publications. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition (Trans. Paul Patton), New York: Columbia University Press. Gurvitch, Georges (1948) La philosophie sociale de Bergson, Revue de M etaphysique et de Morale, 58(3): 294 306. Hardt, Michael (1992) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Husserl, Edmund (1991) Cartesian Meditations, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Patton, Paul (2000) Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge. Schutz, Alfred (1966) Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, I. Schutz (Ed.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

11 This claim needs to be backed up by a proper examination of Deleuze and Guattaris social philosophy, something I cannot do here. To my mind the key text is 1227: Treatise on Nomadology The War Machine, Chapter 12 of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 351 423).