Bergson's Elan Vital and Vitalism

[Music] the greatest strength and weakness of french high culture in the last few centuries has been the close connection between philosophy and poetry henry bergson who won the nobel prize for literature in 1927 was one of the great exemplars of this connection between philosophy and poetry in french culture and in high cultural thought he was a great kind of prose poet who simultaneously generated philosophical ideas that don't form a system and at the same time produces a critique a set of questions about the contemporary status of knowledge and culture which demand answers if he's not perhaps the one to necessarily answer all the questions that he generates he does generate important questions what he thought he discerned in nature and in the world around us is something called elan vital which we might describe as the life force something that is the opposite of mere matter uh a thing that has a creativity dynamism if not direction at least motion it is not static but dynamic and it is the essence of all living things it is a sort of anti-reductive or anti-naturalistic reading of darwin the idea being that organic nature develops but there is something being expressed in the process of organic nature which is not merely reducible to physiochemical elements we might think of the elan vital as sort of the inverse of entropy instead of moving towards greater and greater simplicity and greater to greater lack of energy elon vitale is with the driving force behind all of organic evolution which moves us towards greater complexity towards greater towards a greater domain of activity rather than a smaller domain of activity so elan vital is a sort of skeleton key a sort of linking thread between all human and non-human animate activities and the elan vital is the domain which is contrasted to mere dead brute animal nature so like so many in the french intellectual tradition bergson is a duelist and there is dualisms particularly cartesian holdovers that run all through his philosophy and the distinction between matter and elon vittal or between uh orlando tommy take the place of spirit matter and spirit is the big breakthrough or the big distinction in bergson's work now he tried to distinguish our scientific or objective or analytic knowledge of the external world from another kind of knowledge and another domain of reference our knowledge of our immediate experiences bergson is primarily concerned with the interiority of the self with the direct apprehension of the external world prior to the point where we impose concepts ideas mathematical or scientific formulae on the world in some ways he's looking at the or he's trying to remove the cellophane of conceptual interpretation that we impose on the world that we think constitutes the world itself and look back at the ur stuff the kind of the the substance of phenomenological experience of immediate personal apprehension now the problem that brixton is going to characteristically run into is that it's very hard to create literal speech about the interiority about the things that are not publicly accessible but only accessible or only facts of individual personal experience he's going to have a hard time making the jump from these internal subjective facts of interiority and subjectivity towards the external world and what he will do in the process of trying to make references to interiority to subjectivity and to the content of experience he will give us metaphors images analogies anything but literal speech on the one hand we might say that that's the great defect of this sort of a project it doesn't lend itself to literal speech and it leaves us un uncertain as to what he exactly he's referring to on the other hand if you wish to give more or to take more seriously this project of prose poetry since after all we do with figures like nietzsche perhaps there's something to be learned by these metaphors and images and poetic references which can gesture at some other way of thinking about knowledge and human experience which will serve to inform and alter our understanding of the external world now maxson produced a wide variety of books over 30 years and three or four of them stand out as being extremely influential the first of his books that got a great deal of attention was published in 1903 it was called the introduction of metaphysics and i remember in particular this had a great influence on me when i was in college it's not the kind of thing that one usually gets assigned and i wasn't assigned at the time i was just reading it from my own pleasure and i remember being struck by a remarkable phrase and to this day it's stuck with me the idea that he proposes in this introduction to metaphysics is the following metaphysics is the science which claims to dispense with symbols now i remember at the age of 20 or 21 having no idea what that could possibly mean a little bit older hopefully a little wiser i have some idea of what it might mean having gone back in red bergson and made a certain degree of sense out of it but bearson has a great gift for formulating kind of enigmatic paradoxical peculiar thoughts in a very poetic and attractive way so bergson sort of straddles the line between poetry and philosophy like so many of the great figures in french high culture and that's something to be born in mind whenever we go back reading them don't ask for more precision logical or linguistic than this sort of intellect can possibly offer you a second important work of his is called creative evolution which is a sort of interpretation of the process of darwinian evolution in a non-mechanistic non-naturalistic way what makes uh evolution creative is the fact that it contains elan vital this anti-mechanical anti-naturalistic anti-antropic force which means that if evolution doesn't have a purpose it at least has dynamism motion it's not quite as mechanical and blind and unseen as darwin would have suggested uh two other books that are worth noting um he wrote a book on laughter which is arguably the best philosophical treatment of comedy ever written and that in some ways suggests the richness and depth of this of bergson's outlook there are very few people who concern themselves with such a wide variety of topics as bergson did and those of you who've ever seriously thought about the problem of comedy i will believe will agree with me that it is a particularly difficult genre to write about it is particularly resistant to facile generalizations and especially because we don't have aristotle's foundational work on comedy all we have is the part of the poetics that refers to tragedy we don't have much of a classical connection with the theory of tr of comedy so bergson's contribution along those lines is that much more important i think it's the best book ever written on comedy and fortunately for us it was written in the 20th century so it can take into things like charlie chaplin as well as things like aristophanes so that is something we want to get to and i will cover that towards the end of my lecture but the final or the most important of his great books is called two sources of morality and religion and here he's trying to distinguish the intuitive as opposed to the analytical approach to religion and morals one leads to dead stultifying static morality and religion the other leads towards something else which he describes as open and creative which is of course for bergson yeah his way of saying that he really likes something anything that's open and creative for a thinker like bergson that means that it's a very praiseworthy sort of endeavor so open religion creative morality that's the kind of thing barristan will approve of and he will try and give us reasons or if not reasons maybe metaphors or images which if they do not persuade us should at least give us a suggestion that we might want to inquire into these domains i don't know that logical persuasion is a strong point but the strong point of poetic images may be that they do both more and less than logical persuasion this is what bergson is good for now think about some of the influences when we read barracks and it'll help make a a better sense of context for you and be easy to figure out what's what what barricksen is all about in the first case you could say that barrister's work is homage to heraclitus all right here's the the prescribed philosopher to like change and becoming said that all is flux well bergson is someone who's interested not in the static but in the dynamic not in the fixed but in the changeable and in some respects his whole philosophy is homage to becoming a platynus the founder of neoplatonism the thinker who created a sort of gooey melange between christianity and the more mystical elements in platonism bergson has often been compared to platinus because of the fact that he has the same tendency to to move from unclarity off into myth itself and to bring together various kind of eclectic intellectual elements which he rounds together or brings together not on the basis of some logical coherence but rather because they serve a certain function they give a certain wholeness to his outlook on the world so in the same sense that uh platinus is often described as a mystic with great respect for reasoning i think that bergerson has something along those lines barrickson not surprisingly has great respect for mysticism um another source would be descartes because of the foundational certainty of the self the self is the starting point for many of the great french philosophies um it'll certainly be the case for descartes but we're also going to find that with bergson in addition darwin is very important because this idea of creativity of evolution start takes as a pre as its presupposition the idea of organic darwinian evolution within nature what he adds to darwin is the idea of openness there is no natural mechanism behind it it has an entoleki but it is an intellectual which doesn't achieve any final telos in some ways like gautama he's looking for something less general and less complete than hegel's giant system where we go to the end of history and yet doesn't want to succumb to a completely pointless to a completely random interpretation of history he wants something in between he wants to hold on to the idea of organic evolution but he wants to keep the idea of human creativity right as adding something necessary and unavoidable to that process um any of you know william james and who know the stream of consciousness will feel very much at home with barracks and barracks and and james were if not i don't believe they're personal friends but they're very happy with each other's work and whitehead those of you who know whitehead's work the idea that process connects religion and science well the idea of process of undoing the fixed nature of the world and the fixed nature of the language which refers to it is going to be an important concern both for whitehead's conception of process and for bergson's now an important stimulus to bergson's thought and an important reason or important source of his questioning his doubting of the status of science is that it he felt that it didn't maintain fidelity to the facts of human experience and he went back to the pre-socratics particularly to zeno and his paradoxes in order to show that our scientific conceptions of space and time are inadequate and do not live up to our actual experience of space and time and in fact that our experience internally of space and time is quite different from the way science describes it let's think about zeno's paradox and here i'm talking about the paradox of xeno and the arrow think about it this way at each instant in the flight of an arrow it is occupying a space exactly the size of the arrow all right at no none of these instance can it occupy a space larger than its size so there is no instant at which it can change location so zeno draws the inference that motion is impossible right now we try and recoup that loss by constructing the calculus and the idea of continuity and we managed to solve some of these paradoxes that come from uh xeno and come from this idea of instantaneous motion barrickson does something else with it what barrackson does is say that our experience of space and our experience of time are fundamentally different and time and space do not form a continuum the way all scientists or most scientists have been assuming it is not merely a given right and it is not merely an abstraction space and time are lived experiences and when we examine not what science tells us space and time are but when we experience space and time directly and in an unmediated way we will find that the way science handles space and time falsifies the reality of it and this will serve to ground our movement away from science towards immediate phenomenological apprehension let's think about beckson's conception of time as far as barristan is concerned time is heterogeneous whereas space is homogeneous remember think about time it contains various kinds of moments for you as opposed to clock time um as far as bergson is concerned all of our scientific conceptions of time are really the literalization of spatialized metaphors for example if i get out of stopwatch and i click it so that the hands begin to move how do i know when 10 minutes are up well when the hand has moved a particular portion across the dial so in other words what we're doing is judging time by motion of something through space right but barracks's point is that space and time are very different and that science is loaded pervaded with spatialized metaphors particularly the spatializing of time we think of points in time we think of a time line and barracks's point is that that's not what time is and that we need these metaphors in order to make science work but time doesn't break up into little homogeneous units the way space does as we experience time bergson calls it duret and he says this experience of time is very different from clock time he says somewhat enigmatically and quite poetically it's a reason of proust time is to take duret is the is the experience is the experience of time when it when sugar is dissolving in my tea right it's one thing to take out a stopwatch and watch the hand go around but while that may be happening simultaneously with the duration of my tea getting its sugar the point is that one is describing time and experience of the world from the inside the other from the outside one is talking about the direct apprehension of space of temporality the other based upon a metaphor a spatial metaphor for what temporality is so barracks and says let's move into our direct experience of space and time leaving science by the wayside bracket that for a while if it will go back and use science for whatever it turns out to be handy for but it's a sure thing that space and time are very different definitely different things and the way we experience them is different and when we try and treat space and time as a continuous whole we end up with the paradoxes of xeno so the way he wants to get out of the paradoxes of zeno is to undo the space time continuum and says that space and time are fundamentally different space uh all objects in the world are connected in time but they're separated in space time is heterogeneous whereas space is homogeneous time is irreversible space is reversible time is irreplaceable space is replaceable time is unique uh space is not unique time is dynamic space is static so he it creates a whole set of dualisms that correspond to the distinction between space and time and he is undoing the space-time continuum with the intention of reformulating our description of the way we experience the world and using that as the source for our cr criticism and appreciation of other intellectual alternatives now um you might want to say that i mean even though a heidegger did not know bergson or berkshire didn't know heidegger because bergson is a generation older you might want to say that deray is the temporality of design in the sense that it's the way people directly and apprehend the externality of time and you might want to say that deray is not the spatialized time of clocks but it's the real husserlian experience of time so i wrote a whole book called the phenomenology of internal time consciousness the point being that internal time the way we experience it in external time the way we spatialize it in metaphors fundamentally different now i said that bergson's philosophy was dualistic and it turns out that he established a homologous series of dualisms that run all through his philosophy and these dualisms correspond to the distinctions between mind and matter which corresponds to the disease between accident and essence which corresponds to the distinction between science and metaphysics space and time body and soul matter and memory analysis and intuition and intelligence and instinct so there's a dualism the split between the internal world and the external world that never gets recovered for bergson he thinks it's what makes possible this critique of science now let's start off with this distinction between analysis and intuition now we've all we've had various problems with intuitions before because we found at least in some cases that it can be quite subjective quite nebulous very difficult to articulate we might want to connect it with the work of r.g collingwood those of you who know professor stalloff's lecture on collingwood's idea of history know that collingwood makes the distinction between the inside of an event and the outside of an event between looking at an activity from the perspective of the agent or from the perspective of someone on the outside and when we look at it from the perspective of the agent we are changing our perspective changing the way we look at it and we are adopting a common human perspective that uh that collingwood calls empathy or intuition bergson is suggesting that intuition does something like that it's something we all have in common it is elemental and prior to analysis all right now what analysis does is objectively move around its object it investigates things from the outside and what we need to do if we're going to measure things from the outside is we need things like measuring instruments clocks all the uh we need a whole set of literalized spatial metaphors clocks and things like that measuring instruments so that we can impose concepts on the external world and these concepts are pragmatic fictions which we use to manipulate the world but which do not represent the way we experience it directly the way we experience the world directly is called intuition and in contrast to analysis which moves around its object and is relative intuition enters into its object and it's absolute so here's where the collingwoodian element comes in now what what bergson says is something along these lines is why intuition is so important to him that intuition is an entering into an object which does not need to be mediated by symbols in other words rather than have me explain to you what 15 minutes or 20 minutes of time is you can actually experience what that is intuitively without watching a clock so you can find out on the basis of the space of those hands how much time is elapsing all right intuition then is our direct apprehension of the world and bergson thinks then that the problem with earlier metaphysics is that they continue the problem of intellectual homogenization and analysis rather than going back to this ur stuff this uh direct apprehension of this world this intuition and in the earlier metaphysics the static categories like kant's a priori categories of the mind or a democraticist atoms or descartes clear and distinct ideas all suffer from the from the fact that they are trying to perform analysis within the domain of intuition right they are trying to make metaphysics mediated by concepts and the point is these concepts all adhere to the external world not to the internal world concepts have to do with objectively analyzing the world they are not part of deray or they are not part of intuition intuition directly apprehends the world without the use of words or symbols so that's what he meant in the beginnings of his book called an introduction of metaphysics when he says that metaphysics is the science that claims to dispense with symbols he says that metaphysics is the is the science of the things that we directly apprehend it's the science of intuition or more precisely it is human experience it is prior to our constructions of the physical world so metaphysics precedes physics in that sense intuition precedes analysis all right now let's take some examples of intuition because it's a very nebulous concept and all these prose poets have the characteristic difficulty that it's hard to pin them down hard to figure out literally what they're saying most of the time he says so biggson gives us some very nice examples and here's where he's really at his best because much of his metaphysics is kind of mushy and hazy but the examples he gives are quite suggestive in the first case let's think of going to paris the direct or okay you've been there it's a wonderful city to go to paris is a fundamentally different experience from being shown all the possible photographs of paris from every possible perspective supposed to give you a tremendous stack of photos of paris well if you think of those photos as representing paris as it is rip as it is indicated by concepts they become flat and two-dimensional and square well they are forced into a procrusten mold which does not do justice to the living reality of paris well what bergson will say is that intuition is what happens to you when you go to paris and experience paris you might want to analyze some element in paris the architecture of paris or the characteristic road map of paris or whatever you want to do through this set of images or representations but no set of images of representations no stack of photographs of paris no matter how big the stack is is ever going to be a replacement for the the immediate experience of going to paris right um even if i send you lots of postcards from my vacation i'm the one going on vacation right and there's no doubt in your mind about that it's a very different sort of experience try another example something intuitive the self i have a direct intuition of my own existence of my own consciousness and i don't have to have symbols mediate that for me in other words i don't have to go to anyone and ask them do i exist am i a self i know that directly i apprehend that directly compare that to the analytic parsing of the self that we get in various psychoanalytic theories maybe i have an id maybe i don't maybe i have a super ego maybe i don't but the whole set of parsings the whole set of concepts which one would hope in a kind of general theory of the psyche would account for the various modes of human uh activity moods feelings sentiments all that all of those theoretical constructs cannot replace the direct intuition of being me or being you you intuit that directly so there is always some discrepancy between our conceptual analytic representation of anything and our direct intuitive apprehension of that thing provided it's the kind of thing that we can intuitively apprehend not everything can be done that way but some things are like that he also gives another example or a third example the idea of a hero of a novel all right it's one thing to read a novel say the sorrows of young verter by goethe write in and to feel and to find out what verter is really like another thing to have me tell you about the novel right i'll use some concepts like uh i don't know a protagonist or antagonist i'll use concepts like the novel i'll talk about the genre i'll talk about his dispositions in his psychic states and his behaviors none of those descriptions of verter will be like your direct apprehension of what verter is like when you experience that work of art so it seems then there are certain things which are not done justice when we try and describe them using analytic concepts using our rationality and it's hard to know how to evaluate this sort of a claim because it seems to have elements of truth and also very dubious elements built into it too and the problem with bergson is that he oftentimes doesn't bother to give us a formal logical argument he's a prose poet to be compared with someone like nietzsche for example who gives you interesting ideas to think about and then you don't quite know how to evaluate them when he's talking about instinct he says that instinct is to intelligence or analysis as vision is to touch you know this instinct tells you things at a long distance and then perhaps you can reason about them later on when you come up close and that'll be making them more tangible and substantial but intuition is greatly superior too and goes beyond the domain of mere analysis and mere reasoning how do we substantiate that i don't know uh the best i can tell the best argument that i can make is that bergson because he has this poetic tendency and sees various intellectual difficulties cropping up in modern scientific society is trying to formulate a philosophical alternative and this philosophical alternative will revolve around the idea of creativity the idea of subjectivity the idea of interiority and the idea of elon vittal okay finally barrickson says to think intuitively is to think in duration and no image or concept is identical with duration and yet nonetheless barrackson will tell us that duration is after all the concept and that nothing is actually quite capable of getting that idea across to us so he leaves us with various kinds of poetic paradoxes telling us that no concept is adequate to express duration but well how else will he tell us about it so he would like to emphasize subjectivity but must make concessions to the objective world so he can communicate with us and when he does so he forces himself into language he's slippery enough to move into metaphorical and poetic language but he is forced into the domain of language and analysis nonetheless at least some of the time now another important work by bergson and which shows sort of the optimistic and kind of poetic tendencies in his thought it's called two sources of morality and religion and this is where he makes his argument for elon vital and for the reality of our moral feelings or moral sentiments and for the series the intellectual seriousness of religion and what he says is something like this elon vittal works through history but it's not mechanical and it's not purely naturalistic it's something like um geist in hegel sense but without the telos without the eschaton the end of history and it's also something like darwin's conception of nature of natural evolution natural selection but it's not mechanical it's not blind and it allows for real novelty and creativity um oftentimes it seems that what bergston is trying to do is have his cake and eat it too it seems like he's very impressed with darwinian naturalism and he's very impressed with the theory of evolution feels that the human condition has been fundamentally changed by the advent of darwinism now after he has his cake then he wants to eat it too he says we don't want to be completely rejoined with the natural world if the price of rejoining the natural world is to eliminate freedom eliminate novelty and eliminate the interiority that makes human beings human so he constructs this second way of looking at evolution as being creative rather than mechanical at least potentially and saying this is what will establish the special qualities of human existence as opposed to the existence of other animals which may fit into that darwinian model now in the first case he talks about the sources of morality and religion and the first source of morality in religion is the external world nature and we impose analysis on the external world to get what we want and we generate the first stage of religion which we call static religion aesthetic religion are the ancient myths and codes of behavior which were constructed as a way out of the misery of human life in other words if you can measure what a socio-biological or very naturalistic interpretation of human history would tell us about religion it would say that people are terrified by the world it's full of pain and misery and anxiety and problems so bergson makes the argument i think which most people would agree with that the source of the archaic sources of religion particularly this case what he calls static religion are in human needs and they interact with nature to construct accounts of nature which are not very persuasive or sophisticated but they serve the function then of maintaining social cohesion advancing the survival of the species and allowing for the integration of society corresponding to this static religion bergson thinks this is something called closed morality and closed morality is that system of imperatives that system of moral rules which is connected to static religion and which it derives from the same source of static religion the simple need for human community which requires laws which requires regulation which requires analysis and rigidity for its effectiveness to become manifest now there's a second source of morality in religion and this is barrickson's big contribution or at least this is what he thinks his big contribution is he says that in addition to the static religion and the closed morality of ancient societies where people had just were just pulling themselves out of the domain of nature there's a second alternative which we get not through analysis but through illinois through intuition and not through natural selection but through elan vital and these alternative the alternative static religion is what he calls dynamic religion and the alternative to closed morality is what he calls open morality and dynamic religion and dynamic and open morality both have their source in intuition and here's where bergson makes his homage or kind of a makes his uh affirmation of mysticism he says that within dynamic religion and this is true not just within the western tradition of religion but in all the world's religions that all the great mystics are something like spiritual pioneers who break through the old static stultifying forms of religion towards some new higher and finer intuition his idea of the great and mystics who broke through the established bounds of religion are people like st paul saint francis and if you think about the idea of mysticism as at least potentially leading outside the bounds of religion as a heteronomous in the kantian sense activity making possible autonomy i think that barricksen unlike kant thinks that the source of this autonomous religion and autonomous morality will not be in reasoning it will be in intuition it'll be in our direct pre-linguistic apprehension of the world in other words we see right and wrong and some of us apparently have a more direct apprehension of that and can instruct the others and when this instruction becomes social religion moves from being static to dynamic uh morality moves from being closed a rigid set of systems to an open set that at least allows for a greater domain of human freedom right and this is always the product of intuition never the product of any kind of analytical activity now one might imagine that i mean having said i mean it made such great claims that bergson would go on and try and argue this very carefully in some sort of historical sense in other words he ought i would expect being a historian to give us the actual people and places the dates and times and events which show us this transformation and he's awfully light on that uh the specifics are never barristan's strong point he makes these arguments because he's trying to have he's trying to if not revive religion and morality based upon direct personal intuition he's certainly trying to legitimize it or prevent it from being dropped by the wayside with the advent of 20th century thought connected with this sort of optimistic project with this kind of can i put a unique project because there's really no one like bergston a 20th century thought is his writing on comedy and however dubious or nebulous or questionable his treatment of morality and religion and knowledge are his writings on comedy are arguably the best things ever written on the genre it's a very difficult topic um what bergson says is something along these lines he says that uh he tries to argue to articulate a necessary and sufficient condition uh condition for comedy and he says that laughter strangely enough is a function of intelligence since after all only people laugh you never see dogs laughing no point in telling them a joke so only people laugh and it has something to do with the fact that people are intelligent and in addition perhaps this is again the kind of genial or attractive element in embarrassing he says that laughter and comedy serve a moral function and that's why society invented them and also that's why they're universal amazingly enough there's no society that hasn't invented the joke which suggests perhaps there is some commonality underlying our various cultural experiences let's think about it this way contrast tragedy and comedy to see the difference tragedy individuates in other words think about something like hamlet when hamlet dies at the end of hamlet he is specifically dead on account of hamlet's tragic flaws right he has these edible feelings towards his mother and he's very indecisive and he thinks too much but hamlet is specifically hamlet every tragedy or tragedy generally ends in death and death always individuates pulls the tragic hero away from society makes the tragic hero separate makes him an epitome of his sins and offers him the appropriate agony for his sins or his transgressions his flaws what's interesting about tragedy is that it's always about individuals imagine what would happen if we wanted to re-title hamlet and title it the indecisive edible guy right yeah that's funny that there's exactly a comic response it's funny because hamlet is not about an indecisive edible guy it's about hamlet let's try the same sort of idea think of othello othello is othello a great heroic man who's destroyed by his own jealousy we could not go back and re-title othello the story of the jealous guy why because othello is about othello it is not about a type of a person it is not about a characteristic moral deformity it is about othello's moral deformity it is about hamlet's moral deformity it is about king lear's moral deformity it is about some specific quality of each of these figures tragic heroes or individuals now here's where bergson gets real deep and i think he's i mean this is where he's at his best he's so sensitive and smart he says comedy works exactly the opposite way it's deep comedy does not end in death on the whole comedy ends in marriage perhaps sex and death of the two sex and death of the two poles of human life and i would be inclined to say that marriage is symbolic sex so what comedy does when the comic hero is married and at the end of the comedy he is reintegrated back into society so instead of being killed off and individuated exactly the opposite happens he gets collectivized he gets thrown back into the mix so that he can have sex and then produce more little comic heroes and they can get thrown back into the mix right so comedy gestures at collectivity tragedy gestures at individuality it's a deep argument it goes even further he says not only that but comedy is never about individual people corresponds to the comic hero comedy is always about kinds or types of people think of moliere the miser not joe the miserly man rather the miser he's a type of person imagine the misanthrope we're not talking about someone that doesn't like other people we're talking about misanthropy in general right comedy refers to types to generalities it doesn't refer to specific individuals which is connected to the way comedy and tragedy finish up and their function in society it's a very very deep argument so he says then comedy is about generalities it is morally instructive and didactic the point of the miser is to hold miserliness or stinginess up to ridicule by making it appeal appear as foolish as it in fact is it is morally didactic as well and then he makes out a a sort of he offers us the structure of comedy not only does he stand on the outside of it and talk about what comedy does and compared to things like tragedy he talks about the structure of comic action itself and he makes a number of observations about the infamous banana peel you know when someone's walking down the street and slips on a bad peel and falls flat on their butt people think that's funny they laugh or at least some of the time they do bergson asks the interesting question why what's funny about that when we all laugh we all think it's kind of funny to get to slip on a banana peel why is it we find that humorous and he says first of all that we only find it humorous if nobody gets hurt if someone falls and breaks their leg we don't find that funny we think that's pathetic so first things first we have to make sure there's no real harm right because then we have to have a certain sense of empathy with the comic hero because it turns out the comic hero is just like us we don't want bad things to happen to them a second observation about comedy is that what makes this banana peel and the fall funny is that it's human beings or spirit or alan vitale forgetting itself and acting like matter in other words he says the essence of all comedy is things that are not material alan vitale acting like wood in other words when you fall flat on your butt that's funny because you are acting as if you are purely an object right so that in other words things that are not objects people acting like objects is what comedy is about he says and he also makes the argument there are certain structural rules for comedy which is a very interesting thought first of all things like repetition uh remember that old uh abbott and costello gag who's on first what's on second i don't know is on third right what they do is they repeat things endlessly and it's the frustration that we see the person who's not understanding the dialogue go through that we find amusing why because he's not catching on he's acting like meat like wood he's acting not like a person but like a dummy i might as well be talking to the wall who's on first what's on second there's no communication really going on the repetition is key to comedy a second structural element in comedy according to bergston is inversion this is the inversion of roles uh if you know that indiana jones movie where some guy with a sword comes out and confronts indiana jones and he's waving the sword around and threatening him and it looks like it's bad for indiana and indiana says he just takes it he's going to shoot him says forget it inversion of roles for second indiana jones was the prey then he turns into the predator that's funny because it's an inversion of roles barrickson is really onto something here a third structural rule of comedy is reciprocity in other words we have to have the reciprocal influence of series what it means is something like this we make a we create a mistaken connection between two unrelated series of events and some sort of ambiguity makes us misinterpret that if you've read any of the plays of oscar wilde right the importance of being earnest everybody's talking past everybody else what we get is the interference of different series of events which are misinterpreted people that really don't know what's going on so that's going to be important in the structural rules of comedy as well beyond this verb bexson also analyzes verbal comedy and he says that within language or that there's verbal company within language and then just merely expressed in language let me give you some examples um within language comedy is usually untranslatable think about something like the old uh the old joke take my wife please well unless you have exactly the grammar of english it might be very hard to translate that into arabic right take my wife please may not get big laughs in arabic it hardly gets any laughs now right he said there's a lamest joke i mean it's a prehistoric joke but it has to do with the structure of the english language itself he says that's one kind of verbal comedy the other kind of verbal comedy is the kind that is merely expressed in the language which means that in principle it is translatable and he gives a couple of examples of that first of all it's the literal translate interpretation of metaphors says that's funny because metaphors can't be literally interpreted that translates just fine it's just that that leads to all kinds of inter misinterpretation and uh incoherence and that is comic the transposition of meanings when you take the importance of being earnest for example ernest is a character and earnest is also a disposition of the soul if you transpose the meanings of earnest you can get a lot of mileage out of that oscar wilde already has and then he makes the decision in comic words and witty words comic words you laugh at the utterer right when somebody says something that's comic you laugh at the person that's making the utterance when somebody says something that's witty you're either laughing at a third person or you're laughing at yourself he has a fairly elaborate taxonomy of the ways in which comedy might work and i think that it's not quite a substitute for aristotle but it's clearly about as good an encyclopedic treatment as i've ever seen and something worth your consideration if you're going to just study barracks if you're just studying philosophy for the enjoyment of it i believe that you will find his book on laughter very rewarding i haven't met anyone that didn't find it funny as well as illuminating and enlightening let's look overall and then at comedy figure out what bergson has to say he says first of all that com the comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing when you slip on the banana peel it's just like the podium falling down you're being turned into an object and when you move from being a person to an object that demotion is the comic experience the imperfection of human beings their ability to forget themselves their ability to forget what they are demands a social corrective this social corrective is called comedy in other words we laugh at people to remind them that they're souls rather than bodies and when in other words remember if you know any of the the justifications for restoration comedy in england because the puritans didn't like comedy they thought that it was immoral and it led to uh you know moral depravity those who wanted to defend the comedy during the restoration said no comedy has a morally didactic purpose it allows it allows us to hold up vice to ridicule and improve the spectator well berickson's argument for comedy runs more or less along those lines he says that what it holds up is human deformity our tendency to slip back into nature slip back into the world of the object slip back into the world of matter and what laughter does is remind you that you shouldn't do that that that's not what you are it's society's way of reminding that you're that you're a soul rather than a body as can be seen from the wide variety of the topics that barricksen pursues the the great subtlety and poetry and also haziness of his ideas and the the generally how can i put it generally metaphorical or can i put an aesthetic quality to his writings mean that on the one hand we might be tempted to dismiss him out of hand but it seems that if we do that we will be throwing the baby out with the bath water because we will be losing the insights that he offers us within the domain that is his strong point which is aesthetics in other words he's a very poetic kind of a figure bergson berrickson has a great subtlety of mind i don't know that rationality or reasoning is his strong point but he is able to discern things underlying for example the structure of comedy which most of us would have had a real hard time with so his strong point is his aesthetic treatments his occasionally very insightful and very very thought-provoking metaphors and his weak point is the fact that he never provides us with the argument that would make us convinced or feel some sort of certainty or some sort of surety that the argument he's making about the distinction between static and dynamic religion or open and closed morality really had any more validity than berkshire's wishful thinking my feeling then is that bergson is unique in the 20th century domi in the domain of 20th century thought he's optimistic for the most part rather than pessimistic he is respectful of science without being worshipful towards science and he brings together the strongest and weakest points of french high culture in the 20th century its tendency to undo the distinction between poetry and philosophy which leads us to persuasive images and powerful metaphors if not logical certainty and apodictic truth

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 5,918

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Bergson, Elan, Vital and Vitalism

Id: 0-JN_vf9EFo

Length: 45min 15sec (2715 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020