the novelist wants to describe. Yet that shadow allows the reader to “sense” the nature of the feeling. In language, feelings and thoughts descend into the “common domain,” but the novelist “strives to restore, by adding detail to detail, their original and living individuality.”23 Similarly, Bergson contemplates the nature of the work of people of letters in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. He speaks concretely about two possible forms of literary activity. On one hand, in their work writers can combine words – which, as such, are already generally understandable, socially given and thus express general facts – in new ways. They may even “reshape”24 words before they are used in new combinations. In that case, however, they remain at the level of the intellectual combination of what is given in general consciousness as the sign of a shared idea, as the mere expression of a “social segment of reality.”25 On the other hand, they might proceed in a more ambitious manner. They might attempt to express something purely individual, a unique emotion they could only have felt “fully once in [their] lifetime.”26 Such an emotion would manifest itself in fragments words would be unable to correspond to. In such a case, writers must therefore “do violence to words” and “strain”27 the fragments of the unique emotion. It is only with the help of such use of words, which is the nature of word games, that they can attempt to express a unique emotion. Whitehead also points out in Symbolism that the relationship he describes between things and words is merely evidence of a more general reality – the symbolic reference between causal efficacy, and presentational immediacy on one side, and a further symbolic transfer by means of the two perceptual modes mentioned above into a conceptualized causality on the other. What is at issue, therefore, is the relationship between the individual reality of things along with their emotional efficacy, and a generalized or abstracted reality – i.e., a reality expressible in words and relevant to an activity or action. The general difference between the presentational immediacy and causal continuity of conceptually grasped things and a conceptualized causality is the reflective moment of all art. Whitehead points out that all art tends to accumulate emotional
23 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 164. 24 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2002), 253. 25 Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 254. 26 Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 253. 27 Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 254.
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significance. This is particularly evident in music, probably because the basic significance in music is very weak.28 In connection with music, Whitehead calls attention to the fact that the perspective that determines the causal continuity of things – i.e., the type or arrangement of interconnected things – is absolutely irrelevant here: for example, the spatial arrangement of an orchestra is unimportant, and even misleading, when listening to a musical composition, whereas the spatial determination of the point of origin of an approaching car’s horn is of great import if we want to analyze or express the situation. Also in this context, we might point out how Bergson directs his considerations, which are quite close to Whitehead’s. Like Whitehead, Bergson emphasizes the distinction between the “immediate” reality we perceive and feel in music and the spatial notions with which we replace, without justification, that immediate reality. In a number of places in Time and Free Will, Bergson refers to facts or principles associated with music by describing the essentially non-spatial reality of real time – that is, the immediate givenness of pure duration. Duration does not consist of separate moments, points of time distributed in the imagination as if they were in space. Duration represents a constant “organization” of the current moment along with the previous ones; it is thus like a “melody” formed by tones that “melt into and permeate one another.”29 Compared to the homogeneous environment of space, in which elements distribute themselves next to one another, duration always represents an individual “heterogeneity”30 and a “confused multiplicity.” 31 We probably encounter this type of multiplicity most commonly in certain melodies constituted by tones in “mutual penetration.” The development of certain individual feelings takes this form in consciousness as well, which is also why they cannot be described in words.32 Bergson also discusses the divergence between music and space in his lectures on “The Perception of Change.” Here, he maintains that the perception of melody is in reality the perception of an “indivisible” and pure movement.33 At the same time, we tend to divide the course of the melody in its uninterrupted continuity and imagine the distribution of distinct 28 29 30 31 32 33
Whitehead, Symbolism, 84. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 104. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 104. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 129. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 132–133. Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 174.
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notes “next to one another.”34 Our perception of melody is swayed by our idea of the activity we would have to engage in to reproduce the sound we have heard and it is also swayed by visual images. Let us imagine, for example, a score on a conductor’s podium, notes jotted alongside other notes, musicians playing side by side, keyboards or rising strings. However, if we disregard these “spatial images,” what remains is the immediate reality of the melody as movement, as changes in its indivisibility. The continuity of the melody is undoubtedly close to the “humming of life’s depths,”35 the unsunderable duration of our consciousness. Bergson refers explicitly to the “melody of our inner life,”36 the indivisible melody of our personality. Like Whitehead in Symbolism, however, Bergson also points out in “The Perception of Change” that the individuality which art focuses on deals with both inside and out; it is both the continuity of the perceived transformations of our personality and the continuity of transformations of the things we perceive.37 Bergson deals with the theme of the artist’s directedness towards the individuality of feelings, thoughts or things in many other texts as well. For example, in his study on The Life and Work of Ravaisson, Bergson points out that the painter, by making a record of a particular model’s visible features (that is, features distributed in space – first the space of the model and then space of the piece), aims at a “virtual center” that stands apart from the features captured on the canvas. It is “behind the canvas.”38 Beyond the visible lines, the painter sees the invisible, most fundamental aspiration of the person being depicted, the reality of the movement of his or her thought, “a simple thought equivalent to all the infinite richness of form and color.” The painter’s work portrays the “individuality of the model,” offering up this “secret we shall never have finished reading phrase by phrase”39 in the person’s visible physiology. Much like Whitehead, Bergson also emphasizes that the work of art aims to elevate individuality. However, this aiming towards both inner and outer individuality in the artist’s work is carried out by means of a general character – that is, one that is generally understood and applicable. Only by such means can practical endeavors be undertaken to influence reality. And of course, the
34 35 36 37 38 39
Bergson, Mind-Energy, 174. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 176 Bergson, Mind-Energy, 176. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 176. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 273. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 273.
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